Lifeforce

A team of astronauts finds a giant alien spacecraft hidden inside of Halley's Comet. Within the enormous craft they find the corpses of thousands of weird bat-like creatures, as well as what appears to be three peacefully sleeping naked people (one of them a hot-ass lady). All but one member of the crew dies under mysterious circumstances, and the naked alien people are brought back to Earth for study. What are they? Motherfucking space vampires, that's what, and they intend to conquer Earth by sucking away our lifeforce and turning us into their exploding zombie slaves.

To call Tobe Hooper's output inconsistent would be generous, but I would rank Lifeforce amongst his best films. If nothing else, the man can pump up the visual style, and Lifeforce is a treat for the eyes, trippy and jam-packed with unconvincing but fun 80's special effects. You get a cavernous alien spacecraft, swirling vortexes, emaciated exploding space zombies, vampire blood that erupts out of Patrick Stewart's face and transforms into a naked lady. And so forth.

The insanity of the story (co-scripted by Dan O'Bannon of Alien, Dark Star and Return of the Living Dead fame) adds much to the fun. I was expecting naked space vampires, but I wasn't expecting demonic possession, psychic mind powers, bat monsters or a zombie apocalypse to factor into things. It's overlong and overstuffed but that's all part of its charm.

The Deadly Spawn

A giant alien toothed worm-beast thingy lands on Earth and holes itself up in some family's basement, where it eats the mother and father. The alien gives birth to nasty little baby worm-beasts and uses the corpses to nurse/feed them. Only gradually does the rest of the family realize what's going on, and soon they are fighting for their lives against the deadly spawn, especially the young son, who likes old horror movies and wears a cape around and turns out to be uniquely qualified to fight off an alien invasion.

The makers of Home Sick should take note, this is how you do a low-budget, gore heavy horror movie right. The Deadly Spawn follows a style of 80's horror films that I have a soft spot for; in love with and paying homage to old-fashioned horror and sci-fi movies while updating them with over-the-top gore and a heavy dose of irony. It reminded me somewhat of Night of the Creeps and Reanimator... not quite as funny as those, and with an even lower budget, but still made with a respectable amount of imagination and humor that helps it transcend its shortcomings.

It may look a little cheap (some of this probably more the fault of the shitty DVD transfer than the filmmaking), the acting and dialogue are not always stellar (though good enough), but the writing and directing are dynamic, interesting, playing with your expectations and trying to make the film better than it needs to be. Home Sick, by comparison, wasn't just cheap, it was uninspired; it contained too many scenes where the camera is pointed flatly at characters standing around in empty locations, trading dialogue of little interest. It only comes alive when it brings the gore, it never works to build a memorable sequence, only scattered money shots. The Deadly Spawn gives more of a shit. It too has some surprisingly graphic gore, but the gore is worked into effective, well-crafted sequences and set pieces.

Take for example my favorite part of the movie, an extended sequence where the young hero finds him self trapped in the basement with the monsters. It sets an eerie tone by having the kid walking around in the dark with only a flashlight, catching only brief glimpses of things moving. Then he finds his parents' bodies, being eaten by the spawn. It's a great gross-out payoff, but it doesn't end there. The monster pops out of the dark (it looks fake, but still awesome) and the kid notices that the little spawn are everywhere, squirming around the basement. And slowly he figures out that they can't see him, they have no eyes, they can only hear him. So he's got to figure out a way out of the basement without alerting them to his prescence, using their lack of sight to his advantage.

I mean, this is not exactly a brilliant sequence, but it's light-years beyond what you get in most cheap horror movies.

The Lawnmower Man

A frustrated scientist (Pierce Brosnan) developing a virtual reality program that somehow boosts intelligence begins using his retarded lawnmower man Jobe (Jeff Fahey) as a guinea pig. Things seem to be going great at first, as Jobe becomes somehow non-retarded and normal and attractive to women, but surprise surprise things go horribly wrong as Jobe develops frightening powers, becoming almost god-like, eventually going insane and trying to take over the world.

The Lawnmower Man is an unbelievably terrible movie that bears no resemblance to the not very good Stephen King short story it takes it's name from. Apparently the filmmakers took a pre-existing screenplay they had, and bought the rights to King's story so they could slap his name on their movie. King sued and had his name removed from the film. Awesome.

This film came out in 1992, and I must say, its antiquated misconceptions about the internet and its Sega Genesis quality CGI effects are rather hilarious when viewed today. Were people really falling for this shit a mere 17 years ago? We must have been a bunch of fucking savages back then.

