Santa Claus: The Movie (1985)



Santa Claus: The Movie is a pretty bold title, if you think about it.  The application of "The Movie" after a title implies that what you are witnessing is the one and only definitive cinematic statement on the subject preceeding the colon. Sure, there may be other filmed attempts at the subject, but this is the one.  THE one.  You have to be pretty sure of your mastery of the subject before slapping a "The Movie" on there.  Or you have to be Alexander and Ilya Salkind, the producers of Superman: The Movie and this film.

With a subject like Santa Claus, there is a lot of ground to cover in film.  Who he is, how he came to be who he is, how the annual gift-giving works, how the reindeer fly, etc.  This is where SC:TM really shines.  The first half or more of the movie follows an ordinary 13th century (or so) man named Claus as he and his wife are taken in by the elves and he transforms into the Santa Claus we all know.

There are ancient beardy elves, there's a prophecy, there are muted primary colors, and there are montages a-plenty.  One by one, the Santa F.A.Q. entries are ticked off as we see the backstory come together over the passing centuries.  The origin story presented here is cheery and heart-warming and makes you want to believe that this is the way the "real" Santa Claus came to be.

But then, somewhere past the half-way point, SC:TM comes to realize another aspect inherent in calling yourself "The Movie" - you should probably have a plot. And that's where things go downhill a bit.

It seems that one of the elves - Patch (Dudley Moore) - has a knack for tinkering outside of his normal toy-making duties.  He convinces Santa to let him build some automation into the North Pole manufacturing process.  Things go fine until the toys - lacking the quality control that comes with handcrafted toymaking - fall apart on Christmas day.  For the first time in all the years, Santa's operation receives returns, in the form of broken toys sent up the chimneys from whence they came.

The humiliated Patch quits and strikes out on his own in the "real world," hoping to do something impressive to get back into Santa's good graces.  He tracks down the corrupt and maniacal head of the BZ Toy Company, Mr. B.Z. (John Lithgow), and offers to make something amazing that can given away under the BZ Toys name - lollipops that cause the eater to float in mid-air.

With the success of the Patch Pops, B.Z. insists that Patch up the ante with a stronger batch of the flying candy recipe made into candy canes that BZ Toys can sell in March under the banner of "Christmas 2."  The unscrupulous B.Z. pushes ahead with the candy canes despite evidence that they explode when exposed to heat.  It's up to Santa Claus, an irritating street urchin, and B.Z.'s step-niece (?) to save Patch and put a stop to the nefarious B.Z. before it's too late.

John Lithgow is great as the over-the-top villain when the movie finally gets around to that part of the story, and Dudley Moore makes for an affable elf.  Best of all, David Huddleston (who played the title character in The Big Lebowski) absolutely embodies Santa Claus.  Once you've seen him in the full red suit, no department store Santa will ever measure up. 

Maybe I see it through nostalgia-colored glasses, but I think SC:TM is a pretty good Christmas flick.  It's aimed at children, and its faults are more apparent when seen as an adult, but overall it's charming and fun.

New YouTube series - Let's Do This!

Just dropping a quick note to say I have started a YouTube do-it-yourself series called Let's Do This. See, every now and then I run across something that needs fixing around the house. Usually it's something simple; occasionally it's something complex and scary. Either way, I figure I can video myself giving it a shot and one of two things will happen:  Either I will fix it successfully and have a video that might even be useful to other folks, or I'll fail horribly and the video will be good for a laugh.

So far there is one video out there - Unclog Shower Drain - and I have two other videos in the works, plus another household task or two to get after in the near future.  Here's the first in the series:

If you like, you can subscribe to my YouTube channel - I'm zombear13. On the rare occasion that other videos in the series are uploaded, or I put up other random stuff, you'll be the first to know.

Let's do this!

Final Destination 5 (2011)

Nice poster

If you've seen any of the Final Destination movies, you know the deal from the get-go. A character has a premonition of a spectacular disaster and, along with a handful of tag-alongs, escapes death by fleeing the scene before it goes down. From then on, these survivors who "cheated death," find themselves being  offed in fantastically splatteriffic ways - apparently by Death himself - in the order in which they would have died in the plane crash, highway pileup, roller coaster collapse, or what-have-you. It's a grim premise, but the Rube Goldberg-esque machinations of the characters' demises make the movies more about cheering on the increasingly implausible kills than they are about the existential morbidity of the idea that Death is always stalking us and can take us at any time.

In Final Destination 5, a group of office workers (from a paper company!) are saved from death when one of them has a vision of a bridge collapse and gets some of the workers off of their corporate retreat bus before the collapse happens. From there, we see these survivors face deaths involving gymnastics, acupuncture, LASIK eye surgery, industrial machinery, and a restaurant kitchen full of knives, deep fryers, gas burners, and other frightening implements. This installment adds in the concept that maybe if a survivor kills another person, that death will balance Death's books and He'll leave the survivor alone. That's it. That's all you need to know.

Did I mention that the coroner in these movies is played by The Candyman?

Watching it on the big HD tv at home makes me wish I had seen the movie in 3D at the theaters. The opening credits looked like a grizzly James Bond credit sequence with flying body parts and sharp everyday objects replacing the bouncing bimbos and bullets of the 007 movies. That would have been worth the extra three bucks right there.

The rest of the movie was equally "in-your-face" with gruesome objects flying right off the screen, but unlike the 3D-ified fourth installment, there was actually tension to go along with the gore. Every loose screw, every pointy object, every mechanical device the characters encounter was given an ominous, menacing quality and kept you guessing at what grizzly fate awaited the next victim.

