Halloween Horror Marathon 2020

[Monterey Jack]

-Theatre Of Blood (1973): 8/10



A hammy, Shakespearean stage actor, Edward Lionheart (Vincent Price), reacts to the slings and arrows of critical disdain by making a melodramatic suicide plunge into the Thames river, only to emerge alive with a small army of homeless drunkards and drug addicts at his beck and call, and the burning desire to do away with the critics who denied him the prestigious acting award he deemed was rightfully his by utilizing gruesome murder methods derived from the text of The Bard. Meanwhile, his daughter (the late, great Diana Rigg) wrings her hands in apprehensiveness at both her father’s miraculous resurrection and his newly-found bloodlust as he concocts one elaborate and fitting death scenario for those who critically savaged his reputation.

One of Price’s most enjoyable efforts from his early-70’s period, Theatre Of Blood is a film brimming with enjoyably hokey gimmicks and juicy, arch comeuppances for its stuffy array of “guest victims”, all set to a gorgeously baroque musical score by Michael J. Lewis that underscore Price’s mellifluous Shakespearean monologues with sinister elegance. Great fun.

-Riding The Bullet (2004): 3/10



Lousy adaptation of the Stephen King short story (which was better received for its then-novelty as one of the first stories by a major author exclusive to “E-Reader” devices in the early 2000’s than for its actual content) about a young man, Alan Parker (Jonathan Jackson), who – when he learns of his mother (Barbara Hershey) suffering a stroke – sets off on a hitchhiking sojourn on Halloween night, 1969, to be by her bedside, encountering a number of setbacks before getting picked up by a sinister motorist named Peter Staub (David Arquette) who presents Parker with a fateful choice. King’s slim little horror story would have sufficed as a half-hour episode of an anthology television series, but even at a brief 98 minutes, screenwriter and director Mick Garris cannot sustain any sense of actual suspense or peril, filling the film with schlocky gore and dumb in-jokes (yes, Staub’s ride is a red, 1957 Plymouth Fury, why did you ask…?). And who casts DAVID ARQUETTE as a figure intended to generate fear and unease?! What’s worse is that the C-level thrills give away to a gummy epilogue that’s intended to be wistfully touching, but instead comes across as saccharine and unearned following the mediocrity of what preceded it. Not scary, not thoughtful, just lame. No wonder King stopped using Garris as his go-to guy after this, considering the only authentically good King project he ever directed was the television miniseries The Stand (and even that’s a series rife with cheesy and awkward moments).

[Monterey Jack]

Frank beginnings and endings…

-Frankenstein (1931): 9/10

-Frankenstein And The Monster From Hell (1974): 7/10





One cycle begins and another ends in these two tales spun from Mary Shelley’s famous novel. At the beginning of Universal’s “monster movie” cycle of the 1930’s and 40’s, there was James Whale’s Frankenstein, which depicts the mad desire of scientist Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) to create a man out of spare parts scrounged from wherever he can, and give that misshapen frame the “gift” of life. Frankenstein’s woeful creation is portrayed, wonderfully, by the great Boris Karloff. Underneath Jack Pierce’s iconic makeup design – with sunken cheeks and heavy-lidded, baleful eyes gazing out from underneath the ultimate flattop – Karloff suggests a flicker of a soul inside his hulking, uncoordinated body, making his ultimate “rampage” one where you’re squarely on his side the whole time. Yeah, the Monster does terrible things (including a memorable, oft-censored scene where he mistakenly drowns a young girl in a lake), but he didn’t ask to be made, y’know. The film has its creaky moments, and it cries out for a musical score, but it’s still one of the best filmed versions of Shelley’s novel, and no wonder Universal milked the hell out of it with a series of sequels that petered out by the mid-40’s (only 1935’s The Bride Of Frankenstein could match and even surpass it).

Decades later, England’s Hammer movie studio would make their own series of Frankenstein movies, these ones settled more on the mad doctor himself (played, with supercilious disdain, by Peter Cushing) than his variety of twisted creations. Starting with 1957’s The Curse Of Frankenstein, the series would continue chronicling Frankenstein’s attempts to conquer death over five sequels, culminating in the last film in the series, 1974’s Frankenstein And The Monster From Hell, just as the Hammer studio itself was on the cusp of irrelevancy in a post-Exorcist 70’s. Cushing’s Doc Frank here has all but taken over a madhouse after faking his own death, and with the assistance of an ardent fanboy (Shane Briant) who has pored over his previous work, they conspire to use the asylum’s inmates as spare parts for building a bigger, better Monster (played by the imposing David Prowse, a few years shy of filling Darth Vader’s armor in Star Wars). Monster From Hell is an agreeable final film in the Hammer Frankenstein cycle, with some nicely gristly touches (sadly, some of the gore has purportedly been omitted from the Scream Factory Blu-Ray) and Cushing, as always, making for a marvelously callous Doctor. It’s certainly far from the weakest of the series (the third entry, Evil Of Frankenstein, was the nadir), even if it’s more “good” than anything noteworthy. Still, series fans will eat up that distinct Hammer atmosphere.

