31 Days of Halloween: Halloween Ends

2022, David Gordon Green (Halloween) -- download

Dang! We should have left this for Oct 31st, so it could be "31 Days of Halloween: Ends". Oh well.

Second exclamation.

Really?!? They went there? Oh well.

I enjoyed the first in this legasequel. It resurrected the franchise, wiping away all the other dross. We did not like the last in this series. Of it, Kent said, "This whole exercise of Kills seemed to be about getting to that point, of establishing Meyers' otherness, and it leads me to believe that the closing chapter, the in-production Halloween Ends will spend far too much time delving into why Meyers' otherness is."

Not quite, but it definitely, and mistakenly, embraces his otherness.

So, when we last left our intrepid adventurers, Michael had just transcended from mad man to supernatural being, having been "killed" by the pitchfork wielding (like, literally) villagers, and then risen again to slay them all, leaving us after a final kill -- Karen, Laurie Strode's daughter. Laurie and granddaughter have survived, but so has Michael.

So has Michael. 

The movie tries to bring us back to current times, as the first two happen on the same night in 2018, via a preamble about how the town was infected by the deaths from that night, that Haddonfield had a boogeyman it could not release, and the violence seeped into its very being. It culminates a year later with the accidental death of a young boy at the hands of his babysitter. Years later, said babysitter Corey (Rohan Campbell, Hardy Boys) still suffers from that night in 2019, both internally and at the hands of bullying townsfolk. An interesting way to bring us forward a few years? Yes, but... Michael has survived. The town now has him as their boogeyman, but he is a very real threat! Why aren't there neighbourhood watch groups that patrol, seeing Michael around every corner? Why isn't there an obsessed FBI agent who, against the advice of his colleagues and superiors, continually visits Haddonfield seeking signs of Michael? Why isn't the town afraid for its lives at every moment? The extreme violence of Kills should have banished the apathy of H2018 (to steal Kent's nomenclature) and left a very palpable ever present fear. But instead, Gordon Green goes down the path of passing on Michael's legacy to another.

Oh well.

Laurie and Allyson are trying to get on with their lives. Laurie bought a new house and is writing a book, while Allyson is working for an asshole doctor, and trying to shake the looks everyone gives her. Fate brings Corey into their midst, and Allyson finds connection with him, a shared legacy of the taint of violence. 

And then fate brings Corey into the hands of Michael, and he finds a connection with him. Oh well.

While, admittedly, that is an interesting idea, it just bugged me to no end. Michael is supposed to be the lone monster, something outside reality, not of supernatural nature, but definitely not normal. As Kent's prophetic comment said, this movie dwells too much on what Michael is. No, not explicitly as there are not long monologues from people obsessed with the monster that HAS to be in their midst, and THAT is even more annoying. No, this is an implied focus, in that Michael's monstrous nature can be passed on, and in doing so, be recognized by Laurie, on her own Hero's Journey against Michael.

In the end, or more precisely, the End, I understood why they did this, but it was a toss away, not used as fully as it could have been nor as emotionally impactful as it should have been. Instead, they just move onto the final, full destruction of Michael, as the villagers in silent procession deliver Michael to his alluded (the object of the scene might as well had neon lights above it) to final resting ground.

31 Days of Halloween: The Appearance

2018, Kurt Knight (We All Fall Down) -- download

Click click click. One from the downloads. It was on The Lists for that year, oft a deciding factor in what we watch, once we work through the well known ones, and the interesting looking ones on the streaming services. Note about "interesting looking" given not every movie on a streaming service provides a trailer -- we are talking box covers, blurbs, a few names and placement. Good art work always gets me but the right blurb can be make or break on an unknown.

Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Witch to Live.

A monastery in the Middle Ages, we don't get told exactly where or when, but the old'n times. A monk has been murdered! Looks like suicide, but, "its a witch!" Despite the Abbot's denials, a scribe sends for the Inquisition to prove whether the girl in their dungeons is a witch, or not, before the townsfolk demand her be burned at the stake. OK, weird pivot. Usually the Inquisition is the "bad guy" who the chaste monk or knight has to argue against, with their fervour to burn every wayward woman on a pyre.

So a lone inquisitor and his companion knight Johnny (?!? Kristian Nairn, Game of Thrones) head out on foot, the inquisitor having nightmares, or are they memories of having been raised in the monastery? I liked the opening journey, two inordinately clean looking adventurers on the road, Johnny the good knight faithful to god, and Mateho (Jake Stormoen, Mythica: A Quest for Heroes) whom Johnny frowns at for his lack of faith. But as soon as they arrive, I started noticing the cracks in the (low) budget. Yoinks, the village set outside the monastery walls looked like it was built from the machine cut scraps from the local building supplies. At least muddy it up Mr and Mrs Set Decorator!

Anywayz.

There is a standard plot format to "burn the witch!" movies, especially those set during the Inquisition and/or Crusader time periods. It usually involves someone who whole heartedly believes the old woman / young woman is a witch, and the other person who is not quite sure, and needs to see, well you know, actual proof before lighting the bonfire. Usually the asking-for-proof person is seen as naïve and almost consistently, the UnSub(stantiated) Witch messes with the mind of the person who believes in their proof. There is either seduction involved, or at least puppy dog eyes. Here, Mateho already believes she is innocent, even though it is his job to figger it out. Its kind of weird, but we are given a weakened idea that he may an enlightened man of logic & science trapped within the haze of religious fervour & superstition. But you would think he would at least entertain the idea considering the age he is living in. And especially once more monks start dying under weird circumstances, and he begins seeing things. But nope, not a witch, so let's remove the icons of protection that keep her powerless within her cage. OK, I get the idea of maybe not torturing the young woman without confirming she is a witch, but the bangles hanging on her cage do nothing against her; they are just unfortunate decorations. UNLESS SHE IS A WITCH ! If the bangles bother her, she .... well, she might BE A WITCH !

Eventually, Mateho is forced to actually do Inquisitiony Witch Testing things, like dunking her in a barrel which has a metal clasp in the shape of a cross. If she is willing to raise her head and view the image, she will breathe, and therefore not be a witch. No witch can look on the cross. So, when supposedly not-witch young girl refuses to look upon said cross/clasp and drowns instead, maybe, just maybe SHE WAS A WITCH ? Nope, Mateho gets all grumpy that they did this to the young definitely not a witch woman. So, witch girl is now dead, but guess what, monks keep dying. And now they have to blame Mateho, who is in thrall to the dead-witch.

She gets up, proving once and for all, that is really, truly a witch. We see it, he sees it, he regrets not considering she might be a witch, and she kills Johnny to spite him. The movie then does go down a somewhat interesting path reminding us that the monks had something rather heinous to hide, beyond the fact that the girl might be a witch, but it still struck me as odd that Mateho was still somewhat focused on finding justice for witch girl, who killed Johnny, and might have killed a bunch of other monks. Yes, the raping of the young witch girl was a horrible act, but after determining the girl was indeed In League With the Devil, might he have been more interested in defeating her, than revealing the horrible acts of the monks? I am sure a better told movie would have focused more on the revelation that a woman of power, whether Christian power or not, being anathema to Christian leaders of the time. A better movie would have made her witchy acts more ambiguous, less monstrous, less Pact with the Devil therefore allying us with her actions. But instead, I was more, "dude, banish the evil witch FIRST, then punish the evil humans."

Alas...

Ed. Note: Marmy points out a very salient point which kind of does change the makeup of my opinion. Mostly. The witch was In League With the Devil because the abbot sent her to him. The abbot had been raping her, filling her with all the worldly sins of the other monks, and that had happened when Mateho was a boy. Now, all these years later, she has returned, to take vengeance on her aggressors. 

