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February 2nd, 2012
 | 07:50 pm - B-Fest 2012 Recap: Better Late Than Really, Really Late
Q: What's a worse idea than sitting through a bad movie?
A: Sitting through sixteen consecutive bad movies and trying not to fall asleep! I swear, that joke is funny at four o'clock in the morning, especially if you haven't slept in nearly 24 hours. Well, almost funny.
Yes folks, it's time for the annual State of My Cinematic Masochism report. Every January I go down to B-Fest, and every January I come back wondering what on earth is wrong with me. B-Fest? Why, it's Northwestern University's annual 24-hour B-movie festival, where viewers are treated to a wide selection of horror, science fiction, and exploitation films which range from "delightfully offbeat" to "eye-gougingly bad." Lookit those phrases that I just put in quotes. You could slap those on the back of a DVD case.
Yes, B-Fest is an ordeal, and not for the faint of, well, anything, really, since you have to spend a whole day in what amounts basically to a campus lecture hall. The Fest begins at 6:00 PM on (usually) the last Friday in January, and lasts until the 6:00 the next evening. The seats are cramped and difficult to sleep in, and the buildings hygiene facilities leave a great deal to be desired. Starbucks isn't open half as long as you'd like, and some guy who smells like cigarette smoke and broccoli always insists on sitting in the seat in front of you. So why do we do it? Why, for the movies of course.
B-Fest has movies unlike any you've ever seen. Sometimes that's a bad thing, but not always. The films usually range in age from the 1940s to the 1980s, and though you'll remember some of them from the late-night cable TV of your youth, many of them will be too obscure to even find pirated copies online. Many of us go year after year after year, and get recognized by other attendees as regulars. It's a sobering moment when that happens.
Anyway, I have not grown out of it yet, which means that last Friday I headed down to the Northwestern campus with ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) matt_william, his girlfriend Jynette, evil_jim, and henrietta1. We got off to an unusually early start and had to kill time at the Belvedere Oasis before heading down to Mitsuwa Marketplace for provisions.
Mitsuwa Marketplace is small a Japanese mall in Arlington Heights, Illinois. It has changed over the years that I've been there, but has always contained a grocery store and food court. We grab lunch, then pick up snacks. The first couple of times I attended B-Fest, I made the mistake of buying most of my food at Mitsuwa. However, twenty four hours is a long time to subsist on nothing but junk food, and I have learned that the best way for me to stay awake is to bring apples, cut up veggies, hummus, tabouli, string cheese, and other such relatively-healthy snacks. Protein is good for keeping me awake. Anything that is traditionally sold in individually wrapped portions or colored artificially? Not so much. I did buy plenty of junk food, however, and will be reviewing it on my website soon, so there's that.
We arrived at Northwestern around 4:00, which is the earliest you can park on Friday without expecting a ticket, and went inside to stake out seats and meet up with our friend Tim. Eventually we were met by devianttouch, and I caught up with a few other friends from Madison, but more on that later. We settled into our seats as the retching hour neared, and as the lights dimmed, we turned forward in anticipation and dread of the films we would shortly see...
( Cut for exceptional long-windedness )
After the Fest we blearily gathered up our belongings threw away our garbage, and I -- as mentioned above -- walked off with almost 400 paper plates. I call that a win, but I've always had an unconventional understanding of that word.
We checked into our hotel, and left on foot in search of a good meal. First we came upon a small cafe which looked fantastic to me, but which my companions deemed "pretentious" (it was the hummus wrap, as far as I can tell). Next we found an Italian restaurant where the wait was expected to be around twenty minutes. Finally, we settled on a little bar & grill which had been recommended by the guy working the front desk at our hotel, and which had been our original destination. The food was good, if a little expensive, and the service was, well, lousy. Not that it mattered. Our goals on Saturday night were to eat, and crash. Which is exactly what happened, although I was actually pretty wide awake after returning to the hotel. This is a post-B-Fest sensation which I have only felt since I started eating properly at the Fest.
Sunday morning is not an interesting story. We skipped the hotel's continental breakfast in favor of finding a Denny's somewhere, missed an exit on the interstate, and had to backtrack for half an hour. Everybody was dropped off one by one, and when I got home, I unpacked immediately, put everything away, walked the dog, and sat down to decompress. That never happens. I don't know why I was more awake this year than usual, but I have no complaints about it.