[Monterey Jack]

Corpse Bride(s)…

-The Bride Of Frankenstein (1935): 10/10

-Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994): 7/10





The Monster demands a mate in these two takes on the Mary Shelley classic. Bride Of Frankenstein is the first sequel to Universal’s 1931 production, and one of the best sequels ever made, with returning director Jams Whale allowed more creative control to tailor the material to his outré tastes, and the result is marvelous. Opening with a prologue with Shelly herself (portrayed by Elsa Lanchester) introducing the follow-up to her morbid tale, we start with the Monster (once again played by Boris Karloff) emerging from the charred ruins of the obligatory burning windmill the angry mob had pursued him to at the climax of the previous picture, still smoking and none too happy. Wandering through the wilderness, the creature is taken in by a kindly blind woodsman (O.P. Heggie), who soothes the wounded, pitiable creature with the milk of human kindness, as well as teaching him the rudiments of speech (“Friend, gooooood…!”). Meanwhile his creator, Henry Frankenstein (Colin Clive) receives a visit from his old mentor, Doctor Pretorius (Ernest Thesiger), who goads the chastised man of science to renew his quest for the creation of life, to make the Monster a female companion in order to spark a “New era, of Gods and Monsters!”

A more baroque, playful entry than the first film (and one blessed with a superb score by Franz Waxman), Bride Of Frankenstein is a film brimming with surreal imagery (like Dr. Pretorius displaying his miniaturized attempts at growing life like bacterial cultures), gorgeous B&W shadows and Dutch angles, and an even more impressive performance by Karloff as the soulful Monster. It’s all capped off with the unveiling of his monstrous mate, played by Lanchester in a performance of hyperreal eeriness. While only on-screen for mere minutes, Lanchester, with her shock of electrified hair and darting, birdlike movements, remains an iconic image of horror. Maybe the first-ever example of a sequel surpassing the original, Bride Of Frankenstein remains the absolute pinnacle of the Universal Monster cycle, and one of the greatest horror films of all time.

Decades later, a new cycle of “respectable” horror films began in the early 90’s, kicked off by the box office success of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola’s visually-stunning take on Stoker’s oft-adapted novel that flooding the senses with overheated visuals in a movie that was more MTV than old-school classical. Still, it was a big hit, and Kenneth Branagh (a filmmaker with his own love of flamboyant melodrama) threw his hat into the ring with Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein in 1994. Branagh also stars as Victor Frankenstein, a plummy, virile young surgeon obsessed with the abolishment of death due to his beloved mother passing away while giving birth to his younger brother. His experiments in revivifying dead tissue leads to a pieced-together monstrosity mainly comprised of a recently-hanged killer (Robert De Niro), who flees his creator’s lab and escapes into the wilderness, where he observes a small family in their remote cottage and learns how to speak and reason. Later, he comes back to even the odds with Frankenstein, promising him he will “Be with you on your wedding night” if Frankenstein will not craft a mate for him so the two can leave behind forever the cruel world of Man.

Branagh (working from a screenplay by Steph Lady and horror aficionado Frank Darabont) directs the pulpy material like someone with a hornet loose in his shorts, shooting scenes with an endless, showy display of technical virtuosity. The camera swoops, dollies, runs literal circles around the cast as they exposit overwrought verbiage (with Patrick Doyle’s overbearing score shouting over the top of it), and the culmitive effect of all this drains the film of its dramatic core. Countless scenes could have had more emotional impact had Branagh simply allowed the camera to settle more on the actors’ faces and less on his own ripped, oiled-up torso. As the film moves along, if one can acclimate oneself to the histrionics of Branagh’s theatrical style, the movie becomes more enjoyably bonkers. De Niro is effective as the Monster – his mashed upper lip stitched into a perpetual Sylvester Stallone sneer – and Helena Bonham Carter delivers a performance of wounded delicacy as Victor’s adopted sister and bride-to-be, Elizabeth, that indicates the great film this could have been had Branagh dialed back on the loop-the-loop camerawork. Truth be told, on a scene-by-scene basis, it’s probably slightly better than Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but that film had higher highs even if it also had lower lows. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a hot mess, but a visually sumptuous one that’s fun if you can accept its over-the-top approach. It’s certainly never boring, I’ll give it that.

[AndyDursin]

Always liked Frank Darabont's comments on Branagh making it an "auteur"-fest and turning it into one of the big disappointments of the mid 90s --

I’ve described Frankenstein as the best script I ever wrote and the worst movie I’ve ever seen. That’s how it’s different.

There’s a weird doppleganger effect when I watch the movie. It’s kind of like the movie I wrote, but not at all like the movie I wrote. It has no patience for subtlety. It has no patience for the quiet moments. It has no patience period. It’s big and loud and blunt and rephrased by the director at every possible turn.