For a movie fraught with terrible set dressing and only middling costuming, and the clusterfuck of a plot, the other acts of film making were not that bad. While I was constantly dragged out of the moment by the "castle" scenes that looked more like someone's Halloween maze set, the lighting and sound was grand and the acting was more than passable. This is one of those times when they should have benefited from incredibly bad lighting.

Double Dose of Frankenstein

 (Double Dose is two films from the same director, writer or star...or genre or theme...pretty simple.  Today: Continuing my re-dive into Universal's classic "dark universe", it's the first two entries in Universal's Frankenstein series....)

Frankenstein (1931) - dir. James Whale - CriterionChannel
Bride of Frankenstein (1935) - dir. James Whale - CriterionChannel

Having just watched two versions of Dracula which utilized the same sets, I was keenly aware that there was some sets reused from one Universal film to the next, especially factoring in the timing.  They're maybe redressed a little differently, lit a little differently or shot from a different angle, but there was certainly a economic efficiency to the Universal horror production line.

Likewise, there was some casting crossover, with Dracula's Renfield, Dwight Frye, here portraying Dr. Henry Frankenstein's assistant Fritz, and Drac's Van Helsing Edward Van Sloan is playing the not so different Professor Dr. Waldman (it would have been really interesting if he played Van Helsing in both shows, but they just weren't thinking of franchise building back then).

Dr. Frankenstein is going mad with his desire to play god and create life from death.  He and his assistant Fritz get busy graverobbing for the needs of his particular project.  We're supposed to read a lot into the fact that the brain that Fritz stole was from a murderous criminal...but we'll come back to that.  Meanwhile, Henry's fiance Elizabeth and best friend Victor are very worried about him and his state of mind.  Along with Henry's former professor, they ascend upon his spire just as a storm is brewing.  They're just in time to watch Henry's creation come to life.

The Monster is, immediately, treated as an abomination. Though his mannerisms are positively child-like, he's a bruiser of a giant unaware of his own strength (did the Monster inspire Lennie in Of Mice and Men?).  Fritz immediately starts whipping and tossing torches in the Monster's face.  I had just seen a part of a documentary about how "trained" elephants are effectively beaten and tortured into submission, experiencing intense trauma and PTSD as a result.  This seems almost exactly what is being done to the Monster.  It's no wonder he lashes out.

Henry and Elizabeth are off to get married, and the whole town is celebrating...or else it Oktoberfest.  Meanwhile the Professor drugs up the Monster and seeks to disassemble him.  The Monster awakens and kills him (it's self defense?) and escapes the Keep.  He encounters a lonely child, Maria, who isn't afraid of him.  They play a game of tossing flowers into the water and watching them float, but the confused, childlike Monster doesn't understand, and tosses the child in, and she doesn't float, nor know how to swim.  She drowns and he flees.  Eventually it leads to the town uniting with torches to hunt the creature down, and they corner him into a windmill, which they torch, thinking the creature will meet his demise.

The whole production, while certainly of its time, is still engaging viewing.  The sets, costuming and lighting are all pretty great.  There are a tremendous amount of outdoor scenes which I love seeing in old black and white films, escaping the sameyness of sets.  The Oktoberfest wedding celebration looks like a great time, but Maria's dad stumbling through the festivities with his dead daughter in his arms it's a genuinely upsetting sequence.  The performances aren't uniformly great, but generally solid (Frye certainly reins it in from his Renflied performance), but Boris Karloff as the Monster is striking, and he does a great job bringing the childlike naivete and innocence into the creature.  It's just unfortunate his particular stilted movements and grunting and groaning have been parodied so much in the past 90 years, but there's still more to his performance than just those.

Deviating greatly from Mary Shelley's text, the film does forge its own path but misses the most interesting aspects along the way.  When the senior Frankenstein is introduced, it's clear that Henry grew up with a difficult father.  It would have been wonderful to explore that relationship in partnership to Henry's "parenting" of the Monster, but it never even thinks to broach those relationships in any meaningful way.  Likewise the mix-up with the Monster's brain, from a "regular brain" to a "corrupt brain", could have led to a nature vs. nurture examination, but the film really doesn't want to examine much.  It seems to be in conflict with itself about whether the Monster should be sympathetic or Monstrous, and it never confidently picks a lane.  It's a problem that carries forward into the sequel.

The Bride of Frankenstein opens, bizarrely, with actors portraying Mary Woolstonecraft Shelley and her dandy husband Percey Bysshe Shelley and their dandier friend Lord Byron, all lounging in front of a fire.  Byron recounts the events of the first movie, and Mary decides to tell them what happened next.  It's the last we see of this trio (we could only have hoped for a Princess Bride-style series of interruptions).

Mary's story opens where we left off, with the windmill burning to the ground.  The burgomaster ( Burger Master!) has been recast, as has Elizabeth, and this film introduces Minnie as the loudmouth servant who is I guess comic relief?  Beneath the windmill the Monster has escaped into the underground stream.  He brutally murders poor lil' Maria's dad (also recast) and mother (heretofore unseen) and runs past Minnie leaving her unharmed and escaping into the woods.  

Meanwhile Henry, recovering from his encounter with his offspring, gets a visit from one Dr. Pretorius.  If Henry was a half-mad scientist, Dr. Pretorius is full-bore.  He shows Henry his own creations that he brought to life, a quintet of wee people he keeps in jars, which he said he grew from seed.  I assume the Anton Arkane from Swamp Thing comics was a riff off Dr. Pretorius.  

Pretorius is looking to Henry to teach him how to create big-people life, and he has a couple of assistant murderers who will acquire the raw materials for him.  The Monster meanwhile, after a couple of fateful encounters, meets a kindly blind hermit who takes him in, teaches him how to talk, drink and smoke, and a little bit of the difference between good and bad...all the things his own dad didn't.  The Monster made a friend, but a pair of fearful hunters break up the friendship and send the Monster running, straight to Dr. Pretorius who is very glad to meet him.  He promises the Monster not just a friend, but a girlfriend. Together they kidnap Elizabeth to force Henry to conduct his work.  

The Bride of Frankenstein is a success, except she recoils in fear when she meets her new friend.  Disheartened, the Monster destroys the lab, and presumably Dr. Pretorius, the Bride, and himself.  It's a tragedy.

But the real tragedy is how this film crafts a stunning looking creature in the Bride, but we only see her for a scant couple minutes at the very end of the film.  There's so much to mine with the Monster learning language and how to express himself, and to have another Monster who is even less wise in the world than he. 

The sequel is bigger in scope, and gunning for more entertainment.  There's more Monster rampaging, which means a lot of senseless killing that seems, once again, to conflict with the sensitivity of the Monster. It's not a better movie than the original, but it's more fun.  It tries for more comedy, more adventure, more action, more horror, more weirdness, and it succeeds, but at the cost of consistency.

With the same director, there's a definite consistency in its visual presentation, but there was a huge shift between 1931 and 1935 in that The Bride of Frankenstein has an actual score accompanying it.  It's not a great score, but it fills the empty spaces that seemed so vacant in both Frankenstein and Dracula.

BUT IS IT HORROR? 
I'm sure in the 1930's these were deemed maybe a little more intense, psychologically disturbing (the producer even introduces the film warning of its morbid themes), but 50 years after, when I was a young'un these were considered basically kids movies.

31 Days of Halloween: Deadstream

2022, Joseph & Vanessa Winter (V/H/S/99) -- download

I like to think myself more in touch with technology & social media pop cultural phenomena than the average 50+ person, but ... yeah, I don't get "streamers". Then again, I was also not a fan of Jackass, which a lot of streamers seem to be trying to create pale imitations of. I do get that this is only one subset of an entire sub-culture, but its the one that gets the most off-topic attention, and... well, gets emulated in movies. 

