Can a heart break once it's stopped beating...?

-Corpse Bride (2005): 10/10



One of Tim Burton's most charming features, this gorgeous stop-motion love triangle is a film I've liked more and more with subsequent viewings, and I now consider it one of the director's finest achievements. Johnny Depp voices Victor Van Dort, a tremulously polite young gentleman left befuddled by his betrothal to Victoria Everglott (Emily Watson) in a bid to unite their two families and save both from the poorhouse. Fleeing the wedding rehearsal in fright, he practices his vows in a desolate part of the forest surrounding his small village...and finds, to his chagrin, his proposal accepted by Emily (Helena Bonham Carter), a surprisingly comely cadaver who whisks him away to the Land Of The Dead, a hellzapoppin' jamboree far more lively than the staid, colorless Land Of The Living above. Victor's romantic dilemma -- caught between a pair of lovely women he doesn't want to disappoint -- forms the aching core of this melancholy fairy tale, which bursts with the director's usual mix of light and dark and is brilliantly animated by the emerging Laika studio (who would have their first big solo breakout a few years later with Coraline) and boasts a lovely/lively song score by Danny Elfman (who voices "Ball & Socket Lounge" singer Bonejangles). Along with Edward Scissorhands, this is the Burton feature that I find the most moving of his works, and the inherent sweetness mixes perfectly with the film's lightly ghoulish laughs (Emily has a nattering maggot -- voiced in a Peter Lorre rasp by Enn Reitel -- that lives inside of her eye socket). Perfect Halloween fare for children of all ages.

Sssssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…!!!

-Hush (2016): 7.5/10

-A Quiet Place (2018): 9/10





Kept the noise down with today’s low-volume twofer. In Hush (a Netflix exclusive), Kate Siegel – who also co-wrote the screenplay with director & editor Mike Flanagan – plays Madison Young, a woman who lost her hearing at the age of 13 thanks to a bout of spinal meningitis. Living alone in a rather cushy, isolated house in the woods and working on her second novel, she’s one night besieged by a killer (John Gallagher, Jr.) sporting a generic, white paper-mache mask and a crossbow. He wants in, she has to keep him out…and that is truly that in this economical (81 minutes w/credits) genre piece. On the surface, that’s as routine a home-invasion thriller concept as you can get, but hey, just because you’ve had a thousand hamburgers in your life, it doesn’t mean you can’t still enjoy a really juicy, well-prepared one. And the gifted Flanagan (Netflix’s current Golden Boy, who would go onto Before I Wake, the excellent Stephen King adaptation Gerald’s Game and the new miniseries The Haunting Of Hill House, which just went up for seasonal binge-watching today) wrings a great deal of tension out of material you’ve seen a billion times before. Siegel delivers a compelling, intelligent heroine, and I appreciate that the film isn’t needlessly padded out with explaining why this is all happening. There’s no exposition-dump backstory, no needless subplots (aside from a pair of neighbors who add a sliver of flesh to the bones), just a fat-free exercise in screw-tightening. Not Flanagan’s best work, but a worthy addition to his rapid filmography of superior shockers.