I've never been a big fan of Jeff Fahey as an actor, but he can be perfectly serviceable in the right role with the right filmmaker (White Hunter Black Heart, Planet Terror). In The Lawnmower Man, well, let's just say I bet he wishes this one wasn't on his resume. His performance in the first half of the film as simple Jobe, with his oversized overalls (with one strap always falling off), his messy blonde 5-year-old's hair and his goofy "Aww gee shucks Timmy" line delivery comes dangerously close to Tug Speedman's "Simple Jack" in Tropic Thunder.

I have nothing nice to say about this film. The story is silly. The performances are embarrassing. The special effects are overwhelmingly bad. There is not a single scene, moment or idea that generates any true interest. Not even the violence is fun.

Wait, there is one thing I liked: Jenny Wright (the cutie from Near Dark and I, Madman that I discussed a few posts ago) briefly shows her breasts. That part was worth watching.

Grace

Madeline (Jordan Ladd) survives a car crash that leaves her husband and unborn daughter dead. Unable to let her daughter go, and perhaps somewhat delusional, Madeline decides to carry the dead child to term with the help of her naturopathic mentor/midwife. Then something strange happens. Little Grace is born... alive.

Grace is a clever twist on It's Alive, a baby-monster movie not about the baby but about motherhood, and what a mother is willing to do to protect her child. It's crafty in its structure and the way it builds tension. It begins to make you uncomfortable by exploiting commonplace anxiety (there's tension in Madeline's marriage, her mother-in-law thinks she knows better than Madeline what's best for the baby) before slowly working its way to the violence and murder that the genre demands. It also takes its time in getting to know the characters so that we actually care when shit goes down. Ladd's sympathetic performance is key in this.

Grace is noteworthy for being a horror film primarily concerned with women's issues, despite being written and directed by a man. The film not only focuses on pregnancy and motherhood (and the anxiety associated with each) as dominant themes but also lesbianism, and all of the central characters are female. In the film's most disturbing scene, Madeline's mother-in-law, distraught over the death of her son, invites her oblivious husband to suck on her nipple during sex... not as a turn-on, but because it reminds her of nursing. In a genre dominated by running, screaming, crying victim-sluts and virginal final girls, it's nice to see a horror movie that at least attempts to flesh out its female characters and show things from a feminine perspective.

I'm happy to recommend this one, but if I can't say that I loved it as much as I wanted to, it's because the thriller elements of the final act aren't as effective as the slow-burn build up. The story and the characters are sufficiently set-up that the required violence and murder seems logical, but it generates little tension or excitement, the direction seems perfunctory and it becomes more of a matter of waiting for things to play out. It's something of a letdown, but not completely; the film ends with a grossout shot that is highly effective and most definitely earned.

The Unborn

A Megan Fox look-alike is haunted by a demon searching for a human body to inhabit, who announces his presence with the hilariously unscary mantra "Jumby is ready to be born now." Turns out that the demon had dibs on her twin brother, but he died in utero, so now he's after her. Also some shit about Nazis and curses and Judaism.

I can't say I was expecting this one to be any good, but I did hope that maybe it would turn out to be a pleasant surprise. It didn't take me too long to figure out this wouldn't be the case, but the aforementioned "Jumby" line (seriously, Jumby? That's the scariest name they coud come up with?) and a few other moments had me hoping at least for unintentional comedy.

Sadly, The Unborn doesn't even work as camp, mostly it's just fucking boring. Director David Goyer tries his damnedest to pile on the atmosphere by giving the film a desaturated, color-filtered look. Which is, of course, what one does when one doesn't know how to create atmosphere and wants to trick the audience into thinking the film has some sort of vision.

The occasionally striking images (dog wearing a child's mask) could have been creepy in a better movie; here, they do nothing to save the mediocre material. The plot contains an over baked mythology that you could not possibly care about, unlikable characters (Goyer and Rob Zombie should hang out, they both have a penchant for writing clever dialogue for their young characters that comes off as phony and grating) and suspense sequences that range from stupid to confounding... Why the hell would the heroine peer through what clearly looks to be a glory hole in a public restroom? I'd say she lucked out by getting covered in gross insects. She could have gotten a dick in the eye.

I, Madman

Jenny Wright (long lost 80's cutie from Near Dark) becomes deeply engrossed in a series of old dime store novels by Malcolm Brand, some sort of H. P. Lovecraft/Stephen King type. She's so engrossed that she begins imagining herself as the lead character in his books, a feat that becomes much easier when people in her life start turning up dead in ways similar to the victims in the books. Is there some sort of copycat killer on the loose? Is the mysterious Mr. Brand somehow to blame? Does life imitate art, etc etc?