Shawn Ruddy (Joseph Winter; yeah the director) is a popular streamer that has fallen from grace due to a stunt gone wrong. After his "apology" he needs to rise again in the ranks, so he arranges an extreme version akin to his previous stunts, in which his gimmick was facing things that scare him, usually stupid shit. And to that intent, he is staying the weekend in a notorious haunted house, and states that instead of running away from the scary things, he will run towards them. Of note, which got a loud chuckle from me, he states that this particular haunted house is not popular enough to actually cost him anything to stay in, which says something about the industry that is haunted houses. 

Shawn is all about the tech. He has multiple cameras stuck to his body, all wirelessly streaming to his site. He also tacks up more, in each scary room of the scary (and gross) house, with duct tape. The setup is pretty sweet, with multiple camera views always on, always live, while Shawn walks around with a tablet hanging from his neck, allowing him to view all the cameras, as well as paying attention to & interacting with the chat steam, and load videos and pics from his fans, as need be. Our "found footage" view of the movie is a combination of everything.

Speaking of the "found footage" motif, given that our viewing season usually includes one, a loud guffaw from me, when they did an intertitle commenting on how "streamer Shawn Ruddy disappeared during a night in haunted house" only to pull back, revealing it as a tshirt, which he of course is selling. I would buy one!

Anywayz, Shawn goes in, sees lots of spooky shit, and locks himself into the house. There are fuzzy lights, bumps in the night, creepy left behind shit, and lots of details that add to the legend of the house, involving the ghost of Mildred, a girl who hung herself. As we settled into the movie, the house really was creepy AF, and I expected the story to take a strongly serious turn allowing us to mostly root for the house against this rather annoying streamer. But instead, they do a damn good job of comedy and nostalgic horror references (Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson to name a few) combined with the conceit of the technology being used. Some of the best bits are when Shawn is focused on his own shit (usually crying or bleeding), so only we notice the fan chat stream has caught something entirely else on one of the cams, or has "helped" him by doing a bit of off-screen research, which eventually he catches onto, and it is integrated back into the story.

The jump scares are great, the gore is fun and watching Shawn getting knocked around is never not fun, which aligns well with my "old man yells at clouds" opinion of the whole thing.

This is the kind of movie I want to point at when I have to turn off incredibly low grade indie movies because they don't seem to even have the most basic aspects of film making down. On an imaginably tight budget and minimal number of contributors, the Winters did a great little horror flick.

Double Dose of Dracula

(Double Dose is two films from the same director, writer or star...or genre or theme...pretty simple.  Today: it's two Dracula movies, shot at the same time, on the same sets, but by different people, in different languages, with two surprisingly different results....)

Dracula (1931) dir. Tod Browning - CriterionChannel
Dracula (1931) dir. George Melford - CriterionChannel

I last probably watched the classic Bela Legosi-starring Dracula back around the time that the Francis Ford Coppola version came out, in the early-to-mid 90's.  It didn't make much of an impression. All I retained of the film was what everyone remembers, that incredible dolly shot pushing in on Legosi in his dungeon, and those many insert shots of Legosi's eyes with the light highlighting them.  The rest of the film - any other story or performances - were completely lost to me.  It didn't leave much of an impression.

For October the Criterion Channel is presenting all the main Universal Monsters horror movies, starting with the classic Dracula.  But the classic is backed up with the lesser known Carlos Villarías-starring Spanish-language Dracula that was using the same sets and script.  What resulted was two unsurprisingly similar film, yet still drastically different viewing experiences.

To start, the Browning version clocks in at a should-be-brisk 75 minutes, but the Spanish version is a whopping 1 hour and 43 minutes long.  That roughly 30 minutes does indeed make a big difference.

The Browning version is considered a classic, if only because that's what the majority of the English-speaking audience know as the original Dracula.  The truth is, it's not a great movie.  It's not even a good movie.  It's 75 minutes feel like a very tough watch.  It starts off with some exterior shots and scenes, always a welcome surprise in old black-and-white studio films, as well as some matte painting to establish Trasylvania.  Young lawyer Renfield is on a journey to the keep of Count Dracula, which the superstitious locals warn him about.  The locals, speaking in Hungarian, is also a wonderful thing in the old films, the last bit of naturalism this version of Dracula will have.  

Renfield manages to get dropped off at his meeting point, where Dracula, posing as the carriage driver, picks him up and escorts him to the mansion, where he greets him inside in a different form (to be clear, he transforms into a bat, which then carries Renfields luggage indoors, and he quick-changes into his finest tie-n-tails...it's pretty comical when you think about this charade Drac puts on for Renfield's benefit).  Renfield is there to solidify a legal deal for the purchase/rental of an estate in England for some reason, which, after Renfield is drugged and molested by Drac's wives, he goes nuts and becomes his servant.  While in transport from Transylvania to England by boat, Drac kills all the crew, and Renfield is institutionalized upon arrival.  Drac murders a girl on the street then greets his neighbours at a ballet.  The rest of the film is basically Drac preying upon Mina Seward, and Professor Van Helsing deducing who the culprit of all these neck-bite-murders is (that makes it sound more exciting than it is).

The film, upon leaving Transylvania, gets real boring, real quick.  There's no real character development to any of the players, they have no personality and their motivations are largely absent.  The performers, to a one, are all just delivering lines (or pausing while they think of their next line) and its some of the most stilted acting I've seen in a big Hollywood movie.  It's truly like nobody cared about how this production came off.  

The editing of the film leads to a lot of memorable imagery, but most of which has been co-opted and parodied to such an extent that it all feels kind of hack and corny.  At the same time the editing has trimmed much of the story down to largely its bare bones exposition, which makes for dull, dull viewing.  I'm also assuming there was some censorship as a lot of references to murder, blood sucking or people raising from the dead seem starkly absent (which can be found in the Spanish version).  As a result, the events of the film seem disconnected from scene to scene at times, or laughably disjointed.

Legosi really crafted something unique in his interpretation of Dracula, but unique doesn't equal good.  Dracula, with his slicked-back hair, cape, pressed shirt, cummerbund and tuxedo tails, is supposed to perhaps be debonnaire and suave, but he just seems like a weirdo (which is what Mina tells her friend Lucy who seems ridiculously smitten with him and his bizarre accent).  Dare I say it, I think Dracula is a loser.  This Legosi version is clearly the template upon which Nandor in What We Do In The Shadows was built. 

Dwight Frye's Renfield goes from zero to sixty once he's turned into the vampire's servant. He's annoyingly manic and doing way too much.  Much more than what the film asks for or needs.  The rest of the cast are dull, dull, dull, lacking in any real charm or personality.  Edward Van Sloane's Van Helsing is an exposition machine, and he has zero chemistry when facing off with Legosi.    

The sets of the production, and the accompanying lighting, are all really great, and it's a shame a better film wasn't using them... except there was.

It would be easy to say that the Spanish language Dracula was just a pale ape of the English version, but it's truly the superior picture.  It's not even close.  Don't get me wrong, some of the same problems with the characters and story exist in both versions - motivations are thin, and the story really doesn't ever take off with any intensity - but the performances and the direction are not just different, but really, really good.

Melford was able to see the dailies from Browning's shoot, and in the initial minutes, it seems like Melford is directly aping what Browning had done.  But it becomes starkly clear in the first big reveal of Dracula that he's not going to be content with mirroring, and that he has his own ideas for the picture.  Rather than pan away every time Dracula emerges from a coffin (as Browning does, and it makes me laugh thinking about Legosi's Dracula clumsily crawling up from the dirt to stand so upright trying to present as if he didn't just have that awkward moment), instead Melford cuts to Dracula emerging from behind the coffin lid to a dramatically different effect.

It's also clear Pablo Álvarez Rubio as Renfield is a much better actor than Frye, or at least a more sensitive actor.  He plays Renfield a bit comically in the opening moment, but after his turn, he plays him as a tortured being, which is a much different, more nuanced portray than just playing manic.