Then I waited a good three days before deciding to type up my notes, which, by the way, look amazing. Last year I brought a booklight and filled maybe ten pages of my Moleskine with crabbed, tiny handwriting. This year? Wrote in the dark. The words are gigantic and barely legible. Used up about 45 pages.
So anyway, that uh, was what I did last weekend... How 'bout you?
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October 31st, 2011
| 10:10 pm - 31 Days of Halloween: Masters of Horror: The Black Cat
 Madness is the perhaps the quintessential element of horror fiction, or at least, of American horror fiction. It lurks at the heart of every story by Edgar Allan Poe, and of his literary descendants, from Lovecraft to Kuttner to King, even to Phillip Roth. On the other side of the pond, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, and Vladimir Nabokov all acknowledged having borrowed the element of insanity from Poe.
On this most auspicious of nights (auspicious namely because I was hoping to watch something good at the end of this project), it took me awhile to select a film. Burnt Offerings was a serious contender, but I got bored with it because I knew where it was going. I turned it off, brought up Netflix, and looked at my streaming options. And there it was: Stuart Gordon's "The Black Cat."
"The Black Cat" was made as an episode of Masters of Horror, a Showtime series which ran for two seasons between 2005 and 2007. It's an anthology-style show where each episode is a short film directed by someone famous in the world of horror films. Each director was allowed free reign to make an hour long film without studio meddling. The results are uneven, but they're all worth watching.
Stuart Gordon (discussed earlier in my write-up of Re-Animator) directs one episode in each season. His contribution to the first season is the Lovecraft adaptation "Dreams in the Witch-House," which contains more traditional occultism and less hard math than Lovecraft's original, but it's not bad. His second season entry, "The Black Cat," is based on the Edgar Allan Poe story of the same title.
The film follows Poe himself (Jeffrey Combs) as he descends further into his famous alcoholism. He's suffering a particularly nasty bout of writer's block, running out of money, and his wife, Virginia (Elyse Levesque), is dying of consumption. Poe begins to see their cat, Pluto, as a demon which is killing his wife and breaking his concentration. It's not long before Poe files off the handle and kills Pluto-- wait, no, Pluto's all right. It was a daydream. As the plot proceeds, Poe descends into madness, and we're unclear about what's real and what's not until the very end.
I read the original story when I was in middle school, and as I recall it, this is a reasonably faithful adaptation. Poe isn't the narrator of the original, and he wasn't (this particular type of) insane. Virginia isn't part of that story either, but the main points are all here. More importantly, the increasing feeling of insanity is incredibly well executed. That's really what impressed me about this one; the slow encroachment of madness is not unusual fare for a horror movie, but it often comes off as unrealistic, and at worst, inane. Stuart Gordon likes to revel in gore, so it's easy for people involved in Serious Cinema to ignore him, but "The Black Cat" may have changed a few minds.
Jeffrey Combs is especially good as Edgar Allan Poe. I'm not sure what, exactly, they've done to his face (other than the prosthetic proboscis), but it's hard to tell that Mr. Combs is lurking under there. It's such a good performance that Gordon and Combs followed it up by launching a very successful one-man stage show about Poe called Nevermore in Las Vegas.
All in all, I think The Black Cat was a fine end to my October. Of the films I've seen this month, it's one of the ones I'd recommend most highly.
Here's the trailer.
Maybe we can do this again next year.
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October 30th, 2011
| 10:36 pm - 31 Days of Halloween: Dark Waters
 Ah, nunsploitation! When was the last time I saw a good evil nun movie? No, seriously, nunsploitation is an actual thing (Wikipedia says so), just like Nazisploitation (Ilsa: She-Wolf of the SS) and Wiccansploitation (Blood on Satan's Claw). Plenty of classic titles in this genre: Killer Nun, Sisters of Satan, Nude Nuns with Big Guns... Only the titles are classic, of course. Ken Russell's The Devils actually IS a classic, but I wouldn't seek any of the others out.