Cumulatively, the effect was a totally different movie. I don’t know why Branagh needed to make this big, loud film…the material was subtle. Shelley’s book was way out there in a lot of ways, but it’s also very subtle. I don’t know why it had to be this operatic attempt at filmmaking. Shelley’s book is not operatic, it whispers at you a lot. The movie was a bad one. That was my Waterloo. That’s where I really got my ass kicked most as a screenwriter.

Branagh had made himself such a visible target by proclaiming himself the ultimate auteur of this work, that when people started shooting bullets, they were only shooting at him. They were punching holes in his hide, not mine. He really took the brunt of the blame for that film, which was appropriate. That movie was his vision entirely. If you love that movie you can throw all your roses at Ken Branagh’s feet. If you hated it, throw your spears there too, because that was his movie.

https://creativescreenwriting.com/frank ... edemption/

Ken made few friends on that set. Coppola was going to direct it, stayed on to produce, didn't like what Branagh was doing, wanted him to cut the first half-hour and -- like Darabont -- also disowned the movie afterwards.

[Monterey Jack]

I mean, I sort of like it because of how OTT it is, but Branagh's ego is off the charts on that particular film (there are Twilight movies with fewer shirtless shots of the lead ). I should see if Darabont's screenplay is online somewhere, because there's a writer with a history of his work getting mangled by others. In fact, it's amazing Darabont hasn't made a movie since 2007.

[AndyDursin]

DIABOLIQUE (1996)

Now out on a Mill Creek Blu-Ray (thrown in a single disc Morgan Creek triple-feature with John Badham's forgettable "Incognito" and B-grade teen thriller "The In Crowd"), this is a dizzyingly bad -- but ultimately uproarious -- remake of the classic French thriller. In this Morgan Creek box-office letdown from Spring '96, Sharon Stone is the school mistress who helps unhappy wife (with a weak heart) Isabelle Adjani dispose of her no-good thug husband (Chazz Palminteri)...or DID THEY?!?!

It's always entertaining when bad movies get made -- here it's a case of a director in over his head, stretching to make a movie he wasn't qualified for. Jeremiah Chechik made a name for himself with comedy hit CHRISTMAS VACATION and the Johnny Depp/Mary Stuart Masterson dramaedy BENNY AND JOON, yet swung for the fences twice and missed in different genres. This Morgan Creek production, shot in and around the Three Rivers area, was one of them (the ill-fated film of THE AVENGERS was the other) -- often hysterically overwrought, this "Diabolique" isn't particularly sexy or suspenseful. Yet it's quite entertaining on the Bad Movie scale, especially once you get to the movie's second hour and Kathy Bates appears, leading to a ridiculously good climax that delivers all the goods. On the acting side, Stone does her usual thing but Adjani is downright awful with borderline comical reactions to what's going on around her -- anyone would see her guilt in about a nano-second based on her character's behavior.

I had never seen this film because I expected it to be a dreary BASIC INSTINCT/SLIVER knockoff -- and while it's bad, it's in a good way, less lurid than those and with a seriously good Randy Edelman score that has to be one of his best dramatic efforts. Sure, there are moments when it, too, overpowers the meager theatrics of Checik's work, but I'm going to scramble to buy a used copy of the CD -- it's melodic in places and rousingly dramatic at the finish line.

And how about this -- a speaking role for young JJ (Jeffrey) Abrams, playing a videographer! I knew it was him the second he popped up on-screen. Why his character is there -- who the hell knows -- but it was amusing to see.

[Monterey Jack]

^ Doesn't J.J. know he can afford a new pair of glasses yet...?

-Candyman (1992): 8.5/10

-Us (2019): 9/10





Horror from the perspective of the African-American “underclass” (literally, in one case) in today’s two chillers. Candyman (adapted from a story by Clive Barker) is set in and around the slum tenements of Cabrini-Green in Chicago, Illinois, where an insidious urban legend about the “Candyman” – a hook-handed specter who will appear behind you if you look into a mirror and repeat his name five times and butcher you mercilessly – which attract the attention of grad student Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen), who instigates an investigation into the historical events that the legend grew around and a series of real-life murders and mutilations in Cabrini-Green that have been attributed to it. But Helen gets to meet the man behind the myth, portrayed with ominous charisma by Tony Todd, who aspires to drive Helen to the brink of madness before spiriting her away as his latest victim.

Directed by English filmmaker Bernard Rose, and set to a hypnotic score by Philip Glass, Candyman is a film dripping with atmosphere, the dank rot of the Cabrini-Green setting (a real-life Chicago setting that began to be torn down for redevelopment just a few years later) lending the horror a lived-in quality that’s difficult to recreate on even the best soundstage. You can practically smell the moldering plaster and urine-soaked corners, and the performances of Madsen and Todd give the film a genuine dramatic heft beneath the obligatory – and bloody effective – genre jolts. Only a lame denouement (obviously to set up a series of inferior sequels and establish Todd as the Freddy Krueger boogeyman of the 90’s) mars an otherwise first-rate horror film.