I was frankly amazed that in the fifth movie of the franchise they were able to recapture the slow-burning suspense that had drifted away from the films as the series progressed. That tension, combined with satisfying payoffs for most of the character's deaths, makes for a real return to form after the missteps that almost killed the series in part 4. Maybe the producers saw Part 4 as a premonition and were able to save the series from box office death by making number 5 a lot better. Of course, this means they'll really have to be on their toes when they make the inevitable sixth installment. Or else.

Return to Horror High (1987)

Return to Horror High is one I've been looking at on video store shelves since way back when we used to rent VHS movies from Turtles Records and Tapes. Its cover was certainly eye-catching, with that skeletal cheerleader and goofy little "cheer" tag-line. Naturally, back when I was a kid, there's no way I could have rented such a thing. And now, thanks to Netflix Instant Queue, I don't have to.


Horror High's Jr. Varsity basketball team always appreciated the pep squad's enthusiasm.

The first thing anybody will tell you about Return to Horror High is that it's George Clooney's first movie.  Well, it is, but it's not much of one.  He plays Oliver, a small-time horror film actor that leaves the movie he's shooting when he gets a leading role in a television drama that's sure to be a hit. Clooney himself, of course, left behind horror movies like this, Grizzly 2, and Return Of The Killer Tomatoes to find great success on television.  This amusing bit of art imitating life (albeit before the fact) resonates better with today's audience than it would have with 1987's audiences. Of course, Oliver manages to get murdered on the way off of the set while George went on to star in the worst Batman movie ever committed to film.  It's hard to say who really came off the better.

"You say it's about doctors and I'd be perfect for the part? I dunno... "

You see, five years ago a massacre took place at Crippen High (home of the Trolls, apparently) and the killer was never found. Now a low-rent production company is making a slasher-style movie of the incident using the actual abandoned school as the primary location.  And wouldn't you know it?  The killing starts up again. 

The reason Return to Horror High has such a cliched and oh-so-typical plot is that it's a comedy - a satire of the legit slasher copycat movies of the day and their equally thin premises.  The interplay between the writer and director of the film-within-the-film and the sleazy producer (played by the guy who was Moe Greene in The Godfather) tells the story best, as the former pair are striving for subtlety and an honest portrayal of the true events, and the producer just wants "tits and blood."

Even with the satirical nature of the movie, RtHH holds up its end of the bargain as a horror whodunit pretty well. The movie does a good job of setting up red herrings and of blurring the line of reality that separates flashbacks of the original killings and scenes being shot for the movie-within-the-movie. It keeps you on your toes and guessing.  And when someone is offed, you get all the blood (lots of blood) and gore you would want out of a real horror film.

The comedic elements work, too, for the most part.  It's especially entertaining to see Maureen "Marcia Brady" McCormmick as a cop stepping around and over the body-bagged remnants (parts, really) of numerous victims as she and the detective on the case try to piece together what happened. It's hard to describe, but the movie's pretty danged funny.  It's like a gory Airplane!, or at least Top Secret! or something.

Marcia's all grown up and busting the bad guys in the new TV movie, "A Very Brady Homicide."

Return to Horror High is an overlooked gem from the heyday of slasher horror.  It has a handful of familiar faces, good special effects (including a funny exploding prosthetic that the producer character was dying to see put into the movie), some funny moments, a half-decent mystery, and a bit of knowing commentary on the horror genre that was ahead of its time. And it all comes together in an ending that is equal parts horrific and zany.  Kinda like Clooney's Batman movie.

Horror on YouTube, Part 4: Backyard Horror

This post is really just an excuse to push a link out to a kung fu video my friends and I shot years ago: Crouching Bunny, Hidden Aardvark. The "horror" involved is three-fold:

1. At the beginning, there is a "preview" for a slasher movie we shot, Willard's Escape. This proves that you can cut any ol' crap down into a half-decent trailer. This is definitely just the good parts. Also, I don't have a good "trailer guy" voice at all. Also also, I got to whack my friend Paul with a stick. Really hard.
2. The feature, Crouching Bunny, Hidden Aardvark, features dismemberment and throat-slashery. There's your horror right there, buddy.
3. Well, just look at the thing. Acting, lighting, image quality, fight choreography, costumes, set design, sound recording, semi-offensive accents, and just about everything else are pretty much a house of horrors. But it's fun.

This isn't in the "public" category on YouTube, so you'll have to view it here. Interestingly, if you search "Crouching Bunny" on YouTube, you'll find several backyard kung fu comedies. Guess that title was too easy. Ours was the first. Ours was the best.

Enjoy.

Horror on YouTube, Part 3: Stephen King Short Story Adaptations

Stephen King has written loads and loads of short stories. Tons of them. In between the time I typed that first S up there and right now, King published two short stories. You know that last short story you read? Turns out it was by Stephen King. You look up "prolific" in the dictionary, it has a picture of Stephen King next to it. You get the idea.

Lots and lots of them have been adapted into movies and television programs of varying degrees of quality. You've probably seen some of the tv movies and feature films based on his stories, so I'm going to let those go. Instead, I'm just going to focus on some of the short story adaptations you might not have seen. For example:

The Moving Finger

Short stories are ideal fodder for anthology television show adaptations, and King's have been used frequently. While they may not be suited for feature films, SK's crazier ideas can usually hold up for 22 minutes of tv. Case in point, "The Moving Finger," a story about a man facing off with a finger poking up from his bathroom sink drain. That's all, but it's enough. Here we see it as an episode of Monsters, a short-lived series in the vein of Tales From The Darkside.

