Halloween Horror Marathon 2019

[AndyDursin]

Went to a matinee of THE MANGLER by myself during college when it opened. Positively awful film! The kind where it can be used as "Exhibit A" for anyone trying to mount a defense over the level of Spielberg's POLTERGEIST involvement.

[Monterey Jack]

Went to a matinee of THE MANGLER by myself during college when it opened. Positively awful film! The kind where it can be used as "Exhibit A" for anyone trying to mount a defense over the level of Spielberg's POLTERGEIST involvement.

Aside from Poltergeist, the only Hooper movies I can authentically call "good" are The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Salem's Lot (okay, and Lifeforce can be construed as a guilty pleasure ). But, like Wes Craven, his bad films aren't merely mediocre, like John Carpenter's post-80's work...they're positively UNWATCHABLE. With Hooper, his off-screen drug problems probably contributed to that, but Craven had no such excuse for floparoonies like Shocker, A Vampire In Brooklyn, or My Soul To Take. Yeah, he had Deadly Friend and Cursed taken away from him and slashed to ribbons by their respective studios, so I can sort of give him a pass on those, but still.

[Monterey Jack]

-The Addams Family (2019): 6/10



Moderately creepy, sort-of kooky, but not nearly “ooky” enough for adult viewers animated version of the Charles Addams comic strips. Oh, it’s easy enough to sit through, with flashes of visual wit (morbid mom Morticia using her parents’ ashes for eyeshadow and rouge, goth daughter Wednesday braiding her hair into hangman’s nooses) and a game voice cast, but compared to the 90’s Barry Sonnenfeld films, it never generates more than the occasional polite chuckle. Kids won’t mind, but their parents will finds themselves wishing for the antic, Tex Avery creativity and more heartfelt family values of the Hotel Transylvania films instead.

-You Can’t Kill Stephen King (2012): 1.5/10


Awful horror/comedy about the usual gang of attractive twentysomething idiots on a vacation trip to Maine, where a virginal bookworm is dying to get a glimpse of his idol, Stephen King, at his lake house, but then they all start getting killed off, in ways that mimic death scenarios in King’s body of work. That’s actually a kind of cool, Scream-like idea, but the movie’s deaths barely resemble their literary inspirations, and underneath the idea is your run-of-the-mill “self-aware” slasher knockoff that thinks that simply recognizing the clichés it’s regurgitating somehow counts as humor. No style, no laughs, anemic gore effects, it’s a low-budget snooze that wastes a potentially inspired concept. Don’t bother streaming this one, Constant Readers, ayuh.

-The Slayer (1982): 6.5/10



Somewhat interesting 80’s slasher about a pair of couples who take a vacation on a beach house located on a remote island, where a killer may or may not be lurking. This plays with the idea of reality and dream logic in some interesting ways, and it’s a handsomely-made film with a couple of memorable gore gags, but the infuriating ending kind of tanks the rest of it, essentially negating everything that came before! Shame, because it’s not a bad movie up until then.

-Zombieland (2009): 8/10



With the long-overdue sequel Double-Tap finally hitting theaters this weekend, I found it time to nut up or shut up and watch the 2009 original again. In the pantheon of zomcom horror-comedies, it’s a brisk, energetic way to pass 87 minutes, and the ideal cast has terrific chemistry (Woody Harrelson steals the show as cocksure "Tallahassee”, turning his trademark Good Ol’ Boy charm up to 11 as he slays zombies left and right with witty nonchalance, and young Emma Stone is a sassy dazzler as sexy “Wichita”), yet I still consider Edgar Wright’s brilliantly-constructed Shaun Of The Dead as the absolute best example of this particular subgenre. Still, Zombieland offers up a myriad of pleasures, with big laughs, enthusiastic spouts of grue and a killer extended cameo.

[Monterey Jack]

-Frankenstein Created Woman (1967): 7/10



Fourth movie in the Hammer Frankenstein cycle features the Mad Doctor (played, as always, with disdainful superiority by Peter Cushing) fascinated with the idea of capturing a human being’s elusive “soul” and keeping it in stasis until the diseased or damaged dead body it once inhabited can be repaired, or else a suitable new host can be found. When a local young man named Hans (Robert Morris) is executed for a crime of murder he didn’t commit, Doc Frankenstein commandeers the corpse for his science experiment, ultimately transferring his consciousness into the body of his secret sweetie Christina (Susan Denberg), who Frankenstein reshapes from a cowering, deformed, horribly scarred redhead into a flawless specimen of busty blonde womanhood. But Hans’ unrestful spirit lives on through Christina, who uses her freshly-minted feminine wiles to entrap the trio of foppish cads who did commit the murder in question (and who tormented and teased her relentlessly in her earlier form) and do away with them in a fiendishly satisfying manner. Lacking the usual “monster” you’d expect from a Frankenstein picture, Frankenstein Created Woman is really more of a tale of possession and revenge from beyond the grave (with nods to EC horror comics), but it makes for one of the more unique and interesting films in the Hammer series.

