House of Haunts

Paperback Horror!

2011-12-05T17:18:00.000-08:00

Anyone who knows me knows just how much I love ‘70s and ‘80s horror movie posters and VHS covers (my next comics project, after my current one, will likely involve them). Similarly, I also have a deep affection for trashy horror paperbacks of the same period. Their pulpy, painted covers and foreboding descriptions used to fire my imagination, years before I would be brave enough to actually read any of the darn things. I’m always on the lookout for a few key additions to my collection, and this past weekend, on a quick overnight trip to Summerside, PEI, I was able to scratch a few off my want list courtesy of a games store that carried used books as well.

First up was Whitley Streiber’s The Wolfen. I’ve written before about my love for Michael Wadleigh’s 1981 film adaptation, but I’ve never read the book it was based on. However, for some reason, my grandmother had a copy of the hardcover, and she kept it on a bookshelf in the room I used to stay in when my family visited her. The cover painting for the hardcover edition was graced with this creepy painting…

…but unfortunately, this was not the version I found. I scored a copy of the movie tie-in paperback instead, which for some reason doesn’t use the theatrical one-sheet OR the original hardcover illustration, but an entirely new image that kind of looks more like a pig or something.

I’m a big fan of the made-up adjective “superchilling”, as well as the copy on the back of the book that informs the reader that The Wolfen is “Now A Startling Film”. It kinda sounds like “Startling” is the name of the production company that made it. They didn’t want to quite commit to “Terrifying” or “Horrifying”, and they already used “superchilling” on the front, so…”Startling” it is.

Next up was another novel that was made into a movie I’ve previously written about—The Manitou, by Graham Masterton. This cover employs one of my favourite tricks of this period of publishing—you have your simple, slightly off-kilter cover painting of a beautiful lady, framed in a die-cut iris cameo…

…but then, you open it up, and BAM! Crazy lurking reincarnated medicine man!

Ah, the Seventies. I can’t wait to dig into both of these. I will write about them when I do.

31 Days Of Horror Movies, Part VII: The Final Chapter

2011-10-31T10:55:00.000-07:00

31 days, 31 horror movies. Good times. Here’s the last bunch of ‘em.

Alone In The Dark (1982)

What’s worse than an escaped lunatic on the prowl? How about four of them? Not to be confused with Uwe Boll’s 2005 video game adaptation, this largely-forgotten thriller features a quartet of psychopaths who bust out of the asylum during a power outage, hell-bent on killing their psychiatrist (Dwight Schultz, AKA Howlin’ Mad Murdock!). Among the crazies are Jack Palance as a paranoid war vet, and Martin Landau as a demented preacher. The touchy-feely director of the facility they escape from is played by Donald Pleasance, once again portraying a largely ineffectual psychiatrist (paging Dr. Loomis!). I’m not sure how a movie with such a great cast has gotten lost in the mists of history the way Alone In The Dark has. It’s not a home run by any stretch, but it’s pretty entertaining anyway. Landau in particular is very effective, with his creepy, lopsided grin full of giant teeth. This movie also features a psycho in a hockey mask, mere months after Jason’s first similarly-attired outing in Friday The 13th Part III. There’s also a fun punk rock club scene featuring a band called the Sic Fucks that maybe belongs in a different movie, but is a welcome diversion nonetheless.

From Beyond The Grave (1973)

Another Amicus joint. I don’t know if the EC license got too expensive for the British studio to continue with their adaptations, but this anthology flick goes its own way with a junk shop owner (Peter Cushing) and his store full of cursed items. Wasn’t that basically the premise of the syndicated Friday The 13th TV series in the Eighties? Anyway, the quality of the installments here is pretty varied, as we follow the buyers of a haunted mirror, an accursed medal of honour, a sinister snuffbox, and a decorative door from hell. The stories start out strong with David Warner in the first sequence as a man driven to murder by the malevolent spirit in the mirror, and continue with a creepy segment featuring Donald Pleasance and his daughter Angela as a blind father-and-daughter (mostly creepy because of how much Angela Pleasance looks like her dad!). The third story features a crazy exorcism sequence that must have seemed extra ridiculous coming out the same year as The Exorcist, and the final outing, about a doorway to hell or the past or something, is pretty dull. Maybe a bit better than the studio’s Tales From The Crypt, but not as much fun as their Vault Of Horror anthology.

Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark (1973)

I missed Troy Nixey’s Guillermo Del Toro-produced remake this summer, but I decided to go back to the original TV movie instead. A young couple move into their ancestral home, only for the wife to discover that the basement chimney is haunted by a clan of malevolent little demons. Much like Dark Night Of The Scarecrow, I can imagine that this might have been more effective as a segment in an anthology movie, or an episode of a TV series. The chimney ghouls are pretty silly-looking, and I spent most of the movie trying to figure out where I knew star Kim Darby from. Turns out she’s the star of the original True Grit, which to my shame, I still haven’t seen…but I knew her as John Cusack’s culinarily-challenged mother in Better Off Dead!

The Gate (1987)

I hadn’t seen this Canadian-made chiller in over twenty years, and I’m happy to say it held up just fine. A little boy named Glen (Steven Dorff, in his feature film debut!) suspects there’s something fishy about the hole in his backyard, and he’s right—it leads to the gate to hell, naturally. When his parents go away for the weekend, Glen, his teenaged sister Al and his cool metal-nerd friend Terry are left to fend for themselves as hordes of creepy demon midgets come spewing out of the hole. The effects on these guys is quite startling even by today’s standards; it looks to have been achieved through a mix of stop-motion animation and little guys in monster suits seamlessly composited with regular-sized actors. This is a really fun flick, which seems to belong to a lost genre of kids’ horror movies that are actually pretty scary (at one point, Glen walks by a previously-normal family portrait that now shows his family as a bunch of bloody corpses!). The 1987 fashions are a riot too, particularly during the inevitable teen party sequence.

Amityville II: The Possession (1982)

Wow, this one was dark as all get-out. Basically a prequel, Amityville II (written by Halloween III’s Tommy Lee Wallace) follows the ill-fated Montelli clan, who moves into the famous house only to have older son Sonny get possessed by whatever evil lives there. There is some weird shit going on in this movie. The family—Mom, Dad, teenaged son & daughter, much younger son & daughter—is kind of a wreck already. The father (Burt Young, playing a slightly more malevolent version of Paulie from Rocky) is a drunken, abusive lout, whose long-suffering wife is on the verge of leaving him. Meanwhile, Sonny and his teenaged sister Patricia (Diane Franklin, another veteran of Better Off Dead!) are just a liiiiiiitle too close for brother and sister, if you know what I mean…although once Sonny gets possessed, it gets a lot worse. Eventually, under the evil influence of the house, Sonny shotguns the entire family to death, and it’s up to a heroic priest to try and drive the demon out of him. Directed by Damiano Damiani, Amityville II features some Evil Dead-style camerawork during Sonny’s initial possession, as the camera takes up the demon’s POV, chasing its victim around the house. The movie also features some incredibly disgusting makeup effects—the demon possession is usually portrayed by Sonny’s skin throbbing and bubbling, as well as pulsating veins all over his face, and during the final exorcism scene, his entire face breaks apart like a rotted pumpkin! Definitely an improvement over the original, if only for its go-for-broke craziness.

The Manitou (1978)

I have to say up front that I love director William Girdler. The man behind 1976’s Grizzly and 1977’s Day Of The Animals was not a great filmmaker, but his movies are very fun slices of Seventies cheese nonetheless, usually containing at least one or two bravura sequences that are genuinely original and scary (Girdler died in a helicopter crash in 1978). Based on Graham Masterson’s novel, Girdler’s final film is about an evil Native American medicine man who reincarnates himself as a fetus growing inside a tumor on the back of a woman’s neck in present-day San Francisco. Yes, you read that right. Tony Curtis plays a phony fortune teller determined to save her life, enlisting the aid of a modern day shaman (Michael Ansara). It takes a while to get going, but once the villainous Misquamacus (repeatedly referred to as “Mixmaster” by Curtis) gets loose in the hospital, things start getting ridiculous and fun. I love stories about modern science being confounded by ancient magic, but the only thing better than that is fakey 1970s science, which this movie has in spades. The finale features a naked lady firing laser beams at a midget, and if that doesn’t make you want to watch this movie, nothing else I can say will. Also, if you’ve ever seen The Room, you will find yourself fascinated by Misquamacus’s uncanny resemblance to Tommy Wiseau.

Funny Games (1997)

A family staying at a remote cottage finds themselves trapped in a series of sadistically escalating games with a duo of white-glove-wearing, fourth-wall-breaking, home-invading preppy psychopaths. Michael Haneke’s German language proto-torture-porn thriller isn’t so much gory as it is squirm-inducing; the real-time fallout after the first fatality leaves you more numb than scared, as does the creepy politeness of the two villains, who may be two of the most hateful antagonists I’ve ever seen in a movie. Haneke makes the audience complicit in the movie’s crimes, having one of the villains speak directly to the camera on several occasions, making the viewer question their own motives for participating (i.e. continuing to watch). In one startling sequence, it looks as though the heroes may have turned the tide, but their violent retribution is just as quickly undone when one of the invaders grabs a remote control and rewinds the scene. When the scene plays out again, they are free to change the outcome. As a viewer, the effect is immediate and shocking—not only have you just been completely manipulated into cheering on a brutal act of violence, you are then robbed of the victory when you learn who really controls the rules of the game. Not a fun movie, or a traditionally scary one, but a movie that stays with you nonetheless. Haneke remade Funny Games in English in 2007 with Naomi Watts and Tim Roth, but by all accounts it’s an unnecessary shot-for-shot redo.

And that’s that for 31 Days of Horror Movies, 2011 Edition. Below is the completed list of movies—all caps indicates movies that I hadn’t seen before. I think out of the ones I hadn’t seen yet, Targets and Hausu were the best. Always a blast—let’s do it again next year!

