Horror Rises From the Tomb

Hundreds of years ago, an evil wizard and his woman are executed for their heinous crimes. Cut to modern day, where a group of really boring upperclass friends believe they have made contact with the wizard during a seance. The skeptical one decides there is only one way to prove this is a bunch of hogwash: travel to the old mine where the wizard is supposedly buried and look for his body. Right. So of course they accidentally revive the wizard so that he can continue his killing spree.

Horror Rises From the Tomb has everything in place for a fun, trashy 70's Euro-horror experience except one crucial thing: momentum. It's weirdly slow for a film of its ilk. It's not quite Jean Rollin level somnambulant, but the film lacks narrative energy. The story grows crazier and crazier, yet the characters always under-react, everyone slowly stumbles around even when being attacked, the music doesn't pick up much. Even the voice over actors seem bored, delivering their lines mostly in monotone.

Still, it has everything else you could ask for. It looks good, it gets pretty violent, there's some fun low budget special effect, it's pretty weird in places, it's sometimes accidentally funny, and I think pretty much all of the female cast members get naked at some point. It's also surprisingly unpredictable, despite following a pretty standard template. Characters who seem important get killed off early on and vice versa. If I'm not mistaken, the final survivor is a character who isn't even introduced until 20 minutes or so into the film, and doesn't have any dialogue of substance until probably half way in. Yet the whole finale is built around her.

There's also a bizarre detour early in the film that I just don't understand. The protagonists stumble across some locals who chase down and murder a couple of men who they claim are criminals. They shoot one and hang the other, and then take body parts as trophies. The protagonists typically under-react to this, despite how messed up it is, but then it never really amounts to anything in the story. Like an hour later the locals show up again for like 2 minutes, just long enough to get killed by the wizard. Huh?

Rating: B-

The Fifth Cord

An alcoholic, assholish reporter investigates the assault of an upper-class acquaintance for a story (because I guess that's what reporters do?), and begins to uncover a weird, tangled web of, um, something or other. Not sure. Anyways, soon enough there is a killer on the loose, somehow tied to the case, and of course it's up to the reporter to stop him.

Giallos aren't often the most well structured of mysteries, but The Fifth Cord did strike me as particularly hard to follow. I paid attention, but looking back at it, I don't think I could explain what all the conspiracies and secrets and whatnot meant. Especially considering the movie tells us from the beginning that the killer is just a sick fuck who wants to see what it's like to kill; why all the hullaballoo about rich people with dark secrets and underground pornography clubs and all that jazz?

That's okay, though, because it's still a fun and damn good looking movie. It's not as overtly stylish as a lot of giallos were, but it was shot by a DP who went on to shoot, amongst other impressive entries on his resume, Apocalypse Now, Last Tango in Paris and Dick Tracy. Oh, and previously he had done Dario Argento's first film, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage. That kinda makes this a must see for anyone interested in the genre.

I'm not too familiar with star Franco Nero, but I did see him in Hitch-Hike earlier this month. And it's funny, because Nero also played a drunk in that film. He's more likable here (although not much; there's a scene where he slaps his girlfriend around, but then it's totally brushed off), but I wonder if that was a recurring theme in his performances. He's handsome and charismatic, but seems adept at playing unpleasant fuckups. The only other thing I can recall seeing him in is Django, but he's basically just doing an Eastwood impression in that. Might have to check out more of his films.

Rating: B-

The Devil Rides Out

Gentleman, scholar, and all around badass motherfucker Duc du Richelieu (Christopher Lee) finds out an old friend of his is dabbling in satanism. He's not having any of that shit, so he storms his friend's satanist get-together, knocks him the fuck out and abducts him, and proceeds to wage war with the cult. And that's like the first 10 minutes.

Christopher Lee pretty much never got to play the hero, so I can't tell you what a joy it is do see him thoroughly kicking evil's ass in this highly entertaining Hammer production. Although not as lush and sumptuous as most of my favorite Hammer flicks, The Devil Rides Out is one of their most purely entertaining.