With the additional length, there are expanded scenes which allow the characters to breath, and interact more.  While Villarias' Dracula isn't all that different from Legosi's, his performance isn't as cartoony, and there's a bit more menace, though perhaps a little less danger as a result.   But the difference comes in Mina - or rather Ava as she is called here - and her relationships with her father, as well as her boyfirend Juan Harker, 

 In the Browning version, when Mina is recounting her "dream" of Dracula assaulting her to Van Helsing, it's treated coldly like exposition or a victim reciting their ordeal to a disinterested cop taking a statement.  In the Spanish version, Van Helsing and Ava's father enter the room to overhear her telling Juan of her experience, and her father, with great tenderness and compassion embraces her and helps gently convince her to show Van Helsing her wound.  It's a tremendously better and more affecting scene and really underscores the differences between the two films. 

The English version used a lot of rubber bats and spiders in the production.  Melford wisely limits their use.  His bats, as well, swoop around the sound stage, in and out quickly, where Browning's would just flap in place in a static shot, looking every bit as cheap as they were.   

I can't overstate how much more engaging the Spanish language Dracula is.  Just superior in every aspect.  Sure, Legosi is the archetype for the role, but he's pretty much his own punchline at this point.  There's next to nothing in the Browning version that isn't bettered by the Melford version.  It's just taking the whole endeavour more seriously, and it comes across as a much more engaging production as a result.

BUT IS IT HORROR? 
(yes that's right, this Double Dose has just become a surprise horror, not horror column)
I guess it's olde timey horror, but it's not scary in the slightest.  The Browning Dracula is basically self-parodying at this stage, but the Melford version is, if only a little bit, suspenseful.

3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): Luck

2022, Peggy Holmes (Tinker Bell and the Secret of the Wings) -- download

As we slowly pace ourselves through The Midnight Club we are not watching as many movies as we expected, so I might as well clean out some others from the queue. 

Black cats are Halloween, right? 

But not this black cat. Bob (Simon Pegg, Mission Impossible) is a magical black cat, a luck cat. Wait, aren't black cats supposed to be unlucky? I am sure the movie explains it, but I forget. Anywayz, Sam (Eva Noblezada, Yellow Rose) is the real main character, a girl with loads of unluckiness. A teenage orphan aging out of the system, she has an incredible knack for being at the wrong end of a Rube Goldberg machine style series of circumstances, i.e. VERY unlucky. Until the day she finds a lucky penny. But then she almost immediately loses it. It was Bob's coin and he breaks his own rules by not only talking to her, but also explaining why he needs that coin back. Turns out the penny is part of an elaborate Monsters Inc style industry that takes place in the Land of Luck. Luck as a commodity? Sounds too good to Sam so she follows Bob through his magical portal and ends up in said magical land.

What follows after is a typical Pixar-Disney style animated flick, charming and witty and full of comedy and colourful characters, which unfortunately is far too top heavy to keep attention. Sure, complicated fantasy industries are what dreams (luck) are made of, and we generally love Willy Wonky peeks behind the machinery. But this movie ends up adding listless extra complications, and unneeded twists and turns, probably to distract us from the boring plot. Just goes to show that sticking John Lasseter into a company doesn't mean immediate gold. It might have the opposite effect, in fact, and maybe they should have paid attention to Emma Thompson (and the original director) leaving the flick because of Lasseter's hiring. Talk about horror shows.

Ba dump pssssh.

Horror, Not Horror: the trash bin

"Horror, Not Horror" movies are those that toe the line of being horror movies but don't quite comfortably fit the mold.  I'm not a big horror fan (Toast is the horror buff here), but I do quite like these line-skirting type movies, as we'll see. 

In the past few months I've been wading more and more into the underexplored depths of genre cinema.  Some of this has been on my own, at random, and some of it's been prompted by the films discussed by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avery on the very fun Video Archives podcast (noted by an asterisk below).  These are, to a one, not good films, but the hope is always that, for as maybe limited in budget, or as tossed off as they may have been, they still have something going for them. Oh, but surprise, one of these is a prestige picture that was nominated for Oscars!

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Hercules Conquers Atlantis (1961) dir. Vittorio Cottafavi - Tubi

(AKA Hercules and the Captive Women)

What is it? One of the many, many iterations of Hercules in the "sword'n'sandals" genre of action/adventure movies, largely made in Italy throughout the 1950's through 1980's.  In this one Hercules, played by the handsome and beefy Reg Park, is ostensibly kidnapped by his friend and taken on an adventure where he discovers Atlantis, but the place is a nefarious one, and only the might of Hercules can stop their evil plot (whatever it was).

Why watch? I had, on a whim, picked up a copy of the Mario Bava directed "sequel" film to this, Hercules in the Haunted World, so I thought I should just give this one a shot first.

The good? Bava served as a director of photography so there are some pretty nice shots in this.  Reg Park, former Mr. Universe, is really nice to look at.  Bava does this tilt-down/pan-up shot in the cave which is really sweet, and there's a high-up crane shot of.  The shot of Hercules bounding through a courtyard of dead bodies is kinda nuts as is the reveal of the Atlantian elite guard which is a little provovative.  It's impressive seeing Hercules driving a chariot of 10 horses, if only there were a Hercules movie that could sustain that sort of scale.  Hercules being a petty dick was pretty fun, as were all Reg Park's muscles.  Fay Spain's eyes are the best special effect in the movie.

The bad? The audio - dubbing, sound effects, music - is pretty awful most of the time, and seemingly mixed all at the same volume. The action sequences are incredibly clumsy. The story is flimsy nonsense with little internal consistency. The wardrobe and sets waver between spectacular and silly. The envisioning of both ancient Greece and Atlantis is pretty uninspired. The cinematography wavers between impressive and pedestrian.

The trash? Reg Park does this one-armed swimming technique which just blows my mind thinking about it.

Is it horror? No, but there's definitely some little twinges of horror that the film never thinks to exploit.

---

Hercules in the Haunted World (1961) dir. Mario Bava - BluRay

What is it? Reg Park's second - and final - foray as the demigod hero.  But this one's directed by Mario Bava, and Christopher Lee co-stars.  Maintaining no continuity from the prior film (in which Hercules had a wife and son), here he must go on a quest to retrieve a specific stone in order to cure the madness of his lover.  The stone's destination? Hell!

Why watch?  Bava, of course.

The good? This is a visual feast of nonsense.  I watched it twice.  Bava's innovative craftsmanship and colour sense is so damn impressive.  The visual effects, in many instances, seem so surreal, as if they shouldn't exist.  The big finale features the raising of the dead which is a sequence that would have for sure scared the crap out of me as a kid (but is both fun and silly as an adult watching on a hi definition TV)

The bad? The story is utterly nonsensical.  The Kino blu-ray features an audio commentary from a Bava scholar who identifies that there was obviously a completely different shooting script at one time and that few pains were taken to marry the original story with what they wound up with.

The trash? Very little trash in this one.  It's a really stunning watch.  I guess, the biggest trash is that they dubbed over Christopher Lee's performance. Blasphemy!

Is it horror? No, but it does swerve that way for the climax for a bit, providing a sense of Bava's chops in the genre.

---

*Demonoid: Messenger of Death (1981) dir. Alfredo Zacarias - Tubi

What is it? A Mexican (but English) horror film about a demonic hand which possesses people to kill. Samantha Eggar stars as the wife of the mining honcho who releases the hand.  It seems to be fixated on trying to get her specifically as it goes from possessing person to person and murdering along the way.

Why watch?  It was a Tarantino/Avery recommendation.

The good? Honestly, it has a pretty solid sense of its own history and the evil forces at play.  It does better than many horror films in that aspect. The acting is surprisingly decent for such a off the beaten path production.

The bad? But make no mistake, this is some cheesy-crust crazy-bread stuff.  The special effects are that special blend of late-70's/early-80's waxy gore with stark red corn syrup blood. I have to wonder if the makers of this took any of it seriously or if they knew it would eventually be considered campy fun.

