Halloween Horror Marathon 2022

[Monterey Jack]

Yes Poltergeist bears all the hallmarks of the man who brought us Spontaneous Combustion, Invaders From Mars and The Manger!

These two films were the last authentically GOOD things Hooper ever had his name on (Lifeforce is tremendously entertaining, but for all the wrong reasons )...nothing but garbage after '82. Hooper's career made Wes Craven look good in comparison. I was pleased how much better The Funhouse was this time around considering how iffy I found it on DVD some seven or eight years back. The excellent UHD transfer certainly helps.

[AndyDursin]

Totally agree. I'm not trying to be a jerk either in your astute column but I do think it'd be a LOT easier for people to give Hooper more credit for POLTERGEIST had he directed so much as one -- ONE -- halfway decent movie after it. That he failed mostly spectacularly across the board, sometimes with big budgets too, just adds fuel to the fire.

But to give him credit, you know I've always been a fan of THE FUNHOUSE going back to when I saw it on laserdisc. Gene Siskel was a fan too -- this 1987 "Guilty Pleasures" show I uploaded on Youtube has his critique at 15:25. They also covered (just to tie in with the season) THE ENTITY in this episode at 10:25, though I agree with Siskel the sexual assault content should've been toned down and was probably a reason why it was never more widely appreciated (or seen).

[Monterey Jack]

-The Possession Of Joel Delaney (1972): 5/10



Rote chiller about a divorced, well-to-do New Yorker, Sarah Benson (Shirley MacLaine), who invites her brother, Joel Delaney (Perry King), into her life. She and her children (David Elliott, Lisa Kohane) are delighted to spend time with Uncle Joel...until he starts flying into inexplicable rages, lapsing into fevered bouts of Spanish. Investigating, Sarah comes to the realization that Joel is being possessed by the spirit of a dead serial killer that used to terrorize Spanish Harlem, and is terrified that she and her family may be next.

Directed by Warris Hussein, The Possession of Joel Delaney is reasonably well shot, and generates some tension early on, but it turns ickier as it rolls along, leading to a climax that's excessively ugly and mean-spirited, one of those "only in the 70s" deals that would never fly today. Shame, because MacLaine's performance is strong, and had the movie shown more restraint as it wound down, it could have been a solid little suspense flick.

-The Medusa Touch (1978): 3.5/10



Flat-footed supernatural thriller that opens with the violent bludgeoning of a man, John Morlar (Richard Burton) in his London flat. Investigating the crime, Detective Brunel (John Morlar), is led to the victim's psychiatrist, Dr. Zonfeld (an Omen-era Lee Remick), who reveals that her patient suffered from delusions that he could see future events before they occurred...always one of a tragic and/or violent nature. Was it all in Morlar's head, or was he, in fact, in possession of a genuine psychic talent, and with the ability to not only predict great, calamitous events, but also to create them? Lying in a hospital bed in an apparent vegetative state, his still-racing brainwaves seem to indicate that there's something percolating in his winding-down mind, but can Detective Brunel discover what Morlar's next potential target is before it's too late?

Directed by Jack Gold, The Medusa Touch is a fairly stultifying piece of work, bereft of narrative drive and tension. The late-70s period London settings are nicely shot, but the movie simply has no interesting plot diversions along the way (they attempt to build a mystery around the assailant that put Morlar in the hospital, but it's blatantly obvious who it is), and the climax (involving some substandard miniature effects) isn't nearly spectacular enough to justify the film's very slow build. For a much-better riff on a vaguely similar "Cassandra Complex" idea, check out the underrated 2002 chiller The Mothman Prophecies.

[AndyDursin]

No surprise, Dead on agreement on those two.

GREMLINS 2: THE NEW BATCH
7.5/10



Checked this out this year because Theo made it through the original, so the sequel's a lot less lighter lifting for a 3rd grader (though he still doesn't like any scenes with "melting" creatures or characters).

I didn't really have much of a different reaction to GREMLINS 2 this time around -- the movie kicks off with Bugs and Daffy like it's a live-action cartoon, because, obviously, that's what it is. Joe Dante's playfulness and sense of humor -- if not his self-indulgence altogether -- is basically intact in every scene, the movie makes fun of the original (to the nth degree) and the sequel is, to quote an old, archaic term, "hellzapoppin!" with its slapstick and gags. It's all entertaining and often very funny -- I love the kitchen cooking segment when the wacky mogwais first appear, all the cameos, then the "big production number" at the end. John Glover is terrific as the Trump/Ted Turner mogul as well, though Phoebe Cates might as well have been written out of this movie, she serves so little purpose (honestly I thought Zach Galligan had more chemistry with Haviland Morris, who's highly amusing as Billy's boss Marla).

There is, though, a cost just to the general tone of the picture: that, dramatically, you never feel anything in this movie. There's no dramatic tension, suspense, or emotion, which the original had going for it. Truthfully, the first film is a much better movie, a far more effective story on so many levels, that the amount of apologies Dante makes here for it are excessive. Plus, the sequel isn't really horror/comedy -- it's much more a cartoon, functioning solely on the level of a spoof, with the limited dramatic scope that kind of picture generates.

That carries over to Jerry Goldsmith's score. I've never regarded this score on the level of the first film, and obviously the change in the tone of the sequel resulted in him writing a more frantic, less cohesive work. It has its moments, but overall feels like he was struggling to settle on a central "hook" thematically and never found it, so we get a bunch of quick little themes and thematic fragments that don't amount to much...Gizmo's Theme hardly even makes an appearance, and his "keystone cops" orchestral rendition of "The Gremlin Rag" I've never cared for at all. The weirdest component is his "easy listening" theme for the Futtermans -- complete with this tuneful bridge that sounds like something Henry Mancini might've written for NEWHART!

[Monterey Jack]

Two movies, one title...