Word Processor of the Gods

Speaking of Tales From The Darkside, here's their adaptation of "Word Processor of the Gods," a short story about a man whose late beloved nephew left him a word processor (remember those?) with the power to alter reality. Will he be able to turn his life around and make a better world for himself before the device falls apart? Check it out in this good adaptation. Just don't get freaked out by the creepiest opening credit sequence in the history of television.

The Battle

This short animated adaptation of "Battleground" came to us from the Ukraine back in 1986. I hadn't heard of this one before today, but thanks to the internet, here we are. The story is easy to follow and doesn't require much dialogue, so the language isn't really a barrier. Watch as a hit an returns home from bumping off the head of a toy company, only to find a box of pissed off "army men" on his doorstep. This one is a favorite story of many King fans and was also adapted (live-action) in TNT's excellent Nightmares and Dreamscapes series from 2006. You should check that series out, too.

 

N.

Speaking of animated adaptations, here's a "motion comic" version of one of King's most unnerving and frightening stories from his recent output. "N." is a fantastically paranoid story, and the motion comic's visuals, music, and sound effects add to the discomfort and dread. This is Stephen King at his most Lovecraftian (not counting "Crouch End," a Cthulhu mythos short story that was also adapted in Nightmares and Dreamscapes) and at his best. Turn out the lights, turn up your speakers, and let 'er rip.  (Oh, and if the subtitles bother you, you can watch it in 25 very short parts on youtube. You should be able to find them in the "related" videos.)

 

 

Piranha 3D (2010)

Back in 1975, Jaws hit theaters, made a fortune, and changed everything. Jaws created the concept of the "summer blockbuster" and Hollywood never looked back. Right on the heels of Jaws, several studios of varying size and means smelled blood in the water and chummed theaters with their ripoffs. Among these was 1978's Piranha, which Steven Spielberg considered to be the best of these ripoffs.

In the 2000s, everything old is new again, and remakes are a hot commodity. Now, no one would ever remake Jaws (right, Hollywood? You know how bad an idea that is, right?), but Piranha? Hell, why not?

Piranha 3D (which I watched in 2D on the Netflix Instant Queue) takes place at Lake Victoria, Arizona, where an earthquake has opened a passage to an underwater lake (!) and unleashed the prehistoric piranhas that live inside just in time for the town's annual Spring Break debauchery.

It's a brilliantly simple and simply brilliant story that sets the stage nicely for loud music (every song sounds like LMFAO, but according to the soundtrack listing, only one actually is), drunk collegiates, bikini (and less) babes, and VICIOUS FISH ATTACKS!!

The cast is good, with Elizabeth Shue as the town sheriff, Ving Rhames as a deputy, Steve McQueen's grandson as the sheriff's oldest son, and Jerry O'Connell as an analogue of that super-sleazy Girls Gone Wild guy. Excellent cameos by Richard Dreyfus (essentially reprising his role from Jaws, sortof), Christopher Lloyd, and Eli Roth add to the fun. But the real stars of the movie are the digital fish.

As Christopher Lloyd's fish expert character explains, piranha attack in packs so-as to be an overwhelming force against their prey. That's a great description of what we get in the massive set-piece sequence when the piranha attack the massive MTV-style party as the day comes to a close.

Oh, the humanity. The carnage is epic as hundreds of idiots who spitefully flaunted the Sheriff's command to get out of the water become fish food. Piranha sets the record for most filleted humans in one film, and features a fish through the mouth, a handful of decapitations, this one guy running over dozens of people with his boat, and even a cut/slide. It's not for the squeamish, to be sure.

Piranha gets my highest recommendation if you're looking a fast-paced, loud, violent shocker that eschews subtlety. It's legitimately one of the most fun horror movies I've seen in years.

Exit Humanity (2011)

In the last days of the American Civil War, the dead have begun to rise from the grave to feast on the living. Edward Young returns home from the war to find his wife has been zombified and his son is missing. Edward does what he has to do, putting down his wife and searching for his son through the hostile wilderness. Along the way he runs afoul of a psychotic former Confederate officer who is rounding up the living and the undead to try to discover a cure for the hellish plague.

Exit Humanity proves that an interesting setting and some creativity can overcome the budgetary limitations of your horror movie. Setting their zombie apocalypse just after the Civil War enables the filmmakers to take advantage of the (Canadian) wilderness, some rustic cabins, and a bit of period costuming, which obfuscate the shortcomings of their budget and actors. The movie even manages to employ some animated sequences (!) that effectively fill in for a few costly action scenes and effects they probably can't pull off.

The one thing that Exit Humanity doesn't overcome is the plodding pace. The film is intentionally slow and thoughtful rather than fast and furious, but they overshoot the mark between deliberate and dull. Still, the zombie makeup and effects are pretty good and the setting and style are unique enough to make this a decent alternative to the standard-issue zombie movie.

Sinister (2012)

Sinister's writer/director Scott Derrickson studied at Biola University - the Bible Institute of Los Angeles - where he earned degrees in Humanities and Communications (film), and minored in theological studies. His interest in the dark and dangerous parts of the narrative of Christianity is apparent in his filmography, directing movies like Hellraiser: Inferno and The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Even his The Day The Earth Stood Still remake fits the bill, as it is pretty hellish to try to watch. (Okay, to be fair, I haven't seen it, but I hear it's terrible.)