House Of The Devil (2009)
Suspiria (1977)
DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW (1981)
THE STUFF (1985)
THE DEVIL RIDES OUT (1968)
The Sentinel (1977)
HAUSU (1977)
TALES FROM THE CRYPT (1972)
THE VAULT OF HORROR (1973)
House (1985)
IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE (1958)
THE THING (2011)
TROLL HUNTER (2010)
INSIDE (2007)
THE BOOGENS (1981)
Tremors (1990)
Dawn Of The Dead (1978)
Duel (1971)
The Birds (1963)
MESSIAH OF EVIL (1973)
The Amityville Horror (1979)
Terror In The Aisles (1984)
TARGETS (1968)
SNOWBEAST (1977)
ALONE IN THE DARK (1982)
FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE (1973)
DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK (1973)
The Gate (1987)
AMITYVILLE II: THE POSSESSION (1982)
The Manitou (1978)
FUNNY GAMES (1997)

Fake Criterion!

2011-10-30T11:12:00.000-07:00

I love the Fake Criterions Tumblr. If you've never been there, do yourself a favour and check it out. This month, they've been posting submissions for '80s horror movies, under the banner of Faked From The Dead. I decided to throw my hat in the ring this year and submit one for one of my personal favourite horror flicks, Joe Dante's 1981 classic The Howling.

I wish I'd had time to make more, but it took me all month to get around to this one. Next year for sure!

31 Days Of Horror Movies, Part VI

2011-10-24T05:49:00.000-07:00

Messiah Of Evil (1973)

Thirteen years before making Howard The Duck, Willard Huyck (who, along with Gloria Katz, co-scripted American Graffiti and Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom) directed this oddball little number. It’s mostly pretty slow and very rough around the edges (I also saw it on an extremely cheap DVD that didn’t do it any favours), but it’s got one or two great scenes that made it worth checking out. A woman named Arletty (High Plains Drifter’s Marianna Hill) visits the strange seaside burg of Point Dune to investigate her father’s disappearance. She soon makes the acquaintance of a tall, well-dressed lothario (Michael Greer) and his two girlfriends, all of whom promptly move into Arletty’s father’s house with her. They should have all just packed up and left, since Point Dune’s citizenry is slowly turning into robotic, hungry ghouls who cry tears of blood (years before Lucio Fulci would use that gag in Gates Of Hell). At least, I think that’s what’s going on. It’s pretty tough to tell at times. There are definitely some cool moments and creepy imagery here, like a rat-eating, crosseyed albino truckdriver, and an ill-fated attempt by the local constabulary to disperse the growing horde of ghouls. The design of Arletty’s father’s house is pretty memorable, with giant black-and-white paintings of crowds and escalators all over the walls for some reason (I got the sense that the house they were able to shoot in came like that, and they just went for it). The best scene--for me, the one that made it worth watching--is the one where one of the girlfriends goes off to see a movie alone (appropriately, it’s titled Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye). As she sits in the empty theatre, munching giant handfuls of popcorn while watching the coming attractions, the seats around her begin to slowly fill up with the creepy townsfolk. She doesn’t realize until the trailers are over that she’s surrounded, and that all the other moviegoers are bleeding from their eyesockets. By then it’s much, much too late. Not a great movie, but certainly unique.

The Amityville Horror (1979)

Wow, this is one high-strung movie. It’s just filled to the brim with screaming kids, whining Margot Kidder, swooning clergymen, and the sweatiest James Brolin you’ve ever seen. If The Amityville Horror were a person, it’s be that Panicky Idiot from every disaster movie--the one who spazzes out and needs to be shook by the shoulders & slapped until they’re inevitably killed by a falling piece of debris. Why is The Amityville Horror such a hysterical idiot of a film? I think it’s because its insistence that it’s based on true events (outlined in Jay Anson’s “nonfiction” bestseller) makes all the ridiculous shenanigans even more doubtful to any sane or reasonable moviegoer, so director Stuart Rosenberg and his cast metaphorically (sometimes literally) wave their arms and shout a lot and try to convince you that NO, THIS ALL REALLY HAPPENED AND IT WAS SUPER SCARY TOO…when it really comes off as a lot of horseshit. The supposedly true story of the Lutz Family taps into some interesting and fertile material on occasion; a lot of the horrors that befall them are all too financial, and the fact that Kathy’s three children are from a previous marriage adds an interesting dimension to the threat of the increasingly distant George doing them harm. But then, there’s also all the foolish business about the black crap pouring out of the toilets, and the horde of flies that just won’t buzz off, and the terrified priest (Rod Steiger, who must have been wondering how his storied career came to this) who is stricken blind for his interference. By the end of this movie, I imagined that Spielberg & co. made the far superior Poltergeist just to show these clowns how it’s done.

Terror In The Aisles (1984)

This weird little clips-show of a movie used to play on A & E a lot when I was a teenager. It features a theatre full of overacting “audience members” who are apparently watching Terror In The Aisles—that is to say, ninety minutes of horror movie snippets—while Donald Pleasance and Nancy Allen sit amongst them narrating to us the effects that these movies have on us. That part of it is pretentious and kind of ill-conceived, but this is a fun watch because it really does sample from the best of the best. Keep your eyes peeled for scenes from Jaws, The Exorcist, Halloween, Night Of The Living Dead, The Texas Chain saw Massacre, Psycho, Poltergeist, Alien, The Thing, Rosemary’s Baby, An American Werewolf In London, The Howling, and many more, but be warned—if you haven’t seen any of these (and if you haven’t, shame on you!), Terror In The Aisles spoils many of their key scenes. There are also a lot of dubious inclusions as well that no one in their right mind would consider horror movies. Nighthawks? The Silent Partner? Marathon Man? Regardless, if nothing else, this compilation (which is only currently available as an extra feature on the Halloween II Blu-Ray!) made me appreciate what a golden age of horror I grew up in. If Terror In The Aisles were made today, it would likely be ninety minutes of clips from Saw and Final Destination sequels, as well as the lackluster remakes of a lot of the movies I mentioned above.

Targets (1968)

Out of all the stuff I’ve watched so far this year that was new to me, this one was my favourite by a long shot. In Peter Bogdanovich’s directorial debut, embittered horror icon Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff) announces his retirement, stating that his brand of gothic horror isn’t scary in the modern world. A parallel story follows an ordinary, all-American family man who can’t contain his homicidal rage any longer, randomly shooting innocent motorists with a long-range rifle after killing his wife and mother (this part of the story was loosely based on Texas bell-tower sniper Charles Whitman). The two stories intersect in a gripping finale at a drive-in where Orlok is making a public appearance at a screening of his latest movie. Unbeknownst to everyone, the fugitive sniper has taken up behind the movie screen—all the easier to pick off the helpless moviegoers sitting in their cars.

The story of how Targets came to be is pretty fascinating. Producer Roger Corman gave Bogdanovich the job, insisting that Karloff owed him two days worth of work on a movie. He also instructed Bogdanovich to recycle twenty minutes of The Terror, starring Karloff. The rest of the story was up to Bogdanovich. The first-time director came up with the idea of using the footage from The Terror as a movie-within-a-movie—it appears as Byron Orlok’s latest film—and having Karloff more or less portray himself. He then fused this story with the Whitman-inspired sniper plotline, and Targets was born.
The result is a neat commentary on the end of an old kind of horror, and the beginning of a new kind. The final shootout at the drive-in a masterpiece of tension.

Snowbeast (1977)

You know how sometimes you stumble across a movie you’ve never heard of, and you hope against hope that you’ve found a hidden gem? Well, Snowbeast is not that movie. This 1977 movie-of-the-week is little more than a Jaws rip-off, set at a ski resort under siege by some kind of abominable snowman. The little-seen beast looks kind of like one of the Morlock costumes from the original version of The Time Machine…if it were left under a pile of wet, dirty rags and garbage for ten years. The cast includes Bo Svenson, Clint Walker, Yvette Mimieux, and Tim Burton favourite (and the original Mrs. Carlson from the WKRP In Cincinatti pilot!) Sylvia Sidney. Most depressingly, it was written by Psycho screenwriter Joseph Stefano! It’s not even one of the better Jaws knockoffs (give me William Girdler’s Grizzly any day), and it’s so poorly shot that some big reveals—like the corpse of a park ranger that falls out of the ceiling of a cabin—don’t even register. Being a TV movie, there isn’t even any gore to speak of. I’d say avoid it, but you’d probably have a pretty tough time finding it in the first place.

31 Days Of Horror Movies, Part V

2011-10-18T17:17:00.000-07:00

Troll Hunter (2010)

This Norwegian mock-doc follows an ill-fated camera crew who decides to document a grizzled old hunter who is charged by the government to keep the local troll population down. Seems the supposedly mythical beasties have been snacking on the local livestock—not to mention, the occasional German tourist—and the Quint-like Hans is the only man who can destroy them. When the trolls do show up, the special effects, presumably done on a tight budget, are impressive, and the troll designs are cool. However, I think this might have just been one found footage movie too many for me—there are a lot of scenes of the titular troll hunter and the documentary crew just driving around the mountains, and just as many scenes of them running through the woods at night from an unseen threat. This doesn’t bode well for [REC] and The Blair Witch Project, both of which I wanted to revisit this month. We’ll see.

Inside (2007)

Months after losing her husband in a car crash, a young woman whose baby is ready to pop finds herself besieged by a crazy lady who wants to cut the unborn kid out of her. People keep showing up, and consequently, they keep having their faces and bodies impaled by the crazy woman and her ever-growing arsenal of sharp objects. This was definitely not for me. I was going to watch Martyrs this year, another ultraviolent French flick from the past few years, but…I don’t think I’m much of a fan of this kind of stylized Gallic cruelty. It just seemed kind of gross and pointless to me. Does this mean I’m getting old or something?

The Boogens (1981)

The title of this one always lived in infamy for me—something about it always struck me really funny. Unfortunately, this tale of a mining explosion that lets loose a bunch of tunnel-dwelling turtle monster puppets is a pretty dull exercise. The Boogens, who aren't ever actually called in that in the movie, don’t really show up until the final fifteen minutes or so, and the human characters aren’t nearly interesting enough to maintain much interest until then. When your movie’s smartest and most compelling character is a yappy little poodle, you’re in big trouble.