-What Lies Beneath (2000): 8/10



Sleek, classy, star-driven supernatural chiller about an attractive couple, Dr. Norman Spencer (Harrison Ford) and his wife, Claire (Michelle Pfeiffer), who are settling into middle age having sent their only daughter away to college. Dawdling around their beautiful house on the lake, Claire is suffering from a good case of Empty Nest syndrome and is wondering what comes next when she enlivens her humdrum, aimless existence by theorizing that their next-door neighbor (James Remar) has done away with his wife (a pre-Lord Of The Rings Miranda Otto), who hasn’t been seen for days. Oh, did I mention that Claire is also being haunted by visions of the supposed ghost of a beautiful young woman, who seems to be trying to warn her about something awry in her seemingly benign life? Director Robert Zemeckis and screenwriter Clark Gregg (yep…this was penned by Agent Coulson himself!) play a pitched homage to the old-school suspense melodramas of Alfred Hitchcock here, with specific plot points and visual images cribbed from the likes of Rear Window, Vertigo and Psycho, among others. And they have the ideal, early-2000’s couple to pull it off, Ford and Pfeiffer giving the pulpy proceedings a patina of old-school Hollywood glamor that was already becoming a thing of the past even going on two decades ago. Ford delivers one of his better recent-ish performances, an effective and convincing mixture of affection, concern and exasperation over Pfeiffer’s increasing sense of paranoia and fear, and Pfeiffer, with her melancholy, fine-boned loveliness, could as well have been Grace Kelly or Ingrid Bergman here. The bonkers climax offers Zemeckis at his Rube Goldberg best, and even if it pushes the slow burn suspense of the previous 100+ minutes rudely aside to reach for wham-bang shocks and whiz-bang technical trickery, you can still sense Zemeckis’ Tales From The Crypt prankishness breaking through the surface of respectability and having a grand time.

[Monterey Jack]

-Bad Moon (1996): 7.5/10

-Ginger Snaps (2000): 8/10





A pair of superior Lycanthrope movies formed today’s full moon double-bill. In Bad Moon, a journalist named Ted Harrison (Michael Pare), on an expedition in Nepal, is brutally attacked by a hulking beast, who quickly does away with his terrified native guides and his girlfriend before he blows its head off with a shotgun. Months later, he moves his camper from the isolated wilds into the backyard of his lawyer sister, Janet (Mariel Hemmingway) and her young son, Brett (Dennis The Menace moppet Mason Gamble), and attempts to put his life back together, but the family dog, a giant and fiercely protective German Shepard named “Thor” (played for the most part by the winning “Primo”), can sense there’s something off about Uncle Ted, and why he goes for a jog every night and doesn’t come home until the dawn…

Writer/director Eric Red (who wrote or co-wrote 80’s genre fans like The Hitcher and Near Dark, as well as directing the forgettable Body Parts) doesn’t attempt to re-invent the wheel when it comes to werewolf lore, but his film is briskly-paced (under 80 minutes), well-acted and bracingly gory, only sabotaged slightly by some really poor mid-90’s CGI effects during a key transformation sequence that illustrate how the digital effects revolution has not been very kind to werewolves. Other that that, it’s a dandy little B-horror picture, with great a fine score by Daniel Licht and a terrific performance by canine lead “Primo”.

Meanwhile, Ginger Snaps concerns itself with a pair of sullen, death-obsessed teenage sisters, Ginger (Katherine Isabelle) and Brigitte Fitzgerald (Emily Perkins, a decade removed from playing young Beverly Marsh on the original TV miniseries version of Stephen King’s It), who live in the quaint little Canadian burg of Bailey Downs where a rash of deaths amongst the town’s pet population has everyone on edge. The girls have an adolescent suicide pact (“Out by sixteen or dead on the scene, but together, forever”), but when Ginger is savagely mauled by a mysterious beast in the forest (which coincides with her first, late-onset period), she starts to change, in body and temperament. Soon, the formerly disdainful Ginger is sucking face with a local high-school stud (Kris Lemche) and growing weird hairs along her rapidly-healing scars, as well as a tail and a fondness for munching on the neighbor’s annoying little mutt.

The concept of Lycanthropy has long been associated with a specifically male metaphor for when one’s hormones finally start to kick in. Since the era of Lon Chaney, Jr. (or even Michael Landon in the 50’s drive-in favorite I Was A Teenage Werewolf), the vision of a slavering, hairy beast carrying off some comely, screaming babe has been a flashing neon sign for “Fathers, lock up your daughters”, but considering how the waxing and waning lunar and menstrual cycles are intrinsically linked, it’s kind of amazing how few werewolf movies look at the idea from a female perspective. Ginger Snaps, like Carrie decades earlier, mines the act of a teenage girl “becoming a woman” for the first time as a potent pop metaphor for all sorts of disturbing implications. And while this film lacks the haunting gravity of De Palma’s classic, it’s nevertheless a terrific little horror film, with excellent performances from the two lead actresses and enthusiastic bouts of gruesomeness treated with a satirical wink. While the practical werewolf F/X don’t reach the heights of the 80’s Bottin/Baker era, considering the film’s tiny budget and the fact that it contained practical werewolf transformations at all well into the digital era, they’re easy to forgive.

[Monterey Jack]

Anemia…

-The Lost Boys (1987): 6/10

-Fright Night 2: New Blood (2013): 3.5/10






A pair of vampire flicks were on-tap today. In 1987’s slick, empty The Lost Boys, Jason Patric and Corey Haim play a pair of brothers who, along with their recently-divorced mother (Dianne Wiest) re-locate to a small California town, where the “missing persons” rate is astonishingly high. Soon, the brothers find out why…a ravenous pack of juvenile delinquent vampires prowl the boardwalks at night, lead by the charismatic bad-boy David (Kiefer Sutherland, in full-tilt Ace Merrill mode). They entice older brother Michael (Patric) with come-ons about eternal youth, and throw in the flirtatious affections of sexy “Star” (Jamie Gertz) as a bonus. But younger bro Sam (Haim) wants no part of his sibling’s nocturnal activities, and enlists the assistance of a local pair of adolescent vampire “experts” (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander) to help him rescue his older brother’s eternal soul and vanquish David’s pack of predatory vamps (including a pre-Bill & Ted “Alexander” Winter, dude).