I must confess, I wasn't much into this one, which would be an unforgivable admission if I were a professional, but I'm not, and you've gotten nearly a month's worth of pretty good write-ups so far. Even Roger Ebert half-asses it once in awhile. Less often than me, I'll grant you, but nobody's paying me for this stuff.
Anyway.
Dark Waters is not the 2005 movie starring Jennifer Connolly. This one was made in 1993 in Italy, the UK, and Russia almost immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union. The making of this movie was apparently tumultuous and might actually be pretty interesting, but that's not part of my scope here.
The story centers around Elizabeth, an English girl who has come to remote island to visit a friend who happens to be a nun. Elizabeth just misses her -- she's left the convent to return to London. The nuns offer Elizabeth accommodations anyway, and she is befriended by Sarah, a novice. We learn that Elizabeth was born on this island, but her mother died in childbirth and her father took her to London when she was seven.
Sarah and Elizabeth check out the convent's library, which is normally off-limits, and they find some ancient books with extremely disturbing illustrations. Elizabeth gets attacked by a nun while Sarah is out of the room. The nun falls to her death during the struggle, and Elizabeth winds up in a labyrinth of catacombs under the convent where she witnesses the burial of a corpse wrapped in a blood-soaked sheet, and stumbles into a pit where a blind painter works ceaselessly to cover the walls with alarming images. In the paintings she sees the face of her friend, the body wrapped in a bloody shroud, and realizes that she's being lied to by everybody. Her friend is dead.
She begins to suspect Sarah, and meanwhile she's having strange dreams and visions of her childhood. Things get weirder. She eats a raw fish, and a nun gets flayed. In the end, Sarah turns out to be Elizabeth's sister, and not exactly human, and their mother is revealed to be a demon trapped in the basement of the convent.
I guess people like this movie, but I really didn't. I may just have been in the wrong mood tonight. There are some interesting ideas and images -- I especially like the blind, prophetic painter -- but I feel like it doesn't go anywhere worthwhile. Wikipedia says that the movie was originally conceived as an homage to H.P. Lovecraft, borrowing heavily from some of his stories, but that the budget necessitated a simpler production. I see hints of The Dunwich Horror and The Shadow Over Innsmouth, but the story is more complicated and less interesting than either of those. You know what else this feels like? Susperia. But we already have a good version of Susperia. Who needs another one?
I didn't recognize any of the names involved. The actress who plays Elizabeth must be British, and the one who plays Sarah might be, but most of characters are played by non-native English speakers who sound like they memorized the dialog phonetically. The inflections and cadences are all wrong. Between the thick accents and the bad delivery, it's difficult to make out a lot of the words. I suppose the rest of the world feels the same way when American actors have to mumble their way through French or Japanese.
I feel like I should have enjoyed Dark Waters more, so I wouldn't tell anybody not to see it, but I don't feel like revisiting it to pick up what I missed.
Here's the trailer, which makes the film look far worse than it actually is.
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October 29th, 2011
| 06:05 pm - 31 Days of Halloween: The Last House on the Left
 One of my main goals in this project was to see some of the horror classics that have had a low priority on my list for a long time. There are a lot of these because I already know what I like, and I'm more interested in seeing more of that than I am in filling out the gaps in my education. And in some cases, I've really been missing out.
I'm not sure of my general opinion of The Last House on the Left. I found a used copy about five years ago for $2.00, and I picked it up knowing that I was supposed to have watched it years ago. Then I completely failed to watch it until today.
I won't give a long summary of The Last House on the Left because I don't think it needs one. Not that I think you already know it (though you may), but I think a few short sentences will lay all the framework you need:
Mari and Phyllis are going to a rock concert to celebrate Mari's 17th birthday, when they decide the concert will be much better if they score some drugs first. Their detour into the seedy side of town leads to their kidnapping by a small band of escaped convicts, who torture and rape the girls, and eventually murder them. The convicts' car has thrown a rod, so they seek shelter at the first house they find, which, coincidentally, belongs to Mari's parents who are wondering why their daughter didn't come home last night. The walls of the house are thin, and after piecing together what happened, Mom and Dad decide to exact revenge.
I don't recognize anybody in this movie. Some of them are probably mildly famous, but I'm not looking them up because I'm working under a deadline (Halloween party). In other news, I totally have the work ethic of a professional journalist.