Tremors (1990)

The unconvincing puppety oddballs of The Boogens made me yearn for this tongue-in-cheek exercise in subterranean predators. The desert town of Perfection—population 14—finds itself besieged by sandworm-like “graboids”, who enjoy yanking their prey underneath the ground to snack on ‘em. This one’s really more of a monster movie than a horror movie per se, but Fangoria covered it at the time of its release and that’s good enough for me. The monsters are cool, and director Ron Underwood successfully mixes humour and suspense, but the real reason to check out Tremors is, and always has been, the excellent chemistry between handymen/hetero lifemates/reluctant heroes Val and Earl, played by Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward…although Michael Gross and Reba McEntire (!) as a couple of survivalist wackos who maintain a rec room arsenal that would make Frank Castle green with envy, are pretty great too.

Dawn Of The Dead (1978)

The proliferation of zombies lurching across our shared pop-culture landscape these days made me hesitate to include any walking dead flicks in my lineup, but really, if you’re going to include one, you might as well make it the best one (for my money, Dawn is just a shade better than George A. Romero’s 1968 Night Of The Living Dead). Sure, the bright blue faces of the Seventies-model zombies and the goopy red nail polish-looking blood that splatters nearly every frame of this flick is very silly by today’s standards, but there’s no denying the power of Romero’s metaphor for a consumerist society that’s devouring itself. Tom Savini’s spectacularly gory makeup effects were unparalleled at the time, and are still shocking today (Death by screwdriver! Death by machete! Death by helicopter blade!). The pulsing, synth-driven score by Goblin takes some fun detours, particularly when a pack of rednecks turn a zombie hunt into a tailgate party (“Don’t believe in overworkin’/And I never treat a woman right/’Cause I’m a man/’Cause I’m a man” croons the soundtrack over this scene). Still one of the greats.

Duel(1971)

Stephen Spielberg’s feature-length debut may have been a mere TV movie, but its skillful suspense hinted at cinematic greatness to come. Based on a short story by Richard Matheson, Duel stars Dennis Weaver as a mild-mannered commuter who runs afoul of a murderous, never-seen truck driver on a lonely desert highway. The motives for the trucker’s homicidal tendencies are never explained, but we understand from early on that this is struggle is something of a rite of manhood for our hero; in an early scene, he argues with his wife on the phone about his inability to stand up for her when a creep at a party came on too strong (Weaver’s character name is David Mann—a bit on the nose). Shot on a shoestring budget over thirteen days, Spielberg shot right to the big screen after this; unfortunately, that movie was the forgotten Sugarland Express, but his next film after that was Jaws, so there ya go.

The Birds (1963)

Hitchcock’s beloved exercise in avian assault takes a while to get going, but it’s worth it. I first saw this movie when I was quite young, and I remember being bored by the soap-opera plot—Tippi Hedren’s flakey heiress more or less stalks Rod Taylor all the way from San Francisco to his family home in Bodega Bay, coming between him and his overbearing mother (Jessica Tandy)—but now, I appreciate what Hitch does here so much more. These characters are in the middle of their own various dramas when an extraordinary event—an army of killer birds descending on the seaside town—happens, derailing all their lives. It’s not like they’re just sitting around waiting for something to happen, they’re going about their business and all hell suddenly breaks loose to interrupt them. Albert Whitlock’s visual effects are still startling today, and Hitchcock does plenty with simple sound design as well (like when our heroes are barricaded in their house, and the sounds of the bird army seem to be coming from all sides).

31 Days Of Horror Movies, Part IV

2011-10-14T20:18:00.000-07:00

Tales From The Crypt (1972), The Vault Of Horror (1973)

These two anthology movies, produced by British studio Amicus, can probably be counted as two of the lesser-known entries in the ever-widening field of comic book adaptations. Both feature five short depictions of stories from the classic EC horror titles, as told either to or by five strangers in the titular Crypt or Vault, as it were. In Tales From The Crypt, a group of people on a tour of a series of historic catacombs find themselves detained by a mysterious Cryptkeeper (Ralph Richardson, not nearly as bony or puppety as his more famous HBO counterpart would be several years later), who spins creepy yarns specific to each visitor (said stories feature various ghouls, ghosts, and escaped lunatics dressed like Santa Claus). In The Vault of Horror, five strangers on an elevator are alarmed when the doors open to reveal a nicely-appointed parlor with five chairs, where each of them sits and recounts their recent nightmares (involving vampires, voodoo, and vengeful blind men). The framing sequences to both films also have shock endings that aren’t particularly shocking. Both of them were also written by Milton Subotsky, but handled by different directors—Freddie Francis helmed Crypt, while Roy Ward Baker took the reins on Vault. This might account for the disparity of quality between them; Crypt suffers from a weirdly stilted pace, maybe because the first two installments seem too short while the last three seem too long, and all of them are fairly dull. Vault, on the other hand, moves along nicely, and seems to understand the pitch-black humour inherent in the original EC stories. A fun double bill to be sure, but make sure you save Vault for last.

House (1985)

This tongue-in-cheek exercise, directed by Steve Miner (Friday The 13th Parts II and III, Halloween: H20) from a story by Fred Dekker (Monster Squad, Night Of The Creeps), was a staple of 1980s cable TV, which is probably the last place I saw it. A Stephen King-esque writer, Roger Cobb (The Greatest American Hero’s William Katt!) moves into his deceased aunt’s allegedly haunted house, following both his divorce and his young son’s mysterious disappearance. Cobb is skeptical, but he’s soon besieged by all manner of rubbery ghoulies and malevolent floating garden tools. The haunting may be connected to Cobb’s own experiences in Vietnam, conveyed through a series of flashbacks that feature a very unconvincing Vietnam set (as well as a William Katt who looks exactly like he does in the present-day scenes, right down to the hairdo). House doesn’t try hard enough to be either funny or scary, and as a result, it’s neither. The makeup job on the lead ghost at the end is still pretty cool, but everything else just looks like a puppet.The cast features NBC-in-the-Eighties Thursday night funnymen Richard Moll and George Wendt. Was Michael Gross unavailable?

It! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958)

This Cold War-era schlock classic begins with a cool locked-room murder mystery; all but one of the members of the first manned mission to Mars have all been killed shortly after their arrival on the red planet, and the solitary survivor is accused of doing them in. A rescue mission picks the astronaut up to return him to Earth for his trial, but the real killer—a carnivorous alien being who is the last of his race—hitches a ride and begins bumping off the latest crop of humans one by one. Sound familiar? The filmmakers did too, when they saw an extremely similar plot turn up in 1979’s Alien. There’s no doubt that Ridley Scott’s chestbursting classic is the superior movie, but both films definitely owe a debt to A.E. Van Vogt’s 1939 short story “The Black Destroyer” anyway. This is a very dated movie in a lot of ways—the mouthbreathing monster consists of a guy in a pig-nosed, overbite-laden mask wearing a rubber suit that resembles a burlap unitard. The heroic astronauts have no compunctions whatsoever about firing off round after round of explosive ammunition inside the pressurized hull of their spacecraft, and even in what must have seemed at the time like the far-flung future of 1973, the lady astronauts still have to bring coffee and breakfast to the men astronauts. Finally, even though they do it in Alien as well, it struck me as really funny that the astronauts pause from the action for a smoke break.

The Thing (2011)

I had gone on record for a long time now as saying that the newest version of this classic sci-fi horror tale was going to stink, but I secretly hoped I might enjoy it anyway; after all, it was produced by the folks behind the 2004 Dawn Of The Dead update, which, while not nearly as great as the original, was still a pretty good time. Sadly, though, my initial instinct was correct—this lifeless retread, billed as a prequel to John Carpenter’s 1982 monster mash (itself a remake of the still-great 1951 version, The Thing From Another World), adds little or nothing of interest to the already familiar story. Set in the ill-fated Norwegian camp that first encountered the horrific alien shape-changer, the latest model tells largely the same story, tweaking a few details along the way (not in any way that’s interesting or better than Carpenter’s take). Rob Bottin’s fantastic, imaginatively disgusting practical effects work has been replaced by average-looking CGI, with the new alien beasties all managing to look like nothing more than crazy messes of tentacles and teeth. Important details from the Carpenter version, like the idea that every cell of the creature is a living thing that could infect and replace a host, are never discussed but the characters act as though they have been. And, worst of all, this supposed “prequel” has to all of a sudden rush a sloppy end-credits epilogue into the mix in order to match up all the details of where the Carpenter film picks up! Do yourself a favour and watch either of the earlier versions instead of snoozing your way through this cash grab.

31 Days Of Horror Movies, Part III

2011-10-09T19:53:00.000-07:00

Three more down. You’ll notice that a pattern of movies about houses, and others about devils, sometimes both, is emerging; I noticed this myself when I was compiling my list, and I decided to just go with it (it’s the reason I started with The House Of The Devil). Lots more of these coming, some in this very entry!

The Devil Rides Out (1968)
This classy production from Hammer Studios, scripted by Twilight Zone legend Richard Matheson (from a novel by Dennis Wheatley) and directed by Hammer mainstay Terence Fisher, might be the only time I’ve ever seen Christopher Lee play a good guy (other than Airport ’77, that is). The former Dracula, along with Leon Greene, battles Satan worshippers (led by Charles Gray, best known as Blofeld in Diamonds Are Forever and the criminologist in The Rocky Horror Picture Show) to rescue a family friend from the irresistible sway of the powers of darkness. Not really very scary by today’s standards, The Devil Rides Out is a lot of fun regardless. I’m not sure why Lee’s character knows so much about the mystic arts and how to combat the forces of evil, but it comes in handy about every five minutes or so. This is one of those Sixties horror films where the scares are buoyed by a brassy score—every scene featuring a shock of some kind is accompanied by a deafening blast from the horn section. Most of the dark powers on display are of the hypnotic kind, although there are some cool scenes where cult leader Mocata conjures apparitions from the pit to torment our heroes, like an oversized tarantula, a goat-faced devil, a hooded spectre of death on horseback, and, most confusingly of all, a smiling, bearded dude in a red diaper.