-The Awakening (1980): 6/10

-The Awakening (2011): 7.5/10





Sometimes movie titles just get recycled (even if the second one isn't related to the first in any way, shape or form), like today's pair. 1980's The Awakening stars Charlton Heston as Matthew Corbeck, a dedicated archeologist on a seemingly-endless search for the lost tomb of Queen Kara in the sun-baked deserts of Egypt. Along for his latest expedition is his assistant, Jane Turner (Susannah York), and his seven-months-pregnant wife, Anne (Jill Townsend), who is getting the distinct impression that her husband is becoming obsessed with his work and spending ore time with his attractive young assistant than with her. But when Queen Kara's tomb is finally unearthed, and Matthew strikes the first blow with his excavating tools to open the doors seals thousands of years prior, it coincides precisely with a sudden bout of agonizing pain in Anne's stomach. Rushed to the hospital in a near-catatonic state, Anne delivers a two-months premature baby, who miraculously pulls through with no apparent ill effects. Yet the damage to their marriage is catastrophic, Anne taking baby Margaret away with her to New York in a fit of despair over Matthew seeming more interested in the cataloging of his new find than his wife and child. Eighteen years later, Margaret, now an attractive young woman (played by a pre-Remington Steele Stephanie Zimbalist), travels to London to hopefully reconnect with her estranged father (who has married Jane Turner in the interim). But, following a successful reunion, both are drawn inexorably back to Egypt, where Queen Kara has been put on display...and soon, Margaret seems to become possessed with the spirit of Kara. Can Matthew pull away from his obsession with the moldering corpse inside of those dusty old bandages in order to save his child from becoming her new vessel for a new age of evil?

The first feature directed by Mike Newell (Four Weddings And A Funeral), and based on a novel by Dracula creator Bram Stoker, The Awakening is a film that looks and sounds great, the Egyptian settings beautifully captured by the great cinematographer Jack Cardiff (there's a shot of Heston standing on a dune, backlit by the setting sun, that's almost identical to one featuring Harrison Ford in Raiders Of The Lost Ark a year later) and with Claude Bolling providing a lush orchestral score full of menace and mystery. There's even a striking title sequence by James Bond veteran Maurice Binder. Yet despite the lavish production values and reasonably good acting, the movie never quite gels, with pacing every bit as slow and lumbering as any mummy featured in the old Universal or Hammer horror flicks of the 1930s or '60s. It's never quite boring, yet it's not exactly a taut, riveting experience, with a lack of overt scares or gradually accelerating dread. It's perfectly watchable, but one pines for the divertingly cheesy chills of those old B&W Universal pics.

2011's The Awakening trades the heat of Egypt for the chilly environs of a post-WWI London, where Florence Cathcart (Rebecca Hall) is an educated young woman who makes a living a professional debunker of the supernatural who crashes seances in order to pull back the veil of fakery and reveal those purportedly in contact with restless spirits to be be profiteering charlatans. Yet when she's invited to investigate the haunting of a remote boarding school in the countryside at the behest of Robert Mallory (Dominic West), she finds a class full of frightened children and staff (including housekeeper Imelda Staunton), all convinced that the restless spirit of a dead child has been haunting the grounds for years. Florence meticulously sets out her specialized, up-to-date equipment in order to catch the supposed prankster in the act (she's like the anti-Lorraine Warren), yet disquieting evidence continues to mount that this may, in fact, be the Real Deal, and Florence finds her faith in rational, scientific logic to become slowly eroded as she plumbs into a mystery that may have a connection to a shadowy trauma in her past.

Shot in bleak, wintery tones on lovely, grainy Fuji film stock, The Awakening has the classy, unhurried feel of something that could have been made decades ago. The always-excellent Hall anchors the movie with her fierce intelligence. Not the type to creep down hallways with a bathrobe cinched around her neck while tremulously calling out "Who's there...?", her Florence is a self-made woman who would rather pursue phantom specters with a cynic's eye. This is what makes the film's gradual collection of truly inexplicable events all the more effective, Hall's expressive eyes shifting from jaded determination to spooked alarm. Set to a elegant score by Daniel Pemberton, The Awakening builds to one of those Big Twists that supernatural chillers often rely on to pull the rug out from underneath seasoned horror viewers who have heard too many rattling chains in their day, yet it's one that has a well-delivered reveal, and Hall's performance makes it all work both dramatically and emotionally. Not quite a classic of the genre, but it's a haunted house thriller that earns its gooseflesh.

[Monterey Jack]

"Sign of the devil, dude...!"

-The Devil Rides Out (1968): 7.5/10

-To The Devil...A Daughter (1976): 8/10





A pair of Satanic Hammer shockers (both adapted from novels by Dennis Wheatley) made for today's double-feature. 1968's The Devil Rides Out (retitled The Devil's Bride for its U.S. debut) stars Christopher Lee and Leon Greene as a pair of erudite, rational men who discover a coven of Satanic cultists (led by a charismatically smarmy Charles Gray) in their small village in Southern London circa 1929, and fight to save the souls of a new initiate (Patrick Mower) and a local family targeted as sacrificial lambs as the cult attempts to resurrect Ol' Scratch himself.

Directed by Hammer vet Terence Fisher, The Devil Rides Out is stylish, effectively eerie and surprisingly light on the studio's standard gore and titillation, instead using some solid special effects to depict the vivid hallucinations cult leader Gray subjects his enemies and would-be initiates to.

1976's To The Devil...A Daughter features Lee again as an excommunicated priest named Michael Rayner who has raised a nun named Catherine (a young Nastassja Kinski, in one of her earliest roles) from birth inside of his remote church in Bavaria. She's making a trip to London to meet her father, Henry Beddows (Denholm Elliott), for the first time since she was a baby, and stays with a novelist, John Verney (Richard Widmark) who specializes in the occult. But it becomes obvious that sinister forces are at stake, and that Catherine has become the lynchpin of a conspiracy in order to become the new vessel for an ancient demon that will unleash Hell on Earth.