I don’t know what it is about The Lost Boys, but…it never quite gels. Oh, the production values are to-notch, with stylish direction by Joel Schumacher, gorgeous photography by Michael Chapman, a killer soundtrack and top-notch makeup effects by Greg Cannom, and the acting can’t be faulted either, but the screenplay never really generates a sense of mystery or suspense, probably because the characterization remains one-note and sketchy. We know so little about these characters’ backgrounds or motivations that the movie just devolves into a series of scattershot horror setpieces, and while some of the gimmickry is fun (like super-soakers loaded with holy water), and the climax is exciting, the narrative has all of the depth of a music video. It’s a great time capsule of the era (Video stores! Big hair!), but when it comes to 80’s vampire flicks, give me Near Dark or Fright Night any day.


Speaking of which, the latter inspired not only a sequel (the pretty good but little-seen Fright Night II), but also a surprisingly fine 2011 remake which received a “sequel” of its own, but the reason that word is bracketed by quotation marks is because the confusingly-titled Fright Night 2: New Blood (which went direct-to-DVD) is less a sequel than ANOTHER remake of the same basic idea! It doesn’t follow the narrative of the 2011 remake at all, and instead just gives us a slightly rejiggered spin on Tom Holland’s screenplay for the original, only here transplanted to Romania, where Charley Brewster (Will Payne) and obnoxious buddy “Evil” Ed (Chris Waller) are attending at art class taught by the beguiling Gerri Dandridge (Jaime Murray) who turns out to be -- you guessed it – a vampire, and the two nonplussed friend seek out the assistance of the paranormal investigator Peter Vincent (Sean Power) to do away with their vampiric foe. Some complained about the mere existence of the 2011 remake, but anyone who did should be forced to sit through this weak-sauce re-remake in order to know how bad that film easily could have been. With its no-name cast, blah, anonymous European settings (obviously chosen to save a few bucks) and mediocre special effects, New Blood is in desperate need of a transfusion. Aside from a fairly promising pre-credits sequence (where a woman is viciously mauled to death at a convenience store, her body being flung about seemingly by an invisible force on the security camera), the movie is a complete flatline of creativity.

-Eli (2019): 7/10



Oddball Netflix original is like a bizarre fusion of The Boy In The Plastic Bubble and a supernatural thriller, about a young boy, Eli (Charlie Shotwell), who has a late-onset disease that makes him violently allergic to the outside world. He’s taken by his distraught parents (Kelly Reilly and Max Martini) to see a specialist doctor (Lili Taylor) at her hermetically-sealed hospital set up inside a crumbling, lonely house, where Eli begins treatment for his strange affliction…and soon starts to see spirits haunting the empty corridors. Are his visions real, or just a side effect of the drugs being used to treat his disease? And what’s with the teen girl (Sadie Sink, from Stranger Things) from a nearby house who talks to Eli through the glass of the house’s attached greenhouse and warns him about the previous patients at the clinic?

Eli is a film that has a certain creepy resonance, and is well-acted and directed, but the totally bonkers resolution to the film’s myriad of dangling plot threads will either delight of infuriate you (I lean more towards the former). It’s certainly not the “twist” I was expecting, and it might not hold up to scrutiny if I think about it too long, but I like it when a horror movie swings for the fences like this, and Eli left me with a disbelieving smirk on my face by the final shot. You mileage may vary, as they say, but I kind of enjoyed this weird little shocker.

[AndyDursin]

THE LOST BOYS never did it for me either. Gives off the same feeling I get from a lot of Joel Schumacher's fare. Good cast, a few fun moments, stylish looking, but the cumulative effect is just underwhelming. Certainly the screenplay isn't close to the tight, well-written FRIGHT NIGHT script Tom Holland authored, which mixed old-fashioned horror and humor with well-rounded characters and a specific POV. THE LOST BOYS didn't have that -- it comes off like a concept that was looking for a script, went through several different authors and seems a little fragmented, like it's being pulled in diverging directions at times. I own it, but I've never been a fan.

[Monterey Jack]

Hey, you damn evil kids, stay off my lawn…!

-Village Of The Damned (1960): 8/10

-The Children (1980): 2/10

-The Prodigy (2019): 7.5/10







A trio of terrible tots today. In Village Of The Damned, the small English village of Midwich comes to a crashing halt one day when every human being and animal within the township suddenly falls into a catatonic state, baffling the surrounding communities. A few hours, everyone wakes up, none the worse for wear (well, excepting the plane pilot surveying the town from the air, who flies too low, nods off and crashes in the nearby woods)…and a few months later, every woman of childbearing age comes to the realization that they’re pregnant. The children are all born at the approximate same time, and quickly mature to the age of approximately ten in only three years. They also share the same striking platinum hair, and eyes that emit an eerie pale glow when they use their psychic abilities to influence the wills of their parents and the other townsfolk…even to goad themselves into suicide when they displease them. Soon, the “father” of their leader (the remarkable Martin Stephens, who would appear again in the following year’s superb ghost story The Innocents), played by butter-voiced George Sanders, must make a stand against the evil brood before they can spread their malign influence around the country and, theoretically, the world.

Village Of The Damned is a superior exercise in Twilight Zone-style storytelling, where the origins of the children’s actual parentage is only hinted at, and the resulting film is suffused in surreal suspense, with hauntingly atmospheric B&W photography and fine performances all around. Skip the dreadful 1995 remake (a career nadir for John Carpenter) and check out the original.

In 1980’s The Children, there’s precious few chills to be had, only chuckles of the unintentional sort, as a school bus drives through a cloud of billowing yellow steam from a nearby nuclear power plant, which causes the fingernails of the kids inside to turn a rotten black, and gives them the ability to flash-fry people they lay their hands upon. Yes, it’s a horror movie where the preferred method of murder lies in HUGGING them to death! It’s as silly as it sounds, the resulting film a tacky, incoherent mess that delivers plenty of disbelieving mirth but zero in the way of actual scares or atmosphere.