Meanwhile, A Quiet Place turned out to be one of this spring’s biggest sleeper horror hits, and one of the year’s best films all-around. John Krasinski directs and also stars as Lee Abbott, patriarch of his family who have been surviving a recent, unexplained invasion of…things (Aliens? Monsters? Beings from another dimension?) that have apparently taken over the country, if not the world. These barely-glimpsed creatures are apparently blind, and yet converge towards the nearest – and tiniest – sounds and rip whatever is it to enthusiastic shreds. Living in a virtual cone of silence, Lee, his wife Evelyn (Krasinski’s real-life spouse, Emily Blunt) and son Marcus (Noah Jupe) are all well-versed in sign language thanks to their deaf daughter, Regan (genuinely deaf young actress Millicent Simmonds, in a terrific performance), and thus uniquely equipped to survive a new and frightening world where the tiniest sound can equal instant death. This is seemingly an idea that can only be stretched so far, and to Krasinski’s credit he keeps the proceedings lean & mean, with a 90-minute running time and a blessed lack of unnecessary side plots. He wrings a great deal of suspense out of characters forced to keep quiet in the most extreme of circumstances (the pregnant Blunt’s water breaks at one point…and then she steps on a nail while walking into the basement!), and the film offers the kind of genuinely Hitchcockian thrills that most horror films don’t have the patience for anymore. The only real disappointment are the creatures themselves. While I’m not one of those “practical effects or GTFO” types, there’s no reason these had to be all-CGI, and the design of them is the same kind of generically hairless, reptilian horror/sci-fi beastie we’ve been seeing ever since Cloverfield. It’s far from enough to ruin the film, but it is disappointing. What IS great in the finale, which has one of the best abrupt “cut to black” endings in recent memory that will probably be wrecked by a quickie cash-in sequel that’s in the works. We know EXACTLY where the ending is going, so why do we need to see it visualized? Oh yeah, money. Still, even if the sequel sucks, we’ll always have this genre beaut.

Poison, drowning, claw or knife. So many ways to take a life…

-Trick ‘r Treat (2009): 8.5/10



Merrily macabre horror film expresses the true, autumnal spirit of Halloween better than any film I can think of. The Pulp Fiction of horror anthologies, Trick ‘r Treat interweaves – and overlaps – four distinct narratives, all of which occur on Halloween night in the small town of Warren Valley, Ohio (which looks suspiciously like Vancouver). A diabolical school principal (Dylan Baker) carves more than jack o’ lanterns. A virginal young woman (Anna Paquin) on the make takes a dark path towards a Big Bad Wolf she never anticipated. A group of mean kids invent a creepy town legend to prank a local “retard” (Samm Todd) only to find out it’s horribly real. And a mean old curmudgeon (Brian Cox) finds himself besieged in his home by “Sam”, a nasty l’il imp with a head covered by a burlap sack with eerie Coraline button eyes and armed with a serrated lollipop. Writer/director Michael Dougherty (Krampus, the forthcoming Godzilla: King Of The Monsters) keeps the tone just right, mixing frights and ghoulish laughs together into a fizzy cocktail that goes down as sweetly as a fun-sized Snickers bar. And remember…always check your candy.

-Ghost Stories (2018): 5/10



Blah British anthology feature stars Andy Nyman as a professor who specializes in debunking fraudulent psychics and takes of the supernatural who is goaded by a dying paranormal investigator from the 1970s into investigating three cases he deemed impossible to disprove. The three stories contained therein (a night watchman spooked by half-glimpsed specters, A teenager who hits something on the road in the deepest part of the woods that is neither human nor animal, a financier haunted by a poltergeist whilst anticipating the birth if his child) are all routine, but it’s the Big Twist that takes up most of the last half-hour that deflates everything that came before (and seems like something written in 2003). The movie looks good, and is fairly well-acted, but it doesn’t bring anything new to the table…and why, for the love of God, does it play “The Monster Mash” over the ending credits?!

The early 70’s calling…

-The Mephisto Waltz (1971): 6/10



Extremely odd occult thriller about a music journalist named Myles (Alan Alda) who interviews an aging master pianist (Curt Jurgens), who takes a keen interest in the younger man’s hands, intuiting that he had great skills at the keys before letting his gift atrophy when he switched careers from performing music to studying it. Soon Myles has regained all his former skills, and then some, to the increasing uneasiness of his wife (Jacqueline Bisset), not to mention a series of other bizarre tragedies that soon befalls them, their acquaintances, and their young daughter (Pamelyn Ferdin). This off-kilter film is full of contorted fish-eye and wide-angle shot compositions, and is set to a blisteringly bizarre score by the ever-creative Jerry Goldsmith, but it doesn’t really start to cook until it becomes obvious what’s happening in the last half-hour. Up until then it’s kind of draggy and mildly confusing, but the surreal, disturbing conclusion makes the early sections of the film work better in retrospect. Modest, but effective.

