The Traveler

A mysterious man, seemingly without an identity (or even fingerprints), strolls into a police station one night to confess a murder. Only he won't say who, or when, it happened. Pretty soon it's clear he has some sort of connection to a (possibly innocent) suspect in the murder of a detective's daughter that several of the cops (conveniently all on duty that night, I guess) had tortured and murdered years earlier.

Val Kilmer is too good for us mere mortals. The man is simply great in everything, even half-assed, direct-to-video nonsense like The Traveler. If it's sad that Kilmer's career is at the point where he's showing up in this kind of junk semi-regularly, it's encouraging to see that the man remains undefeated. He's a great choice for this mysterious, avenging angel/harbinger of doom who knows more than he let's on type character, and against all odds Kilmer actually seems like he's trying here and gives a legitimately fun performance.

The rest of the film is not up to Kilmer's performance. It's obvious what's going on almost immediately (Kilmer is the spirit of the man the cops killed, returned to get revenge), but the story is protracted to absurd degrees to stretch this premise out to feature length. There are about, conservative estimate, 800 superfluous flashbacks to his torture/murder peppered throughout the film. I'm not really sure what I am supposed to take from all this except one silly, stupid idea. See, Kilmer uses his supernatural abilities to kill the cops in some sort of "ironic" (I guess?) manner, by using the instrument of torture they used on him against them. But what this means is, bizarrely, each cop did exactly one form of torture to Kilmer years earlier. No one, say, both pulled out one of his teeth and put a plastic bag over his head. Each cop used one, and only one, method of torture on him, and that becomes the manner of their death. This is especially strange because they were all in the same room torturing him at the same time, but I guess they all decided to take turns and stick to just their number one favorite form of torture.

It ends with a twist that, like Dark House before it, is that there is no twist. See it turns out that MAJOR SPOILER FOR A MOVIE I DON'T RECOMMEND YOU BOTHER WATCHING Kilmer actually did kill the detective's daughter. So while the cops' murder and torture of Kilmer wasn't exactly justified, it becomes impossible to sympathize with him. He really was the bad guy all along, and the cops' deaths weren't really any form of karmic justice. So, um, yeah.

Rating: C-

Dark House

See if you can stay with me. A foster mother brutally slaughters all of her charges. Years later, a young woman who witnessed the aftermath is now an acting student, and she and her classmates get a gig doing some sort of haunted house/horror movie thing in the same house the murders occurred in. And it's not just any movie: a state of the art holographic system has been installed in the house which can create all sorts of zany monsters, murderers, ghosts and ghouls. Only it turns out the house is actually haunted by the spirit of the murderer, who somehow possesses the holographic equipment and makes the holograms come to life and murder the actors for real.

I mean, just read that fucking description and tell me if it sounds like a good movie. It's not. About the nicest things I can say about Dark House is that it co-stars Jeffrey Combs (always a plus), and that I frequently laughed during the film. I'm sure it didn't help watching it after a legitimately good haunted house movie, but even if we hadn't I don't know what could have saved such a stupid premise. I mean, why even introduce the holograms at all? We're used to ghosts doing whatever the fuck they want in movies, why not just have the ghosts of the house turn into a bunch of shitty looking monster effects?

Another weird thing is that the film feels the need to throw in about 8 unnecessary twists at the end that don't help explain anything. And some of the twists are that the earlier twists weren't twists. The house is haunted, then it's not, then it is, then holy shit do not watch this movie sober.

Rating: D+

Burnt Offerings

An obnoxious family rents an old, creepy palatial estate from a creepy old couple. The catch, besides the creepiness? There's supposedly an old lady living upstairs that they will never see that they have to leave three meals out for every day. Oh, and also it's probably haunted or some shit.

Burnt Offerings is more or less your standard haunted house movie, which means that it has the usual weaknesses, the story isn't going to be surprising and that whether or not it is successful mostly relies on how much atmosphere and suspense it can generate. Good news is Dan Curtis, director of the not exactly good but still pretty darn fun Trilogy of Terror, manages to squeeze a little juice out of the tired premise. It's got a solid cast (including Oliver Reed, Karen Black, Bette Davis and Burgess Meredith), enough technical assurance to know how to make the house a foreboding presence without going overboard on the German Expressionism (although Davis way overuses the soft focus), and a little bit of a central mystery/what-the-hell-is-going-on element that lends some suspense.