Finally, this year’s The Prodigy is a tight, tidy, nasty little B-movie shocker about young Miles (Jackson Robert Scott), born in the same instant a vicious serial killer, Edward Scarka (Paul Fauteux), is gunned down by a SWAT team arriving at the behest of an escaped near-victim. By age eight, the preternaturally intelligent Miles is suddenly showcasing some alarming behavior (like inexplicably beating a fellow student at his school for gifted youngsters with a pipe wrench!), so his increasingly disturbed parents (Peter Mooney and Taylor Schilling, from Orange Is The New Black) ask the advice of a local spiritualist (Colm Feore), who intimates the boy is a vessel for a reincarnated spirit, one that is at unrest and has some unfinished business. Is Miles the host for Scarka’s unceasing rage, and can his soul be saved before it’s totally consumed by the killer’s sprit? Playing like the 70’s Robert Wise movie Audrey Rose by way of an early X-Files episode (back before the show grew leaden and pretentious and just wanted to scare the viewer silly), The Prodigy is slick, scary and well-acted, even if it can’t quite lift itself out of the clichés inherent in the “sinister kid” subgenre of horror films. Still, it’s an impressive piece of work, and delivers a handful of real jolts along the way.

[Monterey Jack]

More artsy, less fartsy.

-The Hunger (1983): 7.5/10

-The Addiction (1995): 3/10





A pair of pretentious vamp pics today. In 1983’s The Hunger, a pair of chic bloodsuckers (Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie) live the high life feasting on carefully-chosen victims in the varied societal strata of early-80’s New York. Miriam (Deneuve) has been at this since the days of ancient Egypt (she and he her chosen companion keep an ankh necklace readily at hand, which conceal identical blades inside for use in their weekly sanguinary outings), whereas John (Bowie) has “only” been her current lover for the past 200 years, after promising to her beloved that they would be “together, forever”. Yet John finds himself besieged with worry at the crow’s feet and thinning hair he’s suddenly seeing in the mirror (yes, this movie plays fast and loose with the usual mythology revolving around vampires. They don’t even fear the sunlight here, aide from a penchant for sunglasses and hats). It seems like his time as Miriam’s latest companion is nearing the end of its cycle, causing a distraught John to seek the council of Sarah Roberts (Susan Sarandon), a genealogist who has purportedly discovered how to arrest the effects of rapid aging, and perhaps to turn back the clock.

The debut feature of director Tony Scott, The Hunger is very much a film of its period, stuffed full of so many slo-mo shots of hazy smoke, billowing curtains and fluttering doves that you half-expect Bonnie Tyler to start singing about her Total Eclipse Of The Heart. It’s all flash, all montage all artsy atmosphere, and the narrative takes a backseat to the film’s lush, audiovisual posturing. And yet, it still attains a swoony sort of power thanks to Scott’s painterly eye and the strength of the three leading performers. Deneuve, with her aristocratic hauteur, and Bowie, with his androgynous beauty, make for a fetching pair of undead – and drop-dead – lovers, and Sarandon lends a sensual curiosity to her role as the doctor pulled into the pair’s orbit and gradually seduced in mind and body to their ferociously erotic appetites. The film doesn’t have a great, compelling story to tell (what little background we’re given on the Deneuve and Bowie is kept as fleeting, soft-focus flashbacks), and the ending is a fizzle, and yet while it unspools, it holds you in rapt sway to its rapturously gorgeous imagery (with some fantastic makeup effects by the legendary Dick Smith). Look fast for a very young-looking Willem Dafoe making his film debut as a street tough who harasses Sarandon at a public phone.

If the pretentions of The Hunger were primarily on a visual scale, Abel Ferrara’s 1995 feature The Addiction has the kind of muddled, tell-don’t-show philosophizing of the Matrix sequels, taking a slim wisp of a traditional vampire setup (a young NYC woman, played by Lilli Taylor, is rudely yanked into an alleyway one night, gets bitten on the neck by a gorgeously glam Annabella Sciorra, and starts to develop a strange illness and subsequent ravenous appetite) and crafting a film that is leaden and inert, seeming to run almost twice its modest 82-minute running time. The lustrous, B&W photography by Ken Kelsch gives the film a gloomy visual power, but it’s full of the kind of stuffy speechifying and up-it’s-own-ass musings about What It All Means that the resulting film is a borderline-unwatchable botch. Ferarra, a gifted crafter of excitingly tense and scuzzy B-movie thrillers (Mrs. 45, King Of New York, Body Snatchers), totally whiffs with this deadly slab of art-house wank.

[Monterey Jack]

-Zombieland Double Tap (2019): 7.5/10



Agreeable -- if ridiculously belated -- follow-up to the 2009 movie (it's been so long since the world ended in this particular zombie apocalypse universe that someone makes a Paul Blart reference ) remains a breezy, slick piece of horror/comedy hijinks, and the returning cast mostly Nuts Up with the same levels of comic spryness they delivered in the first (although Abigail Breslin seemingly had other things on her mind, her "Little Rock" appearing in surprisingly little of the film's screentime, acting as an offscreen MacGuffin to fuel the road trip plot). Director Ruben Fleischer stages some enthusiastic bouts of zombie-slaying mayhem (including a corker of a one-shot chase scene set inside a Graceland-adjacent hotel), and the film has many bright visual/verbal gags and a delightful supporting performance by adorable Zoey Deutch as dim-witted survivor "Madison" -- not to mention a killer treatment of a well-known studio logo that had me laughing out loud -- and yet the film can't quite match the freshness of the first one. Like TV's The Walking Dead, a decade is a long time to be doing the same-old, same-old, and while this fares far better than a lot of sequels that came out long after their pop-cultural sell-by date, I still think it's a sliver less enjoyable than the first. Still, if you liked that film, you're likely to enjoy this as well, and the cast retains their brash chemistry.