His latest effort treads similarly unhallowed ground for Derrickson. Sinister tells the story of true-crime author Ellison Oswalt (Ethan Hawke), who moves his family to a small town in order to investigate a grizzly and puzzling murder and write his way to fame and fortune. As Ellison uncovers information about several murders that may be related to the subject of his prospective book, he also finds himself caught up with an obscure and (yes) sinister demonic force. The occult forces at work threaten his sanity, his life, and his family as he comes closer to the truth about the murders.

In a way, we've seen all this before. There are elements of The Ring, The Shining, Manhunter, and so forth throughout - influences that are inescapable.  But the execution of these familiar elements makes Sinister creepy, unsettling, and effective as a horror movie. The intercut 8mm films of the murders, with their herky-jerky visuals and rattling sound, gives the scenes an unnerving quality that couldn't be accomplished with a modern digital video camera. The jittery cinematography of the 8mm films bleeds over into the film proper as Ellison goes deeper into the madness and mystery. The sound effects and noisy Nine Inch Nails-ish music were equally creepy, with a certain quality to them that makes you question which sounds are part of the soundtrack and which are diegetic.

While we do get intriguing glimpses of how the horrific events affect the rest of the family, Sinister is almost entirely Ellison's story, and Ethan Hawke carries it off very well. At times the family drama material threatens to overpower and undermine the horror, but Hawke's strong performance keeps the movie from going off the rails. 

Sinister has a lot of familiar elements, but manages to not seem too cliched. It introduces a new and interesting monster to the horror bestiary that we may well see again in the inevitable sequel (or dare I say, prequel). If you like your horror movies spooky, scary, and bleak, Sinister is a welcome sight at the theaters this October. 

Waxwork (1988)

Waxwork, starring Zach Galligan (Gremlins), David Warner (dual-role in MST3K's Quest of the Delta Knights), and the little person who played "Alf", is a conundrum.  It is simultaneously a light-hearted, romp through horror's history that felt a bit like a kid's movie - featuring appearances by Dracula, the Mummy, Romero-style zombies, and so forth - and a bloody, gory mess.

A group of snobby rich kids, including Zachy-G's "Mark" (who we are supposed to like, but we don't) stumble upon a "waxwork" that has opened for business in the middle of their residential neighborhood.  Their first question is not "what the hell is a 'waxwork,'" but, "How soon can we go in and see all the exhibits rather than going out and spending our daddies' money on cars?"

So in they go to marvel at the lifelike vignettes of horror scenes. A couple of them decide to go in for a closer look, so they cross the velvet ropes and find themselves transported Narnia-style to a dimension (or something) that brings their particular wax scenes to deadly life. The first winds up bitten by a werewolf John Rhys-Davies (who tears apart another victim in spectacularly gory fashion). The second finds herself the object of desire for Dracula (played by MST3K alum Miles O'Keefe). She winds up bitten by the Count, but not before running across a fellow that I took to be playing the Keanu Reeves/Johnathan Harker role. This poor unfortunate soul was chained to a white stone table in a clean white room, where Dracula's brides (and some rate) feasted on his defleshed leg. Wow.

Ooo, nasty. Dracula's house has rats.

Anyway, Mark and friends notice that their buddies are missing sometime the next day and set about trying a rescue. Evidently the waxwork owner (Warner) needs 18 victims to be killed in the wax scenes by the 18 most evil beings in the world, at which time the evil (wax) beings will come to life in the real world and take it over. Somehow.

Honestly, I lost track of the convoluted plot. Whatever was supposed to be going on, it all culminated in a sword-swinging battle with all 18 evil beings (really more, if you count individual zombies) going up against our two main heroes and a small army of elderly people. Yes.

So yes, Waxwork is kindof of a mess, but at least it has quite a few classic horror monsters and quite a lot of surprisingly epic gore. It would be fun to track down the uncut version. 

Mask Maker (2010)

Back in the 80s, horror fans had an embarassment of riches when it came to horror icons.  Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Leatherface, Pinhead...  hell, even Chucky.  All were actively slicing and dicing teenagers with abandon in this heyday of horror.  But then the well pretty much dried up when we hit the 90s.  The horror heavyweights went into a slump and their ranks were only freshened by the addition of Scream's Ghostface (which didn't really count anyway, since it was somebody different every time.)  In the 00s, you could say that Saw's Jigsaw joined the horror pantheon, but his was a different kind of horror series.  The slasher subgenre needed a new (anti-)hero.

Victor Crowley in the Hatchet films fit the bill, but the movies were too gory and esoteric for mainstream horror audiences to latch onto.  Now, with each and every horror legend getting a remake, is there anybody out there that can bring us a new and interesting slasher villain to root for/against?

The makers of 2010's Mask Maker gave it a pretty good shot.

Starring... umm...  Well, at least Treat Williams has a cameo.

Mask Maker (another Netflix Instant Queue find) tells the story of a young couple who buy a great big house in the country for super-cheap, intending to fix it up and flip it for a fortune.  Little did they know that the house once was home to Leonard, a deformed man who, along with his voodoo-witch mother, was murdered by the local townsfolk years ago.  As anyone who has ever seen a movie could predict, Leonard was awakened to blood-thirsty life by the new owners of the house. Mayhem ensues.

My brief description makes Leonard's origin sound hackneyed and pedestrian, but it really has a lot going for it: voodoo/witchcraft, illicit love affairs, child-endangerment, murder...  At any rate, it's plenty to get the ball rolling on Leonard's killing spree.  And spree he does, dispatching victims with machetes, axes, pitchforks, screwdrivers (the handle end!) and other assorted implements.  And with each one that goes down, Leonard peels the skin off of their heads to use as masks to cover his own hideous fleshless face.  Nice.