The very last film to come from the Hammer studio (at least until the brand name was resurrected in the early 2010s with scattershot results), To The Devil...A Daughter is a pretty strong film to go out on, with fine performances all around and some effectively contorted camerawork to suggest malign supernatural forces being held at bay by the thinnest of membranes. Lee, as always, seethes with cultured menace, and is well-matched against Widmark as he susses out the evil purposes he wishes to inflict upon Kinski's innocent victim. If the studio had to finally fold in a post-Exorcist 70s, this is as ideal and satisfying a send-off as could be expected.

[Monterey Jack]

-The Curse Of The Cat People (1944): 8/10

-Cat People (1982): 7/10





Kitties on the prowl in today's feline double feature. 1944's The Curse of The Cat People picks up about six years after the 1942 Cat People ended, with widower Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) having remarried following the death of his wife, Irena (Simone SImon), who had become the recipient of a curse that caused her to transform into the form of a large, predatory cat when aroused. Now remarried to Alice (Jane Randolph) and father to young Amy (Ann Reed), Oliver has tried to put his terrifying experiences in the past...and yet when Amy starts to talk to an imaginary friend in the nearby woods, he becomes convinced the girl is in communion with the late Irina, who may wish the innocent young girl harm.

Less a horror movie than a dreamy, lightly eerie dissection of interior childhood whimsies, The Curse Of The Cat People may disappoint those expecting more of the same from the 1942 original (which was produced by Val Lewton and evocatively directed by Jacques Tournier). It's not a film chockablock with tight suspense or standard shocks, but it's a well-acted, beautifully-photographed film nevertheless, and wee Ann Reed anchors it with a strong child performance. The first film directed by the great Robert Wise (who shares credit with Gunther von Fritsch), it's a movie that's rewarding if you can adjust your expectations accordingly, and the wintry settings give it a homey atmosphere.

The original Cat People was remade in 1982 by director Paul Schrader, and it's a movie that's as visually stimulating as it is dramatically unsatisfying. Stunning Nastassja Kinski stars as Irene Gallier, who makes a trip to New Orleans to visit the brother, Paul (Malcolm McDowell) she's heard of but never met after years spent bouncing around foster homes. Once there, she's intoxicated by the festive atmosphere, and drawn to a local zoo, where the catches the eye of Oliver Yates (John Heard), a zoologist who specializes in large cats. He pursues Irene romantically, but brother Paul has his own, incestuous leanings towards her, which ties into their shared lineage as possessors of a condition that turns them into predatory felines when aroused. Talk about a mood-changer!

Schrader's film is a movie with superb production values (which can finally be appreciated on Scream Factory's excellent new UHD release). The photography by John Bailey, visual effects by Albert Whitlock and soundtrack by Giorgio Moroder (with a killer end title track by David Bowie, one cribbed by Quentin Tarantino for memorable use in Inglourious Basterds) are all superb, and Kinski makes for a striking - and frequently, gloriously nude - presence. That said, for all of the movie's myriad of audiovisual pleasures, it's curiously uninvolving from a dramatic standpoint. Heard and Kinski lack chemistry, and while their erotic couplings are certainly easy on the eyes, it lends the movie the tone of an impending romantic tragedy that never fully gels. The movie also lacks in the thrill department, despite a handful of gory inserts of clawed legs and arms bitten off. Schrader - a tremendously intelligent filmmaker - simply lacks the temperament for tasty horror pulp the way other directors of 80s remakes of classic horror movies did, like John Carpenter, Chuck Russell or David Cronenberg. That said, the strong production values (and prurient display of Kinski's talents) makes it never less than watchable.

[Monterey Jack]

-Halloween "Ends" (2022): 3.5/10



What a bloody mess. If you thought Halloween Kills was a waste of time, wait'll you see this, where Michael Myers is reduced to skulking around in a sewer for over an hour (what did he live on down there for four years, fried rats?) while his new "disciple" (Rohan Campbell) pulls a Kylo Ren and tries to imitate the real deal, and badly, initiating a new rash of poorly-motivated murders in Haddonfield while Jamie Lee Curtis mopes and frets about her granddaughter (cute Andi Matichak) taking a shine to this budding sociopath. Aside from a well-done prologue featuring a prank gone wrong that authentically shocked me (and the obligatory throbbing score by Carpenters Senior & Junior and Daniel Davies), this is poorly conceived on every level, not playing well to franchise expectations or reinterpreting it in any meaningful way. It's a good thing the 2018 Halloween functioned perfectly well as a stand-alone, as the two sequels that have followed it are a complete and utter waste of time. Let Myers rest in peace, for God's sake.

If I had a Hammer...I'd Hammer in the morning...I'd Hammer in the evening...all of the livelong day...

-Scars Of Dracula (1970): 7/10

-The Reptile (1966): 6/10

-Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (1974): 8/10







Bite-sized Hammer capsules. 1970's Scars Of Dracula featured Christopher Lee's fifth turn in the Count's natty, red-lined cape, is a solid entry featuring the obligatory cheesy, chittering rubber bats on wires (there's a nicely gory prologue where Drac sics his winged minions on the wives and children of the local villagers who attempt to burn his castle to the ground), atmospheric, fog-shrouded English settings and heaving cleavage festooned with Drac-repelling crucifixes (plus, the series moving into the 1970s, some gratuitously bare bums). It also gives Lee one of his more memorable exits from one of his films. Not the best of the series, but not the worst, either. Solid fun for Hammer fans.

1966's The Reptile concerns a string of deaths in the small village of Clagmoor Heath, where people have been showing up with horribly blackened faces, and puffed-up necks. The brother (Ray Barrett) of the most recent victim inherits his sibling's estate and travels there with his wife (Jennifer Daniel), to discover their neighbor (Noel Willman) is keeping a deadly secret involving his young daughter (Jacqueline Pierce), who is cursed to turn into a cobra-like monster whose bite is virulently poisonous. Fairly pokey and static for the first hour, but once the film's monster (neat makeup!) is revealed, the last 30 minutes is fairly enjoyable, with the obligatory firey Hammer conflagration at the climax .