[Monterey Jack]

-Hell Fest (2018): 7/10



Meat & Potatoes slasher about a group of generically-attractive twentysomethings who attend a local haunted theme park, and find themselves at the mercy of an actual killer (wearing a mask that makes him resemble a roman statue designed by Salvador Dali) who lurks amongst the play-acting park employees before taking out his prey one-by-one. This movie has an irresistible setting and generates solid tension as it unspools, but had it given the characters even a modicum of backstory or subtext, it might have been a minor modern-day classic of the form. Because it doesn’t, it’s just an adequate thriller that fans of the genre – who have been left wanting in recent years – should enjoy without finding especially memorable. It’s fun and flashy, but also a tad rote.

-Short Night Of Glass Dolls (1971): 7.5/10



Weird Italian Giallo thriller about an Americano reporter (Jean Sorel) whose seemingly dead body is discovered in a park and brought to the local morgue for processing, but it turns out he’s only mostly dead, trapped inside his still-aware brain but unable to communicate the fact to the doctors poking and prodding his still-warm “corpse” as he sweats it out and starts to remember flashes of what brought him to this point, when his girlfriend (gorgeous Barbara Bach) goes missing in the night and his investigations reveal a rat’s nest of conspiracy and lies. More of a Polanski-style whodunnit thriller than a Argento-style gore-fest, yet the climax is memorably surreal (and nail-biting) enough to include the film in this year’s horror lineup. Stylish and engrossing, with a typically lush/eccentric Ennio Morricone score.

-Images (1972): 8.5/10



Eerie thriller about a children’s author named Cathryn (an excellent Susannah York) who travels with her husband Hugh (Rene Auberjonois) from their lavish London flat to their rustic, remote cottage in the wilderness, where she’s plagued by vivid memories of past martial indiscretions. Are these increasingly disturbing – and violent -- images all inside her fevered brain, or are they actually happening? Writer/director Robert Altman keeps the viewer in a near-constant state if unease with this florridly stylish chiller, with excellent contributions from cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond and particularly composer John Williams. Anyone who only associates Williams with the Pomp & Circumstance of his Lucas/Spielberg blockbuster scores owes it to themselves to check out his innovative work here, butting passages of pastoral impressionism with startling bursts of atonality (said “sounds” provided by percussionist/vocalist Stomu Yamash’ta) that makes Zsigmond’s atmospheric imagery pulsate with directionless dread. Not a film full of big, visceral shocks, but like the half-finished jigsaw puzzle that serves as a key prop, Images keeps you in a state of constant unease, leaving you to suss out your own answers to the film’s ultimate meaning. Not for all tastes, but get on its unique wavelength, and it’ll haunt you for days.

-The Being (1983): 1/10



Lousy, badly-produced monster flick about a small Ohio town besieged by a blubbery, one-eyed monster that’s a product of nuclear dumping in a nearby reservoir. Only noteworthy for the presence of Martin Landau (at the nadir of his early-80’s career slump) as a chemical spill investigator, and some amusingly daffy touches. Any movie with Laugh-In’s Ruth Buzzi(!) in the cast gets some weirdness bonus points, though, and it’s amusing that the movie was made in 1983 and opens up with the death of a kid who’s a dead ringer for Dustin on season one of Stranger Things (cap, hair and all). Dumber than a bag of hammers.

[Monterey Jack]

-Sleepy Hollow (1999): 9/10

-The Wolfman (2010): 8/10





A twofer of classy, old-school period horror pics today. Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow reconfigures Washington Irving’s classic story so Nervous Nellie schoolteacher Ichabod Crane is now an eccentric NYC police constable portrayed by Johnny Depp, whose ideas about forensic “scientific process” in the year of 1799 are met with suspicion and disdain by his fellow officers of the law. When a trio of dead bodies sans noggins turn up in the nearby small village of Sleepy Hollow, a pious judge (Burton fave Christopher Lee in a robust cameo), Ichabod is sent away to investigate, where he uncovers a byzantine conspiracy, as well as becoming bewitched by the lovely Katrina Van Tassel (a ravishing Christina Ricci), the daughter of a prosperous landowner (Michael Gambon). Oh yeah, and there’s a supernatural headless dude riding around on his fierce black steed lopping off heads left and right, despite Ichabod’s rational protestations that “Murder need no ghouls come from the grave!”

One of Burton’s most purely entertaining films, Sleepy Hollow is a pitched homage to the beloved horror pictures produced by Britain’s Hammer Studios from the 1950’s through the mid-70’s, and the director gets all of the details down with the eye of a loving fanboy, filling the frame with atmospheric swirls and eddies of ground fog, enthusiastic spurts of gore and gratuitously plunging necklines. It’s one of the most visually arresting horror pictures of the era, with Oscar-winning production design by Burton vet Rick Heinrichs and luminous, near-B&W Oscar-nominated photography by Emmanuel Lubezki (plus a killer score by Danny Elfman). And despite the film’s R-rated violence, it’s also suffused with the filmmaker’s trademark humor, with many surreal, kooky asides played to the hilt by an excellent Depp (who shares excellent chemistry with co-star Ricci, their eloquent romantic badinage bearing the distinctive stamp of uncredited script doctor Tom Stoppard). A delight, but it’s a shame it’s still stuck with the lousy transfer of the now thirteen-year-old Blu-Ray, when the film’s 20th anniversary should have inspired a freshly-minted HD transfer. It’s a movie that deserves better.