Leonard! You'd better eat your Chunky soup!

The movie goes a lot further to set up the story than you might expect.  Like the early Friday the 13ths, you get a lot of the characters working around the main location, going into town and interacting with the locals, and so forth.  It takes around an hour for the killer to really get his momentum, but with the occasional one-off murder, amusing characters, and violent flashbacks that fill in the backstory, the movie doesn't bog down.

I didn't really know what to expect when I fired up Mask Maker.  I was pleasantly surprised when I realized it was a slasher and not the torture-y, hillbilly cannibal type flick I feared it might be.  In the end, I really liked Leonard as a potential franchise killer.  He had creativity, a good look, a good backstory, and a good gimmick.  Mask Maker wasn't precisely "original," as it borrowed heavily from Friday the 13th (particularly part two) and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (minus the chainsaw).  But it was still refreshing.

I hope the movie is getting enough exposure on the IQ to warrant a sequel.  If they do get to make a franchise out of Mask Maker, they'll have to stop at the fifth movie, though.  I, for one, don't want any part of seeing Leonard, Part 6 again.

Sugar Hill (1974)

After watching Tales From The Hood, my Netflix Instant Queue suggested a number of "blaxploitation" movies with a horror theme, including Scream, Blacula, Scream. Were the original Blacula available, I would have gone for it. I have always been curious about those two movies, but I didn't want to start with a sequel.

Instead, I picked another IQ suggestion: 1974's Sugar Hill. The tag line sold me - "Meet Sugar Hill and her Zombie Hit Men." Yes, please.

Diana "Sugar" Hill (so named by her boyfriend because she "looks as sweet as sugar tastes") is deeply in love with Langston, the owner of Club Haiti. Langston gets beaten to death by Fabulous (played by Mac from Night Court) and his fellow henchmen for refusing to sell the club to their boss, Mr. Morgan. What's a grieving woman to do?

Baron "The Mailman" Samedi

Seek the help of voodoo priestess Mama Maitresse and Baron Samedi, the Lord Of The Dead, that's what. Baron Samedi, who looks a little like Karl Malone, is more than happy to help Sugar kill the men who killed Langston by raising an army of zombies to do Sugar's bidding. The price for the Baron's help? Well, it ain't Sugar's soul he wants.

These zombies aren't the flesh-eating/brain-eating kind of zombie. Instead, they are the drum-playing, machete-swinging, feed-you-to-the-pigs, voodoo kind of zombie. And they look awesome, with their silvery reflective eyes and their dusty, cobweb-covered bodies.

These zombies have had their eyes "shined" like Riddick from Pitch Black.

Sugar Hill is a fun revenge flick with a veneer of voodoo culture and a 70s grindhouse vibe. It would make a great double feature with J.D.'s Revenge, in which a 70s law student is possessed by the spirit of a murdered 40s pimp bent on revenge. Check them out if you're looking to broaden your horror horizons. I love you, Instant Queue!

Tales From The Hood (1995)

Chill or Be Chilled.  Yes, that is the tag line.

A funny thing happened when I saw Tales From The Hood at a matinee showing back in the early summer of '95. A woman and her child, a boy of about 6, came in during the credits and took a seat in the row in front of me and my friend. They seemed... out of place.  They sat through the previews - I don't remember which ones, of course, but they were the type that get shown in front of horror movies. Then the opening sequence of the movie began with spooky music and a panning close-up of the skull image from the posters. As the title came up, the woman took her son by the arm and led him to the hall.  We could hear the boy say, "Mommy, where's Fluke?"

The two of them had gone into the wrong theater. They had intended to see Fluke, a movie with a cute golden retriever puppy on the poster. 

Of course, reading the synopsis for Fluke, they might have been less horrified by Tales...

Instead, they wound up at Tales From The Hood, a horror anthology from executive producer Spike Lee and focusing on horror from an African-American perspective. As a framing story, the movie begins with three gang-bangers trying to buy a huge stash of found weed from funeral home director Mr. Simms (played delightfully over-the-top by Clarence Williams III). As he takes the trio deeper into the funeral home to get "the shit," he tells them the stories of some of the deceased in the coffins they passed by.

Ahh, 'the shit'.  You'll be knee-deep in 'the shit'!

 The four stories involve a dead activist out for revenge on the racist cops who killed him, a young boy with a monster in his house, a racist candidate for governor (Corbin Bernsen, whose top billing on this movie is baffling) being tormented by killer dolls, and a young prisoner being rehabilitated, Clockwork Orange-style.

As with any movie steeped in a particular sub-culture of a particular time, the dialogue from the young men in the framing story and the characters in the last vignette are hilariously dated. Now that nearly 20 years have passed, the "gangsta" has largely fallen out of the spotlight, so it's a bit jarring to see that 90s stock character again. You have to just kind of roll with it.

Like a lot of the so-called "hood movies" of the 90s, the filmmakers had a message for the audience. It's essentially the same message as a movie like Boyz n The Hood, but with more monsters. The vignettes themselves are actually more effective than I remembered from a horror movie perspective. Unfortunately, they often feature a moment or two that are meant to be key to the message, but wind up kind of ludicrous. When it has to make a choice, this movie chooses the message over the scares.

Tales... hovers somewhere between a horror story told from an under-utilized point-of-view and a movie that you're supposed to actually think about. But even with heavy subject matter, it manages to stay fun, thanks in large part to the amazing and quotable Clarence Williams III. It's on Netflix Instant - check it out if for no other reason than to see CWIII go to work.