The Sentinel (1977)
In the wake of the runaway success of The Exorcist and Rosemary’s Baby, movie studios in the Seventies scrambled all over themselves to produce the next blockbuster supernatural thriller. Sometimes this led to hits like The Omen, but more often than not, it resulted in turkeys like The Sentinel (not to be confused with the Kiefer Sutherland/Eva Longoria thriller from a few years back). A young model (Cristina Raines) moves into a surprisingly affordable New York brownstone to gain independence from her lawyer boyfriend (Chris Sarandon). There’s a reason why the rent is so cheap, though—the building sits on the very entrance to Hell itself, guarded by the sightless priest who lives on the top floor. The building’s other tenants are all apparently ghosts of long-dead murderers, embodied as a bunch of wacky seniors and a couple of kooky lesbians (one of whom is played by a young Beverly D’Angelo!). Weird reaction shots, an insistent and inappropriate score, and endless, boring exposition scenes abound, and the controversial climax—where director Michael Winner chose to use people with real physical deformities to portray the denizens of Hell (!)—is more sad and depressing than terrifying. To its credit, this movie does boast a shockingly prestigious cast, featuring Ava Gardner, Eli Wallach, Martin Balsam, Burgess Meredith, Jose Ferrer, John Carradine, Jeff Goldblum, Christopher Walken, and, strangely enough, a Hitler-mustachioed Jerry Orbach. It also features a birthday party for a cat. Go figure.

Hausu (1977)
Man, where to begin with this one? Hausu is a crazy Japanese haunted-house flick that truly feels like a small child was given free rein to make a movie, along with a small army of actors and craftsmen to make it happen. Former commercial director Nobuhiko Ohbayashi apparently asked his preteen daughter to contribute lots of ideas, so that explains a lot. Seven Japanese schoolgirls, all with names like Gorgeous, Melody, Prof, and Kung Fu, spend the weekend in a remote house inhabited by Gorgeous’ spinster aunt. The house then proceeds to devour them one by one in increasingly crazier ways. Hausu is a dizzying funhouse ride of freeze-frames, fadeouts, flashbacks, painted backdrops, Little Rascals-style iris edits, dancing skeletons, hungry pianos, carnivorous mattresses, talking severed heads, evil cats, and guys getting turned into piles of bananas for no apparent reason. I have no idea if Sam Raimi saw this film before making the Evil Dead movies, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s a fan. By the way, this movie is often called by its North American title, House, but I'm not calling it Hausu for any kind of pretentious reason or whatever--I'm planning to watch the unrelated 1986 American film House later this month, and I wanted to avoid confusion.

31 Days Of Horror Movies, Part 2

2011-10-04T19:17:00.000-07:00

And now, two that were new to me:

Dark Night Of The Scarecrow (1981)

Dark Night Of The Scarecrow is one of those vintage made-for-TV movies that came from an era that didn’t give two shits about traumatizing younger viewers. This golden age stretches from about the early Seventies to the mid-Eighties, and gave us movies like Trilogy Of Terror, the original Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark, and my personal favourite, 1982’s Don’t Go To Sleep. I guess I can see why Dark Night Of The Scarecrow might have been upsetting to little kids of its day—1981, to be exact—but it’s pretty tame by today’s standards. The final scene is a little creepy, but otherwise it moves along like a lackluster feature-length episode of The Twilight Zone (or, more appropriately, one of its lesser imitators—Tales From The Darkside, perhaps, or Monsters).

This slice of Southern gothic begins in a small farming town, with your standard Faulknerian idiot-man-child, Bubba (Larry Drake, in a role that pinpoints exactly where the typecasting began), playing happily with a little girl while the local mailman (Charles Durning) watches suspiciously. When little Marylee is nearly mauled to death by a dog, Bubba is immediately blamed, and the mailman leads an angry mob to dole out some sweet vigilante justice. Bubba’s kindly mother believes he’s innocent, but implores him to hide anyway. Bubba disguises himself as a scarecrow, but is gunned down by the crazed postal worker (is this where that stereotype comes from?) and his redneck pals before his innocence can be proven. The mob is exonerated in a court of law, but before long, weird stuff starts happening—a mysterious scarecrow keeps popping up, then disappearing, usually heralding the death of one of the vigilantes at the hands of some rogue farm machinery. Is it Bubba, back from the grave to avenge his own death? Is it his sainted mother? Or is it some other, ill-defined, unsatisfactory explanation? Prepare to be disappointed.

Dark Night Of The Scarecrow is a veritable who’s who of “Hey, it’s that guy!” guys, character actors like Drake, Durning, and Lane Smith (AKA Perry White from Lois & Clark). It’s an interesting example of a bygone era in network television, but there isn’t a lot else to recommend it. I guess if I had stumbled upon it when I was eight or nine and just trying to find out what Arnold was up to that week on Diff’rent Strokes, it might have freaked me out a bit, but not now. The fuzzy, sorta-spooky ending raised more questions than it answered. The biggest unanswered question of all, though, is how a small-town mail carrier came to wield such power and influence over his peers.

The Stuff (1985)

Writer/director Larry Cohen was kind of like an alternate John Sayles in his heyday. Like Sayles, he wrote (and directed) movies that were unabashed genre pictures, dabbling in Blaxploitation (Hell Up In Harlem, Black Caesar) before settling comfortably into horror movies like It’s Alive, God Told Me To, and Q: The Winged Serpent. Cohen never quite morphed into a full-fledged dramatic auteur the way Sayles would (after scripting chores on fun monster fare like Alligator, The Howling, and Piranha, Sayles would achieve respectability with mainstream flicks like Lone Star and Eight Men Out), but the two were great at writing horror movies that were tongue-in-cheek without being stupid, and vastly entertaining besides.

The Stuff was Cohen’s great dig at the rabid consumer culture of the Reagan years, tucked away into a movie that works like a cross between The Blob and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. A mysterious white goo bubbles up from the ground, and is soon turned into a tasty dessert treat that America can’t get enough of. When a colourfully southern corporate saboteur named Mo Rutherford (Michael Moriarty) is hired by a conglomerate of dissatisfied snack-food competitors to learn the formula behind the titular treat, he soon discovers that The Stuff is a living organism out to take over the world. In his campaign to save humanity from The Stuff, Rutherford gathers a team of allies, including a kid whose entire family has become zombielike “Stuffies”, the guilt-ridden advertising wizard who helped make The Stuff a hit, a crazed militia leader (Paul Sorvino, five years before Goodfellas), and a rival snack-food proprietor (SNL’s Garrett Morris!).

The Stuff suffers a bit from an obviously low budget—the ambitious effects aren’t quite up to snuff, especially in the finale—but Cohen’s cheeky script makes up for it. Loads of popular brand names of the day are tucked into nearly every frame of the film, giving us a view of an America that was already begging to be taken over by a sinister brand name. The TV spots for The Stuff are a fun slice of dead-on Eighties commercial cheese, and Michael Moriarty is a lot of fun as the delightfully deadpan Rutherford…even if his hairdo makes him look like MacKenzie Astin. All in all, The Stuff is much better than any movie about killer yogurt has any right to be.

31 Days Of Horror Movies--2011 Edition!

2011-10-02T09:39:00.000-07:00

It’s the most magical time of the year once again—the month of October, where I commit myself to a solid 31 days of horror movies! One movie a day seems like the most logical approach, but I like to double (or even triple) up on some days, just in case the schedule of my actual life trips me up later on in the month. I’ve got a loose schedule of films assembled, but I’m not holding too tightly to it since I want to make sure I see lots of stuff that’s new to me. I’ve got plenty of ideas though, lots of horror flicks that I’m excited to see for the first time and lots of others that I’m stoked to revisit after way too long. I kicked it off last night with two that I’d seen—one not so long ago, and another that was an old favourite that I was all too happy to get reacquainted with.

The House Of The Devil (2009)

I first saw this one a little over a year ago, and I loved the superslow buildup and incredibly deliberate pacing…although I’m pretty sure said pacing did render me unconscious a time or two during that first viewing. Director Ti West’s leisurely pace will probably not be for all tastes, but if you’ve got the patience for it, The House Of The Devil is a cool exercise in retro atmosphere. Set in the 1980s, this flick combines that era’s fear of Satanic cults and a babysitter-in-peril storyline, very much in vogue in the horror films of the decade. A young college student, Samantha, takes on an unusual babysitting gig when she’s hard up for cash. Arriving at a big spooky house in the middle of nowhere, she is told that there is no baby, but that she’ll be paid several hundred bucks to hang out there while the house’s weirdo owners go watch the lunar eclipse. Sure enough, she soon finds herself targeted for a fate worse than death at the hands of devil worshippers. Maybe more than any other retro-style movie I’ve ever seen, The House Of The Devil feels legitimately of its era—at times, it’s like you’re watching a Canadian made-for-TV movie from 1984. The slow burn of the movie’s first half makes the inevitable scares that much more effective, and the weird feeling of hanging around a stranger’s house late at night is captured perfectly. My favourite scene doesn’t even involve anything scary: when a bored Samantha bops around the big, dark, empty house to the sounds of The Fixx’s “One Thing Leads To Another” on her Walkman, it’s like a great little mini-music video within the film. The House Of The Devil also features supporting roles for genre vets like Dee Wallace (The Howling), Tom Noonan (Manhunter, The Monster Squad), and Mary Woronov (probably best known for Eating Raoul and Rock N' Roll High School, but to me she’ll always be the mother in the video for Suicidal Tendencies’ “Institutionalized"). The movie also features a fine, understated performance from the incredibly cute Jocelin Donahue, who’s got kind of a young Karen Allen look.

Suspiria (1977)

It had been way too long since I revisited giallo maestro Dario Argento’s masterpiece; ever since I upgraded my home theater system a few months back, I’d been waiting for an opportunity to fire this sucker up, and it was worth the wait. Argento’s tale of an American girl (teeny-tiny Jessica Harper) who discovers that the prestigious German dance academy she’s been admitted to is run by a coven of witches may be thin on plot, but it is one of the most visually striking horror movies ever made. Suspiria is a virtual feast of garish colour, goopy stage blood, and the craziest architecture I’ve ever seen.