1974's Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter (he should team up with Abe Lincoln!) hails from the studio's twilight years, and stars Horst Janson (dubbed by Julian Holloway) as the charismatic title character, who travels the English countryside with his hunchbacked sidekick (John Cater) and a recently-acquired young beauty (dazzling 70s Hammer ingenue Caroline Munro) who he frees from the stocks for the crime of "Dancing on Sunday", in search of vampires to slay in order to avenge the family lost to bloodsuckers when Kronos was a lad. They arrive at a village where young, beautiful women have literally had their vitality sucked out of them, leaving them withered old crones, and determine to ferret out the soul-suckers and restore order. A nifty crossbreeding of standard Hammer vampire fare with swashbuckling adventure, Kronos eschews the usual neck-nibbling in favor of the victims having their inner essence drained (shades of The Dark Crystal), and it builds to a rousing swordplay climax between Kronos as the revealed head vamp, in a sequence with solid fight choreography. One of the studio's better and more unique efforts from the 1970s, set to a propulsive, Bernard Herrmann-like score by Laurie Johnson.

[Monterey Jack]

Back from the grave, and ready to party...!

-The Return Of The Living Dead (1985): 7/10

-Zombieland (2009): 8/10





Zomcoms are the tasty dish on today's flesh-munching menu. 1985's The Return Of The Living Dead features Poltergeist's James Karen as Frank Johnson, an employee of the Uneeda medical supply center, who's busy showing new recruit Freddy (Thom Matthews) the ropes when they inadvertently vent some toxic gas from a government canninster left sealed for decades, getting a faceful. Left retching both from the effects of the gas and fear for their jobs, they call up their boss, Burt Wilson (the late Clu Gulager), and the three deliver a medical cadaver who has sprung back to live to a nearby crematorium to dispose of the evidence...little realizing that the smoke billowing from the chimney will seed the clouds, letting down a deluge of rain infested with the toxins that seep into the soil of the local cemetery. Soon, they, as well as a pack of stereotypical 80s punks who are using the cemetery as a hangout, are besieged by packs of the ravening undead, all hungry to chomp into the noggins of the living and feast upon the succulent braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaains contained therein.

The directorial debut of Alien co-screenwriter Dan O'Bannon (working from a story by, among others, John A. Russo, who co-wrote the original Night Of The Living Dead, to which this movie is not related to), The Return Of The Living Dead is one of the earliest zombie comedies, and while it doesn't scale the creative heights of the same year's gross-out favorite Re-Animator, it's consistently amusing and boasts some nicely gushy gore effects (plus a nude cemetery dance sequence by punkette "Trash" - played by Lianna Quigley, later of 80s favorite Night Of The Demons - thats a prurient highlight). But, sadly, the film's effects are dampened considerably by an abrupt bummer of an ending that's up there with the "director's cut" ending of Army of Darkness that comes across as needlessly nihilistic. The movie doesn't conclude so much as STOP, and it makes the preceding events seem especially pointless. What this really needed was an "S-Mart"-style reshoot to give the characters some proper closure. Still, up until then, the movie is disgusting fun.

2009's Zombieland hails from a later revival of interest in the genre, and concerns itself with the survivors of a plague that has swept the world (instigated by someone biting into a bad roadside hamburger) and turned the populace into flesh-fetishizing fiends. "Columbus" (Jesse Eisenberg) is a former introvert who uses his own set of ironclad rules to navigate a new world of dangers (including sensible entries like "Cardio" and "Seatbelts"), and along his travels he crosses paths with "Tallahassee" (Woody Harrelson), whose cornpone exterior disguises the badass zombie slayer within ("It's time to nut up or shut up...!"), as well as the fetching "Wichita" (foxy Emma Stone) and her kid sister "Little Rock" (Abigail Breslin), and the quartet form a fractious family unit as they traverse the country. Highlights include a stay in L.A. where they crash the mansion of a rib-tickling celeb in a riotous cameo and a climatic visit to the abandoned amusement park Pacific Playland, where they'll have to fight against the masses of slavering zombies...and maybe find the last, delicious Twinkie in existence.

The high point of the uneven directorial career of Ruben Fleischer, Zombieland (penned by Deadpool scribes Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick) is slick, winningly glib horror/comedy entertainment, and the four leads are clearly having a blast. Eisenberg utilizes his jittery, nerd-vous deadpan to good effects, nicely matched to Harrelson's good ol' boy distemper. Stone is gorgeous and feisty, and Breslin makes for a winningly fresh-faced budding undead slayer. The movie's on the slight side (running barely over 80 minutes sans credits), and yet it's full of laugh-out-loud situations and lines, and enthusiastic spurts of comic gore.

[Monterey Jack]

Obsessed scientists, and the women who love them, next, on Jerry Springer...!

-Altered States (1980): 7.5/10

-The Fly (1986): 9/10





A matched pair of tales involving science gone horribly wrong, and the women who stick by their men no matter what. 1980's Altered States features the late William Hurt (in his first movie role), as Edward Jessup, a scientist concerned with expanding the breadth of human consciousness utilizing experiments combining drugs and immersion in a sensory deprivation tank. In-between bouts of scientific bravado, he connects with budding anthropologist Emily (Blair Brown) at a faculty party, and decide to get married, despite Edward's distant, vaguely autistic obsession with his work. He has a major breakthrough ingesting a new drug synthesized from one utilized by the Hinchi tribe in Mexico for hundreds of years, and in combination with his deep-dives into the inky void of sensory deprivation, has hallucinatory experiences so intense they begin to literally rewrite his DNA, allowing him to regress into a feral, primitive state and causing his musculature to balloon out in a number of alarming contortions (thanks to the makeup wizardry of the great Dick Smith). Can Edward sever the connection to these phenomena and return to the here and now, guided by the love of his distressed wife?

Directed by Ken Russell, and adapted from his own novel (under a pseudonym) by Paddy Chayefsky, Altered States has a fairly thin narrative spine (we've seen this kind of Mad Scientist schtick many times before), but as an audiovisual head trip, it's full of dazzling visual effects depicting Jessup's hallucinatory visions and set to a blisteringly atonal score by John Corigliano that earned an Oscar nomination. Definitely worth a view for the visuals alone (and keep an eye peeled for wee Drew Barrymore, making her film debut as one of Hurt's two daughters).