Look, we got satanic masses, car chases, hypnotism, ritual sacrifices, an old school goatman devil, demon riders on horses, giant spiders, and that guy who played Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever. This is a movie that wants to give you some bang for your buck. It gets right down to business, and never slows down; it's basically a series of cool set pieces split up by relatively brief dialogue scenes. You want a 60's British horror flick that delivers the goods? You got one.

Rating: B

Not of This Earth

An alien, in the guise of a human, enacts a complicated plan to harvest blood from humankind to save his dying race. Of course, he seems to only harvest from topless women, because it's one of those movies.

There's this concept out there, this cliche, of a certain kind of horror movie. Z-grade trash, cheaply filmed, mostly just an excuse to show off some tits and some gore. Really though, these movies aren't as prevalent as pop culture would like to pretend. Even the most artistically bankrupt Friday the 13th ripoff tends to show at least a little ambition; some attempt to add a scare, or some atmosphere, or some interesting element, or at least come up with a reasonable excuse for why the female characters get naked. Most filmmakers can only be so crass before that realize that movies are hard, and they should try a little.

Most filmmakers aren't Jim Wynorski. I spent an embarrassingly large chunk of my youth watching garbage like Sorority House Massacre II and Hard to Die and Cheerleader Massacre, zero-budget movies that really seem to exist to throw a few titties and some blood up on the screen. They were crass, stupid, and pointless... and maybe slightly kinda fun.

(The one outlier is Chopping Mall, which actually had some real special effects and looked like effort was put into it).

Not of This Earth isn't a good movie, but it's kinda fun in that Wynorskian way, if you set the bar low. Although almost completely lacking in any graphic violence, it marries a goofy 50's B-movie tone to 80's trashiness for a surprisingly watchable final product. It's made in the spirit of fun, and features a feisty Traci Lords performance (one of her first non-porn roles) as the heroine.

The film's biggest miscalculation is to use a montage of images from other Corman-produced movies of the era for the opening credits. It's a bunch of crazy monster and gore special effects, and it gets you expecting something a little more than what you get. (The most elaborate effects in this one are some animated lightning bolts that come out of the villain's eyes). Of course, I guess it wouldn't be a Wynorski film if he didn't steal some footage from another, higher budget film to try to lend his film a false sense of legitimacy.

Rating: C

The Last Wave

An Australian lawyer begins working a mysterious case involving a murder possibly committed by a group of urban-dwelling aborigines. He begins having bizarre, apocalyptic dreams that seem to tie in with the case and the tribe. But what do they mean, and how much to the defendants know about it?

Peter Weir's follow up to the great Picnic at Hanging Rock is a similarly mood heavy drama/horror/art film that pits man up against the unfathomable depths of Mother Nature. Weir once again captures that implacable feeling of existential dread, that we live in a world of terrifying, inexplicable mysteries. Someone should convince this guy to do a Lovecraft adaptation some day.

The Last Wave plays it a little less ambiguous than Picnic, probably for the worse. Although not everything is explained, exactly, there are some answers here, and it maybe steals away a little bit of the impact of the otherwise perfect, inevitable ending. Picnic stays with you long after it's over because it never quite releases its tension; Wave ends spectacularly but definitively, and that sense of resolution will at least help you sleep better at night.

Not that this is a bad film; far from it. It's actually quite awesome. For fans of deliberately paced, imagery driven horror films (with enough skill not to skimp on the story and character development), this is a must see.

Rating: B+

Dead Awake

A depressed young man, still dealing with the loss of a loved one, works at a funeral home. He bets his boss that if he faked his death, no one would show up for his funeral. This sets off a chain of events involving an old flame of his, a whacked out junkie, and some possibly supernatural shenanigans, all tying back to a car accident from years ago.

Although I think ultimately it's more of an everything-is-connected drama, Dead Awake flirts with being a horror film, a supernatural thriller, a mystery, a dark comedy. That's probably for the best; the plot turns out to be so ludicrous that if it was played as straight drama it would likely elicit laughs.