Amidst all the operatically-conceived murder, mayhem, and hilariously stilted dialogue (“He’s my nephew, I’m very attached to him”), Suspiria is also notable for having a cast composed of some of the most hideously ugly actors in film history.

There’s no overstating the importance of a good sound system when watching this movie—the wild soundtrack by Goblin virtually fills the room with twinkly piano, booming percussion, and crazy chanting. My friend Alex Kennedy pointed out when we watched this years ago that the movie’s famous tagline—“The only thing more terrifying than the last 12 minutes of this film are the first 92!”—makes Suspiria sound kinda anticlimactic, but rest assured, those last 12 minutes are still pretty terrifying (the appearance of zombified, mutilated, knife-wielding Sara is always a shocker). Now, when the hell is this gonna finally come out on Blu-Ray?

Wolfen

2011-09-18T11:08:00.000-07:00

1981’s Wolfen is not a very good film, but I love it anyway. I find myself throwing it on once a year and enjoying the hell out of it despite its leaden pacing and preachy storyline. It was released the same year as two similar but far superior films—The Howling and An American Werewolf In London dazzled audiences with breakthrough transformation effects, witty, postmodern approaches to the werewolf legend, and buckets of gore. Comparatively speaking, Wolfen seems like the stuffy older cousin of these films, opting for environmental themes and a sober police-procedural approach that doesn’t quite coalesce into a fully satisfying movie. And yet, I always come back to it.

Based on Whitley Streiber’s novel of the same name, Wolfen isn’t strictly a werewolf story. The movie opens as a wealthy New York developer, his wife, and their bodyguard are violently killed by something off-camera in Battery Park, something that moves low to the ground before ripping out throats and tearing off limbs. Boozy detective Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney) is assigned to the case, reluctantly teaming up with younger investigator Rebecca Neff (Diane Venora). Tons of red herrings are thrown their way; were the murders actually committed by the terrorist group whose Patty Hearst-like spokesperson claims responsibility? Do the bodyguard’s Haitian Voodoo connections have any bearing on the case? What about outspoken Native American troublemaker Eddie Holt (a shockingly young, yet still craggy-faced Edward James Olmos) who seems to know a lot about the killings? The real culprit, it turns out, is a pack of godlike superwolves from Native American myth who have been forced out of their native habitat by encroaching development, hiding among the concrete canyons of Manhattan to feast on the rich and poor alike. As I said, not really a werewolf story, but what else do you call it?

The pacing of Wolfen is seriously out of whack, spending way too much time on those aforementioned red herrings when it’s obvious to the audience from the opening scenes that something supernatural is afoot. Finney’s detective character is enjoyably cranky, but not the most compelling lead, and the romantic subplot between Wilson and Neff is pretty farfetched. Far more interesting are the supporting characters, like Olmos as the Native activist, Gregory Hines as Wilson’s wisecracking cop buddy, and notable weirdo Tom Noonan (Manhunter, The Monster Squad) as a zoologist who is sympathetic to the Wolfen’s plight. In addition to the memorable supporting cast, director Michael Wadleigh (Woodstock) makes innovative (at the time, anyway) use of tracking shots for the Wolfen POV sequences, as well as heat-vision photography of the kind that would be popularized by Predator a few years later. The score by James Horner is suitably exciting, although he would go on to cannibalize parts of it for later projects like Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan and Aliens. Wolfen’s real strength, though, comes from its urban setting, shot for maximum creepy impact by cinematographer Gerry Fisher. The central horror behind Wolfen—the idea that, even in a modern-day metropolis of technology and civilization, you could be hunted and torn apart by creatures straight out of folklore—doesn’t really come alive until Dewey and Neff’s final confrontation with the Wolfen on Wall Street. Wolfen doesn’t completely succeed in selling its premise of modern man vs. ancient myth, but it comes pretty close at intermittent moments throughout, and I love it for trying.

The ALIEN Vault

2011-09-17T16:18:00.000-07:00

Alien is one of those movies where I couldn’t possibly say how many times I’ve seen it. I’ve owned it in four formats now—taped off a late night CTV airing, store-bought VHS, DVD (twice—as a single disc and again as part of the Alien Quadrilogy box set), and now finally again in the Alien Anthology Blu-Ray box set. Fans can endlessly debate the dubious merits of the third and fourth films in the series, and the Alien Vs. Predator franchise is probably best ignored altogether, but we can pretty much all agree on one thing—the first two installments are an unbeatable combo of outer space terror. However, my first love will always be Ridley Scott’s 1979 original, a beautiful and terrifying fusion of down & dirty sci-fi and Lovecraftian horror. It hasn’t aged a day, and I suspect it never will. So for a fan like myself, Ian Nathan’s new book from Voyageur Press, The Alien Vault, offers an indispensable peek behind the curtain of a classic.

The Alien Vault details the making of the film in all its lurid detail, all the way from Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett’s script (originally titled Starbeast) to the scribes’ battles with producers Walter Hill and David Giler, and all the way on into the torturous production that saw director Ridley Scott fighting tooth and nail with the studio over budget excesses and design elements, right on up until the early test screenings that reportedly had audience members running to the restrooms to vomit. Nathan seems to have had unprecedented access to archival materials—the book contains scores of fascinating photos from the set as well enough production art and creature design illustrations (including some pretty goofy early attempts to envision the monster as a sort of fleshy, bipedal space lobster) to fill a derelict space cruiser. These production illustrations underscore one of the most fascinating elements of the Alien experience—how the filmmakers charged two separate designers with creating the warring aesthetics of the movie. The visions of H.R. Giger (responsible for the alien creature’s life cycle, as well as the mysterious Space Jockey and his shipwrecked craft) and Ron Cobb (the artist behind the movie’s human elements, like the Nostromo and all the technology within) gave Alien an indelible originality, highlighting the gulf of difference between the film’s vision of spacefaring humanity and the interstellar horrors it encounters. Nathan was also able to interview nearly everyone involved in Alien, unearthing some choice bits of set gossip along the way (Yaphet Kotto got so into character as the abrasive Parker that, when it came time to film his death scene, he got up in the director’s face, insisting that his character was going to survive his alien encounter, despite what the script said).

The coolest thing about The Alien Vault, though, are the many “enclosures” found within—envelopes containing reproductions of design schematics, foreign one-sheet designs, Ridley Scott’s original storyboards (or “Ridleygrams”), script pages with handwritten revisions in the margins, and even a Nostromo crew patch in the form of a sticker. If you’ve seen The Marvel Vault or The DC Vault from Running Press, or the more recent Transformers Vault from Harry N. Abrams, then you’re familiar with this “Museum-In-A-Book” approach. It’s sort of like being allowed to hang out on the production lot of 20th Century Fox Studios after hours, sifting through the most exciting film memorabilia imaginable. More appropriately, it’s like landing on a strange, exotic planet and finding the wrecked hulk of a starship filled with fascinating artifacts of genre film history rather than hostile xenomorph eggs.

Conspiracy Of The Planet Of The Apes

2011-09-12T13:21:00.000-07:00

Between this summer’s excellent cinematic reboot (and surprise smash hit) Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes and Boom! Studios’ solidly entertaining Planet Of The Apes ongoing comic series (and its recently-announced spinoff miniseries, Betrayal Of The Planet Of The Apes, co-written and illustrated by Hulk & Atlas artist Gabriel Hardman), it’s a good time to be an Apes fan. It’s hard to detect where this sudden new surge of interest in the property is coming from—when most of these projects were being planned, the box office outlook for the new film was looking pretty grim—but I’m personally happy to reap the rewards, such as the intriguing new illustrated novel from Archaia Entertainment, Conspiracy Of The Planet Of The Apes.

Written by Andrew E.C. Gaska and sporting an absolutely dynamite cover painting by comics legend Jim Steranko, Conspiracy takes place in and around the events of the original 1968 Planet Of The Apes film. The plot diverges from marooned astronaut Taylor’s plight and instead centers on his colleague, Landon, following the events that resulted in his eventual lobotomy courtesy of Dr. Zaius. Gaska spins a suspenseful parallel adventure to the more familiar storyline of the original film, one that features flashbacks to an earlier space mission gone awry (which makes surprising use of simian imagery to slyly suggest that the whole adventure on the ape planet might all take place in Landon’s mind during cryosleep), while folding in elements from assorted Apes sequels, like the psychic mutants from Beneath The Planet Of The Apes and sympathetic chimp scientist Doctor Milo from Escape From The Planet Of The Apes. Gaska’s plot helps set up elements from the sequels, laying the groundwork for the war between the mutants and the apes in Beneath, while showing how Milo learned of, and eventually retrieved, Taylor’s sunken spacecraft so he could use it to flee his doomed world in Escape.

It’s not easy to maintain suspense when you know the story’s outcome courtesy of a 43-year old film, but that’s not really what Gaska is up to with Conspiracy Of The Planet Of The Apes. Aimed squarely at diehard Apes fans, who know not only the first film intimately but are familiar with the mythology of the sequels as well, Gaska is more interested in unifying the various strands of plot into more of a companion piece to the overall Apes experience. I can’t imagine it’ll be of much interest or use to the casual fan, but having just revisited the entire film series over the summer (check out my series overview at The Coast’s website), I definitely admired the scope of the project and was able to appreciate his knowledge of Apes lore. Gaska’s gritty prose thankfully doesn’t update the Cold War roots of the original movie (Taylor, Landon, Dodge, and Stewart still left Earth in 1972, hoping to conquer deep space before the Communists). A subplot about chimp surgeon Galen and his unfaithful wife doesn’t really go anywhere, and a last-act revelation about the fate of Ape City’s political dissidents is potentially interesting, but the book ends before we can learn more about it (maybe a sequel is in the works?). Archaia has put together a sharp package here, with some beautiful, occasionally nightmarish, paintings by Chris Moeller, Erik Gist, Joe Jusko, Barron Storrey, punctuated by Struzan-esque character illustrations by Matt Busch, although some proofreading was definitely needed before this book went to press (horse instead of hoarse, faired instead of fared, it’s instead of its). Still, as companion pieces to film projects go, Conspiracy Of The Planet Of The Apes takes a surprisingly old-school approach to fleshing out a familiar storyline and melding it with a larger established tapestry, one that Apes devotees would do well to explore.