The trash? They really liked to work their gross visual effects, and we've come so far in making that shit so gross that it's really quaint what they used to be able to get away with.  Oh and gratuitous nudity tied to violence in the first five minutes (seen in one of the trailers even)

Is it horror? Yeah. It's that special type of 80's low-budg horror.

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*Blind Rage (1976) dir. Efren C Pinon - YouTube

What is it? The war in Viet Nam has decimated the markets in the Asian Pacific, so the world bank (I guess?) has decided to invest 15 million dollars into the region, to be held at a bank in Manila before dispersing. A man on the inside is recruited by a Black L.A. mobster to pull off a heist of said 15mil, but he's going to do it with ... 5 blind guys!  Because who would ever suspect blind guys of robbing a bank. 

Why watch? Another Tarantino/Avery recommendation.

The good? Umm, this movie real bad, but so bad that I enjoy telling people about how bad it is. It ends with a cameo by Fred Williamson in a bright blue butterfly collared deep-V-neck jumpsuit chomping on a cigar, looking great and being a total badass.  And the line: "It's all going down right now at the International House of Pancakes".  

The bad? There's no protagonist to this film.  There's nobody we follow all throughout the movie.  Is there anyone to really care about if they succeed or fail? No, there is not.  

The trash? This movie is part Blaxploitation, part kung-fu, and part crime thriller, none of which is done particularly well.  Is "Blindsploitation" a genre?

Is it horror? No, nor is it trying to be, though people do be getting shot, tho.  And the script is a nightmare, lol.

---

*Welcome to Blood City (1977) dir. Peter Sasdy - YouTube

What is it? A group of strangers find themselves in the desert with no memory of who they are, and a note each found on their person telling them that they were a killer.  Kier Dullea (2001: A Space Odyssey) doesn't believe a thing.  They're escorted to Blood City by the sheriff (Jack Palance) who doesn't really want to tell them much about how the town operates, but it's basically a place where anything goes, including slavery and murder.  In fact, the more you murder, the greater your status.  But who are the people in a control booth watching all this, and why? 

Why watch? Though Avery and Tarantino didn't necessarily love this, they were generally intrigued by the premise, and cited it as one of the Westworld knock-offs of the era, which intrigued me.

The good? The premise was really, really intriguing.  A group of people with a secret past, possibly filled with murder, but without their memories, are they still the same murderers?  Just one of many questions the film poses, but never answers.  It's rather rife with ideas that don't get explored well enough, and has a mysterious backdrop that gets slowly revealed in a pleasant way (possibly cribbed by Cabin in the Woods) but ultimately doesn't pay off.  And hey, more Samantha Eggar

The bad? The film is either shot terribly, with the active actor partially or fully out of frame most of the time, or else its transfer to video/digital went horribly wrong.  It's actually pretty funny how awful it looks.

The trash? The one female "murderer" is the helpless object of affection and treated like a non-entity by everyone (content warning: off screen rape).

Is it horror? No, but it's certainly playing with dystopian themes which can be scary to some.

---

*The Keep (1983) dir. Michael Mann - Criterion

What is it? The infamous/forgotten Michael Mann disaster that finds Nazi soldiers in 1941 taking over an old Romanian Citadel only to unleash a terrible, murderous being from its cage.  The being uses Jewish scholar Ian McKellen to try and get set free upon the Earth, by tempting him with revenge upon all Nazis.  Scott Glenn plays an otherworldly savior type who's arrived on earth to stop it, but not before sexing up Alberta Watson, McKellen's daughter. 

Why watch? I caught this film years and years ago on a late night TV airing, and have long been wanting to revisit it.  It's a moody piece with haunting Tangerine Dream synths, that probably was even moodier in Mann's lost original 210minute cut.  This 98 minute hack job by the studios leaves the film feeling disjointed and frequently confusing.

The good?  I love all the strange lighting, the sets, the evil creature, Mann's style is all over this, even in it's chopped up form.

The bad? I have to think that a 210minute version of this would be better as a cohesive story, but still potentially direly boring.  But then again, there are some intriguing character reveals and dynamics that I think may have played out so much better in a longer form.

The trash? Scott Glenn meets Alberta Watson for less then a minute before they start boning.  Does he have Starfox's powers?

Is it horror? I think it's trying to be.  

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Leviathan (1989) dir. George P. Cosmatos - AmazonPrime

What is it? The other, lower-budget undersea movie of 1989 (next to the Abyss), it's basically Alien (with a dash of Carpenter's The Thing) in a sealab.  Starring Robocop, a Ghostbuster, Flash's girlfriend, and Evil-Lyn, so it's 80's to the core.

Why watch? It's been on my "to watch" list since I first spied its tape cover at a video store.  It always looked like something that would be in my wheelhouse.

The good? There's some really great sets and some nice underwater sequences.  It does manage to build a decent amount of attention, but...

The bad? ...you can basically watch as the film's budget starts shrinking the longer it goes on. They try to edit around the budget limitations, but they become painfully obvious.  The budget limitations can't capitalize upon the film's buildup and it's a real wet fart of an ending.

The trash?  The creature, and not in an "oh, it's so gross" kind of way but more in a "really? That's what you're going with?" kind of way.  It's a pretty corny looking beast, and the film does an incredibly poor job with devising any sort of mythology or backstory behind it.  It's basically a perfunctory creature with little to no intrigue behind it.  It's a terrible let down to an otherwise acceptably entertaining picture.

Is it horror? It probably was at some point during production.

---

Nightmare Alley (2020) dir. Guillermo del Toro - Crave

What is it? The saga of down-on-his-luck crumbum Bradley Cooper who winds up helping out at 1920's-era carnival/freakshow, learning the tricks of the trade.  He effectively steals one man's mentallist act then starts performing for New York High society, pushing the boundaries of good taste and kayfabe.  Psychologist Cate Blanchette starts working with him, if only to ultimately use him for her own purposes, then destroy him for fun.

Why watch? Generally intrigued by del Toro's films, and I share his fascination with carnivals of old.  Oh yeah, and Sid worked on it!

The good? It looks great.  It's a phenomenal looking film in every aspect.  The attention to detail in every scene -- the sets, lighting, costuming, makeup, props - all just eye catching and really attractive.  I also liked how it exposed the sham of mentallists (if only it had more fun with it)

The bad? The film is tedious. It's a long 150 minutes of watching a not great person do not great things. You never really connect with Bradley Cooper, nor with any of his relationships. There's nothing there. You know he's bad news from the beginning, and that sense of distrust never abates. It makes it very, very hard to invest in him. Were he, maybe, more charming, or perhaps if we had some insight into what his goals were, what he's actually working towards, or, mayhaps if he were even a semblance of a good person we could follow him, hoping for his success even as he makes the wrong choices and finds himself unable to stop from going deeper into the darkness. But we know he's shit from the beginning, Del Toro wants us to know that being easy on the eyes will get him far, but for this story, it's not enough. We're rooting for him to fail (and hoping, at least, that he doesn't take others undeservedly down with him)..

The trash?  The last 30 minutes finally pick up the pace but they're kind of the worst moments of the film. Just waiting for Cooper to get his comeuppance, little of which is satisfying, moreover, it all seemed kinda overblown and carny...I mean corny.

Is it horror? Meh, its toes creep over the edge of the deck, but it never really tests the waters, nevermind jumps right in.

Horror, Not Horror: Nope (we agree-ish)

 2022, d. Jordan Peele - VOD

Toasty just posty'd his Nope write-up and he was unabashedly excited by the film.  I, on the other hand, have been feeling pretty uncertain about the movie since viewing.  