I, Madman plays almost at times like an earlier version of John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness (Lovecraftian hack novelist's stories seem to be coming to life), and although Carpenter's film goes much further and has more fun with the material, there's still a lot to like here. Director Tibor Takacs gives the movie a comic book vibe, creating a world of dark shadowy hallways and corridors, highly stylized with bold colors and dramatic angles. The film boasts a few effective stalk/murder sequences (the finale in a used book store is fun, with characters stumbling over stacks of books while trying to flee for their lives), is told with good humor and has a very likable performance by Wright in the lead. The final result is no classic, but it's a little bit John Carpenter, a little bit Sam Raimi and a little bit Nightmare On Elm Street, not the worst places to look for inspiration.

The Stuff

So follow me here. Some old dude finds a puddle of weird looking white shit bubbling out of the earth. Naturally, the first thing he does is try to eat it, and as it happens the stuff is delicious. Before you know it, "The Stuff" has become the most popular food on earth, dominating the supermarkets, with a ubiquitous marketing campaign to boot. The few holdouts who don't want to eat "The Stuff" start to sense that something is wrong, that other people are acting weird, and... did they just see that shit move? Turns out it's no ordinary snack treat, "The Stuff" is some sort of sentient The Blob like being that is trying to take over mankind by turning all of the people who eat it into its zombie slaves.

The Stuff, something of an offbeat horror/comedy, was written and directed by Larry Cohen, a fellow whose talent as a writer seems to be to take the worst possible idea for a B-movie he can think up and try to make it as fun as possible. Though not always successful (Maniac Cop, Uncle Sam), when he does come through, the results can be irresistibly silly and very entertaining (this one, the It's Alive movies, and surprisingly the Maniac Cop sequels). The Stuff is a goofy story told with a straight face. It benefits also from a likable performance by Michael Moriarty, some funny dialogue and a lot of enthusiastically ridiculous special effects.

Home Sick

A gathering of obnoxious douchebags is inexplicably interrupted by a weird dude (a cameo-ing Bill Mosely) with a brief case full of razor blades. The weird dude starts slicing up his own arms and makes everyone tell him the name of one person they hate. Soon there after, a masked killer begins murdering the people they named. And oops, wouldn't you guess it, one of the douchebags named everyone in the room. A bona fide gorefest ensues.

I'm not in the business of inherently trashing a movie because it has a very low budget, in fact I might be inclined to give it a little leeway in the visuals and acting departments if makes up for it in creativity. But you have got to go that extra mile, you have to show some vision or ingenuity or unique spirit. I will not tolerate long, awkwardly drawn out shots filled with empty space, a lack of action or unnatural pauses in the dialogue if you aren't serving up any other goodies. Home Sick serves up more than its fair share of entertaining gore, but little else. It is a tediously told story about unlikable characters, directed with little style or wit. I enjoyed some of the crazier scenes of grand guignol, but nothing in between those moments.

Home Sick's biggest problem is that it tries, very hard, to be funny. But it isn't. At all. Especially the final act, which has the surviving protagonists get the gun fever after obtaining weapons from a local gun nut. The director apparently asked everyone in the cast to turn it up to 11, with everyone hooting and hollering and running around like children. It's painful to watch a bunch of grownups embarrassing themselves so fully for something so unfunny.

Still, A + for the gore. Maybe next time the filmmakers can write an actual movie to go along with it.

Of Unknown Origin

When his wife and son take a trip to visit family, a successful businessman (played by Peter Weller; looks like I accidentally had an actors-who-played-Robocop double feature on Friday night.) is left alone in their oversized New York apartment. With pressure building up at work, he slowly starts to crack, becoming obsessed with killing a rat that has taken up residence in his home. First it's just a matter of putting rat traps everywhere and researching rat trivia and regurgitating it to everyone he talks to. Soon enough, however, he's suiting himself up in old sports gear, crafting homemade weapons and waging a full out war against the rodent.

Although Of Unknown Origin never quite descends into full-out horror, and has a weirdly funny/upbeat ending, it was quite awesome and probably my favorite movie I've watched for the marathon so far (I'm writing this on Monday the 5th). Part of the fun is the entertaining, exaggerated yet never quite over-the-top visual style that director George P. Cosmatos brings to the material. In addition to some striking framing and much fun with reflections (something I'm always a sucker for), I very much enjoyed Cosmatos' treatment of the rat. He almost always films it in extreme, fragmented close-up, so that the rat's nasty teeth or giant claws look enormous, dominating the frame and dwarfing Weller. One stupid fucking rat is not a credible threat in a horror movie, but the point is that Weller sees the rat as such and becomes fixated on it. The result is a lot of fun to watch.