2010’s The Wolfman, meanwhile, is a film that acts as a perfect mate with Sleepy Hollow, sharing a similar period setting and featuring contributions from many of the key production personnel from Burton’s film (Heinrichs, Elfman, screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker). A lavish official remake of the classic 1941 Universal Wolf Man with Lon Chaney, Jr., this version, directed by Joe Johnston, boasts similar levels of Hammer-esque gore as it charts the tale of Shakespearean actor Lawrence Talbot (Benicio Del Toro), recalled to his hometown of Dartmoor, England, by the death of his brother, Ben, found savagely mauled to death close to his sprawling childhood home, where his father (Anthony Hopkins) and his late brother’s fiancé (a luminous Emily Blunt) await him so they can give Ben a proper burial. Lawrence becomes obsessed with finding out who – or what – killed his brother, and his investigations at a local Gypsy camp leads to his betting bitten by a mysterious beast on a misty moors. His terrible wounds heal with an eerie rapidity, and when the next full moon swells in the sky, Lawrence finds himself with the terrible plague of lycanthropy, doomed to transform into a hideous, slavering wolf and kill again and again until he can be released from his curse.

One of the more underrated horror pictures of the last decade, The Wolfman pays due homage to the cheesy chills of the classic Universal monster pics of the 1930’s and 40’s, but ups the ante with levels of violence that would have been unheard of back then (while still never tipping over into gratuitous, cruel nastiness for its own sake), and Rick Baker’s Oscar-winning makeup effects – despite being augmented with tasteful amounts of CGI – are top-drawer from one of the masters of the genre. Elfman’s churning, impassioned score is one of his best recent efforts, and the film is jam-packed with exciting action setpieces while still taking enough time between them to allow for the proper building of dread and to allow Del Toro and Blunt’s relationship to flower in a believable manner (more so in the extended cut of the film available on Blu-Ray, despite the additional footage leading to a modest continuity glitch). If only THIS could have been the kick-off feature for Universal’s overhyped “Dark Universe”, which ended up exploding on the runway with the dreadful, cluttered 2017 version of The Mummy with Tom Cruise.

-Uninvited (1988): 3/10



A cute orange kitty cat escapes from a local genetics lab and is taken in by a group of young people about to go on a cruise on a lavish yacht with a bunch of nefarious types out to avoid criminal prosecution (including a Naked Gun-era George Kennedy), when it turns out that kitty has a demonic jack-in-the-box monster that springs out of its throat and attacks people with a virulently poisonous bite! As silly as it sounds, schlock writer/producer/director Greydon Clark (Angel’s Revenge, Final Justice, Without Warning) doesn’t get much traction in developing characterization or genuine suspense with the film’s humorously sub-par puppetry effects, although to be fair the ballooning gore effects are reasonably well-done.

-Don’t Answer The Phone! (1980): 4/10



Sleazy exploitation fare about a kinky, serial Hollywood strangler (Nicholas Worth, who’s like a surreal cross between John Heard and Kevin James) who calls into a local radio psychiatrist (Flo Lawrence, credited as “Flo Garrish”) after his most recent murder to rub the police’s noses in their inability to catch him. Reasonably tense at times, and well-acted by Worth, but the film suffers from odd tonal changes (like a police bust of a local whorehouse that’s played for broad laughs) and the remainder of the film’s performances remaining flat and one-dimensional. I got more fleeting enjoyment out of seeing Worth driving by a movie theater showing a line waiting to get into a showing of Alien than anything else in this rote thriller.

[Monterey Jack]

Chills by candlelight…

-Crimson Peak (2015): 10/10

-Down A Dark Hall (2018): 5/10





One of my favorite scary movie subgenres is what I think of as the “Candelabra Movie”, which contain scenes of a comely young woman clutching a bathrobe or nightgown tightly around her neck with one hand while holding a candelabra in the other as she fearfully creeps down dimly-lit corridors in a creaky, cavernous old house while whispering, “Who’s there…?!” Today’s twofer contains one of the all-time best modern examples of the Candelabra Movie, as well as a far inferior specimen. 2015’s Crimson Peak plays a rapturous homage to gothic literature from the likes of Emily Bronte, as well as evoking elements from haunted-house classics like The Innocents and those swooningly romantic suspense melodramas Alfred Hitchcock made for David O. Selznick in the 1940’s. Mia Wasikowska portayed Emily Cushing, a well-to-do proper young lady – and aspiring novelist -- living with her father, Carter (Jim Beaver), in New York at the dawn of the 20th century when a dashing young man named Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and his austere sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain), arrive from England hoping to curry the favor of Emily’s father and get him to invest in his self-made clay-mining machine that will revolutionize the industry and hopefully return a tidy profit for them both. Carter refuses, and stands by with severe disappointment as Thomas begins to court Emily, but when he suffers a fatal “accident” at his local men’s club, a bereaved Emily is swept off her feet by Thomas and brought back with him to his crumbling childhood home of Allerdale Hall in Cumberland, England, as his new wife. Settling into her newlywed bliss, Emily begins to hear haunting whispers and see ghastly specters looming in the hallways, all croaking out dire warnings. Are there actual ghosts, or is Emily beginning to lose a tether on reality? And what are the intentions of siblings Thomas and Lucille to their new guest?

Director Guillermo Del Toro (who co-scripted with frequent collaborator Matthew Robbins) fashions material we’ve, frankly, seen before, and polishes it to a high gloss. This movie is a bath for the senses, with the evocatively rotting interiors of Allerdale Hall shot with a painterly eye by cinematographer Dan Laustsen, filling the frame with golden yellows, mottled greens, deep blues and white snow stained with blood-red clay. Composer Fernando Velazquez accompanies the film’s lush visuals with an equally sumptuous musical score, and the film’s cast is ideally suited to pull of the requirements of the film’s literate screenplay. Wasikowska, with her fine-boned, woeful beauty, could well be Ingrid Bergman in Hitchcock’s Notorious, or Joan Fontaine in Hitch’s Rebecca, a strong woman trapped by circumstance and trying in vain to fight her way out. Hiddleston’s hawk-like features recall Peter Cushing in his Hammer prime, and he and Wasikowska share an immediate, palpable chemistry. But it’s Chastain, her strawberry hair dyed pitch black, who makes the film’s strongest impression, driven by conflicting spasms of love and rage. I can understand why mainstream moviegoers rejected the film when it first hit theaters – it’s too genteel and slow-burn for the Blumhouse crowd and yet with occasional spurts of strong violence that would turn off the Merchant/Ivory art-house crowd – but Crimson Peak stands as one of Del Toro’s finest films, one I appreciate more with each viewing, and which I now consider one of the best supernatural love stories of the last decade.