The big flaw is the one that seems to haunt most movies of this ilk: over-reliance on unscary, arbitrary special effects and meaningless supernatural  shenanigans. It's just not scary to see a backyard pool start making big waves and thrashing a little kid around. I submit that the potentially scary thing about ghosts is not whether or not they can physically manipulate reality, but what the ghosts represent psychologically or imply about our own fates. Yet time and again, haunted house movies rely on ghosts knocking over chairs and levitating beds and stupid shit like that. What makes it egregious in Burnt Offerings is that there's a great hook (the ghosts seem to slowly be possessing the members of the house) that frequently is ignored in favor over tired pyrotechnics.

It starts strong, but then wavers for a good while in the middle. Fortunately, Burnt Offerings rallies for a solid ending. The last 5 or 10 minutes sets up a classic "don't go back in the house!" scenario that has some real tension, and climaxes with a creepy payoff that, while not exactly unpredictable, gives the movie the edge it had sometimes lacked.

Rating: B-

The Mummy's Curse

While representatives from a history museum search for the rumored site of an ancient mummy and his bride, the two corpses are revived by an evil cultist.

I guess I thought this was in continuity with The Mummy, but turns out it ain't. It's actually the 4th movie in a different mummy series, starring Lon Chaney Jr. instead of Boris Karloff. It's a reasonably good old horror cheapie; some fun atmosphere, game cast, and its super short. Unlike The Mummy, this mummy actually looks like a stereotypical mummy for the whole film, all old and decrepit and wrapped up in toilet paper and shit. It's not as good of a film, but I appreciate that I actually get to look at a fucking mummy for the whole movie.

Rating: C+

Black Out

Three strangers (Amber Tamblyn, Aiden Gillen, and Armie Hammer) from different walks of life find themselves trapped in an elevator in a nearly empty apartment building after the power goes out. As time passes, they start to lose their shit a little, conflicts arise and secrets are revealed.

Though ultimately saved by its more than capable cast (although Hammer, the world's most absurdly handsome and well put together actor, is oddly miscast as a surly, scruffy punk), Black Out suffers by not quite knowing how to handle/embrace its one location premise. I mean, I get it; it's a tough challenge for a filmmaker. How do you make a thriller set almost entirely in one location without it become stale, slow or repetitive? Problem is, most films ended up going to far in trying to "open up" the action and squander the premise. I mean, this should be a claustrophobic, intimate thriller, but they blow it by jamming in a ton of flashbacks and unnecessary cuts to things going on outside the elevator.

Still, the cast is awesome, and there's a last act twist that, while somewhat predictable, does help up the stakes for the big finale. I had fun watching Black Out, even if I think it mostly failed to live up its potential. The premise and the cast are strong enough to pull you through.

Rating: C+

Twins of Evil

Two sexy, young twins move in with their religious nut bag uncle (Peter Cushing), who spends his free time hunting down innocent women he believes are witches with his congregation and burning them at the stake. Unfortunately, the crazy uncle isn't totally crazy, as the local count is an evil satanist who summons his dead vampire lover from the grave, becomes a vampire himself, and proceeds to seduce one of the twins.

Certainly not one of Hammer's best, but I think it has enough of the requisite fun elements to give you your dollar's worth. It's apparently considered the 3rd part in a thematic trilogy of Hammer films loosely inspired by Carmilla, including the pretty good The Vampire Lovers and the unseen by me Lust for a Vampire. Despite the beauty of the actresses playing the twins, this film is considerably less sexy than Lovers, with only some brief sex and nudity, and I think the film suffers for it. The eroticism is part of what made that film memorable.