Unfortunately, the final act, when Weller finally loses his shit and tries to take the rat on mano-a-mano is a little disappointing, though still very watchable. It's a classic case of the build-up being more interesting than the pay-off; watching Weller slowly lift his veneer of normalcy is more compelling than watching him try to fight one non-evil, non-supernatural rodent.

Still, what's interesting and somewhat strange about the ending of this film is that it finally presents Weller's breakdown as being a positive experience. In the end, though he succeeds in killing the rat, Weller has jeopardized his career and destroyed his fancy looking home. He walks around his apartment, surveying the damage, he sees a vase that remained unharmed... and smashes it on the ground. In the final shot, his family returns from their trip, Weller embraces them and leads them inside. From outside, we hear his wife, understandably shocked, ask what happened. "I had a party." The end.

If I'm reading this right, Weller's war against the rat was less a breakdown of his sanity/stability and instead an event that brought him in touch with his inner savage, and lead him to reject his upper-class lifestlye as well as the white-collar, ahem, rat race that he was a part of. I was expecting Weller to end up hurting or killing someone, and instead I guess he finds self-actualization.

Dust Devil

From Richard Stanley, the director who got fired from The Island of Dr Moreau, comes this strange and atmospheric horror movie set in South Africa. A woman splits from her abusive husband and takes a road trip through the desert. Along the way she picks up a handsome drifter, which of course is a bad idea, but you know how it goes. The guy isn't any ordinary drifter, he's not even an ordinary serial killer, he's some sort of shape-shifting demon completing a series of ritual sacrifices.

I'm impressed that Stanley was only in his mid-20's when he made this film... my age, essentially. He's got an admirably tight control of the tone, evoking the desolation of the wasteland that the characters are passing through. Apparently when this was initially released, the Weinstein brothers cut out a good 20 or 30 minutes of it, including all the supernatural stuff, I guess because it was too slow and too strange. Poor Stanley can't get a break, that's two movies I know for a fact that he got fucked on. But this DVD release is a restored version, the "final cut," and it's pretty sweet.

I could have done with out the portentous voice-over narration, or the subplot about the woman's husband, or the other subplot about the aging black police office searching for the killer that also is trying to make some sort of statement about racism in South Africa that doesn't have anything to do with the rest of the film. That said, Dust Devil is still an effective and entertaining horror movie with style to burn. I might try to catch another of Stanley's movies for YVIAHMMAOIHTNQ:Y2.

Also of note: the Dust Devil is played by Robert John Burke, the actor who played Robocop in Robocop 3. He's a lot better looking when his face isn't covered in metal shit.

Doppelganger

A scientist working to create mind-controlled robotic arms for disabled people becomes increasingly stressed out by his work. One day, with no real explanation, his is confronted by a mysterious double, a more aggressive and conniving version of himself, who offers to help him with the project. Unlike in other films and stories with a similar premise, the doppelganger doesn't seem to want to kill him or take over his life so much as he wants to act out all the scientist's unconscious desires.

I've admired all of the previous Kiyoshi Kurosawa films I have seen. Pulse, Seance and especially Cure are all well-crafted horror films heavy on moody atmosphere and dread. Doppelganger seems to start off that way, but gets lost in endless, uninteresting subplots before eventually abandoning most of the atmosphere for slick style (with split-screen and everything), while often veering towards broad comedy. And I get it, Kurosawa is exploring the idea of the double by having a movie that is similarly split; sometimes it's a horror film sometimes its an oddball comedy. I admire Kurosawa's balls for making a movie like this. I knew he had a penchant for making weird films, but not weird in this way. Ultimately, though, it's slow and not much fun to watch, the horror isn't as effective as in his other films, and the comedy is only fitfully funny. Call it a unique failure.

Hour of the Wolf

From Ingmar Bergman, director of such internationally beloved cinematic classics as The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Fanny and Alexander and Scenes From a Marriage, comes... a horror movie? No way, horror movies are for children and fat, immature nerds who live in their mother's basement and jerk-off to Fangoria. Bergman was a serious artist, he wouldn't taint his name by working in such a disreputable genre.

No? Well guess what, bitches? He did. Sort of.

Hour of the Wolf stars Bergman staple Max Von Sydow as a tortured artist type, living in semi-seclusion on an island with his wife (Liv Ullmann), who is being haunted by... what? Ghosts? Demons? Memories? Are these experiences even real, or is he losing his mind?