On the other hand, Down A Dark Hall is a film that squanders an ideal setting and adequate performances with a plodding pace and a paucity of suspense. AnnaSophia Robb plays Catherine, a teenage girl with a penchant for destructive, antisocial behavior who is given a choice by her school counsellor and parents – either prison time, or being sent off to Blackwood, a remote boarding school where she and four other troubled girls will study under the watchful eye of headmistress Madame Duret (Uma Thurman, with a frou-frou French accent), who endeavors to help the girls manage their inner demons and help shape them into productive members of society. Cut off from the niceties of modern devices (cell phones are verboten, and even the house itself is primarily lit by gaslight and candles), the girls prove to be apt pupils as they’re taught mathematics, music and art…a little too apt, as it turns out…

Down A Dark Hall is a film that starts off promisingly enough, and the woodsy, remote setting is ripe for a good chamber suspense drama, and yet once the malign intentions of the girls’ caretakers is made implicit, the suspense drains away, leading to a climax that’s disappointing and faintly absurd. The Peter Hyams-levels of dim underlighting don’t help, either. I know it’s supposed to make us peer fearfully into every darkened corner, but mostly it just seems that way to hide the lack of production design. It’s not a terrible film, just one that tries to goose the viewer with some awfully familiar spook tactics, and without enough subtext or skillful manipulation of these moldy clichés to make itself distinctive in any way.

[Monterey Jack]

Proof that, back in the 1980’s, horror movies rarely received sequel justice…

-Amityville II: The Possession (1982): 1/10

-Howling 2…Your Sister Is A Werewolf (1985): 0/10

-Poltergeist III (1988): 1.5/10







Tormented myself with a trio of terrible 80’s sequels today. 1982’s Amityville II: The Possession purports to be a prequel to the 1979 blockbuster (even though there’s little continuity linking the two films, and this may as well be an unrelated screenplay with the Amityville “brand name” slapped on in like the 5,000 other cheapjack horror movies bearing that name in the last four decades), and it’s the thoroughly rote tale of the Montelli clan, abrasive patriarch Anthony (Burt Young, killing time between Rocky sequels), doormat mom Dolores (Rutanya Alda), older brother & sister Sonny and Patricia (Jack Magner and a Last American Virgin-era Diane Franklin) and younger bro and sis Mark & Janice (Brent & Erika Katz), who move into their new home in New York and are almost immediately at each other’s throats. It seems the demonic spirit infecting the house is stimulating the family to act out their worst impulses, eventually possessing older son Sonny into not only engaging in sexual congress with sister Patricia(!), but eventually murdering the lot. Oh, did I mention this all occurs within the first hour, leading to a full FORTY MINUTES of leaden post-massacre filler with a concerned priest (James Olsen) trying to save Sonny’s soul? I’d say this is a terrible sequel to an “iconic” horror classic, but…its 1979 predecessor was equally tacky and garish and unpleasant. The only thing either of these two films had going for them was Lalo Schifrin’s music, and his score to the sequel offers up a skillful remix of his Oscar-nominated score to the first film. Other than that, this film is almost unendurable, launching into the family sniping and cursing at each other barely twenty minutes into the movie, leaving us wondering why we should care if any of these characters survive the experience. Compare to the same year’s Poltergeist, where co-directors Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg went to great lengths to establish their family unit as loving and well-adjusted, which made the eventual intrusion of angry specters all the more harrowing and effective. Here, it’s just ugliness for ugliness’ sake, and it grates on one’s nerves almost immediately. The late Ed and Lorraine Warren are credited as “demonology consultants” in the end titles, but this movie isn’t a pimple on the ass of the two Conjuring movies that were inspired by their case files.

1985’s Howling II…Your Sister Is A Werewolf (arguably the most memorable 80’s sequel subtitle this side of Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo) is barely related to Joe Dante’s 1981 original, with Reb Brown playing the brother of Dee Wallace’s protagonist from the previous movie and attending her funeral when spry oldster Christopher Lee shows up ranting about covens of werewolves in Transylvania, and…I can’t even describe what occurs when they finally get there. There’s a werewolf threesome with a nude, furry Sybil Danning, midgets with exploding eyeballs, bad heavy mental concerts, the use of garlic and wooden stakes to ward off the Lycanthropes (the screenwriters of this film would obviously not gain membership in the Monster Squad with this astonishing lack of basic knowledge of how to kill a werewolf)…it’s an absolute mess. I’m actually not a big fan of Dante’s movie (I find it kind of pokey and uncompelling), but at least that film had some skillful filmmaking, Rob Bottin’s top-drawer makeup effects and Pino Donaggio’s lush score. This, on the other hand, may be the worst and most incoherent horror movie I’ve seen since The Sentinel. Naturally, this has the obligatory cult following and a features-packed Blu-Ray release from Scream Factory, but it’s absolute garbage, virtually unwatchable.