1986's The Fly stars Jeff Goldblum as Seth Brundle, an endearingly awkward scientist on the verge of the greatest breakthrough imaginable...a teleporter that can warp objects from one side of the room to the other. The rub? It only works on inanimate objects. All test animals that go through come out the other side looking like inside-out roadkill. With a fascinated reporter named Veronica Quaife (future Goldblum squeeze Geena Davis) there to chronicle his attempts to make the process safe for living things, he eventually cracks the process...and simultaneously falls in love. Not wanting to wait for tests on the baboon he successfully sent through, Seth, in a fit of drunk bravado, elicits to be the first human to be teleported through space...not knowing that a common housefly has entered his teleportation pod at the same time, splicing their DNA together. Soon, Seth finds himself rotting from the inside out, making a slow, painful transformation into a hideous fusion of human and insect, as Veronica stands by to witness in horror...and fret over Seth's baby, currently incubating in her womb.

The apotheosis of director David Cronenberg's early "body horror" phase, The Fly boasts brilliant, Oscar-winning makeup F/X by Chris Walas that fuse organically with Goldblum's superb performance to create a pitiable and frightening descent into despair and madness. It's a tour de force of rapidly-accelerating unease, horrific gross-outs and tragic romance, with Howard Shore's tense, operatic score putting it all into the right framework of fear. The 1958 Fly is a great B-movie, yet this stands as one of the greatest horror remakes of all time. Just skip the awful, disgusting 1989 sequel.

Master of Puppets...!

-Corpse Bride (2005): 10/10

-Frankenweenie (2012): 9/10





Needed to lighten the mood with this pair of charming stop-motion animated features from director Tim Burton. Corpse Bride concerns Victor Van Dort (Johnny Depp), a timid young man who is betrothed to Victoria Everglot (Emily Watson), despite the two never having met. Fleeing the rehearsal of his rapidly-forthcoming nuptials, he ends up in the woods, bemoaning his sorry state, and whilst practicing his vows, places the ring intended for his bride-to-be onto the gnarled "branch" of a nearby tree...which then grasps onto his arm with startling ferocity. It turns out it's actually the withered hand of a corpse that claws its way out of its shallow grave, pulls back its diaphanous veil...and says, "I do". Whisked away to the Land of the Dead, a befuddled Victor finds himself unwittingly wed to Emily (Helena Bonham Carter), the surprisingly comely cadaver of a murdered young woman who has been waiting, oh so long, so finally have the wedding stolen from her in life. Conspiring to get back to the land of the living above, Victor manipulates Emily's ardent affections in order to get topside once again, yet finds himself torn romantically between the living Victoria and dead Emily, whom he feels tremendous sympathy for.

Set to a wonderful score by Danny Elfman (who also provides the vocal stylings of skeletal bandleader "Bonejangles", who delivers the film's expository song highlight "The Remains Of The Day"), Corpse Bride is one of Burton's most charming and gorgeously-designed films, with an impeccable voice cast, eye-popping animation (literally, in the case of the nattering, Peter Lorre-esque maggot who lives inside Emily's eye socket) and a genuinely touching ending.

2012's Frankenweenie (an expansion of the 1984 short that was one of Burton's earliest efforts) takes place in the small-town suburbia of "New Holland", where 12-year-old Victor Frankenstein (Charlie Tahan) is a budding science buff, his interests enthusiastically encouraged by his school's new science teacher Mr. Rzykruski (Martin Landau). He has an opportunity to put his new interests to the ultimate tests when his beloved pet dog, Sparky, is hit by a car, and before you can say "Pet Sematary", he disinters Sparky's corpse, and utilizes a lightning storm to reanimate his loyal pooch. But when his classmates get wind that Victor has brought an animal back from the dead, they try to replicate the process, leading to a swarm of reanimated critters (including a pack of Gremlin-like sea monkeys and a turtle that swells to Gamera-sized proportions) attacking the local town fair, climaxing with a tussle between Sparky and a bat/cat hybrid inside of a burning windmill.

Another example of Burton's peerless gift for combining sweetness and amusing morbidity, Frankenweenie boasts more beautifully articulated puppet animation, enthusiastic vocal performances and another lovely Elfman score. Proof positive that there's nothing like a good "Boy & His Dog" story...even if said dog is drawing flies and shedding as many body parts as fur ("I can fix that").

[Monterey Jack]

-Mayhem (2017): 7.5/10

-The Belko Experiment (2017): 8/10





Office drones are incited into a beehive of buzzing madness and murder in today's double feature, both coincidentally released in the year of 2017. Mayhem stars Steven Yeun as Derek Cho, an upwardly-mobile lawyer in the TSC Corporation who is handed the unpleasant task of denying a much-needed bank loan to a desperate young woman, Melanie Cross (Samara Weaving). This not only coincides with a power play where Derek is set up at the fall guy for a bungled court case, but also the entire building getting infected with the "Red Eye" virus, which infects victims with sudden spasms of unfiltered rage. Forcibly quarantined inside with the other employees by the CDC (sound familiar...?). the justifiably enraged Derek and Melanie (who was on her way to being escorted out by security before the building's doors were locked) put their differences aside and team up to bludgeon their way up the corporate ladder and get to the building's top floor to dispense some frontier justice to the bigwigs who run the company, before the virus can run its eight-hour course and they're still legally justified to do whatever they hell they want.

Director Joe Lynch archly-stylized horror/comedy romp is full of righteous anger and fury, and Yeun and the fiercely sexy Weaving make for an ideal team as they work their way through countless opponents on their way to a bloody catharsis. Glib, shallow, and loads of fun for those who aren't squeamish.