11/11/11 (2011)

My Netflix Instant Queue is getting out of hand. I don't know exactly how many titles are on there, but I can tell you that between the horror movies I keep stumbling upon for this month's viewing and the shows my lovely wife keeps putting on there to entertain our almost-one-year-old, it is literally a crap-ton of programming. Literally. My "Recommended For You" feature just suggested "A Nightmare On Seasame Street" and "Dora: Portrait Of A Serial Killer." I tell ya, it's getting out of hand.

Today I selected one that I hadn't heard much buzz about, but had nevertheless intrigued me. Last year, Darren Lynn Bousman, director of Saw II, III, and IIII (the Saws weren't known for their adherence to strict rules of Roman numerals - just ask Saw IIIIIII) put out an apocalyptic Devil-y movie that was released on and revolved around November 11, 2011. The idea was something akin to when Hollywood decided to remake The Omen (terribly) simply because they could hit a release date of June 6, 2006 --- 6/6/06, or 6/6/6 if you bought what the Hollywood machine was selling.

Okay, so put one out on November 11, 2011, tie in some other numerological mumbo jumbo and you've got yourself a horror movie. Let one of the Saw guys direct it? I'm in.

So here's the deal. I select 11/11/11 from the IQ. The credits fire up and we're on our way. I don't recognize any of the names here, but that's no real surprise. But wait - it's not even the right director. Uh oh. Oh no - there it is in black and white - An Asylum Films presentation.

Damn you, Asylum Films. You got me. I've been mockbustered.

If you don't know about The Asylum, they are the production company that swoops in just before a big Hollywood movie is released and drops their own very low budget version onto dvd (or SyFy) with a similar title and similar artwork. Transformers at the box office? Try our giant robot movie, Transmorphers. Snakes On A Plane? Meet Snakes On A Train. Abraham Lincoln vs Zombies, The Amityville Haunting, The Day The Earth Stopped... All of these can be yours from The Asylum if you don't care about good special effects, story, acting, and so forth. Somewhere along the way, The Asylum got the idea that Bousman's 11-11-11 (now I get it) would make some money at the box office (it didn't), so they beat them to the punch with 11/11/11. See what they did there?

But hey, a movie's a movie, right? I figured, in for a penny, in for a pound. So I resisted the urge to hit the ol' bail-out button and stuck with my knockoff.

As expected, it looked cheap. But at least with a movie about a neighborhood full of Devil worshippers trying to bring ol' Brimstone Britches into the world through a boy who turns 11 on a certain date, you don't have to worry about spectacular special effects. Honestly, the budget was plenty to pull off this story, convoluted and confusing as it was. It helps when you don't have to pay for real actors.

The biggest problem with 11/11/11 is that it was just unremarkable. Asylum films are frequently good for a laugh, such as in their so-bad-they're-good original productions Mega Pirahna and Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus. Sometimes they even approach a quantum of competence like in the surprisingly solid 2-Headed Shark Attack. (Really!)  And sometimes they are so awful that you can derive a certain pride in having had the courage and willpower to sit through the whole thing. I'm looking at you, AvH: Alien vs. Hunter.

11/11/11 was none of these things. It was just there. It was the movie equivalent of the last game of the NFL preseason. It resembles the real thing in certain ways, but there's nobody you recognize involved and it feels entirely pointless. When it's over, all you can say is, "well, I'm glad we got that out of the way."

True Horror

Today's horror post is simply this. I can't think of when I have seen anything so horrifying as the effort my Georgia Bulldogs put forth in getting trounced 35-7 by South Carolina. Yuck.

Hatchet (2006)

Back in the heyday of the slasher film, critics, parents, and pundits of all variety decried the ultra-violence and gore of the Friday the 13ths, Halloweens, and the countless knock-offs they spawned. In hindsight, the kills in many of these classic 80s slashers look tame and quaint to modern eyes. You are tempted to wonder what all the fuss was about.

And then you look at Adam Green's Hatchet. Hatchet is an homage - a loving throwback to the old school slasher flick, but with the gore and creativity in each kill ramped up by a factor of three. Five, in the unrated edition. Really, this is the kind of movie the anti-horror movie crusaders thought they were seeing back in the day. This is the movie your mom was warning you about.

Hatchet takes place in the swampland of Louisiana, where local legend Victor Crowley is said to live. The story goes that some kids set fire to the Crowley's shack in the swamp with poor deformed Victor trapped inside. Victor's father tried to axe his way into the house to save Victor and accidentally killed him in the process. And so Victor's very corporeal ghost (?) haunts the swamp as a hulking monster of a man (complete with giant hatchet gash in the face), constantly reliving the night of his death and slaughtering anyone who crosses his path.

Our victi... er... protagonists are a semi-diverse bunch of tourists on an unauthorized nighttime swamp cruise whose boat has run aground. They provide Victor with plenty of canvases on which to perform his gruesome art. You get all manner of dismemberments, many by the sheer force of Victor's supernatural strength, but occasionally using tools like a hatchet (naturally), a shovel (both ends), and a gas-powered belt sander. (Is that even a thing?) Each kill is jaw-dropping (sometimes literally) and creative. It's a tour de force of violence.

What separates the gore and violence in Hatchet from the gore in a "torture porn" movie? In a word, tone. Movies like Hostel and Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning give you the gore in lingering torture shots and with an atmosphere designed to make the audience uncomfortable. Hatchet, on the other hand, goes for fast-paced thrills and just the right amount of unreality to make you laugh along with the gore instead of cringing away from it. Like the 80s movies it emulates, Hatchet wants you to cheer for the killer and look forward to whatever method of mayhem he has in store for the next victim. It's basically a comedy.

