Everything about Session 9 feels wrong. Every moment feels a little off and every exchange of meaningless work banter is loaded with a little more tension than you'd expect. Every shot of an abandoned room or a tree seems to be concealing or foreshadowing. It's like watching "Friends" without the laugh track: it makes you want to claw your eyes out.
The sad thing is, From Beyond could only ever have been a disappointment. Re-Animator was such a perfect schlock horror movie, with its mix of creeping dread, savage gore and an incredible hammy villain. And when Jeffrey Combs gets up in that mix, giving one of the greatest displays of anti-heroics ever committed to celluloid, you've got yourself a fake-blood barn burner. Director Stuart Gordon's sophomore horror movie was never going to be able to match up.
There's only one reason to write about "There's Nothing Out There": Mike. Because Mike, the man who inexplicably escorts three couples he doesn't get on with to a cabin in the woods, is such a hypnotically bad-ass dude that he renders anything else of note in the movie (of which there isn't much of anyway) completely irrelevant. Mike knows he's in a bad horror movie and he's not happy about it. At all.
"Basket Case 2" and "Basket Case 3" are not typical sequels. They don't really have the same tone as the first movie and both take the most unexpected turn possible. This is especially weird considering they're horror sequels. One thing I love about horror is the constant borrowing-re-invention and multiple fictions fold in on themselves. This weird nebulous place where somehow "Night Flier" (an upcoming entry in this series) and "Twilight" can share some of the same conceits. Very little of "Night Flier" is about Mormonism though, so maybe that's an unfortunate comparison.
Frank Henenlotter is a cult figure within a cult genre and it's about time he be celebrated. While other 80s horror luminaries like Sam Raimi or Peter Jackson went on to devastate the box office and make a huge amount of money, Frank Henenlotter stayed with weird cinema. He dedicated his life to it, spending 16 years working with Something Weird Video, releasing the weirdest movies possible. Hennenlotter then returned to directing. And like fellow god-tier goresmith Stuart Gordon, Henenlotter stuck to the fake-blood and rubber monsters for all six of his films to date.
Like most things, you can link this back to Leslie Nielsen. The reason "Airplane" is one of the funniest movies ever made, and if you don't agree I'll kill us both without hesitation, is they didn't use comic actors. The comedy comes from seeing serious people deliver insane dialogue with grave facial expressions. (Also: can't wait for the time people realise "CSI:Miami" was a comedy and it gets a serious critical re-evaluation). "Airplane" would not have been the same if Gene Wilder was up in that mix, telegraphing the hell out of all 20 jokes-per-minute that movies has. No shots at Gene Wilder-just, deadpan is the only path you [...]
Thus continues our Horror Movie A Day Throughout October project! Our coverage will move from the shoddy to the sublime.
You've probably seen parts of this movie. And it's good that "Silent Night, Deadly Night" got at least some partial recognition. It was inevitable of course, the forces of nature wouldn't let something like SNDN 2 fade into obscurity. And by forces of nature I'm talking about internet nerds.
Horror movies are so powerful because of the many different ways artists can spin the archetypes. They aim for the most visceral and basic of reactions, but how they go about getting these responses can be fascinating even when the movie is terrible. Such a pity then that zombies and horror have been assaulted by petty gate-keepers of imagined rules, pounding on their leather back copies of What Zombies Should Do, their mouths frothing at the idea someone has defiled the blessed system and their trousers troubled at the idea of a Zombie Tsar who vets all films for their level of adherence to lore. Horror movies are about [...]
Hardware is a movie about a cyborg that hunts a woman relentlessly, murdering everyone who gets in its way. It had the misfortune to be released as the hype was building for the return of the robotic Austrian weightlifter who redefined emptiness of expression and creativity in parking. This inadvertently invited inevitable, illogical comparisons and doomed it to obscurity along with the rest of the rubbish killer robot knockoffs released off the back of the Terminator hype. This is a shame, because Hardware is probably the best sci-fi slasher movie ever made. And sure, its competition is basically the psychedelic Jason X and probably some "Doctor Who" episodes, but [...]
Many horrible things have been done in the name of collegiate tomfoolery. Yesterday Vice unearthed Todd Phillips' horrific lost documentary "Frat House" on Google video. More terrifying and more gross than anything I'll be writing about, "Frat House" gave me some insight into the fact that frats are not just a story device fabricated for American comedies and they do, in fact, actually exist. So what better to look to for some light relief than an 80s B-movie classic in which a corpse-related prank goes awry, releasing zombifiying brain worms on the entire campus?