Poltergeist III probably hurts the most of this sorry bunch, because it’s the only sequel to an authentically great movie. Poltergeist is a film that still crackles today thanks to its eerie special effects, fine performances and most of all empathetic family unit. But by this wan third installment, all we’re left with are moldy scraps. Heather O’Rourke (this, sadly, was her last film role) reprises her role as the spook-plagued Carol Ann, bundled off by her parents to live with her Aunt Pat (Nancy Allen), her husband Bruce (Tom Skerritt), and his daughter Donna (a pre-Twin Peaks, pre-anorexia Lara Flynn Boyle, in her film debut) in the lavish Chicago high-rise building that Bruce manages. Carol Ann continues to be haunted by the grinning specter of Poltergeist II: The Other Side baddie Reverend Kane (Nathan Davis, replacing Julian Beck, struck down by cancer during the production of that film), but instead of the lavish supernatural visions provided by ILM in the previous films, what does director and co-writer Gary Sherman try to goose the viewer with? How about frozen swimming pools? Skerritt and Allen being chased by ice-covered cars in a parking garage? Characters not appearing in mirrors? Being pulled into puddles? It’s sort of laudable that the film attempted to do the majority of it’s F/X work “in-camera” with various tricks, but it’s strenuously lame and never once scary, not helped at all by Joe Renzetti’s mediocre synth score, an abomination compared to Jerry Goldsmith’s pair of superb efforts for the first two films in the series. Zelda Rubinstein is also wasted in her performance as diminutive psychic Tangina, looking every bit as bored as I was watching this nonsense. Just a pity that O’Rourke died so tragically young, and that the role that became her legacy was tarnished by this too-little, too-late cash-in.

[Monterey Jack]

The Ghosts with the Most, baby.

-The Shining (1980): 8/10

-The Conjuring (2013): 9/10





Haunted houses were the order of business for the day. In Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (“adapted” from Stephen King’s brilliant novel by Kubrick and Diane Johnson), Jack Nicholson plays Jack Torrance, recovering alcoholic and new caretaker of the Overlook Motel, nestled on a scenic, remote mountainside in Colorado. He’s relocated there with wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and their young son, Danny (Danny Lloyd) to maintain the hotel during the brutal winter months. Isolated from all possible distractions, Jack hopes to finally get his writing career back on track and help heal his fraying marriage (in a fit of drunken rage, he dislocated little Danny’s arm, which Wendy has never fully forgiven), but not only does he start suffering from an acute case of writer’s block, but the quietude is beginning to get to him, and his antipathy for his wife and child festers while the uneasy spirits that inhabit the hotel’s antiseptic corridors begin to use Jack’s unhappy state of mind as a conduit for their own malign purposes…one likely ending in an enthusiastic bout of “REDRUM”.

It’s funny how Kubrick’s film was dubbed a pretentious fizzle when first released, and yet now it’s almost blasphemous to find any slight way to impugn its magnificent brilliance. That said…I’ve always found this movie to be a cold fish. Kubrick’s impeccable mastery of camerawork , lighting and carefully-cultivated soundtrack selections is consistently on-point, and the film does generate a palpable sense of unease as its events unspool with glacial inevitability, and yet the burning heart of King’s superb book has been gutted during the adaptation process. In King’s book (which I’ve re-read over the past summer, so it’s still very fresh in my mind), Jack Torrance is a humbled, broken man, one clutching at the prospect of being gainfully employed at the Overlook for five months straight like a drowning man grasping desperately at a life preserver, but Nicholson’s Torrance is given no such psychological shadings or sympathetic humanity. In fact, he’s clearly off his rocker from frame one, engaging in Nicholson’s patented bag of tics, leers and glowers, and thus the slow, agonizing descent into madness chronicled by King in his novel is rendered almost moot. Oh, to be sure, Nicholson’s performance is tremendously entertaining, full of iconic line deliveries and surreal, looney touches (much like Al Pacino in Scarface, he buoys up the film’s shortcomings through sheer force of will), but for anyone who has read King’s deeply personal book, it comes across as a cloddish caricature, one so eager to engage in the eventual mugging insanity of the film’s climax that it jumps the gun, to the detriment of the film as a whole. Like Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, it’s a movie that’s easy to admire, but hard to like, and one hopes that Mike Flanagan’s upcoming sequel, Doctor Sleep, can fuse Kubrick’s technical brilliance with the heartfelt emotion of King’s prose with more consistency.

For a movie that does fuse white-knuckle shockeroo scares with a passionate human heart, look no further than James Wan’s 2013 chiller The Conjuring. Inspired by the case files of Ed & Lorraine Warren (here played with great warmth and sincerity by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), a pair of “demonologists” who specialize in the scientific study of paranormal phenomena. In 1971, they’re tasked with assisting the Perron family, consisting of mother Carolyn (Lili Taylor), dad Roger (Ron Livingston) and their brood of five(!) daughters. They’ve just moved into a new home in Rhode Island when, almost immediately, things begin to happen. The family dog is found strangled by her leash, there are odd rattlings, bangings and eerie whispers, and far more frightening manifestations of impending peril. A malign spirit from the past inhabits the house (which dates back to the Civil War era), and it wants to possess Carolyn to enact a gruesome form of comeuppance.

Wan, like Steven Spielberg and Tobe Hooper in Poltergeist, knows the importance of firmly establishing the family as a loving and well-adjusted unit, and thus when things begin to get spooky, we’re far more invested in their well-being. This goes double for the Warrens and their young daughter, Judy (Sterling Jerins), who finds themselves equally in danger from the spirit’s murderous rage. It’s rare, in a horror movie, to find a sympathetic look at a devoutly religious couple, and Wilson and Farmiga hold the film together with their chemistry and strength. Wan is also a wizard at conjuring (wakka-wakka) a sense of impending dread with skillfully disorienting camerawork and an elaborate mixture of sound design and buzzing music that keeps the viewer in a near-constant state of uneasiness. The Conjuring is honestly one of the best haunted-house movies made in the last decade, and its phenomenal box office success led to a an entire “Conjuringverse” of sequels, prequels and spin-offs that continue to this day (think of it as the MCU of scary-movie franchises) and that have had a remarkable consistency of vision and quality. Highly recommended for Bruised Forearm enthusiasts.