Had Covid not brought Hollywood to a standstill, this past summer would have brought us a new remakequel produced by Get Out director Jordan Peele (it’s now slated for release “next year”, like 99% of all movies originally intended for a drop on 2020), so instead of being able to compare and contrast, it’s the next best thing to slot Candyman next to Peele’s follow-up feature, last year’s Us. In Peele’s second scary movie, Lupita Nyong’o stars as Adelaide Wilson, a young woman returning to the boardwalk at Santa Cruz with her family (hubby Winston Duke, and children Shahadi Wright Joseph & Evan Alex) following a nebulous but traumatic childhood incident that occurred in 1986. Once there. They find their summer home besieged by home invaders – all clad in identical red jumpsuits, all wielding identical, razor-sharp pairs of scissors – who are eerie doppelgangers of the Wilson clan. The mother, “Red” (Nyong’o, pulling exceptional double duty), intimates, in a husky croak, about taking all that Adelaide holds near and dear and making it the property of her own mute, savage family unit…including their very lives.

A more baroque, stylized and ambitious project than the more constrained Get Out, Us is the work of a filmmaker flush off the wild success of his previous movie (which earned a bushel of Oscar nominations, including a win for Peele’s original screenplay) and swinging for the fences. It’s a messier effort in some respects – a lot of it rests on one’s ability to accept its fever dream tone and not play Logic Police with the admittedly hard-to-swallow details once the underlying meaning of the doppelgangers is revealed – but it’s also thematically rich, directed with a real horror fan’s eye for generating tension and release, and featuring a pair of superb performances from Nyong’o as a pair of motivated mothers scratching and clawing to preserve what is rightfully theirs. Set to an innovative score by Michael Abels, Us proves that Peele isn’t a one-trick pony, and I look forward to what he gives us inside of the horror genre for many years to come.

[Paul MacLean]

Branagh (working from a screenplay by Steph Lady and horror aficionado Frank Darabont) directs the pulpy material like someone with a hornet loose in his shorts...

^^

I thought the film had some strengths -- and agree, it's never boring -- but I'm with with Darabont that is was far-too over-the-top.

The studio pressured Branagh to cast Schwarzzenegger as the monster, but Branagh insisted the role needed a "real actor" -- which is a shame because Arnold would have been perfect in the part. I thought DeNiro was terrible, and he sounded -- as always -- like a "New Yawkah".

[AndyDursin]

Totally agree Paul, I thought DeNiro was a total washout as the monster. For all the "prestige" his casting brought at the time of its production, I didn't think he connected at all or added anything to the film whatsoever.

I still laugh whenever I think about that staircase in the movie, and Branagh running up and down it, usually yelling and shirtless for no good reason, with Doyle's hysterical score going bonkers.

[Paul MacLean]

I still laugh whenever I think about that staircase in the movie, and Branagh running up and down it, usually yelling and shirtless for no good reason, with Doyle's hysterical score going bonkers.

All I could think in those scenes was "Where's the railing? That's dangerous!"

[Monterey Jack]

Wax on, Wax off…

-Mystery Of The Wax Museum (1933): 6/10

-House Of Wax (1953): 8/10





Scares courtesy of Madame Tussaud’s in today’s frightful double feature. In 1933’s The Mystery Of The Wax Museum, bodies are going missing from the New York City morgue…at the same time a luxe new wax museum is opening on New Year’s Day, 1932. A sassy dame reporter (Glenda Farrell) wants to get the scoop, even as her roommate (a King Kong-era Fay Wray) finds herself the unwilling model for the museum’s proprietor (Lionel Atwill) as he crafts his latest waxen masterpiece. An early experiment in two-strip Technicolor, Mystery Of The Wax Museum (directed by Casablanca’s Michael Curtiz) has been meticulously restored for the new Warner Archive Blu-Ray, and it looks and sounds spiffy. As a film, though, it’s kind of pokey and meandering, with too much rat-a-tat-tat screwball bantering and not enough in terms of suspense or scares.

It was the perfect subject matter for a remake, though, and two decades later House Of Wax came along sporting its own then-novel technical innovation, pop-out 3D effects (sadly, unless you have a 3D-capable television set – which haven’t been manufactured for a while – you have to settle for pain ol’ 2D). It’s also the film that cemented Vincent Price’s standing as one of the horror genre’s greatest showmen, as he sets out to re-create his lost wax museum’s key tenant, Marie Antionette, with the help of comely Phyllis Kirk as his chosen model. Even taking the gimmicky-but-fun 3D effects out of the equation (including a memorable use of paddleball), House Of Wax is simply a better film than is predecessor, with more sustained suspense (especially an atmospheric foot chase through fog-enshrouded turn-of-the-century NYC streets early on), better shocks and an effective eerie score by David Buttolph.. And yes, that’s a pre-Bronson Charles Buchinsky as Price’s deaf/mute assistant, Igor. Skip the godawful 2005 House Of Wax, though, which has little to do with either earlier film and is needlessly ugly and unpleasant.

“Terrible things, Lawrence…you’ve done terrible thingssssssssss.”