The early scenes of Hour of the Wolf are rough going. I've admired and even loved some of Bergman's films, but for a while I thought that Hour of the Wolf was an expression of his worst tendencies; gloomy self-seriousness about a bunch of joyless Swedes posing in the shadows and reciting grim, impenetrable statements to each other. Not that this style of turgid theatricality is inherently ineffective, but I much prefer the warm humanism of Fanny and Alexander to the posed obscureness of, say, Persona. Though I can perhaps admire its posture, it doesn't connect with me emotionally.

It gets better, luckily. I never quite got in sync with whatever Bergman was trying to communicate in terms of narrative or meaning, but Hour of the Wolf becomes increasingly eerie as it goes along, as well as increasingly bizarre, and Bergman treats the audience to some memorably weird visuals. The atmosphere is thick enough in the later portion of the film that I'm glad I watched it, but it's not the brilliant revelation I might have expected from the film's pedigree.

Marsupials: The Howling III

From Philippe Mora, director of The Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf, comes your classic in-name-only sequel. It's not even about werewolves; as the title implies, the monsters in this film are were-marsupials. It turns out that there's a hidden race of them that evolved in Australia, and one of them gets cast in some corny B-horror movie about shape-shifting monsters (meta-ness abound), but her secret is inadvertently exposed to the outside world, the government wants to study them, etc etc.

I like the new direction that Mora went with, but it is something of a shame that we never saw the original story some to closure with The Howling III: Your Father is Also Coincidentally a Werewolf and The Howling IV: Yo Momma So Werewolf, She Put Lon Chaney Out of Business.

Okay, I realize this was a fucked-up way to start off Your Vice is a Horror Movie Marathon and Only I Have the Netflix Queue: Year Two. It's the third movie in a series, I haven't blogged about the previous two, and neither Netflix nor Hollywood Video seem to have all the remaining sequels so I can't do much follow up. I should have at least kicked off the marathon this year with a standalone movie, but that's not how things worked out. I'm sorry. Deal with it.

Howling III is not quite funny enough to be called a good horror comedy, but it is strange and goofy enough that it provides suitable entertainment. There is in irresistible charm to it's silly hodge podge of weirdness: cheap but enthusiastic special effects, B-movie parodies, were-marsupial birth scene, an Alfred Hitchcock impersonator for some reason, a were-marsupial wins an Oscar but then transforms on stage. It doesn't make a lot of sense and the story never really seemed to go anywhere, but it is unique and not a total waste of time.

"Midnight Movie" a poem by Shenan Hahn

(This is a poem that Shenan wrote to kick off YVIAHMMAOIHTNQ:Y2, and I think it rocks. Not that I wasn't already jazzed about this month, but now I'm jazzed AND I have a poem that expresses said jazzing.

I like that, besides the overt references it makes, it also evokes John Goodman's speech about horror movies from Matinee, as well as makes what I believe to be an accidental reference to David Cronenberg's Videodrome.

Shenan also wanted to note that this started off as a sonnet, but then she needed an extra stanza so now it's some original form which we'll call a Shenan-sonnet or a "Shonnet." She also requested suggestions for a better title, but I think this one works fine.)



Imagine that first scream- before Fay Wray,
before the queens of Halloween, The Blob,
the jazzy giallo chases, and the Day-
or many Days- the Dead saw fit to mob-

there’s one guy by a fire who on a whim
says, “Out there is a killer mastodon,
who used to be a man like you, or him…”
and boom, the horror tale is born, its spawn

of bloody hoopla letting people tempt
the dread of what’s beyond that blaze, assured
in sticky popcorn safety as the reels
are flickering, as if we’d somehow dreamt
ourselves new flesh, its monstrousness a lurid
form caressed in grisly circus zeal

until we exit and the casualties
and killers we’d become are shrugged away,
or melt as we remember sunlight, moan
again, more distantly, at memories
of narrow odds we overcame to slay
the mastodon to a filet mignon.

Your Vice is a Horror Movie Marathon and Only I Have the Netflix Queue: Year Two

Greetings, boils and ghouls. It's nearly Shocktober once again, and much like in the previous fear of 2008, I plan to spend the month having a frightfully good time watching as many horror movies as I can possibly fit in. A murderthon of horror cinema, new and old, about which I will blog for your reading displeasure. A scare-iety of boo-vies upon which I will comment... spookily!. A cornucapitation of flayed-skinemtic masterpieces-in-which-you-are-resting which I will review for your amoozement and blood-er defright...

Okay, enough of that shit. Same deal as last year. I'm going to try to watch a shitload of horror movies before the end of October. For each one I watch, I will make a post on this blog about it. I may try to structure it a little more, perhaps offering a synopsis of the film followed by my thoughts. We'll see. Stay tuned, updates should be following soon.