It's not really a successful film, but I admired its ambitiousness, and the solid work of its cast. It's always good to see Nick Stahl turn up in something, a dude who always struck me as one of the most promising actors of his generation but had a career that fizzled out for whatever reason. (It was sad to hear earlier this year that his personal life is kind of a mess; glad to hear he's now in rehab, hopefully getting things back together). He turns in a sympathetic performance that goes along way to making this silliness watchable.

Rating: C+

Paranormal Activity 4

Do I really need to explain? It's basically the same as the last 3 times. Ghostly shit happens, coincidentally all the principles involved happen to be video recording every damn moment of their lives. Blah blah blah. This time we have a creepy kid, and an even more actively murderous Katie. Otherwise: same shit, different sequel.

I'm not going to say I was looking forward to Paranormal Activity 4; I'm just not a fan of these movies. However, part 3 was by far my favorite, and they brought back the same directors, so I thought this would be more along those lines. 3 had a few clever ideas, most notably the oscillating fan camera, so maybe they'd have some cool new ideas for this one.

I guess they have some new ideas, but none of them are any good. The most prevalent one is that the main character and her boyfriend are constantly using Skype, which... big whoop. It doesn't really change anything about the dynamics of the film, except that the "camera" is more stationary, but the film rarely uses that to its advantage. The other new idea is that the family in this film has an XBox Kinect, and when you turn a camera onto night vision mode, you can see the motion sensors as a bunch of glowing dots in the room. I'm not really sure what they were going for except probably a blatant piece of product placement, but it leads to a handful of unmemorable moments where you can see some ghostly figures moving in the dots. It's not a particularly scary or effective special effect.

The one interesting idea in the whole film actually involves the Kinect, where the kids are playing a game and some unseen force briefly starts controlling player 2, using a creepy looking avatar. It kinda works because the avatar is just this blank, stupid face on the screen, but it almost looks like it's peering out at the characters. So of course this turns out to be one brief moment in the film and is never explored again.

The last movie introduced some of the only plot development in the whole series, a weird twist ending where it turned out that Katie's grandmother was a part of some sort of coven of witches, and they were behind the hauntings. I thought maybe they were going to explore this more, but no such luck. Instead we just get a bunch vague stuff about possession, and the family's son being Katie's nephew (which really confused me; didn't she abduct him at the end of the second film? But now he's adopted and living with a new family? And if that's the case, who is the kid living with Katie?) I'm not sure the story is adequately spelled out, and not in an eerily ambiguous way, just in a poorly executed way.

I guess I would say this is marginally better than the terrible part 2. It's slightly less uneventful, and it doesn't botch anything as epically as part 2 did with it's security camera gimmick. (This one uses a similar gimmick, doesn't do anything interesting with it, but at least does a better job framing the individual shots). There's almost nothing to recommend here except, as with some of the other entries in the series, some reasonably likable lead characters. Otherwise, this is more or less a cinematic dead zone.

Rating: D+

White

A struggling Korean female pop quintet discovers an old, beat up VHS tape with a music video for a catchy but seemingly unknown song called "White." They begin performing the song, which starts to bring them their long sought-after fame. But this is an Asian horror movie, so the song turns out to be cursed, and the members of the group befall terrible, mysterious fates.

Gotta give it up to South Korea, they are doing genre movies better than just about any other country right now. It's like what Italy did with Westerns back in the 60's; they know all the cliches, they don't want to regurgitate the same crap, so they are going to take the format and push it into crazy extremes. White starts with the dumbest possible premise and shoves it as far as it will go stylistically. It's full of bizarre murders, nonsensical plot twists, and cute asian girls singing terrible, catchy pop songs. What more could you want?

As silly as the premise seems, they really milk it for all it's worth. It's one of those backstabbing, dark side of showbiz tales, with a bunch if young starlets turning on each other to try to become the biggest star. It's taken to literal extremes, with girls always getting attacked in way relating to their lifestyle; one even gets smushed by a camera while on reality TV.

I might be making it sound like some raucous parody, but part of the fun is that it takes itself totally seriously. It's outlandish and over-the-top, but the atmosphere and suspense are real, and the main character is fleshed out and genuinely sympathetic. It's a real horror film, just one that's sick of the status quo and wants to take its dumbass premise into unexpected places.