This was Wes Craven's first feature film after he left the porn industry. Oh, you didn't know he worked in porn during the '60s? Neither did I until today. Anyway, The Last House on the Left was made in 1972 on a shoestring budget, and that has translated to a stark, pseudo-documentary style which makes one uncomfortable. The rape and violence are impressively graphic, and I'm somewhat disturbed by the fact that this film has a large cult following. Craven reportedly wanted to make this a more "hardcore" film (referring, I assume, to violence, not sex), but was forced to tone it down. I can't imagine what he'd originally envisioned.
Even after the cuts to the shooting script, this movie has been heavily censored, especially in Britain. Even the supposedly-uncut versions of this movie are missing scenes. A remake came out in 2009, and The Internet Says that it's even more violent, but I find that difficult to believe. In fact, I'd say that The Last House on the Left belongs alongside I Spit on Your Grave and Cannibal Holocaust as one of the most unpleasant movies I've ever seen.
That's not saying that it's bad. It's very good at what it is intended to do. Some people like that, I guess, but I don't. My wife and I were recently discussing what defines a horror movie, and I realized that in order to consider it a horror movie, I need it to have a supernatural element. In order to enjoy it, I need the main character -- hero or villain -- to be likable, and preferably to survive. The Last House on the Left has neither of these things, and it's not as socially poignant as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer.
Anyway, here's the trailer.
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October 28th, 2011
| 11:26 pm - 31 Days of Halloween: Cry Baby Lane
 In addition to wit, brevity is good for all sorts of things. Scary movies, for instance. It's the reason you've never seen a 160-minute horror movie, and why the anthology-style films of the British studio Amicus sold so well (I know you don't know what I'm talking about, but look into it. They're good.). Cry Baby Lane would have benefitted from a little more brevity.
You've either never heard of Cry Baby Lane, or you just became aware of it. It's a movie produced by Nickelodeon in 2000. Originally envisioned as a modestly-budgeted theatrical release, the budget was finally cut to $800,000, and the result aired once (and only once) on TV. The story goes that it was banned thanks to a flood of calls and letters from angry parents who thought it too frightening for children. There was no DVD release, and it was never available anywhere else.
And then about a month ago, somebody digitized and uploaded to YouTube a VHS tape they'd made of the original broadcast. I snagged a copy with the intention of watching it later, shortly after which Viacom had the film taken down. Other people have rushed to re-post it, but those links will likely be taken down soon. Those still wishing to see it could probably torrent it, though the renewed interest has prompted Nickelodeon to re-broadcast it a couple of times this weekend. Check your listings, blah blah blah.
So what's so scary about Cry Baby Lane, anyway?
The film follows Carl and Andrew, two boys in their early teens. They hang out occasionally with Mr. Bennet (the always-intense Frank Langella) who tells them creepy stories about the undertaking business, much to their mother's chagrin.
One night, Bennet tells them of a local farmer who fathered a pair of conjoined twins. As the twins grew, it became clear that one was good and one was evil. They died prematurely, and the farmer separated their bodies, having the good one buried in the local cemetery, and the bad one buried near the farm. Carl decides to play a trick on a few of the local girls, and enlists Andrew's help. They go into the cemetery, locate a child's grave, and rig a tape recorder to play spooky sounds. The two boys return later in the evening with the girls and hold a seance which is interrupted by the pre-recorded shrieks and moans. The girls call them jerks, and it's a pretty lousy night, in all.
The next morning, things are different in town. Dogs are meaner. People are acting less responsibly. A gang of vicious teenage girls is tormenting other citizens. Mr. Bennett pieces things together and figures out that an evil spirit is causing mischief. Turns out that he didn't tell the boys the whole story: Just before burial, the bodies of the twins were switched. They've awakened the evil one. Now everyone, including Carl, is out to get Andrew.
I can see why this might have bothered parents. It's awfully suspenseful. The callous figures are really callous, and people do die. Nickelodeon swears they never officially banned it, and I'm inclined to believe that; between the angry parents and the unpopularity of the broadcast, there was simply no reason to air it again. That has changed recently, and I wonder if we won't be seeing a DVD in the near future.