-The Wolf Man (1941): 8/10

-The Wolf Man (2010): 8.5/10





Werewolves run amok in these two atmospheric Universal thrillers. In the classic 1941 Wolf Man, Lon Chaney, Jr. stars as Lawrence Talbot, bitten by a wolf on the foggy moors in his home town of Llanwelly, Wales, which begins to change him into a slathering, mindless beast on the coming of the full moon. Chaney, with his sad, basset hound features, is ideally cast as Talbot, cursed with his insatiable bloodlust as he mourns his loss of control, and Jack Pierce’s iconic makeup design remains one of the best for a werewolf ever done. Yeah, it’s creaky in spots, but still delivers the requisite full-moon chills.

Some 70 years later, Universal remade the film in a lavish, big-budget production based on Curt Siodmak’s screenplay to the original and helmed by Joe Johnston. Benicio Del Toro, with his swarthy features, is a terrific choice as Lawrence Talbot, a popular and acclaimed stage actor who returns to his hometown on news of the death of his brother, left savagely mutilated by some horrible beast. Once there, he is reunited with his distant father, Sir John Talbott (Anthony Hopkins), and his late brother’s lovely fiancé, Gwen Conliffe (Emily Blunt), but his investigations into his brother’s death are cut violently short when he’s assaulted and maimed by a mysterious monster on the moors. His wounds heal up with supernatural speed and cleanliness, and soon Lawrence starts feeling rather hairy as the moon grows full and bright, earning the fearful scorn of the community and a visiting Scotland Yard detective, Francis Aberline (Hugo Weaving), who is looking to end the recent wave of ghastly nighttime deaths in the area.

Johnston’s incredibly handsome film (with Oscar-winning makeup effects by Rick Baker and set to a churning, propulsive score by Danny Elfman) landed with a soft thud at the box office after a series of release date pushbacks, and received mixed-to-negative reviews a decade ago, but it’s worn really well in the wake of a series of mixed-bag attempts by Universal to resurrect their “Universal Monster” brand as an ersatz-MCU “cinematic universe” (the charmless, cluttered 2017 version of The Mummy crashed and burned, whereas this year’s Invisible Man redux was surprisingly good). The entire cast attacks their roles adroitly, the visuals shine, the action sequences are terrific (especially an extended foot chase through period London and a final, firey conflagration at Lawrence’s childhood manor) and the R-rated violence hits the perfect middle ground between old-school Universal chills and more explicit Hammer-style gore without tipping over into needless grotesquery. And this is the rare case where an “unrated” cut of a movie actually improves it, with more character development and time to “breathe” (plus restoring a lovely cameo by the great Max Von Sydow), even if the extra footage introduces a slight continuity error not present in the theatrical cut. It’s a tremendously underrated film, perfect for Halloween thrills. Beware the moon…!

-Zombie High (1987): 5/10



Mediocre mix of 80’s campus movie and slow-burn suspense features Virginia Madsen as a boarding-school student who discovers the faculty members are turning her fellow students (including Sherilyn Fenn and – yes – future Bridesmaids director Paul Feig! ) into mind-wiped zombies who excel in their post-academia careers even at the cost of their precious individuality. Yep, it’s Invasion Of The Student Body Snatchers, and a particularly wan riff on the well-worn idea, with an uneasy mix of weak shocks and generally flat satire (albeit with an amusingly awful end title song). Aside from the easy-on-the-eyes pleasures of seeing Madsen and Fenn in their youthful primes, it’s a pretty forgettable fright flick.

[Monterey Jack]

Day Of The Animals…

-Willard (1971): 7/10

-Man’s Best Friend (1993): 7/10





Nature runs amok in today’s twofers of creepy-crawly (and/or cuddly) killers. In 1971’s Willard, Bruce Davison stars as Willard Stiles, a middle-management drone as a textile mill owned by his late father’s business partner, Mr. Miles (Ernest Borgnine), who despises Willard, berating him at every opportunity and dumping more work in his lap than he can keep up with. And going home at the end of the day offers no relief, with a bedridden harridan of a mother (Elsa “The Bride” Lanchester) haranguing him about their crumbling abode’s state of disrepair and her son’s introverted state. But Willard finally finds a friend when he feeds a scrap of his birthday cake to an errant rat in the yard, which brings back its hungry brood for seconds. Willard starts getting an odd affinity for his rodent pack, naming a white, pink-eyed specimen “Socrates”, whom he makes the pick of the litter. Soon, he’s trained the rat pack to do his bidding, utilizing them to strike back with increasing violence at those who displease him, even as a kindly temp co-worker (a pre-Eastwood Sondra Locke) tries to get him to open up.

Willard (which inspired a superior remake in 2003) offers solid suspense for its premise, and Davison – with his satellite-dish ears and sharp features – makes for a compellingly eccentric, put-upon rat ringleader. Set to a fine Alex North score, Willard delivers the guilty-pleasure goods when it comes to vicarious revenge fantasies.