One weird thing that didn't quite sit well with me was the Cushing character. He starts off seeming like the obvious villain, an out of control religious zealot responsible for the death of innocents. He's called out for his crimes by the count early on, which makes the count seem like the good guy, but then the count turns out to be the satanist/vampire. And by the end, Cushing has redeemed himself and becomes one of the heroes, helping slay the evil vampires. So I guess his shitty religion is actually good or something? I dunno.

Rating: C+

Excision

Pauline is a peculiar girl. She dreams of becoming a surgeon and doesn't care about anything else. She spends her days alienating and disgusting everyone around her with her off-putting behavior and her one-track mind. And at night, she has bizarre dreams that mix surgery, sexuality, murder and necrophilia.

We've seen a lot of movies about ticking timebomb psychos, where you slowly watch the character unravel until they finally snap, and something awful happens. Excision is proudly in this tradition, but I'm not sure we've ever seen a character like Pauline before. She's not some picked-on, lonely nerd striving for attention who gets the Carrie White treatment. Instead, she's incredibly self-possessed and domineering, forcing her weird personality on everyone else. And if they don't like it, that's their fucking problem. She's bold enough to proposition the high school hunk for sex despite the fact that he has a girlfriend, and then get him to go down on her without warning him she's on her period (it's a turn on for her).

Excision is a wicked dark comedy that slowly turns horrific and tragic. It's buoyed by a great cast (most of them ringers only showing up for a scene or two) that includes Roger Bart, John Waters, Malcolm McDowell, Marlee Matlin and Rise Wise. But the movie lives or dies on the lead performance by AnnaLynne McCord, and it's a stunner. Now, for comparison, this is what Pauline looks like (shown here checking out her bloody tampon), and this is what McCord looks like in real life. Normally I'm not crazy about this kind of stunt, taking a pretty Hollywood starlet and uglying her up instead of casting a more normal looking actress. But McCord is so perfect in the role it doesn't matter; she makes Pauline so peculiar and particular, unpleasant yet real and even occasionally sympathetic. Plus, McCord is kinda fearless in just how little vanity she brings to the role, not afraid to take Pauline to dark and nasty places that would probably scare a lot of other actresses her age off. And casting a hottie in the role actually has a practical purpose, too: in her fucked-up dreams, Pauline sees herself as gorgeous and highly styled, sort of a weird mix of Lady Gaga and Ed Gein.

The other central performance here is by Traci Lords, ironically cast as Pauline's uptight, conservative mother. Their relationship is the centerpiece of the film, as Pauline resents her mother and Lords tries to deal with the fact that not only is Pauline not going to be the perfect daughter she dreamed of, but that her behavior is growing increasingly bizarre. It's a performance that, like the film itself, starts off as parody before developing into something more surprising.

Rating: B

Lisa and the Devil

A sexy, young tourist somehow loses her group and ends up at a mysterious mansion, the home of a blind old woman, her strange son, and a butler that looks oddly like the painting of Satan in the town square.

It's fitting that I watched Lisa and the Devil the day after watching The Old Dark House, since it's sort of like the same film on acid. And even more fitting that I watched it the same night as Messiah of Evil, because it made a perfect counterpoint in showing how dream-like horror is supposed to be done.

I've had an iffy relationship with Mario Bava so far. I mean, you got to respect him. The man had serious stylistic chops. His films set the template for the entire giallo genre, and were a key influence on slasher films. Dario Argento basically jacked his steez for his early films (albiet, vastly improving upon what Bava had done). Black Sabbath is a pretty awesome movie, and I also enjoyed Black Sunday and Blood and Black Lace. But everything else has ranged from mediocre to downright horrible, enough so that you can't help but wonder sometimes about his sterling reputation in the horror canon. I mean, Argento made some shit in his time, but I don't think he ever made anything as worthless as 5 Dolls for an August Moon.

So I'm happy to report that Lisa and the Devil might be a favorite Bava film yet; an ornate, colorful supernatural/slasher/mystery that wows you so much with its style that you hardly notice you've been swept up into a nonsensical story that basically follows dream-logic. It's not scary, exactly, but it's got a lot of effective creepy details. The best might be that Telly Savalas's character carries around this mannequin/dummy guy in several scenes, but sometimes it's played by a mannequin, and sometimes it's being played by a real (unmoving) person. It's an effectively eerie detail that pulls the film into the realm of surrealism.