-Dark Shadows (2012): 8/10



I’ve written at length about this in previous Halloween rundowns, so I’ll keep it brief, in that it’s one of Tim Burton’s frothiest and most droll comic efforts in recent years, and that Johnny Depp’s wittily suave turn as Barnabas, the glam, antecedent of the Collins clan (cursed to eternal life as a vampire and let loose from his centuries-long burial in the strange, futuristic year of 1972) stands as some of his finest recent work. It looks superb, boasts an excellent and most groovy 70’s soundtrack, and Eva Green plays Barnabas’ witchy, jilted ex, Angelique (who placed the curse of vampirism upon him in the first place) with a gleefully sensual sparkle of mischief in her gorgeous, flashing eyes. It’s not one of Burton’s best efforts – one wishes he spent more time building Depp’s courtship of Bella Heathcote’s Victoria, the reincarnation of his centuries’-lost love, which would have given the ending more of the emotional kick it deserved – and yet it’s consistently amusing, sneaking up on you with visual and verbal punchlines that are leadenly obvious on the page and yet made to sing via Depp’s juicy, grandiloquent diction (his Shakespearian delivery of the “best” line from Erich Segal’s Love Story never fails to make me laugh). Mordant, underrated fun, perfect for the season.

Don’t make me slug ya…!

-Night Of The Creeps (1986): 8/10



-Slither (2006): 8/10



A gruesome twosome, showcasing the state-of-the-art in sci-fi ick for the 80’s and 00’s. In Night Of The Creeps, a cannister of alien ooze is jettisoned from a spacecraft and touches down in a prototypical Small American Town in 1959, wherein a series of gruesome murders ensues. Twenty-seven years later, a pair of collegiate chums, Chris and James (Jason Lively and Steve Marshall), uncover a cryogenically frozen body from the 50’s in a local science lab, and soon a new rash of murders start occurring, which elicits the keen interest of a cynical detective, Ray (80’s genre fave Tom Atkins), who was a mere beat cop in ’59 when the similar killings occurred. Seems that alien slugs from another planet have been nesting in human hosts, driving them around like zombies as they look to spread to new victims, including a sorority where Lively has an eye on the particularly fetching Cynthia (the gorgeous Jill Whitlow). Written and directed by Fred Dekker (The Monster Squad), Night Of The Creeps offers up a wry blend of gore and giggles (check out the familiar surnames of every character), with superior, ooky makeup and creature F/X and a brisk, breezy tone.

As for Slither, it’s so similar to the earlier Creeps it often suggests a quasi-remake (right down to some character names horror fans will recognize). Nathan Fillion plays Bill Pardy, sheriff of Wheelsy, South Carolina (which looks a lot like Vancouver..), where – you guessed it – a recently-crashed meteorite has spewed forth a squggly mass of disgusting alien slugs, which squirm their way into the mouths of the local populace and turn them into jittery zombies that share a hive mind with the first infectee, Grant Grant (Michael Rooker), who starts devolving into a Lovecraftian horror to the chagrin of his beautiful wife, Starla (good sport of the century Elizabeth Banks). The first feature directed by James Gunn (recently fired from his tenure of helming the Guardians Of The Galaxy films, making one wonder why Disney would look at THIS particular film and hand him the keys to a major superhero franchise), Slither mines a similar thread of bodily-horror freak-outs as the earlier Creeps did, and while it’s not the kind of film you want to watch right before lunch, it nevertheless is top-of-the-line for People Who Like This Kind Of Thing, enthusiastically gross, scary and frequently funny (“We’re itchy.”). And don’t forget the Mr. Pibb! It’s the only Coke I like!

OK, close enough to the 31st to dip my toe into "Halloween" viewing.
Start with a brace of Merrie Melodies...
Scaredy Cat (1948)
Sylvester (paired with Porky) encounter a house "haunted" by mice, until Sylvester develops a backbone...

Hair-Raising Hare (1946)
Bugs is lured by Peter Lorre look-alike into his "evil scientist" laboratory as playmate (or meal?) for his tennis shoe-wearing monster.
Obviously Bugs outsmarts them...