As Toasty notesy'd, it's a great looking movie.  Peele, working with DP extraordinaire Hoyte Van Hoytema (Tenet, Ad Astra, Dunkirk) delivers a COVID production that never feels like a COVID production.  They use their Californian desert setting (Agua Dulce) to such a grandiose and maximal effect that the picture feels huge, but features barely a dozen speaking roles.  It's a vibrantly-shot picture, full of life and colour, which is a stark contrast to the more tempered Get Out and the shadow-heavy Us.  Its night scenes will test the limits of your home screen's contrasts as it sends shadows streaking through the moon-illuminated sky (mine failed the test, with the blacks and gradient grays and blues looking hella pixelated).  I do wish I'd seen it in theatres.

Toasty in his review gets deep into spoilers, and it's hard to talk about this film without saying what is going on.  The highly effective trailers for the film took pains to be particularly unclear on what exactly was happening in the film, so it's clear that surprise and uncertainty is considered a big aspect of the viewing experience. It makes me wonder, then, how strong the film would be upon repeat viewings.

We expect Peele at this stage to be operating in the realm of horror, but this film operates more in the realm of wonder.  Sure there are some disturbing elements or even whole scenes (Gordy's Home), which are there to hit home the point about humanity's relationship to wild animals, and our limits on taming them for our own entertainment.  Perhaps it's an even greater statement about deriving pleasure from the exploitation of others (be they human, animal, or alien), but if so, it's not a crystallized point being made.  Since I was expecting a straight-up horror, Jordan Peele-style, I wasn't really sure how to deal with the film as presented. 

(I have to do some spoilers ahead)

The crux of what our protagonists are attempting is to capture video or photographs of the "UFO".  But we live in a society where just the concept of deepfakes can undermine the authenticity of any video or picture, and the general public, particularly the American public, call into question anything reported from a valid news source, but are quick to embrace anything that seems dodgy but backed by an effusive pitchman.   

What is the gameplan of our protagonists once they get "the shot"?  How do they expect to retain ownership of their images once they release them when the internet will take anything and everything, even monetized social media would prove limiting (especially when something like TikTok has been documented in how the algorithm undermine POC creators, specifically Black contributors, on the platform).  Although, Em Haywood (the fabulous Kiki Palmer) seems to be particularly adept at hustling, it would have been good to get some dialogue, at the very minimum, of what their get rich quick scheme was off all this.  I think it would have worked better as an 80's period piece overall, just take modern technology and discourse out of it altogether.

My other issue was, at the end of the day, in this Jaws-like scenario, we humans can't help but destroy what we can't control.  The whole set-up of pacifist big-game hunting (eg. photography) culminates in the demise of a unique life form, and seems more tragic than heroic. But I guess that parallels the story of poor Gordy the chimp.

It's clear that Peele, working again with composer Michael Abels, wanted this to be more of a spirited adventure than horrifying.  Ables' compositions wouldn't seem out of place in an 80's Spielberg-produced young-adult adventure.  The sounds are bouncy and triumphant rather than ominous (though at times it seems at odds with the screaming wails from inside the belly of the beast that resonate out as through an echo chamber...but this is Peele's sense of humour coming out as well).

If, in the end, I didn't love this as much as Toasty, it may be because Peele doesn't make his intentions fully clear.  If he just wanted a Jaws-esque adventure, lite on horror, big on fun, then it's largely a success.  But if there's a message within this, it feels buried and difficult to extrapolate.

BUT...IS IT HORROR?
Nope.

31 Days of Halloween: Hellraiser

2022, David Bruckner (The Night House) -- download

OK, back to movies. 

Research is not the main foray of this blog, but two things had to be done. One, remind myself as to WTF the original movie (9 sequels ?!?!) was about, and be surprised (and not surprised) it was directed by Clive Barker himself, as the entire series is based on his short stories. But beyond the Cenobites, I had no recollection of plot, which turns out to be an extreme hedonist using the puzzle box to fuel his own resurrection amid sacrifices. Two, the director of the new one did The Night House, which at its core, set a plot that lends his approach well to doing this one. Rituals, the Other Side, constructed magic are what he seems to be exploring, so naturally, the Hellraiser series suits.

So, why return to this movie franchise? Well, its not surprising in this current ecosystem that mines all the "classics" for a return from the dead bank. This one is mos def not a classic, but the Cenobites will always have a place in horror pop culture playlists. They are artful creations of a twisted mind and skilled practical effects creators. They make you cringe, fidget in your seat and feel uncomfortable. And I imagine, for quite a few beyond Barker himself, feel uncomfortable in your pants. Not me. No. Ew David, Ew.

This movie begins with a character not unlike the "main" from the original, a wealthy man seeking to surpass the depths of pleasure & pain, who reaches out into The Unknown via dark means. I was catching hints of 13 Ghosts... *ahem* Thir13en Ghosts, in that the house is constructed for the express purpose of supernatural rites. His final ritual completes, we move on to the story of recovering addict Riley (Odessa A'zion, Grand Army) who is roped into robbing a shipping container once owned by our previously mentioned rich weird guy Voight (Goran Visnjic, Timeless). You can easily guess what is in the container, and what Riley does immediately with it.

She loses her brother to the Evil Rubik's Cube, and spends the rest of the movie intent on getting him back. I was never quite sure how she intended on doing that, especially after she learns it requires further sacrifice. But things never go as planned and in the end... well, lots of people die.

The plot was never really the thing with this movie -- the return of the Cenobites was. But why? Recreate them, being faithful to the original (a new style of Pinhead) but create some more, and make the reimagined ones even creepier? No, not really. They had an opportunity to take a truly terrifying, disturbing approach to their design, but they ended up just being... alright. Which is not alright. And despite a little bit more fleshing out, pun intended, of their motivations and purpose (which, I supposed could have been lifted from any of the 9 sequels, but not that I am aware of) the story was quite pedestrian.

31 Days of Halloween: Some TV

The Midnight Club, 2022, Netflix

Werewolf by Night, 2022, Disney

Life and Thanksgiving overtook most of our available time, so the last three four nights have just been watching our new favourite Mike Flanagan series, The Midnight Club, and chuckling at the one-shot Special, Werewolf by Night. 

I have already fessed to being big fans of Flanagan, so it was no surprise I was in for this latest series. I do like that Netflix is invested enough in him that they have dubbed it the Flanaverse, but also, that's kind of lame. This one sets itself once again in a haunted house, this time a hospice for terminal teenagers, a bucolic estate in the countryside where they can live their final days out in comfort and support. But, of course, something else is going on.

This is based on a YA series, to some degree, and that is present in the conceit of the show, in that The Midnight Club is where the kids come together each night to tell horror stories, and to address a pact they have made, in which when they die, they will do their best to send the rest messages back from the other side. But again, something else is going on in that house, because... well, there always is. Stories within stories seems, to me, to be prevalent in YA fiction.

The first handful of episodes have been, as Flanagan is wont to do, setting up the stories. We meet the kids, understand their motives and predilections, getting to like some and dislike others. I am not as wrapped up in their stories as much in previous series by Flanagan, and I am also not as keen on the continuous jump-scares. I know he likes them, but I guess due to the demographic audience, there was a need to up the ante on them. And as before, as we reveal more of the story and more about the kids, you get more wrapped up in the intermingling stories. 

We are trying to not binge it, but also want to get back to the now-once-again-full queue of downloaded horror movies. Watch what we already had from previous years? Sure, but watch from a growing list of even newer downloads? SURE. (insert the Drake meme image)

Meanwhile over on Disney, they added Halloween to the MCU by giving us an all too brief exposure to some of the monsters in its universe. Marvel has always had some proper monsters in its world, including Dracula, Frankenstein (they drop the apostrophe-monster), Man-Thing, Ghost Rider, etc. They have even brought them together in cross-over comics, such as Midnight Sons. And some have even reached over to the screen, including the much derided Morbius and Ghost Rider and even Hellstrom which is about the Son of Satan. And this time, we get the Werewolf, my favourite of monsters!