The Belko Experiment is set in a remote office building in Bogota, Columbia, owned by the mysterious Belko Corporation. The employees (including John Gallagher, Jr., Tony Goldwyn, John C. McGinley and Michael Rooker, amongst others) find themselves the unwitting guinea pigs in a social experiment when every entrance is barred by steel plates, the air conditioning is shut off, and an ominously electonicized voice issues from speakers in the ceilings, informing the men and women that, if they don't kill off thirty of the eighty or so trapped inside before two hours have elapsed, the explosive charges set inside their heads (which they were told were tracking chips to prevent potential kidnappings) will kill off an additional thirty. Happy hunting...!

Directed by Greg McLean and scripted by Guardians Of The Galaxy writer/director James Gunn, The Belko Experiment is a pressure-cooker game of determining who's the most "expendable" of the increasingly frightened and frantic employees, and loyalties and relationships are put the ultimate test as the body count grows exponentially. It's gruesome, gripping and expertly constructed, and while the ultimate aim of the titular experiment remains vague, it's a wild ride to get there. Buckle up!

-Tentacles (1977): 2/10



A giant octopus terrorizes the seaside community of Solana Beach (which includes the slumming likes of Peter Fonda, John Huston and Shelley Winters) in this incredibly shameless Italian Jaws knockoff. Hey, nothing wrong with a decent rip-off, but Tentacles is an incredibly tedious experience, with subpar creature effects (what few there are), a decided lack of tension and an amusingly awful score by Stelvio Cipriani that does it no favors. It's not even "so bad it's funny", it's just DULL, with even a climatic tussle between the monstrous cephalopod and a pair of trained Killer Whales(!) coming across as boring as hell. Here's a movie that makes Grizzly and Orca seem like masterpieces in comparison.

[Monterey Jack]

-The Card Player (2004): 5/10



Middling, late-period Dario Argento thriller about a serial killer who plays a sick games with the police, abducting young women and broadcasting their terrified faces via webcam and goading the police into bouts of online poker...they win, the girls go free. If not...

Compared to his 70s and 80s prime, The Card Player hardly seems worthy of Argento, a generic, gimmicky cop procedural that you'd expect to see in the late 90s (and likely starring Ashley Judd), lacking in the filmmaker's usual gooshy gross-outs and elegant camerawork. It's easy enough to sit through, but lacks enough red herrings to make the identity of the killer especially difficult to guess.

-The Monster Squad (1987): 8/10



Dracula (Duncan Regehr) has gotten the old Universal monster gang together again, including the Mummy (Michael Reid MacKay), the Gill-Man (Tom Woodruff, Jr.), the Wolfman (Jonathan Gries) and Frankenstein's monster (a ideally-cast Tom Noonan) in order to get his mitts on a mystical amulet that could tip the balance of Good and Evil decidedly in their favor, and it's up to a pack of monster-obsessed 80s kids to repel their intrusion into their suburban enclave.

Directed by Night Of The Creeps' Fred Dekker (who co-wrote with Shane Black), The Monster Squad replicates the cheesy chills of the old Universal Monster flicks of the 1930s and 40s with the eye of a genuine enthusiast, and the resulting film stands as one of the better 80s Amblin productions that wasn't actually produced by Steven Spielberg. The gaggle of Goonies-esque kids are all stock 80s types (the Fat Kid, the Cool Kid, the Babe), but they're a likable bunch, and the super-duper monster designs by Stan Winston and F/X supervised by Richard Edlund (not to mention Bruce Broughton's spirited score) gives the spooky proceedings a slick gloss. Great fun, and an ideal "gateway drug" for younger viewers looking for some scary Halloween fare that isn't too traumatizing (albeit with some light "outdated cultural attitudes" that will enrage the Twitter crowd).



-Dog Soldiers (2002): 8/10

-Ginger Snaps (2000): 9/10





A pair of superior lycanthropic thrillers. 2002's Dog Soldiers is about six British soldiers (including Sean Pertwee and Kevin McKidd) dropped off in the woods of the Scottish highlands on a training exercise, and who find themselves besieged by slavering werewolves. Barricading themselves inside of a remote house with a zoologist (Emma Cleasby) who has been tracking and studying the beasts' pattern of kills over the past six months, they have to fight off their hairy foes with any and all means at their disposal. A woodland riff on Assault On Precinct 13, Dog Soldiers (written, directed and edited by Neil Marshall) is gory, exciting and not without a certain sense of gallows humor.

2000's Ginger Snaps is about a pair of morbid, death-obsessed teenager sisters, Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald (Katharine Isabelle and Emily Perkins, who played young Beverly Marsh in the 1990 TV version of It), who live in the small Canadian burg of Bailey Downs, where a rash of savage mutilations of pet dogs have left the community on edge. One night, the two girls (who have made a pact to be "Out by sixteen or dead on the scene, but together, forever") are attacked in the woods by a slavering, canine beast. Ginger is mauled, but her wounds start healing with unnatural rapidity, leading to changes that cannot be entirely attributed to her late-onset first period. Soon Ginger is sprouting a vestigial tail, coarse hair growing out of her scabbed-over wounds, and an insatiable appetite both sexual and in terms of craving fresh, bloody meat right off the bone.

A canny puberty metaphor that links the lunar and menstrual cycles, Ginger Snaps has excellent performances by the two young leads, a good mixture of tension and gruesome humor and a climax that has genuine emotional resonance as the two sisters find their adolescent pact put to the ultimate test. The practical werewolf effects show the film's low budget (it's no Rick Baker or Rob Bottin showcase spectacular), but they're adequate enough for the film's effect. A minor classic.

[Monterey Jack]

VAMPIRE: Woe is me, I've lost my one true love...!

VAMPIRE'S MOTHER: Where was the last place you looked?

-Fright Night (1985): 8.5/10

-Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992): 7.5/10

-Dark Shadows (2012): 8/10







A trip of vamps lose - and find - their lost paramours in this trio of romantic horror flicks. 1985's Fright Night offers up a nifty suburban riff on Hitchcock's Rear Window, as horror-obsessed teen Charley Brewster (William Ragsdale) becomes convinced that new neighbor Jerry Dandridge (Chris Sarandon) is a vampire, and is working his way through a succession of beautiful young women in his small town. The cops don't believe him, his virginal girlfriend Amy (a pre-Married With Children Amanda Bearse) doesn't believe him, and his obnoxious buddy "Evil" Ed (Stephen Geoffreys) doesn't believe him, so Charley is forced to beg for assistance from local horror TV host Peter Vincent (a wonderful Roddy McDowall), who's initial dismissal of Charley's wild claims melts away when the evidence mounts that he'll have to survive "Fright Night"...for real. Did I mention that Mr. Dandridge sees Charley's squeeze Amy as the spitting image of the woman he loved from centuries earlier, and wishes to claim her as his own?