Attack The Block

2011-09-11T11:21:00.000-07:00

This October, I’m planning to watch 31 horror movies throughout the month for the second year in a row. I did it last year and it was a blast—check out my reports on it at my friend Carsten Knox’s movie blog, The Flaw In The Iris. As I’ve been stockpiling movie ideas for this month-long blowout, I’ve been trying to avoid watching any horror films…which, unfortunately, makes it a bit tough to maintain a blog largely dedicated to horror films. I am, however, always on the lookout for loopholes in the sketchily-defined boundaries of this blog, and since the new UK release Attack The Block contains a lot of elements of other genres—sci-fi, action, and comedy, specifically—I feel justified that, in watching it, I wasn’t draining a movie away from my October stockpile. It does contain enough elements of a horror movie that I think I can get away with writing about it.

Attack The Block comes from across the pond via writer/director Joe Cornish (one of the scribes of the upcoming Tintin feature) and producer Nira Park (pretty much everything Edgar Wright has ever been involved in). It concerns a group of underage South London street toughs—along with the off-duty nurse they rob early on in the film—who do battle with a swarm of toothy, furry monstrosities from space that descend on the city during a meteor shower. There’s not really a whole lot else to the plot other than that; within the ninety-minute running time, the kids and their mugging victim have to join forces against both the beasties and a pissed-off drug dealer, mostly within the confines of an apartment complex called Wyndham Towers (presumably named after British SF giant John Wyndham, author of The Chrysalids and Day Of The Triffids).

The tone of Attack The Block is decidedly in the gosh-wow vein of a 1980s Amblin Entertainment flick, but with a darker edge—most of its protagonists are, after all, teenaged criminals, and some of them meet with bloody demises before the credits roll. Describing the movie as Goonies Vs. Critters wouldn’t be far off. It’s also a bit like the kids from Season Four of The Wire fighting for their lives against toothsome alien yetis, only in South London instead of West Baltimore. The young cast, led by a charismatic and believably tough John Boyega as Moses, is superb. It seems at first that it might be hard to rally behind a group of unrepentant criminals as the film’s heroes, but as the movie progresses, the kids gain more dimension and, with it, more sympathy. The design of the monsters is a refreshing change-of-page from the usual CGI ghoulies; the pitch-black, furry “gorilla wolf motherfuckers” with neon green fangs look to have been achieved through a mix of guys-in-suits and rotoscope animation. It’s a refreshingly low-tech solution that gives the beasts real presence and weight on film. Not everything works—the subplot about the murderous drug dealer Hi-Hatz feels a bit extraneous, born out of some misguided need for a human villain, and an awful lot of the film’s climax hinges on an extremely well-placed nature program playing on TV early on that provides a vital clue about the creatures’ behaviour. There isn’t ever much of an explanation as to why these alien nasties settled on South London for their rampage, but then again, Tremors never bothered to explain why the Graboids decided to suddenly spring up around the town of Perfection either, and it never impeded my enjoyment. Attack The Block races through its running time with loads of style and wit, buoyed by a strong cast and a cool new kind of monster. See it before the inevitable American remake.

Swamp Thing #1, Animal Man #1

2011-09-07T20:18:00.000-07:00

Apologies up front—my updates here at the House Of Haunts have been pretty scarce lately, mostly due to the run-up and recovery from this year’s Fan Expo convention in Toronto (where I was off selling copies of my Eighties Pro Wrestling comic, Slam-A-Rama). I failed to score autographs from Robert Englund, Lance Henriksen, Michael Biehn, and Tom Savini—the lineups were too damn long—but I did snag an original 1979 poster for Prophecy: The Monster Movie for a measly twenty bucks, so there’s that. Anyway…

It’s old news to comics fans by now that DC is relaunching their entire line all September with 52 brand new number one issues, spanning a wide variety of genres—okay, mostly capes-and-tights stuff, but classic non-superhero titles like All-Star Western and Men Of War are getting a spit-and-polish too. Of course, DC has a proud tradition of publishing titles that straddle the line between superheroes and horror; it’s from out of this tradition that the venerable Vertigo label was born in the early Nineties, as titles like Sandman and Doom Patrol graduated from the DC Universe to deluxe format, mature readers-labelled books. So naturally, two of the most fondly-remembered comics from the Vertigo inaugural class—Swamp Thing and Animal Man—are once again part of the DC Universe, kicking off a horror-edged sub-imprint of the so-called “New 52”. Both of these titles have an intimidating legacy to live up to—after all, they did kick off the American comics careers of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, respectively, ushering in a new era of “Sophisticated Suspense” (this tagline adorned Moore’s Saga Of The Swamp Thing for much of its run) and selling strongly in collected editions for years, even to this day. With such a frankly terrifying precedent, how do these new interpretations hold up?

Quite well, as it turns out, thanks to each book’s energetic creative teams and a surprising mix of both new and old ideas. Animal Man, written by Canadian superstar Jeff Lemire (Essex County), works as either an entirely new series, or as a continuation of the character’s previous incarnation, depending on your level of familiarity. The title hero, known publicly to be former stuntman-turned-superhero Buddy Baker, is a mostly-retired crimefighter when the story begins—he’s more interested in acting (he plays—what else?—a washed-up superhero in a gritty indie drama) and spending time with his wife Ellen and their two kids, Cliff and Maxine. Still, he occasionally pulls on the tights to help when needed, like when a grieving father takes a bunch of kids in a cancer ward hostage. During this crisis, Buddy’s powers—which involve siphoning animal abilities from the “Life Web”—start acting strangely, causing him to bleed from his eyes. Things get weirder still Cliff wakes from a horrific nightmare about Maxine and some monstrous apparitions called the Hunters Three, only to find Maxine playing in the backyard with some creepy new four-legged friends. Lemire’s homespun approach to the fantastical, honed to perfection in the Vertigo monthly Sweet Tooth, fits nicely with the balance of the domestic and the horrible established in Morrison’s Animal Man. The art by Travel Foreman (The Immortal Iron Fist) is startling and nightmarish, in the mold of New Mutants-era Bill Sienkiewicz. His work really comes alive in the more outlandish set pieces, such as his depiction of how Buddy’s powers work (and their strange new consequences), the gray-and-red dream sequence, and on the super-weird last page cliffhanger.

While new readers can come to Animal Man pretty much cold—there’s a passing reference to the Justice League, but that’s about it for acknowledging the larger DCU—the relaunched Swamp Thing may prove a bit more intimidating as a first issue. That doesn’t mean that new readers who only know the character from the 1982 Wes Craven film or its soggy sequel should be put off, even if they haven’t read Brightest Day or The Search For Swamp Thing. I haven’t, and I still was taken with/thoroughly creeped out by this new take on the classic muck-monster. A mysterious rash of animal deaths catches the attention of various Justice League members, causing Superman to seek out Alec Holland, formerly known as the Earth Elemental called Swamp Thing (well, sort of—it’s a bit complicated). Recently returned from the dead, the scientific genius is now a humble construction worker who knows nothing about any supernatural mysteries of either the dead animal kind or the one where a strange twister carried a mastodon skeleton out of an archaeological dig a few pages earlier. Where his swampy alter ego was a living avatar of the plant world, Holland now believes that Swamp Thing’s precious “Green” is a place of violent nature run amok, and he wants no part of it. Of course, The Green isn’t quite done with him yet. Writer Scott Snyder (American Vampire, Detective Comics) gets off to a shaky start with all those superhero cameos and references to previous series and crossover events, but when the horror stuff kicks in, Swamp Thing takes off. A group of archaeologists, discovering that their mastodon fossil is missing, are attacked by something pretty awful; whatever it is, it involves flies and backwards-turned-heads, both of which are callbacks to Alan Moore’s legendary run on Saga Of The Swamp Thing. However, you don’t need to get the reference to be seriously unnerved by this sequence. Yanick Paquette (another Canadian!) wouldn’t have been my first choice to draw this book, as his work has been previously…er, rooted in more realistic depictions of the human form; it also usually involved a fair bit of T & A. However, the more realistic elements of his art style provide a striking and effective counterpart to the supernatural craziness of whatever the hell the book’s antagonist is (Paquette brings a bit of classic Bissette-and-Totleben to his rendering of it), and his Swamp Thing, unseen until the final page, has just the right mix of noble and monstrous. I’m still not totally sold on the “New 52”, but the creepier corners of the DC relaunch are most definitely off to a solid start.

Fright Night (2011)

2011-08-22T05:59:00.000-07:00

Might as well get used to it—remakes, like CGI effects, Photoshopped movie posters, and Michael Bay movies, are here to stay. Original ideas are obviously preferred, but in the meantime, you can always bet that some studio or other is in the process of reimagining Your Cherished Childhood Favourite Movie this very minute. Once you’ve accepted that fact, it makes it a lot easier to dole out praise when a remake is done right, like Craig Gillespie’s slick, witty Fright Night. The 2011 model retains the basic setup and tongue-in-cheek flavour of Tom Holland’s 1985 original (see my review here), while adding enough of its own flourishes to justify its existence.

This time out, Charley Brewster (Anton Yelchin) lives in a prefab suburb of Las Vegas, where he begins to suspect that his buff douche of a neighbour, Jerry Dandridge (Colin Farrell) is a bloodsucker. At first, Charley’s too busy having a girlfriend (Imogen Poots—think Scarlett Johansson’s little sister) for the first time in his life to listen to the theories of his cast-aside nerd pal Evil Ed (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) when a surprising number of neighbours and classmates start disappearing. However, it’s not long before Charley is convinced that Jerry is a vampire, and his only recourse is to try and recruit Vegas-based occult stage performer Peter Vincent (former Doctor Who David Tennant) to help him slay his quite literal neighbour from hell.