I loved Werewolf by Night, the comic, when I was a kid. It was right down my alley of a superhero comic that was not about straight superheroes. I always liked a twist to the usual. They definitely modelled his look from The Wolfman, the Universal monster movie, giving him a sort of Hulk-like appeal, even always leaving him wearing (purple?) pants. I don't recall any of the stories, but the supernatural would get mixed in, and he was a typically tortured soul character.

The show comes along not explaining anything, which is perfect for One Shot Specials. We are introduced to a group of monster hunters, founded around leader Ulysses Bloodstone, and his prodigal daughter Elsa. The monster hunters, a colourful cadre of Z-grade characters from Marvel, are vying for control of the stone, by hunting a monster, and each other, in a maze of Bloodstone's design.

The monster they hunt? Marvel knows its viewers well enough that they are a mix of old fans and new fans, so they hide the monster's identity for a while, eventually revealing Man-Thing (squeee!) and that one of the hunters is not hunting him, but is his buddy Jack Russel, i.e. Werewolf by Night. Their interaction makes it sound like a run of a Team Up comic run. Soon after the reveal, Russel is unmasked as monster, not monster hunter and captured. But not for long, as they invoke The Moon and ... well, slaughter ensues.

It was a fun romp for about an hour. They have a lot of fun playing with the tropes and the style of the show, it mostly being shown in black & white, with overtones of B level monster movies, as well as the buddy-cop motif showing up in more MCU shows of late.

So, what if they were to do a proper Midnight Sons or Legion of Monsters? Morbius was a dud, so many they can recover him? Ghost Rider could be done again, and we know there is already is a Blade movie in the works. So many options!

31 Days of Halloween: Cam

2018, Daniel Goldhaber (50 States of Fright) -- Netflix

Every season, there is going to be at least one of those, "Why exactly did we watch / keep watching that one?" We used it to fill that gap, so we don't spend the entire evening clicking through the downloads and the streaming services going, "What do you want to watch?" We still have a few we know we will watch during the season, but we like to pace those out for the most part. And yet, my brain still harkens back to the idea of, "Why the fuck are you wasting time on bad or painfully mediocre media when there is SO... MUCH... MORE ?!?!"

Cam was not terrible, nor was it really engaging to any degree. It was more another postulation, like Nope was, of an idea stretched out into a story. The basic plot, of Lola the camgirl (Madeline Brewer, Shining Girls) who finds herself replaced by a duplicate who milks Lola of her "fame & fortune", is relatively eerie, especially when they confirm it is not a stalker/look-alike, but a digital simulacrum that has gained some semblance of life on its own, but the movie is just primarily obsessed with the exploring the "life" of being a camgirl.

And breathe. TBH, I rather enjoy my massive run on sentences. I read far too much Victorian literature when I was a kid.

So, for those not in the know, a camgirl is at it's heart, a girl who strips and/or masturbates on a webcam to strangers in exchange for tips/coins. The industry, and don't be faint of heart, it is a strong segment of the sex worker industry, has built structures and cultures that can generate the popular girls a lot of money. The movie, which seems to be a writer/director finding a way to make money from his own addiction / awareness (*cough* research *cough*), introduces and explores all the aspects, such as obsessed fans who are deluded into believing they are close friends with the girls, to the amount of disposable income they can make, to the competition, and especially the escalation of their escapades in order to gain popularity / more tips / more money. Anyone can just masturbate, but building a character with emotional connection to a lot of lonely (but apparently wealthy) men takes care & skill.

Ed NOTE: A quick wiki read tells me the screenplay was actually written by an ex-camgirl who used the horror story as a way to tell people of her job. OK, fair enough.

The movie was not erotic or titillating in the least. It was kind of depressing. It was not scary and it was barely tense. About the only truly interesting aspect of it, and this was incredibly mild, was how Alice/Lola comes up with a way to defeat the doppelganger and regain her seat on the (*cough* vibrating *cough*) throne.

Ed. NOTE: This won film festival awards?!?! Sure, it was decently constructed and acted, but... really?!?!

31 Days of Halloween: Possessor

2020, Brandon Cronenberg (Antiviral) -- Netflix

If your dad is David Cronenberg, are you just destined to direct weird fucking movies? Joe Hill followed in his own dad's footsteps (Stephen King) by writing horror stories, but is there any other path? How would David have felt if Brandon had become the king of Hallmarkies?

Anywayz, weird fucking movie. And about time. There used to be a time, when these were my thing. It all started with that copy of a copy VHS tape of Tetsuo: The Iron Man, and for a time I was clamouring for anything weird, which of course, led me to Cronenberg's (David, not Brandon) seminal films. They always begged the question, horror or just horrifying? This movie ends up giving me the same query. It was definitely horrifying, with some definitely look-away cringe moments (I am getting soft in my old age) and the plot goes down an expected terrible (for all characters involved) path. But at its core, it is more a scifi thriller than horror movie.

Vos (Andrea Riseborough, Oblivion) works for an organization as an assassin. Unless the company serves other purposes, with its brain implant technology that allows their agents to "possess" someone else (also implanted, obviously against their will and without knowing) and guide them like an avatar in a video game, Vos's job is to kill people. It has taken its toll on her -- she is separated from her husband & child, and has begun embracing the violence of the acts, getting a wee bit bloodier than her handler Girder (Jennifer Jason Leigh, The Hateful Eight) care for. But no matter Vos, get your killer head on straight, because we have to kill rich guy Sean Bean, because... Sean Bean.

Vos is lying to Girder about having her head on straight, and almost from the moment she steps into the life of her next host, Colin Tate (Christopher Abbott, The Sinner), things are strained. For one, Vos is a woman, and the man's body is... interesting. She is supposed to lay low, play the part, until a party in which she will violently kill Bean's John Parse, allowing the company Girder and Vos work for to take over his. Tate is also seeing Parse's daughter Ava (ay-va, not ah-va; Tuppence Middleton, Jupiter Ascending) and during the botched assassination, Tate/Vos kills her. Vos is unravelling, and Tate is coming to the surface more and more.

This movie was brutal, no not too brutal to watch, but the brutality was done as spectacle, and to be honest, I am not sure it worked. Right from the get go, the Vos we meet is losing herself to the violence of her chosen profession, losing more and more touch with humanity. The more effective aspect of this loss is the horrific imagery associated with Vos becoming intertwined (visually, literally) with Tate despite his best attempts to break free. The violence was almost exploitative, while the sex, less so. I am on a metaphorical fence, wondering what I got out of it, but even that, means I got more than I usually get from all those middling to low monster & slasher flicks we watch.

Final question: what do you think Tate's job was?

Kent's post here.

31 Days of Halloween: The Cursed

2021, Sean Ellis (Anthrodpoid) -- Amazon

This originally was one of our leftovers, a flick sitting in the Downloads from last year. But it showed up on streaming services, and with it came trailers, forced to watch before our other Amazon shows. They did their job, catching our our attention, and I admit, initially I did not think that this period movie about a child possessed by evil looking teeth was what we downloaded -- that looked like something about a swamp creature full of tentacles. But yeah, evil looking teeth, silver teeth. That's a weird flex. Oh there is a swamp and tentacles, but the ... teeth. <shudder>

We begin in WW1, with an officer shot by German soldiers, the field surgeon removing three bullets from him, the final one, something definitely not German... is that, a silver bullet? Fade back into memories, some 35 years prior. Where are we? England? North France? Not quite sure, but everyone but John McBride (Boyd Holbrook, The Sandman) has a French name, and there are constant references to McBride's previously tragic encounter with the Beast of Gévaudan, a historical encounter with a great monster (or multiple creatures) that slew many many people and livestock, a real world event gave rise to many a related werewolf story. McBride lost his wife and child to it, and was tracking down Roma who were said to be connected to the beast.