Halloween? These are enjoyable any time...

Gillman! You’re up…!

-Creature From The Black Lagoon (1954): 8.5/10

-The Monster Squad (1987): 8.5/10





Took in some aquatic frights with one of Universal’s more enduring classic monsters. In 1954’s The Creature From The Black Lagoon, we’re introduced to the Gillman for the first time, a scaly, primordial beastie from the depths of the Amazon that a group of meddling scientists disturb during a research expedition…but saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay, once G.M. gets an eyeful of the fetching Kay Lawrence (the outrageously gorgeous Julia Adams, the Jennifer Connelly of the 50’s) in a spectacular, white one-piece swimsuit, he’s hopelessly smitten. Directed by B-movie specialist Jack Arnold, Creature is a film that holds up beautifully, with genuine tension, beautifully-shot underwater sequences (a scene with Adams taking a dip in the titular Lagoon, while the Gillman witnesses in rapt awe from below, was definitely an influence on the famous opening sequence from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws) an appropriately shrill musical score (penned by an uncredited team including – yes – Henry Mancini) and one of the most enduring monster designs of all time. And while the Gillman may have had his advances rebuffed here (he’d also re-emerge in two inferior sequels), he finally found love in last year’s Best Picture winner The Shape Of Water, which proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Gillman has nards.

Speaking of monster testes, 1987’s The Monster Squad is an irresistible Monster Mash that plays like the Goonies sequel we never got, only swapping out a hunt for pirate treasure for a gaggle of 80’s kid-movie stereotypes (the Leader, the Cool Kid, the Fat Kid, the Girl) facing off against all of the classic Universal Monster archetypes, including Count Dracula (the suave Duncan Regher), the Wolfman (Jonathan Gries), the Mummy (Michael MacKay), Frankenstein’s Monster (a terrific, perfectly-cast Tom Noonan), and, of course, the Gillman (F/X wiz Tom Woodruff, Jr.) in a bid to stave off The End Of The World (a previous attempt to do so a century earlier by Drac’s nemesis Professor Van Helsing is foretold in the opening text crawl, which features a great punchline). The Monster Squad is essential viewing for younger monster movie fans (although the casual usage of a certain homosexual slur dates the movie), with excellent monster designs by Stan Winston, visual effects by Richard Edlund and music by Bruce Broughton. Director Fred Dekker (Night Of The Creeps) and co-writer Shane Black keep the tone and pacing breezy throughout, with the enthusiastic bouts of PG-13 thrills mixed well with plenty of genuine laughs, and the appealing young cast acquit themselves well, even if the acting is somewhat scattershot. Terrific fun.

Julia Adams...very beautiful woman!

This time a pair of Looney Tunes,
Broom-Stick Bunny (1956)
Trick-or-treating Bugs, in the guise of a witch, visits Witch Hazel; very funny with surreal backgrounds.

Hyde and Hare (1955)
Bugs meets Dr. Jekyll. A one-joke short but these never out-stay their welcome.

esteban miranda wrote: Mon Oct 15, 2018 9:17 pm Hair-Raising Hare (1946)
Bugs is lured by Peter Lorre look-alike into his "evil scientist" laboratory as playmate (or meal?) for his tennis shoe-wearing monster.
Obviously Bugs outsmarts them...

I just got the new Blu-Ray of "Trilogy Of Terror" which I had never seen before but on the heels of the Night Stalker/Night Strangler Blu-Ray releases I figured I should give this one a try. The first segment "Julie" had a twist I wasn't expecting and IMO is very underrated given all the lavish attention critics give the final segment "Amelia." "Amelia" had some effective moments but it is really when you get down to it, an Earthbound remake of Matheson's "Invaders" for "Twilight Zone" right down the gimmick of the knife sticking out by the escaping invader. The less said about the middle segment with its predictable "twist" that can be smelled five minutes into it (the whole basic story has been done and redone ad infinitum in scores of TV series) the better.