I didn't much care for it, and I think it would have been tighter and more exciting if it had been a bit shorter. The kids are all pretty good, and in addition to Langella, we also get a pre-stardom Jim Gaffigan. The director, Peter Lauer has a lot of TV work under his belt, including episodes of Scrubs, Pushing Daisies, Arrested Development, and so on. He knows what he's doing, so maybe I should give him the benefit of the doubt: this movie was for kids, after all.
For the most part, though I was just kind of bored. I think people overrate it because it's been so hard to see until recently, and as I said, I'm probably the wrong age for it.
No trailer, but here's a YouTube search which would probably lead you to the whole thing.
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October 27th, 2011
| 10:47 pm - 31 Days of Halloween: Trick 'r Treat
 I feel like I must be the last person in the world to know about Trick 'r Treat. Seriously, where did this movie come from? Did you know about this? I'd never heard of it until it started popping up in all my RSS feeds a couple of weeks ago. I assumed it was a new movie being released direct-to-DVD, but apparently it was slated for an October release in 2007, got pushed back and came out on DVD in 2009 instead. In the meantime, everybody except me has fallen in love with it.
After I'd seen reference to Trick 'r Treat a few times, I decided to look into it, and somehow I got the idea that this was a kid-appropriate film. I didn't think it was actually for kids, but when I finally saw today that it was rated R, I was confused. Watched it anyway.
The opening titles of Trick 'r Treat are styled as comic books. I get the feeling that they're supposed to evoke the feeling of the E.C. publications of the 1950s, but the art is too modern. It's a nice touch, though, and does a good job of setting the stage.
This is an anthology film which tells five different stories, and I can't summarize much of the plot without spoiling it. The first and shortest involves a woman who becomes spooked and nervous when she has to take down her elaborate outdoor Halloween decorations without her husband's help. Is there somebody out there watching her? Is it the kid across the street, or someone in her own yard? I can't make this sound exciting without going into more detail, and I can't go into more detail without spoiling the story.
The second segment involves a school principal who engages in some very antisocial behavior. The third follows some tweens who investigate the site of the local urban legend (The Halloween Schoolbus Massacre!), and the fourth is about a group of sexually promiscuous college girls who are interested in a different kind of good time. Finally, in the fifth story, the neighborhood grumpy old man gets an unexpected visit from Sam, who appears to be a little kid in orange footie pajamas wearing a burlap sack as a mask. Sam shows up here and there throughout the movie and all over the movie poster and DVD insert, but I had to check IMDB to get his name.
This is decidedly not children's fare, which is fine. I have no problem with that, but I'd been in the mood for something else, so I tried to hate Trick 'r Treat. I really did. But it's really surprisingly good, given that it's a modern horror movie made with modern horror audiences in mind. I'm not a big fan of modern horror movies, which tell stories explicitly designed for cinema. They're all about spectacle. Can you imagine summarizing Saw around a campfire?
Trick 'r Treat harkens back to a different type of scary story; one driven by plot rather than special effects. This is the stuff of urban legends, and the sort of material that doesn't need a big budget to be executed well. Of course, the big budget helps, and this is a good looking movie. The stories really do keep one guessing. Even after I realized that each vignette was going to end by turning the situation on its ear, I found the film going off at weird, obtuse angles. Not in a crappy, counter-intuitive way, either.
Also worth mentioning: the chronology of the film is interesting. All of the stories overlap to a certain degree, and sometimes we see an event that happened earlier in the movie from a different character's point of view.
The film was written and directed by Michael Doherty, who penned both X-Men 2 and Superman Returns. This is an impressive pedigree, and he'll be one to keep an eye on. The film also features performances by Brian Cox, Dylan Baker, and Anna Pacquin. Not exactly A-listers, but established actors rarely take horror films seriously. Their presence suggests that they recognized this as a worthwhile project.
All in all, even after the letdown of expecting something else, Trick 'r Treat turned out to be a very good time. I think the reason that I'm so drawn to classic horror and sci-fi movies is that the good ones earn a cult following, and the bad ones get completely forgotten. I think that Trick 'r Treat will be one of the ones that survives.
Here's the trailer.
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October 26th, 2011
| 10:35 pm - 31 Days of Halloween: Dark Night of the Scarecrow
 "There IS other justice in this world besides the law." Ah, the revenge-from-beyond-the-grave flick. Is there any genre (sub-sub-genre?) more predictable? And yet they keep making these movies, and we keep watching them.