Written by Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s Marti Noxon, the new Fright Night is most definitely a post-Buffy vamp spin, with lots of rapid banter and modern flair. Setting the film just outside Las Vegas is an inspired touch—Jerry has his pick of a mostly-transient population that sleeps all day and is looking to party after sundown. Changing the character of Peter Vincent from a late-night horror host to a Vegas entertainer seemed like an awkward fit at first, but David Tennant sells it well, crossbreeding Criss Angel with Russell Brand for a refreshingly foulmouthed performance. Tennant’s Vincent is largely absent from much of the film’s advertising, but that’s a good thing—it’s better to discover the unexpected layers of this character within the movie rather than in a trailer. Anton Yelchin is a solid fit as Charley, bringing a lot more depth and personality to a character that was pretty one-dimensional in the 1985 original (sorry, William Ragsdale—not your fault, but the original Charley was a bit under-written). The real star of the show, though, is Colin Farrell, who, like Chris Sarandon before him, looks to be having the time of his life playing Jerry Dandridge. Farrell’s vamp is just as much at home lounging in an easy chair, drinking a beer and watching one of the Real Housewives spinoffs, as he is when he’s tearing the throat out of a stripper. He and Yelchin have a great antagonistic chemistry too—one highlight is an early scene where Jerry hovers, uninvited, outside the door to Charley’s kitchen, trying to tease out an invite that is not forthcoming any time soon. Craig Gillespie’s sure-footed direction maintains the suspense—especially in a claustrophobic night attack on the Brewster family minivan that recalls both Children Of Men and Spielberg’s War Of The Worlds—while maintaining the just-shy-of-comedic tone that this new Fright Night shares with its predecessor. And, even though the whole 3D gimmick is beyond tired, the effect works quite well in a number of scenes, especially when vampires explode in a shower of cindery sparks. If all remakes were pulled off this effectively…well, I’m sure I’d still complain about it (the trailer for the 2011 redo of The Thing had me gnashing my teeth before the movie started), but maybe a bit less so. In any event, though, Fright Night is that rare horror remake that may not be necessarily better than the original, but it still definitely doesn’t suck.

Fright Night (1985)

2011-08-13T08:58:00.000-07:00

The 1985 Fright Night is the kind of movie that was perfect for repeat cable viewing and multiple VHS rentals in the mid-Eighties. It appears to have been aimed squarely and expertly at the kids of the day (speaking from experience, it hit the target pretty much dead on). It’s scary, it’s funny, it’s gross, it’s titillating but not too titillating--I think there’s maybe one topless shot--and there’s exactly one f-bomb. It wants to scare you and make you laugh. Largely, this vamped-up riff on Rear Window succeeds at doing both.

Charlie Brewster (William Ragsdale) is an average suburban kid who suspects that his new neighbour, the inoffensively named Jerry Dandridge, might be a vampire. Charlie is so average, in fact, that he appears to have almost no personality whatsoever--his only motivations in life appear to be a) finally getting to home base with his girlfriend Amy (Amanda Bearse, best known from Married With Children), and b) exposing Jerry for the bloodsucker he is. Shortly after Jerry and his “live-in carpenter” Billy Cole (Jonathan Stark) move in to the neighbourhood, reports of dead prostitutes start popping up in the nightly news—dead prostitutes last seen alive making out with a fanged Jerry across the way. An increasingly desperate Charlie recruits his weirdo pal Evil Ed (Stephen Geoffreys) and faded horror movie star and late night shriek-show host Peter Vincent (Roddy MacDowall) to help him slay the vamp. Vincent is obviously skeptical at first, but when he realizes Jerry doesn’t cast a reflection in the mirror, he has to put his Hollywood vampire-killing skills to the test for real.

Fright Night was written and directed by Tom Holland, screenwriter of Psycho II and writer/director of Child’s Play, and it’s the best showcase for his particular mix of humour and horror. Holland layers in a bit of suburban homosexual dread—Billy is obviously Renfield to Jerry’s Dracula, but it’s strongly hinted that they might also be lovers. Certainly in the buttoned-down, Reagan-era suburbia of the film, the possibility that the new neighbours might be gay could be just as terrifying to Charlie as the possibility that they might be vampires. The effects by Richard Edlund (Raiders Of The Lost Ark) are delightfully gooey—the high points are Billy’s green-slime meltdown on the stairs, Vampire Amy’s freakishly toothsome maw, and Evil Ed’s transformation back from wolf to man. The latter is a surprisingly startling and unnerving sequence, in no small part due to the inspired sound design that mixes human and animal noises to squirmy effect. Chris Sarandon plays Jerry as a sinister, immortal dandy, and he appears to be having a blast with the role. Roddy MacDowall shines as Peter Vincent, alternately embittered and terrified (his movie-within-a-movie scenes are a treat too—watch as his onscreen alter ego brazenly wields a wooden stake with the pointy end facing the wrong way). However, it’s Stephen Geoffreys as Evil Ed who steals the show. He’s like a jittery, screechy-voiced, baby Jack Nicholson, all nervous laughter and twitchy tics. Fright Night is by no means a classic—the pacing near the conclusion is especially creaky, consisting of a lot of Charlie and Peter having to first run up, then down, then back up the stairs of Jerry’s house—but it’s a fun snapshot of the crest of the horror boom in the 1980s, right before endless slasher sequels starting sucking the fun out of the genre.

The Finalest Destination

2011-08-11T18:11:00.000-07:00

My buddy Mark Palermo was trying the other day to convince me that I should watch and review all of the movies in the Final Destination series, in preparation for the release of the newest installment, Final Destination 5, this weekend. He further tried to win me over by sending me this montage of all the death scenes from the series so far. Nice try, Mark, but I don't think I can go through with it. However, I do recommend following the above link if you want to see some context-free, mostly computer-generated, extreme brutality. You'd be surprised at how quickly you become desensitized to it.

I've only actually seen the first Final Destination, and I wasn't a big fan. I was sort of going with it for the first three-quarters of the movie or so, but by the end I was all out of love. I think my problem with the movie, and by extension, the franchise, is that the supposed villain of the series has no literal or figurative presence--it's the abstract concept of Death Itself, who really hates being thwarted and makes up for it with a series of increasingly unlikely and elaborate deathtraps. Sure, there may be a fun geekshow aspect to seeing just how the cast of characters meet their bloody demises, but it's not really scary--after all, how scary is it being chased around by an abstract concept, one only occasionally given voice by Tony Todd's perennially whispery undertaker character? It's sort of like David Cross's stand-up bit about how silly it is to wage a War on Terror; he maintains that you might as well wage a War on Jealousy. Similarly, it seems to me that the idea of being chased around by Death is about as scary, or likely, as being chased around by Jealousy.

Now I've done it. I've gone and hurt Death's feelings. If Final Destination taught me anything, it's that He/She is surprisingly sensitive. I may have just signed my own death warrant. But hey, if it makes Him/Her feel better, the movie does have a pretty cool teaser poster:

My Dinner With Leatherface

2011-08-09T17:54:00.001-07:00

Okay, so I didn't actually get to have dinner with Leatherface. I just really wanted to use that title. But this past Saturday, at the first annual Summer Fear event in Tatamagouche, NS, I did eat a hot dog across the room from Gunnar Hansen, the power tool enthusiast from Tobe Hooper's original Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Summer Fear is a new annual horror event that takes place in the Tatamagouche Grain Elevator, which has been converted into a sort-of community arts centre, and Mr. Hansen was the event's inaugural special guest. The hot dog cart parked outside the grain elevator filled the venue with the smell of cooking meat, which seemed appropriate, give the carnivorous tendencies of Mr. Hansen's alter ego. I drove up with my employer, Calum Johnston of Strange Adventures Comic Bookshop, to set up a vendor's table and get my TCM DVD signed. Some short movies were screened--Jason Eisener's Treevenge and Jason Shipley's Blood Shed, among others--along with the trailer for the upcoming feature The Corridor, and other assorted short films and trailers, and Mr. Hansen (a friendly, engaging, grandfatherly dude, but still a tall, imposing drink of water) hosted an hourlong Q and A where he shared funny anecdotes from the filming of the 1974 classic that made him a horror icon. He also revealed that he has agreed to a role in the forthcoming Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D, but he couldn't say what that role was just yet (other than the fact that he's not reprising his most famous role). There were even some fans in costumes, including a Michael Myers who just couldn't resist buying his little plush doppelganger from our table...

...and even a wannabe Leatherface.

Nice try, pal, but it's pretty tough to compete with the original!

The NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET Artwork of Matthew Joseph Peak

2011-08-07T13:57:00.001-07:00

I picked up a used Blu-Ray copy of the original Nightmare On Elm Street today, and while I was happy to usher this flick into my hallowed Three Format Club (meaning I owned it on VHS, DVD, and now Blu-Ray), I was pretty disappointed with the cover artwork. It’s just Freddy Krueger’s distinct silhouette against a red backdrop. My irritation at this lazy cover dovetailed nicely with a conversation I had with my buddy James (aka Signalnoise Studios) just the other night about the painted movie posters for the original Elm Street film series. I did a bit of digging today, and was shocked to find that, not only are the first five posters done by the same artist (based on the style of them, I’d always suspected this, but never actually bothered to confirm it until now), but that they are done by a fellow named Matthew Joseph Peak, who just happens to be the son of one of the all-time greatest movie poster artists, Bob Peak! Great talent really does run in the family, I guess. But don’t take my word for it, check out the original five posters below. I left off Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare because it was created by another artist (and the movie stinks), and I also didn’t include Wes Craven’s New Nightmare and the 2010 Elm Street remake—neither of them belong to the original series, and neither of them have painted posters. Feast your eyes on these beauties, though…

It also turns out that the makers of the recent documentary Never Sleep Again, which focuses on the history of the original Elm Street series, contracted Peak to do a poster for their film--an immensely smart and classy move, I think, and the results speak for themselves:

I’m still reeling from the knowledge that the guy behind these incredible illustrations is the son of the artist who created some of the most exciting and influential movie posters ever (Apocalypse Now, Superman: The Movie, Excalibur…he even makes Every Which Way But Loose look epic!), but it makes perfect sense. Check out Matthew Joseph Peak’s website here, and check out the official Bob Peak website here. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the massive coffee table book of the elder Peak’s work being released this November—it’s available for pre-order on his site. I’ve already ordered mine, and I can’t wait to get my hands on it.