Rating: B

Tony

A lonely Londoner likes to go out and make friends by bribing junkies to come back to his place to hang out.  Then he kills them so he can prop their bodies up on the couch to watch 80's action movies and porn with him.

In the endless array of cinematic serial killers, this Tony fellow just doesn't stand out enough. It's not a bad portrait of an emotionally stunted, lonely social retard who is compelled to kill. It's just that it's not a very remarkable one, either.

Part of the problem might be the tone. I sense an aura of dark comedy/satire in Tony, but it never fully forms. It paints a miserable picture of lower class London, full of junkies and pushers and predators, without ever seeming to have a point of view on the urban squalor. If the filmmakers had just pushed it a little further, gone a little over the top instead of playing it so close to the chest, broke away a little from the realism, we might have had something here.

Instead, it's a slice of life (albeit, of a strange and unpleasant life) that doesn't have the insight or a well fleshed-out enough world to make it a slice worth tasting. The film introduces an unpleasant weirdo, shows the depths of his awfulness, seems to flirt with making him vaguely sympathetic before abandoning that tack, shows us some lowlifes and I think one sympathetic person (who only has one scene, as I recall), tries to rally for some final act suspense and doesn't achieve it. It's not poorly made (and the acting is quite good) but  it doesn't add up to much, either. I am certainly not one to insist that a movie have a "message" or even a "point," but Tony doesn't have much going on besides a slightly specified take on the same old serial killer cliches.

Rating: C

Messiah of Evil

A woman travels to a small beach town to visit her father, and finds that he has mysteriously disappeared, leaving behind a cryptic, spooky journal. She teams up with some oddball libertine and his two girlfriends, and they uncover the town's shocking (and incomprehensible) secret.

As a fan of strange and surreal horror films, I had been looking forward to Messiah of Evil due to its reputation as a big old creepy slice of WTF. Alas, my friends, this is no Inferno or City of the Living Dead or House. For one, the weirdness isn't really obtained through any powerful imagery (there may be a moment or two, but the film looks ugly and most of its images are banal), more so by its odd, hard to follow plot. Unfortunately, the story doesn't feel incomprehensible in a dream-like way, it feels awkward in the poorly-made low budget horror movie way. Now, I'm fully willing to believe that the filmmakers were going for deliberately surreal, but it just doesn't scan that way. The story is too dull and stiff and follows some pretty obvious horror movie beats. It doesn't lead you along from scene to disconnected scene by way of dream logic like the best of these films.

Bottom line: watch the similar but far superior Dead and Buried instead. You'll thank me in the morning.

Rating: C-

The Old Dark House

Caught in a harsh storm, a group of travelers take shelter in an old mansion, occupied by a very bizarre family with a few dark secrets.

Directed by James Whale, The Old Dark House tops his Frankenstein films for rich, spooky atmosphere and delicious black humor. Whale was great at making scary movies in the spirit of good fun, and this one has such a lovingly exaggerated visual style (shadows galore) and increasingly crazy plot developments that this counts as horror/comedy, but without feeling too zany. Top it off with Boris Karloff as the world's most intimidating butler, and that's some old tymey classic shit I can get behind.

Rating: B

Lovely Molly

After moving into her old family home with her husband, a young recovering drug addict begins displaying some alarming behavior, including strange hallucinations. But is she relapsing, or is there some sort of supernatural explanation?

Bless those Blair Witch guys, they keep trying. They had one monster hit like 15 years ago, but further success did not follow. Blair Witch 2 was a bizarre, awful misfire, and that was that. But they are still out there, plugging away, making ambitious, respectable horror movies that aren't very good.

I want to give props to Lovely Molly for attempting a character driven horror film, but I guess for me the central idea didn't work. Whether or not what Molly is experiencing is real, it still leads to terrible things happening, and what does it matter the answer for why it's happening? I just didn't care about the central mystery, and the movie felt like a slog. Coupled with a lead performance that (by necessity)  has to veer into obnoxious histrionics, I was left with a nicely mounted but empty experience that I found it near impossible to invest in.