Dark Night of the Scarecrow is a TV movie from 1981 which was produced and broadcast by CBS, and the entire story is pretty much revealed in the premise. Am I wrong about this? Do other people find supernatural revenge stories as simplistic as I do? I mean, you can make a story as twisty and bizarre as you like, but when the characters start noticing that the killer is only taking out people who were involved in the murder at the beginning of the movie, you can pretty much guess what the big reveal of the plot is going to be. I suppose these movies are more about suspense than story, more about execution than plot.
Which is not to say that Dark Night of the Scarecrow is bad. In fact, it's better than most TV movies of its vintage, which is why it's out on DVD, and still occasionally gets referenced in pop culture. I hadn't heard of this one until until a couple of years ago, but it has a sizable cult following.
The movie begins with Bubba (Larry Drake), a mentally handicapped adult whose best friend is Marylee, who must be about ten. The local Good Ol' Boys are not fond of Bubba -- or his innocent relationship with Marylee, and they're practically looking for a reason to do something about him. Their chance comes when Marylee is mauled by a dog while playing with Bubba. Otis (Charles Durning) doesn't know about the dog and assumes that Bubba has beaten and possibly raped the little girl. He leads a gang which confronts Bubba (who is hiding inside a scarecrow) and pumps him full of lead. Marylee turns out to be fine, but the deed is already done.
Otis & Co. are accused of the murder, but they hold a certain amount of sway in town, and there's no real proof of their involvement, so they escape imprisonment. Soon, however, a mysterious scarecrow starts popping up in the fields, and members of the execution party start dying one by one.
The story unfolds against the backdrop of a small, southern town. This is a good setting for a Halloween story, and as predictable as I find the plot, it's still very effective. The performances are good, though the characters are a little thin. I suppose there's not a great deal of development to be done with a large cast of pitchfork fodder in the space of ninety one minutes. Along with Durning (who you've seen in The Hudsucker Proxy and The Muppet Movie, among other things) and Drake (Firefly), you'll also recognize Claude Earl Jones and Lane Smith as a couple of actors who were in everything made during the '70s.
The film was directed by Frank De Felitta, who I'm completely unfamiliar with, and was based on a book by J.D. Feigelson, also unknown to me. This is a good film, but I've looked at their resumes and don't feel inclined to track down any of their other works.
At any rate, I do recommend this one. Here's the trailer, which gives everything away.
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October 25th, 2011
| 10:35 pm - 31 Days of Halloween: Re-Animator
 "It is uncommon to fire all six shots of a revolver with great suddenness when one would probably be sufficient, but many things in the life of Herbert West were uncommon..." So begins the third chapter of Herbert West: Re-Animator by H.P. Lovecraft. Apparently my big themes this month are Lovecraft, Vincent Price, and A.I.P. Oh, well.
Herbert West: Re-Animator was the first story Lovecraft wrote on commission. It was serialised by an amateur publication called Home Brew, which published it in six installments between February and July of 1922. Lovecraft was paid $5.00 for each, and though he was initially very happy with the result, he felt hampered by the requirement that each episode begin with a recap and end on a cliffhanger. Eventually he came to despise it as "hack work." The original stories are not that bad, though they compare poorly to his later work. You can see him trying to work out his writing style.
The film, Re-Animator by Stuart Gordon is an unusual adaptation, in that it completely misses the tone of the original work, but retains an impressive number of small details that most screenwriters would ignore. Gordon has done quite a few Lovecraft adaptations (Castle Freak, Dagon, From Beyond, Dreams in the Witch House), all drenched in blood and jiggling with sex. Lovecraft, whose works were impressively sexless, would have hated them, and yet they all show a certain die-hard reverence for the original works. They feel somewhat misguided, but then again, text-accurate Lovecraft adaptations are both difficult to make and too boring for an uninitiated audience.
Re-Animator begins as Herbert West is disgraced at the Zurich Institute of Medicine. We take it as read that the faculty at the Miskatonic University School of Medicine are unaware that he was possibly (read: unmistakably) connected to the death of his old tutor, Hans Gruber. West moves in with med student Dan Cain, and begins taking classes under the tutelage of Carl Hill, Miskatonic's resident grant magnet.