There's many ways one could interpret "Frankenhooker." It could be seen as a meditation on breaking up. A warning about the obsessiveness and nostalgia that accompany the grieving process and how trying to fill that hole with sex and drugs is dangerous and harmful to everyone. You could see it as a simple tale about what one man will go through just to be happy again. Or you could just take it as a warning not to explode a load of prostitutes, sew them together and stick your dead wife's decapitated head on top. Whichever you decide, they're all good lessons to learn.
Guitar Wolf are from Japan and are a garage rock band. Actually, they're The Garage Rock Band. To say the three members of Guitar Wolf (Guitar Wolf, Bass Wolf and Drum Wolf) perfectly replicate the garage rock sound of The Sonics, The Readymen and The Gories is actually to do them a disservice. What Guitar Wolf actually manage to do is replicate what you'd imagine these bands would sound like if you believed every breathless hyperbolic piece of enthusiastic press written about them. Their combination of blown-out distortion, lethally snotty vocals, immaculate biker outfits, unflappable pompadours and writing the same great song over and over make [...]
This movie picks up where the first left off. That's a lie, I think it happens a few years later. Anyway, Freddy exists in dreams, kills people when they sleep and the more you fear him the stronger he gets. You know the story. At least, I hope you do. If not this probably isn't going to make a whole lot of sense. Even if you have seen the first one, this might not be what you'd expect. This is an odd sequel. It manages simultaneously to be the most-maligned Freddy movie and yet the one that Elm Street nerds want to talk about the most.
In honor of the approach of Halloween, I'm going to be showing bits from a horror movie each day throughout October. I'm a big fan of horror movies and even if they're terrible there's usually something of interest going on… even if it isn't intentional. As the month goes on, the movies will get better and better; we're starting with camp and trash, pretty much, and moving into the wonderful. A note: I know you're a grown-up and you know what's going on but sometimes people can think they're a lot more ready for violence and offensiveness than they actually are. A lot of these entries are going to [...]
Horror movies are rarely beautiful. The gore can be impressive, the atmosphere can be expertly created, the cinematography but the movies are rarely allowed to be beautiful. Dust Devil is beautiful. And not just because they shot it in a desert. It's a great piece of horror, a great western and a great piece of cinematic achievement all at once. Not bad for a demon in a cowboy hat.
Of all the movies we're discussing this month,Blood Diner is the most divorced from reality. It makes an incredibly consistent argument for its own distance from verity. While most films take place in somewhere at least tangentially relatable, Blood Diner drives across that line it in a flaming Cadillac. A Cadillac made of cannibalism, Nudie suits and wrestlers called Eddie Hitler.
When someone stops doing something for 16 years and then gets back in the game, you expect them to be a bit rusty and outdated. The films Frank Henenlotter directed during the first decade of his career were probably quite shocking at the time, but with the "4chanification of our generation" (to quote the worst sentence I've ever read in a college paper) they seem almost quaint. Well, maybe Frankenhooker couldn't be classed as quaint, but it certainly comes across as effective gross-out campy fun rather than a movie that makes you cover your face with fear.
At first, things are pretty rosy for our hero Brian. As long as he brings Aylmer for a "walk," the charming slug will inject blue juice directly into his brain, giving him odd hallucinations which mostly seem to involve everything glowing like the car at the end of "Repo Man" and the feeling that he's being covered in neon liquid. However, there's a sting in the tail. Not only has Brian been neglecting those around him, he has also been helping this mutant slug eat people's brains. That's not so great. What follows is Brian's attempts to give up, the pensioners' campagain to reclaim Aylmer (depsite their age, [...]
In most genres the self-indulgence of actors is not something people usually enjoy, at least not intentionally. Sure, people have accidentally enjoyed I'm Still Here, perhaps mistaking it for a sketch where Zach Galifianakis is experiencing lengthy side effects from a surgery to make him taller. Mostly though, people like their actors to suffer. They have to lose weight (like Christian Bale in The Machinist), bulk up (like Christan Bale for Batman) or put a lot of work into inhabiting the mind of a disabled person (like Christian Bale on the set of Terminator Salvation).
But with horror villains, the opposite is true.
It's a case of adjusting expectations and panning for gold. When you watch a gross of horror movies (pun intentional, apology available upon request) you probably shouldn't be looking for cinematic excellence. It can happen, as we'll learn as we progress in the coming weeks, but more often than not you're being surprised by the occasional good or incongruous element rather than dazzled by a cohesive piece of art.
For instance, there's a movie called "Home Sick" I was going to cover for this series. But when I rewatched it I realized all it had going for it was one incredible scene at the start, where a grimacing [...]