Rating: C

Beyond the Black Rainbow

In 1983, a young woman is being kept in some sort of futuristic medical facility, overseen by what has to be the doctor with the world's worst bedside manner. As the doctor increasingly seems to lose his sanity, the woman discovers certain abilities that may help her escape the facility.

It seems that director Panos Cosmatos (son of director George P. Cosmatos) and I have something in common: as children, we spent a lot of time hanging out in video stores, looking at the VHS boxes of the 80's horror and sci-fi movies, pouring over the images, and imagining movies in our heads that the genuine article could never live up to (not that we'd ever even get to see those movies for many years). Beyond the Black Rainbow is extremely evocative of this; not the movies themselves, but rather the bizarre films that ran through our fevered imaginations. I imagine I'm not the only young person out there who can relate to this.

In the interview with Cosmatos that I linked to above, he compares the plot of his film to the music/score; integral, but not the focus, and something he can turn up and down depending on the needs of the scene. What little plot there is in Beyond the Black Rainbow is mostly cryptic anyway, just an excuse to guide the audience on a unique ride through the oversoul of late 70's/early 80's horror and sci-fi.

The film is the most unapologetically psychedelic I've seen in forever, even more so than Enter the Void. It's a film that luxuriates in bold colors (deep blues and greens, stark whites, lush red/oranges), surreal images, slow motion, blurring and focus, minute set details. It's all slathered in a rich synth soundtrack that guides the viewer into a near trance. And Cosmatos is even kind enough to throw in some fucked up monsters as the cherry on top.

If you know me, you should already know how I feel about this one: I loved it. It is consummation of those times I spent marveling at the boxes for movies like Xtro or Return of the Living Dead or Outland and wondering what mysteries lay inside. The irony being, of course, that I would have hated Beyond the Black Rainbow as a child; it's far too slow and obscure. But as an adult, it tapped me back into that primal place of childhood imagination that I hadn't visited in a long time.

Rating: A-

Open House

A radio psychologist begins receiving bizarre calls from a nutcase who gets his jollies killing real estate agents. No points for guessing that the shrink's girlfriend is a real estate agent herself.

I'm not gonna lie, it's only been a few days and the memory of this one is already getting fuzzy. What I am recalling suggests a competent (the picture quality on Netflix streaming was way better than expected) but basically unremarkable slasher movie. It has the benefit of costarring the great Adrienne Barbeau, always a plus. I seem to remember the killer eating dog food out of the can, I guess that's novel. But it seemed like, after a maybe okay beginning, this one got kind of tedious and dragged itself out on its way to an underwhelming conclusion.

Rating: C-

The Awful Dr. Orloff

A crazed doctor begins kidnapping young women, to take their faces in an effort to repair his daughter's disfigurement, and, hey, wait a minute...

Turns out that Faceless wasn't the first time that Jesus Franco made a ripoff of Eyes Without a Face; he had already done it 20 years earlier, in black and white. The Awful Dr. Orloff makes one major change to the template: instead of a female sidekick, the mad Dr. has a giant deformed weirdo named Morpho doing his dirty work. At one point, Morpho kills someone by biting their neck, so I thought maybe he was supposed to be a vampire and that I was watching the wrong movie. But he's not a vampire, just a big psycho who likes to kill in awkward, difficult ways.

This is the 4th or 5th Franco film I've seen. I'm planning on seeing more, because although not exactly... good, some of his films are kinda interesting and entertaining. He developed this weird style where his camera floats around the scene aimlessly and zooms in and out constantly. It's a fascinating mix of spooky and incompetent that I find occasionally compelling, and then there's usually enough blood and boobs to make it watchable. Orloff is one of his earliest, and much more reigned in than some of the later films I've seen. The black and white photography lends an (unearned) air of class to the film, making this the most respectable Franco film I've seen. And I'm not sure if that's a good thing.

Rating: C+