West butts heads with Hill, whose work West considers to be derivative of the late Dr. Gruber's. While Hill is obsessed with the physical location of the will in the brain, West's pet project is the reanimation of dead tissue, and the mastery of brain death. First he manages to revive a dead cat into a spitting, yowling demon. When West and Cain attempt to try the serum (I mean, reagent) on a human subject, the dean of the school bursts in just as the spark of life is rekindled in the test subject. The subject's reduced mental faculties prevent him from doing anything more brain-taxing than foaming at the mouth, bleeding, and throwing things, and he kills the dean during his rampage. West manages to subdue the test subject with a bonesaw (perhaps subdue is the wrong word), and injects the dean with his reagent.
Once the action is over, Dr. Hill shows up and immediately takes the not-exactly-dead dean into his care. Not long after he pays West a visit, and makes it very clear that if West does not hand over his research, the murder of the dean will be exposed. West beheads Hill with a shovel, and then injects the head and body back separately, which turns out to be a bad idea.
There's a lot more story, and more sex and gore than I've let on. There's also a superfluous love story. The film adapts about half of the original story, the other half of which is massaged into a new story in Bride of Re-Animator. The third installment, Beyond Re-Animator, again features West and his reagent, but that's the only real connection to the previous films. West is played in all three by Jeffrey Combs. This is practically the role that built his career. You may also recognize Barbara Crampton, who can be seen wearing just as few clothes in From Beyond, and several other mediocre '80s splatter films.
That's what Re-Animator is, really: a splatter film. It's so amazingly, trashily excessive that it transcends that stagnant and indefensible sub-genre into something sublime. These are the same heights that would be scaled again a few years later in Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, the same depths that would be plumbed by Sam Raimi in Evil Dead 2. It's also very funny, in a horrible, horrible way. Two of the people I watched it with tonight had not seen it before, and both had a good time, despite the fact that I don't think they will voluntarily watch it again. That says something.
Here's the trailer, and also the terrible music video from the third movie.
Those with more free time may wish to peruse the original story, which contains the fabulous quote from the beginning of this entry.
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October 24th, 2011
| 10:09 pm - 31 Days of Halloween: Rough Magik
 This is at least my third -- possibly fourth time watching Rough Magik (AKA Rough Magik Initiative), and I'm embarrassed to say that I just don't care for it. I feel like I'm supposed to, but I just don't. At least I finished it, and got the gist of the story this time.
Rough Magik was pitched as a TV series to the BBC in 2000 (or so). They didn't pick it up, but the pilot episode has been released on DVD and stands alone reasonably well, as long as you don't mind an extremely open ending. It's like watching a movie that sets up a sequel which never comes. I'm sure you've never had that experience.
Rough Magik follows The Night Scholars, a government organization whose job is to keep the cult of Cthulhu (better known here as "Dreamers") in line. Cthulhu, for the uninitiated (eh, who am I kidding? You already know this.) is an ancient alien, sometimes worshipped as a god, who slumbers beneath the Pacific ocean but is expected to awaken and rule the planet again sometime in the future. This is the backstory of H.P. Lovecraft's The Call of Cthulhu, and is explained in about as many words by the protagonist of Rough Magik, Mr. Moon (Paul Darrow). Moon is the kind of cool-headed sociopath that makes a good TV government agent, and he shows up uninvited to take stock of a murder investigation.
The murder in question is that of two children. The culprit is their mother, and she seems perfectly content to confess her crime. She's been having dreams, you see, and they told her what to do. Moon takes one look at the tentacled idol in the corner, and decides to speak with a former Night Scholar, Kenneth Reese Warren (Gerrard McArthur). Mr. Reese Warren, under drugged interrogation, recounts a military operation involving another ancient alien, telekenesis, and personality swapping. The film ends with Mr. Moon reflecting on the possibility that Cthulhu is waking, and that the Dreamers -- who are scattered across the furthest corners of the globe -- will need to be stopped.
Apparently this pilot episode was actually intended to be the second episode of the series, and I can imagine the story unveiling over six or twelve episodes. That's how British shows work; there are far fewer episodes, and they tend to comprise a single story arc. The setup of Rough Magik almost negates a monster-of-the-week format, which would have made this into a British X-Files.