Written and directed by Tom Holland, Fright Night is a classy, beautifully-produced vampire thriller with effective performances, top-notch special effects and a near-perfect mixture of scares and laughs. Ragsdale and McDowall make for an ideal pair, and Sarandon makes for a suave, threatening adversary.

1992's Bram Stoker's Dracula is a far more elaborate piece, a lavishly-produced take on the titular novel featuring Gary Oldman as Prince Vlad, whose defense of his native Transylvania against the forces of the Ottoman Empire circa 1462 is "rewarded" when his young bride Elisabetha (WInona Ryder), believing her husband dead, hurls herself from their castle's parapets. Enraged with grief, he vows to rise up from his own grave and avenge his love's death. Cut to 1897, where young solicitor Jonathan Harker (an amusingly stilted Keanu Reeves) is tasked with a trip to Transylvania to see to the affairs of Count Dracula (Oldman again, in the first of a variety of guises courtesy of Oscar-winning makeup artist Greg Cannom), who wishes to purchase several pieces of real estate in the heart of London. But when Drac gets a gander at the portrait of Harker's fiance, Mina (Ryder again), he's smitten with her, seeing the ghostly image of his lost bride, and vows to woo her anew, even as his old nemesis Abraham Van Helsing (a hammy Anthony Hopkins) susses out his old foe has returned.

Directed by Francis Ford Coppola (and scripted by Hook's James V. Hart), Bram Stoker's Dracula is a film of bountiful audiovisual pleasures, from the Oscar-winning costumes of Eiko Ishioka to Michael Ballhaus' lustrous cinematography to Wojciech Killar's lush musical score. And the central romance between Oldman and Ryder is passionately-written and performed, giving the movie a strong dramatic core. But for all of these positives, the movie is - simply put - a mess on a narrative level. Performances from the majority of the rest of the cast are pitched as one-note cartoons (Cary Elwes doing his stuffy prig routine as the fiance of Ryder's friend, played by Sadie Frost, a Texan suitor played broadly by The Rocketeer's Bill Campbell as Yosemite Sam), and the film veers from gory horror shocks to harlequin romance to bouts of unintentional chortles (especially Hopkins' utter lack of tact in delivering grim news). It's never boring for a second, and it's so pretty to look at it's easy to get swept up in its entertaining histrionics, yet it glances off the greatness it's striving for in every frame.

Finally, for some intentional yuks, there's Tim Burton's underrated 2012 riff of the popular 1970s soap opera Dark Shadows. After a prologue, set in 1760, where the fortunes of the Collins clan - who relocate from Liverpool, England to the wilds of Maine and start a successful fishing company - are cut short by witchy Angelique (Eva Green), we cut to 1972, where Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) is finally unleashed from nearly two centuries' worth of entombment in a shallow grave. Seems like, after rejecting Angelique's ardent affections in favor of the fetching Cossette (willowy Bella Heathcote), she cursed her romantic riva to pitch herself from a local cliff and Barnabas to turn into a vampire so that his torment would be everlasting (Women...!). Now in a strange new era, Barnabas makes his way to to the now-decrepit family mansion of Collinwood, where the remnants of his family (including siblings Michelle Pfeiffer and Johnny Lee Miller, their children Chloe Grace Moretz and Gully McGrath, and a psychiatrist played by Helena Bonham Carter) are living in quasi-squallor. But Barnabas looks to restore the family to its former glories, and makes great strides, even as he is struck by the resemblance of new governess Victoria WInters (Heathcote again) to the lost Cossette. Too bad that his old fling Angelique - now "Angie", and head of a rival canning factory - gets wind that Barnabas is back, and she's looking for a rematch.

Burton's droll film works, in many respects, by playing the material straight, and allowing the humor to grow naturally out of the situations. Depp is peerless at playing Barnabas as a courtly gentleman out of his proper time, and much of the laughs arise from his prim, overly-cultured reactions to modern-day devices and attitudes (his delivery of lyrics from "The Joker" by the Steve Miller Band has the plummy grandiloquence of a Shakespearean sonnet). The movie has a beautiful, gloomy atmosphere to it, and the soundtrack - both the obligatory, brooding Danny Elfman score and a most groovy selection of 70s songs - is impeccable. It's one of Burton's most enjoyable movies of the last 15 years or so.

-Last Night In Soho (2021): 10/10



Superb psychological shocker about a young woman, Eloise Turner (Thomasin McKenzie), who heads off to London from a small town in Cornwall with dreams of becoming a great fashion designer...and, in general, keen on experiencing the city that her grandmother and late mother have rhapsodised about for years (especially in its glamorous swingin' 60s prime). After some unpleasant experiences with a roommate, she finds her own flat run by kindly Miss Collins (Diana Rigg, in her final screen appearance), and settles in amicably...until she starts having a series of exceptionally vivid dreams, ones where she follows a young woman named Sandy (Anya Taylor-Joy) in the mid-60's. Sandy wants to sing, and pursues her dreams with pervid passion, only to find herself manipulated and used by a charismatic pimp (Matt Smith). In her waking life, Eloise is initially fascinated by these dreams, even going so far as to dye and chop her hair into a facsimile of Sandy's blonde, Brigitte Bardot locks, but quickly finds herself having difficulty in separating her dreams from reality. Was there a murder in the past? Does it have a sway that connects to the present, and are unrestful spirits haunting Eloise as she slowly begins to lose her grasp on sanity?