Meanwhile, 1993’s Man’s Best Friend stars Ally Sheedy as a young reporter named Lori Tanner, out to expose a science lab for cruel experiments involving the vivisection of test animals. She breaks into the lab hoping to get videotaped evidence of these atrocities, and finds “Max”, a hulking Tibetan Mastiff with expressive blonde eyebrows and an almost preternatural intelligence. She brings the friendly pooch home, much to the chagrin of her boorish boyfriend (Fredric Lehne), not knowing that mad scientist Dr. Jarret (genre staple Lance Henriksen) has genetically-crossbred Max with the DNA of a variety of other animals (leading to enhanced strength, agility, and various other unnatural abilities) in order to create the ultimate in attack dogs…and, cut off from the meds he was given in order to keep him docile, Max gradually transitions from cuddly to murderous.

Written and directed by the late John Lafia (who helped guide the creation of the Child’s Play franchise with his contributions to the original movie’s screenplay and by directing the stylish, underrated Child’s Play 2), Man’s Best Friend is a slick, entertaining cross between Cujo and The Terminator, with the dogs portraying Max trained into some excellent canine performances (nowadays this film would have an uncanny valley CGI doggy in Max’s role) and Lafia staging some exciting action and suspense sequences. It’s not a film that can taken all that seriously, yet it’s not quite a spoofy lark, either, with a blend of scares and laughs that keeps the viewer unawares throughout and play off standard pooch clichés with amusing élan. Featuring a score by Joel Goldsmith, it’s far from a genre classic, but offers up plenty of enjoyment, and it’s a shame that Lafia’s directing career basically ended with this film, and that he died so relatively young.

[Monterey Jack]

I wanna kill / everyone / Satan is good / Satan is my Dad…

-The Omen (1976): 8/10

-Damien: Omen II (1978): 7/10

-The Final Conflict: Omen II (1981): 6/10

-Omen IV: The Awakening (1991): 1/10









When it comes to horror movies successful enough to spawn a sequel or entire franchise, there’s usually little cohesion to the ensuing films, the creators just winging it until dwindling box office receipts signal the end of the series. The Omen films represent the rare opportunity to see a unified narrative spread across a threnody of fright flicks. The 1976 original (the first big break for director Richard Donner) is the effectively chilling tale of politician Robert Thorn (Gregory Peck) and his wife, Kathy (Lee Remick), who loses their baby in childbirth. Wracked with grief, unable to break the hard news to Kathy, Robert agrees to a clandestine “adoption” of a baby whose mother died in childbirth to spare her unnecessary anguish. Five years later, little Damien (Harvey Stephens) is a chipmunk-cheeked scamp and Robert is the new Ambassador to Great Britain when a series of disturbing tragedies start to surround the Thorn family, starting off with their nanny publicly hanging herself at Damien’s 5th birthday party (“Look, Damien! It’s all for you…!”). Soon Kathy finds herself growing more and more inexplicably distressed by her son, as Robert begins to unravel a sinister conspiracy revolving around Damien’s adoption with the help of a reporter (David Warner) with a keen interest in the case.

Riding a wave of interest in shocking, sacrilegious horror films in the 70’s (sparked off by films like Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, The Omen is a film that’s carefully structured to work whether or not you believe any of the film’s theological discussions about God and the Devil. The film’s myriad of death scenes could very well be a series of extremely odd coincidences, or else guided by the hand of a malign exterior force. However you lean, Donner directs the material with a sure hand, with many memorably horrific scenes (like Warner’s abrupt exit from the film) and an eerie, Oscar-winning score by Jerry Goldsmith that keeps the viewer in a constant state of unease. It’s also blessed with the presence of Peck and Remick, who ground the proceedings with their old-school gravitas. It glances off true greatness, but as far as mainstream popcorn horror flicks go, it’s a mighty effective one.

It was also a huge hit in he summer of ’76, so a quickie sequel, Damien: Omen II, came along two years later. After a prologue with the last of those who know of Damien’s sinister lineage being dealt with, the film jumps ahead 7 years to find Damien (Jonathan Scott-Taylor), now a strapping lad of 12, engaged in military school after being raised by Robert Thorn’s brother, Richard (William Holden) and his second wife, Ann (Lee Grant). Damien is on the cusp of puberty, and his school’s new sergeant (Lance Henriksen) encourages the boy to read certain passages in the Bible, in order to put his questions about his destiny in proper perspective. Meanwhile, a new series of mysterious deaths start to occur, with Damien in the center of an ever-tightening circle.

Directed with workmanlike efficiency by Don Taylor (replacing original director Mike Hodges after a few weeks’ worth of production. Hodges still receives credit for his contributions of the screenplay), Damien: Omen II was one of the early examples of a franchise sequel comprised mainly of “setpieces” that could be arranged in any order, so long as their steadily escalate over the course of the narrative. These death scenes have a playfully sinister Rube Golbergian quality to them that anticipate the later Final Destination franchise, and returning composer Jerry Goldsmith re-arranges his “Ave Santani” chant into a furiously driving statement that cheerleads over the film’s array of killings with a ghoulish humor. It’s not quite as good as the first film (although Holden lends the material the same prestige that Peck did to the original), but it’s more “fun” in many respects.