The series as a whole might have been good, but as I said above, I don't like this episode. I've seen it a few times now, and this is the only time I've really gotten the story. I know exactly what the problem is. It's that most of the episode is taken up by Reese Warren's story, told in flashback. These flashbacks are uneventful, boring, and frankly, there's a lot of irrelevant material. The end of the flashback is really interesting and engaging, but you have to slog through twenty minutes of soldiers crawling through mud to get there, but at some point during this part, my brain just shuts off, which is why I've never understood the story before. I've had the same experience watching Jacob's Ladder and Starship Troopers, which superficially suggests that the military bores me, but I've liked enough army movies that I know that's not it.
Still, other people seem to like it. There are some good points, though I wonder how they'd have developed Mr. Moon. He is obviously intended to be the main character, but he isn't given much personality, other than being a ruthless bastard. They also get points for getting the Lovecraftian angle right. It's really too bad that Rough Magik didn't get picked up as a series, but I think they were a little too early. A few years later shows like this one became common and popular.
I don't believe that you can stream this one online (certainly not legally, anyway), but Netflix has the disc, and you can watch the trailer here.
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October 23rd, 2011
| 09:30 pm - 31 Days of Halloween: The Stuff
 Night. Rural Georgia. An old miner is out walking when he notices a viscous, white fluid bubbling up out of the ground. He bends down and scoops some up with his hand. Looks harmless, feels silky and smooth, doesn't have an odor... What's the next logical step? Why, to eat it, of course!
So begins 1985's The Stuff, a film which proudly and cheerfully (and far too often) proclaims that it's a Larry Cohen production. Chances are you don't recognize Larry Cohen's name. He's an incredibly prolific writer/director whose name has emblazoned all sorts of memorable films (Q: The Winged Serpent, Black Caesar, the Maniac Cop franchise and Phone Booth, to name a few), but nothing actually good.
The Stuff is, for better or worse, a pretty typical Cohen film. After the miner tastes the goop and finds it delicious, the story skips a few months ahead. A new snack food, Stuff, is sweeping the nation. It looks like runny marshmallow cream, but it's low in calories and nutritional information. The dessert industry hires ex-FBI agent and all-around slimeball, David "Mo" Rutherford to figure out where it comes from, what's in it, and why the FDA allows it to be sold without proper labelling. Rutherford smarms his way through the investigation, picking up some allies on the way: Nicole (the marketing executive responsible for putting Stuff on the tables of America), Charlie W. "Chocolate Chip Charlie" Hobbs (a former cookie tycoon who's still miffed about being unseated by the popularity of ice cream), and Jason, a kid who runs away from home after seeing Stuff moving around of its own accord inside the fridge.
The Stuff is a parasite, and the nation is indeed in dire straits when Jason finally crosses Mo's path. Jason's family -- like most of the other families in the U.S. -- subsists exclusively on a diet of Stuff. In general life is still business-as-usual, but the Stuff addicts (stuffies) become agitated and violent when their Stuff supply is threatened. They've been posessed, and it's not pretty when the Stuff leaves its host (or when it goes back in, for that matter).
That this horror film is also a comedy almost goes without saying. Certainly you could handle this material seriously, but the subject matter lends itself to well to satire. To that end, we're treated to several advertising parodies and a pretty harsh sendup of modern consumerism. Ultimately, I think it succeeds, but on a small scale. The Stuff was intended to be silly, not to inspire introspection.
The cast is fairly impressive -- Michael Moriarty plays Mo, and we get Danny Aiello as an FDA administrator, Paul Sorvino as a bloodthirsty, commie-hating colonel, and Abe Vigoda as a random old guy in a commercial. The production value is good for the paltry $1.7 million budget, but perhaps gallons and gallons of goo aren't as expensive as one would think. Some of the special effects are quite good, and this was pre-CGI, which I love. I appreciate well-done practical effects, and I like to marvel at the level of detail and work necessary to acheive them.
Anyway, here's the trailer. It's not a great movie by any means, but if we wanted art, we wouldn't watch horror movies. It's supposed to be fun, and that's where it succeeds.
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