Directed by the gifted Edgar Wright (who co-scripted with Krysty Wilson-Cairns), Last Night In Soho is like one of Roman Polanski's pressure-cooker psychological thrillers from the 1960s bathed in the lurid color spectrums of a Dario Argento films from the 1970s. Set to a bloody brilliant soundtrack of excellent 60s cuts and boasting terrific performances from McKenzie and the striking Taylor-Joy, it's a film that's engrossing, eerie and exceptionally well made on every technical level. It sadly found few takers at the box office this time last year, but it's worthy of a major reappraisal, and ought to weather the years well as more and more people discover it at home.

[Monterey Jack]

-Evil Dead (2013): 9/10



Intense remake of Sam Raimi's 1983 classic features an excellent performance by Jane Levy as Mia Allen, a young woman hoping to finally kick her drug habit for good by going cold turkey ina remote cabin in the woods, with her estranged brother David (Shiloh Fernandez), his girlfriend Natalie (Elizabeth Blackmoor) and a pair of concerned friends, Eric & Olivia (Lou Taylor Pucci, Jessica Lucas), there in support. But then they find a charnel house in the basement, filled with dead cats, the stench of burned hair and a mysterious book bound in plastic and barbed wire. Foolishly cutting away the wire and reading the incantations within unleash evil spirits that possess the quintet one by one, turning them into slavering, violent fiends as they try to stick a cork in the forces they've allowed into our world and save their immortal souls in the process.

Director Fede Alvarez (who co-wrote with Royo Sayagues), Evil Dead '13 is one of the most...groovy remakes of a 70s/80s horror classic done, featuring gallons of grue, believably rattled performances (especially Levy, turned from sympathetic victim to fiendish, cackling Deadite) and ferocious camerawork and editing that would make exec producer Papa Raimi proud.

Halloween sweets to the sweet...

-Candyman (1992): 8.5/10

-Candyman (2021): 7.5/10





Black Lives Matter in this pair of dissections of the insidious, lingering power of urban folklore. 1992's Candyman (adapted from a story by Clive Barker by writer/director Bernard Rose) is set in Chicago, where a pair of college students, Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) and her friend and colleague Bernadette Walsh (Kasi Lemmons) investigate a series of scary stories handed down about the mysterious "Candyman", a hulking figure with a razor-sharp hook jammed into the bloody stump where his right hand used to reside who will appear if you look into a mirror and intone his name five times...and tear you to ribbons. Their research brings them to Cabrini-Green, a run-down, crime-ridden apartment complex in the heart of the city where the recent death of a young woman has been attributed to the Candyman. Soon, Helen finds herself struck with visions of the 'man himself (the great Tony Todd), who pleads with her to become his next victim. Soon, a string of graphic murders are attributed to Helen herself. Is she cracking up, so obsessed with the old hand-me-down legends she's been researching that she's gone around the bend, or has the Candyman appeared in the flesh, ready to consummate his union with Helen so they can be together, forever, in death?

One of the better pop horror films of the early 90s, Candyman is a film full of bloody, serrated shocks, yet it's also a hypnotic deep dive into how superstition can acquire a palpable hold on the imagination, one that could drive a rational person to murder...or perhaps keep the restless melancholy of a horrible crime from the past in the minds and fear centers of the modern day. Todd makes for a charismatically imposing figure, and Madsen sells her character's deteriorating state of mind with teary-eyed aplomb. Philip Glass's haunting score is the perfect icing on the cake.

A pair of cash-in sequels - unseen by me - followed in the 90s, but a new wave of African-American horror cinema in the early 2020s has caused the old legends to be dusted off again for a new generation. 2021's Candyman (directed by Nia DaCosta, who co-scripted with WIn Rosenfeld and producer Jordan Peele) stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Anthony McCoy, a prototypical starving artist who hears about the scandalous case of Helen Lyle from nearly two decades earlier and follows the rabbit hole down into the Candyman legends that preceded it. Soon, he's the toast of the Chicago art circuit with his new pieces dedicated to violence against blacks handed down through the decades...and finding himself catching glimpses of a shadowy, hook-handed figure lurking inside of mirrors. Is the Candyman gaining power from Anthony's newfound interest in the old, whispered stories, and is he trying to gain entrance into the world again using him as his avatar?

One of the better recent "Requels", Candyman '21 is a sleek, handsome production with a sense of moldering dread and some enthusiastic spouts of violence (plus striking use of cutout paper puppetry to add visual pizazz to expository dumps to get those unfamiliar with the events of the first movie up to speed), yet it also has pretentions towards being one of those "elevated" art-house horror pieces, Hey, nothing wrong with adding a dash of relevant cultural subtext to a standard horror piece, but it bogs the movie down slightly. Still, at only 91 minutes, these aspects don't cripple the movie, and it still works as a superior horror joint.

-The Addams Family (1991): 7.5/10



The first of two early-90s films adapted from the macabre cartoons of Charles Addams, The Addams Family is an engagingly cracked familial funhouse, with doting parents Gomez and Morticia Addams (Raul Julia and Angelica Huston), children Pugsley (Jimmy Workman) and Wednesday (moon-faced scene-stealer Christina Ricci), natting Grandmama (Judith Malina) and hulking butler Lurch (Carel Struycken) welcoming back long-lost Uncle Fester (Christopher Lloyd) into the family fold, not suspecting he's an imposter looking to separate the family from the fortune hidden somewhere inside their ramshackle, evocatively-designed abode. While not as witty as its sequel, The Addams Family nevertheless benefits enormously from ideal casting across the board. Julia and Huston make for an engagingly passionate pair, and Ricci is a deadpan delight as the morbid Wednesday. The splendid-looking new UHD thankfully restores the elaborate "Mamuska" dance number to its full length, which was puzzlingly cut in half for the theatrical release despite appearing unabridged on the movie's soundtrack album. Tim Burton's finally getting a crack at the material with the forthcoming Netflix miniseries Wednesday, but it's hard to imagine a better live-action take than this and its sequel, Addams Family Values.

[AndyDursin]

Halloween column!

https://andyfilm.com/2022/10/20/10-25-2 ... n-edition/