“We’re mutants. There’s something wrong with us, something very, very wrong with us…”

-The Island Of Dr. Moreau (1977): 7/10

-The Relic (1997): 7/10





Strange perversions of science we on-tap for today’s twofer. In 1977’s The Island Of Dr. Moreau (the second big-screen adaptation of H.G. Wells’ classic cautionary fable), Michael York plays a man left drifting at sea in a lifeboat for weeks until he is finally washed up on the titular Island, where the good Doctor (played with glittering eyes and clenched teeth by Burt Lancaster) has been experimenting with the mixture of human and animal DNA, resulting in a series of piteously deformed half-breeds beholden to Moreau’s “laws” (Richard Baseheart is the key mutanimal, keeping the others in check so that they don’t revert back to their inherent, bloodthirsty natures). York finds himself appalled by Moreau’s indignities to his creations, even as he finds himself smitten with his comely daughter (Barbara Carrera). Directed efficiently by Don Taylor (Damien: Omen II) and with solid makeup effects by, among others, John Chambers and Tom Burman, plus a superb score by Laurence Rosenthal, the 1977 version of Moreau is an effective, respectable version of the story, even if it can’t match the haunting poetry of the 1932 iteration, Island Of Lost Souls (with its great performance by Charles Laughton as Moreau). Still, it’s miles beyond the insipid, unintentionally hilarious 1996 version, directed by John Frankenheimer and featuring a memorably daffy turn by Marlon Brando as the mad Doctor (replete with an ice bucket on his head!).

Skipping ahead two decades, we find 1997’s The Relic, a guilty-pleasure spook show about a giant monster rampaging through the Field Museum Of Natural History in Chicago, ripping off heads left and right for much-needed sustenance, while a brainy, improbably-attractive biologist (Penelope Ann Miller, reaching the end of her brief Leading Lady window in the mid-90’s) and a superstitious police detective (Tom Sizemore) try to figure out what the hell it is and try to stop its reign of decapitations. The last watchable feature from prolific horror/action/sci-fi journeyman Peter Hyams (Capricorn One, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, Running Scared), The Relic is enthusiastic Dumb Fun all the way through, with solid “Kothoga” creature effects by Stan Winston (although the full-body CGI shots of the creature running have aged very poorly) and well-paced bursts of tension and violence. The movie falls prey to the slasher movie law that the monster/killer can warp from one location to another instantaneously in accordance to the needs of the plot (and, considering how LARGE the monster is, one wonders how it can fit down the many narrow corridors it traverses, but whatever), and director Hyams’ cinematography is so RIDICULOUSLY dark, it’s hard to make out much of anything, especially in the second half of the film, where what isn’t swathed in shadow if often covered with a cloud of anamorphic lens flares. I get the idea of keeping the monster cloaked in shadow for atmosphere, but this is the kind of movie where even dialogue scenes consist of pale faces swimming out of a pool of inky blacks. In addition, John Debney’s ploddingly generic musical score is an earsore, treating every moment with the same numbing sense of faux-import. Comparing these two movies, it’s easy to note just how badly film music devolved in the twenty years that separated them, and, sadly, it’s gotten even worse in the two decades since The Relic came out…in another two decades’ time, “movie music” is going to consist of directors banging rocks on trash can lids. Still, for all its flaws, The Relic offers up a good deal of monster-movie fun.

The chief flaw with 77 IMO is that they clearly hastily altered the ending. The Marvel comics adaptation shows what it really was (and the music also is more appropriate for the original ending).

Correction. It's Richard Basehart (who I think would have made a good Moreau) not Widmark.

Eric Paddon wrote: Wed Oct 17, 2018 1:37 pm Correction. It's Richard Basehart (who I think would have made a good Moreau) not Widmark.

D'oh...!

-The Lift (1983): 3/10



An elevator in an Amsterdam high-rise gains sentience and starts killing people. That's about as dumb a concept for an inanimate object as a murderer this side of Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. Dull, plodding and unintentionally amusing, the most memorable thing about this clunker is the hilarious tagline for the U.S. release, "Use the stairs...use the stairs...for God's sake, use the stairs!"