Capping off the series (for a while) was 1981’s The Final Conflict: Omen III, which clumsily retcons the previous films to have taken place decades earlier so that a now 32-year-old Damien (San Neill) can make a run for political office “In ’84”. Damien is now in full control of his late father’s Thorn Industries estate, and is a slick, charmer living high on his wealth and privilege as he surreptitiously sets up his Satanic followers to guard against the imminent “Second Coming” of his antithesis, Jesus Christ, even as a cadre of monks, armed with the Seven Daggers of Megiddo, look to bring his evil existence to an end once and for all.

Directed by Graham Baker (Alien Nation, The Final Conflict has a number of things to recommend, including Neill’s devilishly charismatic performance (his scenes expositing to a defiled statue of Christ offer some sharp writing) and Jerry Goldsmith’s finest score of the series, and one of the best he ever wrote full-stop. It’s a dark opera that’s so richly compelling that the film’s screenplay could have been acted out by sock puppets, and it still would have seemed like the most epic thing ever. That said, there’s a distinct lack of energy to the proceedings, with the memorably-staged death scenes from the previous movies supplanted by more mundane murders (like Damien’s trademark Rottweiler hypnotizing a political rival into committing suicide by…rigging a shotgun to blow his head off in his office) and a seriously underwhelming climax. While Goldsmith’s glorious music goes for broke trying to make it seem as grand as possible, it’s hard to get worked up by how routine Damien’s ultimate undoing is. The film works a little better after a few viewings, but it’s still a sadly disappointing wrap-up to an otherwise compelling trilogy of scary movies.

No one can ever leave enough alone, though, so a decade later there was a television movie, Omen IV: The Awakening, that tried to jump-start the dormant franchise for anew generation. It’s a rote rehash with a childless couple (Faye Grant, Michael Woods) adopting a baby girl they name “Delia”, who, eight years later, is personified by the wooden, obnoxious Asia VieIra, who – you guessed it – becomes the center of a new wave of “accidental” deaths used to conceal her nebulous parentage. This is weak sauce all around, with poor production values, mediocre acting, and rife with big, unintentional hilarity (I especially liked a bit with Delia spitting in the face of a nanny, who responds with the memorable line, “Why would you do that? What evil would make you do that…?”). Not helping is a riotously bad score by Jonathan Sheffer, which honestly sounds like it would be more at home in an Airplane!-style spoof of a religious horror movie. No wonder the producers took Goldsmith cues from the first and third Omen films and chopped them up to sprinkle over the movie like confetti (including a hysterical moment where a pack of evil Christmas carolers start chanting the “Ave Satani” lyrics on-screen!). This is a catastrophically awful and inept movie on every conceivable level, and dull as all hell.

-The Nest (1988): 2.5/10



A New England island fishing community is besieged by flesh-eating cockroaches in this routine gross-out flick. The shots of skittering roaches getting pulped, mashed and pureed makes this an effective appetite suppressant, but it ain’t much of a movie.

[Monterey Jack]

-Valentine (2001): 2.5/10



A group of twentysomething friends (including Denise Richards, Katherine Heigl and Marley Shelton) find themselves stalked by a killer (wearing a plastic cupid mask) inspired by a traumatizing event at a middle-school dance some thirteen years earlier, who taunts them with sinister Valentine card greetings and other nasty surprises (like a box of maggot-infested chocolates) before moving in for the kill. It’s yet another depressingly routine slasher from that post-Scream period in the late 90’s and early 00’s, where the only thing separating it from a film made 20 years earlier is better production values and less nudity. Complete cliché-ridden trash.

-The Faculty (1998): 7/10

-Planet Terror (2007): 9/10





A pair of snarky horror efforts from director Robert Rodriguez today. 1998’s The Faculty, like Valentine, is cut from the same Dimension Films cloth, with a then-buzzy collection of hawt teen-movie performers (including Josh Hartnett, Clea DuVall, a pre-Lord Of The Rings Elijah Wood and a pre-anorexia Jordana Brewster, looking super-cute in red-framed glasses) as students at Herrington High in Ohio who discover that their teachers and assorted school faculty members (including the impressive likes of Robert Patrick, Famke Janssen, Salma Hayek, Carrie’s Piper Laurie, Daily Show host Jon Stewart and – ugh! – disgraced Ain’t It Cool News honcho Harry Knowles) are being taken over by repulsive, slug-like aliens that worm their way into their ear canals and turn them into hive-mind drones who look to take over the students, their parents…and eventually, the world. Amusing crossbreeding of The Breakfast Club and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers is a far better riff on the latter’s well-worn sci-fi/horror formula of forced conformism than Zombie High was, with Rodriguez’s slick direction/editing and a snarky screenplay by Scream’s Kevin Williamson making the obligatory shocks, gross-outs and pop-culture riffing go down easy. Like a lot of Rodriguez’s films, it’s all a little too light and disposable at times (especially a wrap-up that lets the characters and audience off the hook too easily), but it’s certainly fun as unspools in the moment.