Rating: B

The Hole

A young boarding school student stumbles back onto campus one day, appearing dazed and seriously injured. When questioned by a psychiatrist, she explains that she and some other students planned to spend the weekend in some sort of abandoned bomb shelter, but got locked inside. Only, something about her story just isn't adding up...

The Hole gives us the Rashomon treatment, telling the story in a series of contradictory flashbacks. Based on the premise I was expecting something a little more grueling; one of those "ordeal" horror movies where the characters become increasingly desperate and they slowly starve to death, lose their minds and turn on each other. It provides a little of that during one of the flashbacks, but really the film is structured more as a mystery: what exactly happened in the hole?

Although it doesn't exactly work its way to a great ending, and I'm not sure all the stories make sense (seems like some characters have flashbacks to events that they weren't there for), it weaves a good yarn and has a strong center in Thora Birch, playing a character who slowly reveals some interesting layers as the film goes along. Plus, a very young Keira Knightley is on hand, and flashes her breasts, so that's a nice little cherry on top.

Rating: B-

Queen of Blood

In the futuristic year of 1990, a group of scientists make the first human expedition to Mars to track what they believe might be a distress signal from an alien spacecraft. They discover a strange, green woman and take her back to their ship, only to discover that she has a taste for human blood...

What with it's sparse sets, slightly out of date for the 60's corny sic-fi tone, it's plot involving a sorta space vampire, and its vaguely psychedelic color scheme, Queen of Blood reminded me of Mario Bava's Planet of the Vampires. Whether or not it was a deliberate ripoff I don't know (although apparently it was based around a bunch of purloined footage from a Russain sci-fi movie), but it's probably the slightly more successful film. Bava's film is a little more striking and unique, but Queen feels better pieced together, with a more fleshed out silly, unbelievable, fake-looking sci-fi world, and a more intriguing villain.

It also features some early roles for John Saxon and Dennis Hopper (the latter of which looking particularly young and handsome), which adds a slightly appealing nostalgia/curiosity element that Vampires lacked. Although somewhat slow paced, it builds up to an acceptable second half. It's not very scary or exciting, but the "queen" makes for an offbeat enough villain to lend interest to the suspense scenes. She's got green skin and hair, doesn't speak, and seems to be able to bewitch/hypnotize the crew members, so I guess there's this hazy sexual element to the whole thing that I liked. Anyways, not particularly great or even that good, but has a certain something that I found made it watchable.

Rating: C+

Naked Fear

A young woman moves to a seedy town in New Mexico for a dancing job, only to find out that "dancing" of course means "stripping." With no money to get home, she finds herself manipulated and taken advantage of by the various creeps she works for. And just when things seem like they couldn't get any worse, she's abducted by a serial killer who likes to drop his victims off naked in the middle of nowhere and hunt them for sport.

Apparently directed by the dude who did Night of the Comet, Naked Fear is a mostly effective thriller with some resonant themes about the treatment of women in our society. Lest my plot description made you worry this was some sort of misogynist piece of garbage, allow me to assure you that it is not. Although the lead actress does have to spend an uncomfortable amount of the film in the nude (not that she's hard on the eyes; far from it), it's definitely a pro-lady story of empowerment, as this oft-abused women has to use her wits to defeat a madman with literally no resources at her disposal.

The whole hunting segment, which takes up an enjoyably large chunk of the film, is reasonably well done and exciting. This is the real meat of the film, but unfortunately the filmmakers decide to burn off too much of its running time with an extraneous subplot about the police sorta kinda investigating the whole matter. The sole purpose of this seems to be to give Joe Mantegna (the only name actor in the cast) some screen time, but it doesn't add anything appreciable to the film. At an hour and forty five minutes, they could have easily excised all this material, and left the movie a more lean, mean thriller.

After a satisfying climax, the film goes on a few beats too long and settles on and ending that, while thematically appropriate, strikes the wrong note. I appreciate that the filmmakers probably wanted to underline the film's ultimately feminist-ish themes, but what they go for is oddly over-the-top and out of left field. A more subdued ending would have been a better fit.

Rating: B-

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+