Bottom line, Hatchet rocks. You get the laughs, you get the thrills, you even get appearances by horror legends Kane Hodder, Robert Englund, and Tony Todd. Sometimes you need a little "old school American horror," and Hatchet delivers in spades. And hatchets... And gas-powered belt sanders...

The Curse (1987)

What do Wesley Crusher, Bo Duke, and H.P. Lovecraft have in common? That would be The Curse, a low budget adaptation of Lovecraft's "The Colour Out Of Space." This little gem was directed by David Keith, who is mostly an actor, and featured special effects supervised by none other than Italian gore movie director Lucio Fulci (credited here as "Louis" Fulci.) Also, the Producer's name is Ovidio G. Assonitis, which never failed to make me laugh when it came on screen.

Young Zach Hayes (Wil Wheaton just before he donned his rainbow-y Star Trek: TNG uniform), his little sister (played by Wheaton's real-life sister Amy), and their mousy mother live with Zach's step-father Nathan and Nathan's jerk-ass son Cyrus on a small farm in Tennessee. Their lives are changed when a strange glowing meteor crashes into their field.

The meteor diminishes in size until it disappears, leaving the "experts" to determine that it was nothing more than a frozen chunk of waste released from an airliner. (See also Joe Dirt. Or don't.) Whatever the case, the meteor causes their fruits and vegetables to grow extra large. The joy over the bumper crop is short-lived, however, as slicing into these crops reveals loads of hideous maggots and worms wriggling inside. Eww.

The effect of the meteor on the family is even worse (well, arguably). As they drink contaminated water, they grow blisters and sores on their faces and basically lose their minds. Zach is able to escape this fate by drinking water and eating food bought from the grocery store, but his poor mother has to be locked in the basement and his sister spends most of the movie sick in bed.

Also entangled in the plot are the doctor next door, a local real estate agent, the agent's assistant, and a representative of the Tennessee Valley Authority (played by the Dukes of Hazzard's John Schneider) who is in town to buy the farm and make it into a reservoir.

After a sluggish start, the movie ramps up to a satisfyingly tense, gloppy, gory conclusion. I was impressed by the oppressive atmosphere even before the meteor's arrival, and it only gets better after the family has devolved into madness and mutation. The Curse boasts knife-wielding maniac attacks, dog attacks, horse attacks, and even chicken attacks.  If you are a Lovecraft fan who has exhausted all of the better known story adaptations and can get past the budgetary limitations, you'll find this one to be a pleasant surprise.

Horror on YouTube, Part 2: The Gore Edition

Get your Gallagher-style ponchos ready - it's about to get messy.

Friday the 13th Part 4 - Uncut Kills

The Friday the 13th series made its mark on audiences with a simple premise, a strangely compelling antagonist, and creative, over-the-top violence. Most, if not all, of the 80s editions of the series had to make pretty heavy cuts just to receive an R rating from the MPAA, rather than the dreaded X. While the little bit of excised gore from the first film was restored to make an "uncut" version on DVD and blu ray, the rest of the series has not received such a treatment. However, much of the cut footage is available through a number of sources, and generally it would be great to see it restored to the films. Here is a comparison between the theatrical and uncut versions of some of the deaths in Part Four. This supposed "final chapter" of the series allowed special effects all-time great Tom Savini to go nuts on the kills, culminating in the "death" of Jason Voorhees himself. His demise was short-lived, but it was still spectacular.

Cut/slide

Search around YouTube enough and you will find yourself in some pretty dark and disturbing places. Fortunately, you can find your way back to the goodness and light by simply searching for the phrase "cut slide."  A cut/slide is a very specific type of horror movie kill, in which the victim gets something sliced off almost without their knowing. You see the horrible realization dawning on their faces only when the victim slides down a wall or collapses slowly to the floor with their dismembered body parts dropping away underneath them. Watch this cut/slide montage and you'll see what I mean.

Horror on YouTube, part 1

So you're looking to slake your thirst for horror and you can't be bothered to pull yourself away from your computer. Where are you to turn? A movie pirating site? Google? Some stupid blog?

No! Just pull up good ol' YouTube (or Y'allTube as its known where I live) and you're in horror heaven. Below are some examples of horror content on YouTube that you might want to check out.  I'll provide links to more bone-curdling, blood-chilling videos as October creeps along.

Halloween 6: The Producer's Cut

Halloween 6: The Curse Of Michael Myers is a jumbled mess of a movie. It tried to tie Michael Myers to an ancient Celtic cult using a mystic rune and a Man In Black and Paul Rudd and... daaaaah. It sucked. What hit the theater screens with a thud in 1995 was not the original vision of the writer and director. In fact, about 40 minutes of the theatrical cut consisted of material that was reshot after bad performances with test audiences. So, whatever became of the originally shot material? Well, you can watch it on YouTube in what is known as the Producer's Cut. Does this version make more sense? Is it better than the theatrical version? Lots of fans think so. They are dumb. It's not better, but it is interestingly different and worth checking out if you are a fan of the series or of slasher movies with confusing mystical nonsense in them.  Here is the first of eight 15-minute or so segments.

Horror VHS Covers

Look at just about any movie poster or dvd case today and you'll see nothing but a bunch of Photoshopped faces floating on a background of yellows and blues selected by Marketing department scientists as the hues most pleasing to the eye. But back in the day, movie posters and video boxes were crafted with at least as much care and creativity as the movie they represented. With horror movies, the artwork was often a hell of a lot more intriguing and evocative than the movie itself. In the VHS era, a million cheapo horror flicks were in direct competition with the big budget Hollywood movies right next to them on the shelves at the rental store. They couldn't touch the effects and star power of their big-time peers, but they could sure put up a front with a killer video box. These videos collect tons of great box art that you may not have seen in years, and the likes of which we'll probably never see again.