The horror begins after the landlord refuses the claims of the "travelers" on his land, murdering them all instead of giving them the land they claim as their own. Everyone who watches horror movies knows that nothing good ever comes of slighting the Roma. Soon after the children of the village are possessed by dreams, a number of them are compelled to dig up the teeth that the Roma witch had crafted just before she and all her people were killed. Why teeth? Who knows; they are creepy. Teeth in mouth (dude, DON'T put that in your mouth) the biggest boy bites Edward (Max Mackintosh, Rocketman), the son of the landlord, before running off to hide. The young boy, who we know to be the officer wounded in the opening scenes, takes ill from the bite, and we see him writhing with vines or tentacles before disappearing into the wood.

McBride shows up, tasked with finding the boy and dealing with whatever beast has now slain the boy who originally bit Edward. We know what is going on, and how its going to go, or we wouldn't have that opening scene. So, yeah a pseudo werewolf story, as Edward the Beast wanders the countryside slaying whomever he comes across, and anyone who survives sickens and is in turn infected by the tentacles/vines, becoming yet another beast. At this point, I was wondering if this was more a werewolf story or a pale shadow of The Thing. But no matter, what plays out is a decent enough creature feature which is satisfying if nothing novel. 

Any regular reader of this season knows that I don't require new to enjoy the movie, just a modicum of style and skill. I would have preferred a bit more stretching out of the connection between silver coins and teeth and Roma curses, beyond some thin references to the 30 pieces of silver from the Bible, and nursery rhymes which lend themselves to the original title of the movie, Eight for Silver. I could get crankier for some of the clumsy plot building, such as, "Why do we need the WWI opening?" or "What's with the scant attempts at sexual tension between McBride and the landlord's wife (Kelly Reilly, Eden Lake) ?" but it's early in the season and at least it was not that exorcism movie (*snicker*).

31 Days of Halloween: The Black Phone

2022, Scott Derrickson (Sinister) -- download

I was right, I do recall enjoying Sinister, Derrickson's last horror flick also starring Ethan Hawke. I didn't recall being annoyed by how trope driven it was. This time round, we are not as powered by the common plot points, as we are something newish. I cannot ever honestly say new properly, as no horror movie is ever truly original, and that is sort of the point. This is my usual winding wooded path to saying I really enjoyed the movie.

From the opening credit bits, I knew this was not typical. No crow flying overhead, no lonely country road seen from on high, just a setting the scene of the late 70s, built with less than nostalgic images of kids in school, and the establishing of child disappearances, all grainy home video style. I commented quickly, as we met our main characters, that this was a sign of a film maker that knows what they are doing, just in the dialogue between Finney (Mason Thames, For All Mankind) and Gwen (Madeleine McGraw, Outcast), adolescent siblings, as we meet them. It rung of truth and emotion, unlike the stilted conversations between the girls in the abandoned My Best Friend's Exorcism. Yeah, I guess it bugs me how bad that was, before we turned it off. The two do not have a good family life; Dad's a drunk who abuses the kids, and they hand off who gets to take care of him. Finney is also being bullied at school, but is surviving because he tutors the tiny scarily violent kid. Gwen let's slip that she has dreams about the disappearing kids, but that just leads to another beating from her father. She wants to help but...

Then more kids directly connected to Finney go missing, and then.... Finney himself is taken.

This is one of the movies that has no need to hide who the bad guy is, as he (Ethan Hawke, In a Valley of Violence) has lead billing. The Grabber, as the kids call him, is a fucking scary guy in a black van, during the height of Scary Guys In Van urban legends, so I am not sure how any kids trust him, but with a quick magic trick and disarming black balloons, he tosses them into the back of the black van.

Finney immediately knows how this is going to go. Stuck in a deep basement, behind a reinforced door, where no sound escapes, Finney has finally had enough with the bullying. He cannot leave his sister alone at home with their broken father. Meanwhile Gwen is tortured all on her own, her prophetic dreams (which her father wants to drive from her, as they drove his wife to suicide) are not helping. I was moved that the drunken abusive father proves to not be a monster, and is broken even further by his son's disappearance. And Finney has other allies...

There is a phone on the wall. A phone not connected to anything. But it rings, and the voices of previously taken kids comes out of it for Finney to hear. And they begin coaching him towards escape.

I have voiced before that I like horror movies which take a turn towards the heroic reversal. No, not the Final Girl aspect, but where the victim pulls up their pants and decides their fate for themselves. Finney does this, along with the allyship of the kids who have all died at the hands of The Grabber, eerie voices and visions from the Other Side. 

And what a monster to slay, is Hawke as The Grabber! I am sorely disappointed that his devil-clown mask has not instantly become a pop culture icon. This mask, which comes in two pieces: a top of horns and nose, and a lower interchangeable jaw and sometimes mouth, hides not his appearance from us or Finney (for we have already seen his face in full) but his own horror at himself, from himself. Some aspects are almost friendly, and others are gleeful. And one is great and terrible.

I thoroughly enjoyed how this movie played out, in mood and atmosphere, sound design and imagery. I wondered at so many times where it would go, as in horror you can survive or you can end with further reversal and loss. Little things came together, not as twists, but as pieces making a whole. This may be one of the season's best.

31 Days of Halloween: Hocus Pocus 2

2022, Anne Fletcher (The Proposal) -- Disney+

After an abandoned attempt to watch My Best Friend's Exorcism (far too amateurish, and with my "horror" standards, that's saying a lot) on Amazon, we grabbed the next obvious thing. As we loved the original ("amuck amuck amuck"), we expected to watch this one during this run, so why not now.

The thing is, and I didn't realize until we started it, but I have absolutely no recollection of the original. It was almost twenty years ago, and I guess there haven't been many re-watches since the days of VHS faded out. The performances of Sarah Jessica Parker and Bette Midler are somewhat in the pop culture lexicon, but really, its not really out there. But in today's era of resurrecting anything with the most remote connection to nostalgia, I was not at all surprised to see this come about. But no, not really eager or excited. Still, it filled a slot.

After watching, yeah... it filled a slot.

So, despite being dead and then resurrected and then dead again, the three Sanderson Sisters,  Winnie (Bette Midler, Freak Show), Sarah (Sarah Jessica Parker, Mars Attacks!) and Mary (Kathy Najimy, Veep) are summoned to life once again via the virgin & black flame candle spell. This time, the teen girls, Becka (Whitney Peak, Chilling Adventures of Sabrian) and Izzy (Bella Escobedo, The Baker and the Beauty) are conned into it by Gilbert (Sam Richardson, Werewolves Within), the guy who runs the local magic store. Since he saw the three sisters their last time around, back in the late 90s, he's been obsessed with getting them back, and getting access to real magic. That should make him a villain, but he's a nice guy and we all like him and he redeems himself, so yeah, no real villains in this movie, not even the Sanderson Sisters who are given a mild reason to dislike Salem (you know, beyond being hung) and therefore justify them eating all those children. No, not really, but they are far too stupid and funny to be real villains. We need a mockbuster where they are truly horrendous resurrected witches. Ex-BF, not really, zombie Billy Butcherson (Doug Jones, The Shape of Water) is back, losing his head and helping foil the sisters again.

OMG, was this a product of the Disney Machine !! So many scenes felt like they were just setting up material for events at the theme parks: dance numbers, an intricately designed "old Salem" and the magic shoppe built in the witch's old cottage. You can see them just moving all the props from the movie into a lot in Disney World and charging people by the cauldron loads. That said, that design was quite glorious. Every little detail is bright and clear and built with great care to attract children, catch the eye and be genre appropriate. Not horror genre, but teen and younger, to have their babysitters rent it and all watch together. Do babysitters rent (digitally?) movies to watch with their wards anymore? I am old/out-of-touch.