Almost a decade later Rodriguez teamed up with filmmaker buddy Quentin Tarantino for the audacious experiment Grindhouse, where each director would helm a throwback to the grimy exploitation fare of the 1970’s and 80’s and package the two resulting films together in a double-feature, replete with old-timey theater slides and fake trailers for other similar fare (like the seasonal slasher flick Thanksgiving and the haunted-house chiller Don’t). Sadly, the resulting film failed to find an audience (aimed at an age group that obviously had zero idea of the era of filmmaking being paid loving homage to), and both films – including Tarantino’s automotive slasher piece Death Proof – were separated for their debut on DVD. Rodriguez’s half, Planet Terror, is a hellzapoppin’ gross-out zombie flick about an outbreak of nerve gas that turns the inhabitants of a small town into slavering “sickos” covered in pulsating, pus-filled blisters, and how a hardy group of survivors, including a go-go dancer (an outrageously sexy Rose McGowan), a mysterious, badass stranger (Freddy Rodriguez, no relation to the director), a nurse (Marley Shelton) evading her psychotic doctor hubby (Josh Brolin), and a curtly commanding sheriff (80’s sci-fi/action-movie favorite Michael Biehn), band together to fight back the zombie hoards and find a place of refuge.

While a lot of Rodriguez’s films tend to be rife with unnecessary side characters and subplots that do nothing but bloat out the running time and allow him to utilize a large backlog of actor buddies he wants to work with, Planet Terror is thankfully streamlined and to-the-point (even in the extended cut available on DVD and Blu), staging sequences of violence, tension and shuddery ickiness with the director’s enthusiastically cartoonish sense of humor and slick editing techniques. And the “grindhouse” aesthetic he applied to the film in post production – adding a lot of faux wear & tear to this digitally-shot film to make it look like a old, beaten-up film print – adds to its grubby, low-budget charm. Along with Sin City, Planet Terror is one of the director’s best films, and highly entertaining for fans of this kind of winkingly disgusting genre fare.

[Monterey Jack]

You better watch out / you better not cry / you better not pout / ‘cuz you’re gonna diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiie…!

-Krampus (2015): 8/10

-Anna And The Apocalypse (2018): 8.5/10





Yule love this pair of bloody merry holiday-themed ho-ho-horror flicks. In Krampus, a family headed by Adam Scott and Toni Collette have to host Collette’s sister (Alison Tolman), her boorish husband (David Koechner) and their beastly brood of children for the Christmas season. But when their son (Emjay Anthony) tears up a letter to Santa in a fit of spite that their family can’t have a nice, relaxed Christmas like they used to enjoy, he sets off a visit from a nasty Christmas spirit that pre-dates ol’ St. Nick, one whose more-naughty-than-nice history is related to him by his doting grandmother (Krista Stadler) in a flashback depicted via beautiful, Rankin/Bass-inspired animation. Soon, both families finds themselves fighting for their lives inside their home from a variety of happy holiday icons turned into twisted monsters (homicidal, Gremlin-like Gingerbread men, a feral teddy bear, an oversized, carnivorous Jack-in-the-box, etc.) who are just the appetizer before Krampus himself arrives to spread some holiday jeer.

Director and co-writer Michael Dougherty (who previously helmed the terrific Halloween-themed anthology Trick ‘r Treat before receiving the blockbuster franchise reward cookie of Godzilla: King Of The Monsters) crafts a film full of mordant laughs and lite, PG-13 horror jolts that makes this an ideal film for the 10-to-13 set looking to dip their toes into the scary movie genre without getting something too grotesque and frightening. And the various yuletide beasties are presented with a great deal of terrific, old-school puppetry and animatronic effects work that will delight horror fans of a certain age.

Meanwhile, we take a trip across the pond to Scotland for the 2018 high school zombie Christmas musical(!) Anna And The Apocalypse, where the obligatory outbreak of flesh-eating ghouls descend upon the small town of Little Haven, breaking up the holiday festivities and causing the titular Anna (Ella Hunt, who has the facial features and sparkling charisma of a young Anne Hathaway) and her friends to band together to evade becoming a hot plate lunch and find a place of safety…in-between bouts of teen angst frequently dramatized with peppy musical numbers penned by the team of Roddy Hart and Tommy Reilly.

Director John McPhail has a ball mating a generic living-dead scenario to a bouncy High School Musical-style template, and while the songs and choreography may not be brilliant, they’re catchy and infectious enough to make the film’s spurts of enthusiastic Sam Raimi gore go down with toe-tapping enjoyment. The sheer audacity of the concept gives the film enough of a discernable identity to make it stand out from the crowded zomcom market (zombie comedies have developed as many clichés as the po-paced zombies movies they’re sending up at this point), and Ella Hunt makes for a charming, kick-ass heroine, delivering high notes and candy cane impalements with equal skill.