Morgan Freeman as Dracula

Morgan Freeman has done it all in Hollywood. He's played every part from prisoners to Presidents and he has never disappointed. But has he ever played that most malevolent of monsters, the embodiment of evil, the one and only Count Dracula? Yes. Yes he has. Here he is on the children's show The Electric Company, putting on his best Transylvanian accent while bathing in a coffin. There would be better times to come for Mr. Freeman.

Horror Movie of the Year 2012 - The Cabin In The Woods

Let me stop you right here. This post is going to be FULL of spoilers, so if you haven't seen The Cabin In The Woods and you think you might want to, go watch it now and come back. I'll wait.

Okay, did you see it? Amazing, right? What about the part where the cabin floods with water and our heroes have to fashion a raft out of the front door?  Yeah!

No.  That's not in the movie. Stop trying to trick me and go watch it. It's at your Red Box right now.

Okay, now are you ready? Good. Let's do this.

The above situation with the flooding and the door and such is about the only thing that didn't happen in The Cabin In The Woods. Seriously, this movie had it all.

NO REALLY ---  SPOILERS ARE HERE  ---  PROCEED WITH CAUTION

It had pain-worshipping redneck torture zombies, regular zombies, werewolves, demons, scarecrows, ghosts, Japanese little girl ghosts, killbots, blobs, faceless serial killers, giant snakes, unicorns, a tooth-faced ballerina, and Lovecraftian elder gods. It even came through with a merman, for crying out loud. But it all starts with a cabin in the woods.

Oh man, am I glad they didn't unleash Kevin.

Like a thousand movies before it, Cabin sends a handful of stereotypical college-age buddies out to spend a weekend of good-natured debauchery in a ramshackle shack out in the middle of nowhere. You know them well - the jock, the hottie, the stoner, the nice guy, and the studious, virginal nice girl. Generally, this type of cookie-cutter characterization is what horror fans have come to put up with over the years in service of the action, the violence, the gore. With Cabin, for perhaps the first time ever, the stereotyping isn't just something to accept as par for the course - it's actually vital to the story.

I won't spend a lot of time tying the plot together. You've seen the movie, right?  Turns out the whole trip to the cabin is being orchestrated and monitored by a massive global secret organization dedicated to annual rituals of horror. If the rites go according to plan, the victims will die in the proper manner and order, and the ancient gods sleeping beneath the surface of the Earth will be appeased enough to spare our world. The horrors we see on the silver screen are all real, and are all tools in the arsenal of this organization to kill the right people at the right time. Better a handful should die grizzly deaths than the end of the world, right?

On this surface level, we have one of the most creative and convention-defying horror movies ever made. Co-writer Joss Whedon wasn't content to make a simple slasher homage sprinkled with a bit of Buffy-speak. Instead, Whedon and co-writer/director Drew Goddard took the classic horror tropes and turned them on their ears, making an epic sci-fi horror mind-trip full of scares, laughs, and applause-worthy moments of just plain awesomeness. (No one who sees this movie will ever see a lobby full of elevators in the same way again.)

Ding!

And while they were at it, Whedon and Goddard blew up the horror genre as we know it. Blew it right the hell up.  

The whole movie is a love-hate letter to horror. Whedon and Goddard know the genre. They respect the ritual of horror and even have a good idea of its purpose, albeit with exagerated consequences (I hope). They get all the details right and they make a horror flick that's pretty darned effective as such until they decide to yank the rug right out from under you. Then it becomes apparent that these two have had about all they can stand of conventional horror, especially in the direction the genre has moved over the past decade or so. 

It's all put in its place - the slasher sub-genre, classic movie monsters, the J-horror explosion, the CGI SyFy monster cheapies, and with perhaps the most relish, the torture killer movie. The main message seems to be that horror has sacrificed creativity and originality on the altar of violence, and the bloodlust of the audience is getting worse with every copycat cash-grab pumped out from year to year.

It's not that Whedon and Goddard are against violence per se. But the violence has to serve more than the studio paymasters (the guys downstairs). It has to serve the story. It has to mean something. This is what they are getting at when a character humorously makes the distinction between a zombie (classic monster that served as a backdrop for social commentary) and a "redneck zombie torture family" (a stand-in for the recycled remakes and homages that take classic concepts and up the gore factor with lingering torture while dumbing the stories down to nothing.)

The whole horror genre is fair game. In the end, every kind of horror monster you can imagine is unleashed at once on the organization that heretofore controlled them. It's no coincidence that the big red button that looses the "army of nightmare creatures" is marked "SYSTEM PURGE." Whedon and Goddard want to reboot the entire genre in one fell swoop in the hopes that it will be replaced with something new, something original. Something created for love and art like horror used to be, and not just there to feed the machine and keep the gods appeased. Some new blood, you might say. 

So what or who might this replacement be?  What kind of horror movie can rise from the ashes after Cabin In The Woods nuked the genre from orbit?  Whedon and Goddard don't provide any answers. All they do is give us a fun horror romp that, in a better world, would wipe the slate clean of remakes, sequels, torture porn, and churn-em-out studio horror crap. Hopefully, they have at least paved the way for that next originator and innovator to break through the system and give horror back it's true power.

As one character puts it, "it's time to give someone else a chance."