This is an old gripe of mine, but I miss painted movie posters like I would miss an amputated limb. Every trip to the movies is a little bit poorer without the work of guys like Struzan, Amsel, and Peak (junior and senior!) hanging on the walls of the theatre to excite your imagination. A painted poster used to be a key component in the marketing of a motion picture, and now it seems to be an afterthought that’s largely driven by a bunch of marketing guys trying to copy what worked for somebody else. Can you imagine anyone ever marketing Jaws without using John Berkey’s iconic artwork?

Does An Inside-Out Bear Shit In The Woods?

2011-07-31T10:51:00.000-07:00

1979’s eco-thriller Prophecy and I go way back. Probably to about when I would have been 7 or 8, when I first caught it on ABC’s Friday Night Movie. I have no idea what business I had staying up so late to watch a scary movie at that impressionable young age, but it certainly stayed with me. If you haven’t seen it and have a taste for fine Seventies cheese—that particular vintage that reeks of a respectable director (John Frankenheimer, no less) slumming in a genre that he clearly didn’t understand, and a major studio trying to cash in on the decade’s horror craze—then you might want to seek out this environmentally conscious wedge of fromage.

Robert Foxworth plays a magnificently permed and bearded doctor of the socially conscious variety investigating the effects of mercury poisoning from a paper mill in the woods of Maine (this particular Maine has lots of mountains, go figure—apparently the movie was shot in British Columbia). The kindly paper mill manager (Richard Dysart) insists that everything they do is up to code, but the mutated critters roaming the forest beg to differ; there’s a crazed, spastic raccoon, a six-foot trout, and a ravenous bear-thing with a ruined face and a penchant for laying waste to mill employees and hapless campers alike. The local Native Americans, who are locked in a bitter struggle with the mill owner over the carelessness of their toxic byproduct disposal, think that this beast is the latest incarnation of Katahdin, a kind of Sasquatchy forest protector come to drive out the evil white man. Unfortunately for them, Katahdin isn’t too picky about who he chows down on in the end.

Make no mistake, Prophecy (subtitled The Monster Movie, which always struck me as a bit uppity) is a very silly movie. The characters—idealistic doctor, friendly-but-ultimately-sinister company man, heroic Native American (a very not Native American Armand Assante)—are all pretty thin, and the story is all kinds of preposterous. The effects are, largely, extremely goofy and unconvincing, and the monster attacks are shockingly inept in their presentation. Surely the director of The Manchurian Candidate should have some idea of how to create and maintain suspense! The most promising subplot doesn’t go anywhere; the doc’s wife (Talia Shire), having eaten some tainted fish, is terrified about the effects of the mercury poisoning on her unborn child, but we never get to find out if she gives birth to some kind of crazy mutant or something. However, a lot of unintentional laughs arise from the doctor’s complete cluelessness—his wife hasn’t told him she’s pregnant yet, and all of her not-so-subtle hints about her condition sail right over his curly head.

I say all this, and yet I still heartily recommend Prophecy, if you’re at all into this sort of thing. I have a much bigger tolerance for lousy '70s horror than any other decade, so that helps, for me at least. The cinematography by Harry Stradling Jr. is pretty sharp. It’s a good movie to crack a few beers over, and have some laughs with friends. There is at least one very shocking and gross special effect that’s worthwhile—a couple of Katahdin’s horrible offspring are discovered in a fishing net, and the animatronic creatures—the kind of slimy special effect that my friend Aaron Bower calls “wet Muppets”—are suitably, fascinatingly, disgusting. They also add a layer of suspense to Talia Shire’s delicate condition, possibly foreshadowing what she can expect when she gives birth. She even tries to save one of the creatures, but is rewarded by nearly having the ugly critter tear her throat out. The real reason to watch Prophecy, though, comes when a family of campers—a father, his teenaged daughter, and a young boy—are attacked and killed by Katahdin. The boy is wrapped up in a bright yellow down sleeping bag, and he tries to hop away from the crazed beast. One swing of Katahdin’s mighty paw later, the kid is fired across the campsite like a banana fired out of a bazooka, and he fairly explodes against a tree stump in a bloody mushroom cloud of feathers (don’t take my word for it, check it out here). This scene, more than any other, stayed with me as a kid, and as an adult, I was convinced that I remembered it wrong. How could that scene have possibly played out that way? Turns out I remembered it exactly right. I love when that happens. Prophecy also has a delightfully gross one-sheet, which adorned the VHS version and the earlier DVD release. I finally ordered a DVD copy of my own recently, though, and was bummed out to see that the most current version (it’s still not out on Blu-Ray, and I can't imagine it ever will be) has a shitty new cover that does use the original artwork, but has a stupid new tag line and a butt-ugly design. I expect better reissues of my charmingly lousy monster flicks! This isn’t just ANY Monster Movie, after all, it’s THE Monster Movie.

Screamland

2011-07-24T17:13:00.000-07:00

I’m a little disappointed in myself that I only just recently learned about Screamland by Harold Sipe, Christopher Sebela, Hector Casanova, and Lee Leslie. I love monsters (and have a particular soft spot for the classic Universal guys), I love stories about Hollywood sleaze of yesteryear, and I love comic books. So the fact that a comic book series that delves into the sleazy backstories of classic movie monsters trying to scrape by in today’s CGI-enhanced, youth-obsessed Hollywood eluded me until the debut of the new ongoing series a few months back is, frankly, more than a little embarrassing. Thankfully, Image Comics has released the original 5-part miniseries in a new trade paperback, so I’m finally up to speed.

Screamland takes place in a world where the famous movie monsters are real and they all portrayed versions of themselves on screen in their heyday, appearing in multiple horror sequels until they were put out of work by the science fiction craze of the 1950s. In the original mini, the gang is (mostly) reunited when they are offered parts in the big-screen adaptation of a manga series called Monsterhunter 3000. The monsters are a pretty sorry lot; Frankenstein’s Monster is an alcoholic with a combover, the Wolfman spends his days signing autographs on the fantasy convention circuit and sleeping with as many groupies as possible, Dracula fights a never-ending battle against the tabloids to conceal his sexual identity, and the Mummy is involved in a protracted legal struggle to recover treasures raided from his tomb by greedy archaeologists (that is, when he’s not too busy ducking Homeland Security, who see him as a suspicious, possibly hostile foreign national). The ongoing Screamland series, now two issues in, follows the Wolfman and several other new characters (an Invisible Man, a Blob, and a faded sci-fi TV star, among others) as they try to halt the release of an epic porno film they all participated in back in the cocaine-fueled 1970s.

The scripts by Harold Sipe and Christopher Sebela (who co-writes the ongoing series) pack a one-two punch of biting Hollywood satire and dead-on comic timing, while the art--Hector Casanova illustrated the original mini, while Lee Leslie takes over for the ongoing, faithfully maintaining the book's established visual style--combines the rough, simple linework of Jeff Lemire with the murky textures of Ben Templesmith or Ashley Wood. The trade paperback of the original series serves as a solidly funny introduction to the cast of characters and their litany of personal and career woes (although the conclusion to the Monsterhunter 3000 storyline does seem a bit rushed). The ongoing series is off to a promising start, with lots of jabs at the current state of horror movies, sci-fi conventions, and a murder mystery to boot. Screamland shows that you can’t keep a good monster down, but you can find plenty of humour in the wreckage of his career.

Shock Value

2011-07-21T18:21:00.000-07:00

One of my all-time favourite books is Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind’s fascinatingly trashy history of 1970s Hollywood. Biskind details how a bold young group of innovative new directors—Spielberg, Scorsese, Friedkin, Coppola, and Cimino, to name a few—took the movie business over from the suits with a string of critical and commercial hits…only to blow their newfound cachet on expensive vanity projects that, in some cases, derailed their careers. Imagine my enthusiasm, then, when I learned about a new book that told a similar tale, one that follows the trajectory of a trailblazing group of horror directors who helped make the genre respectable (more or less) in the very same decade. The book is Shock Value by Jason Zinoman, and it’s a must-read for fans of the new age in horror that brought us films like Halloween, Alien, Carrie, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

The early chapters of Shock Value deal with the impact of films like Night Of The Living Dead and Rosemary’s Baby, visceral, challenging movies that ushered in a new kind of socially relevant horror. The book ends with the release of Friday The 13th and the beginning of the dynasty of the Slasher Sequel, which robbed the genre of its newfound credibility (at least, until Silence Of The Lambs swept the Academy Awards a decade later). However, for the bulk of the book, Zinoman zeroes in on what happened in the years in between. He details how Wes Craven pushed boundaries past their limits for the Grindhouse set in Last House On The Left, and how the blockbuster critical and financial success of The Exorcist made horror hot. He examines the various connections that tied these groundbreaking movies together (William Peter Blatty wrote The Exorcist in response to what he perceived as the spiritual emptiness of Rosemary’s Baby; Ridley Scott screened The Texas Chain Saw Massacre to prepare for the filming of some of Alien’s bloodier bits). Most surprisingly, he reveals how eccentric screenwriter Dan O’Bannon was a powerful, unheralded influence lurking behind the scenes of some of the decade’s most innovative films; many of O’Bannon’s conversations with John Carpenter while they were at USC together, and during their later collaboration on Dark Star, were key in the conception of the unknowable horror of Michael Myers in Halloween, while O’Bannon’s contributions to Alien were downgraded by the film’s director and producers, despite the fact that he co-wrote the screenplay and had the inspiration to suggest H.R. Giger as the film's creature designer.

Zinoman interviews many of the participants of this era, like John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, George A. Romero, William Friedkin, and Brian DePalma, along with various spouses and collaborators. The result is a thrillingly all-access look at the genre’s most creatively exciting period, peppered with telling biographical details and overflowing with revealing, sometimes shocking anecdotes (Romero got his start shooting short films for Mister Rogers’ Neighbourhood! A teenaged DePalma helped his mother obtain a divorce by secretly recording his father’s adultery!). Zinoman treats the subject matter with a respect it is rarely afforded by the mainstream press, showing the zeal of a true fan when arguing the merits of the genre. My only real complaint is that, at less than 300 pages, it’s too short, although one can hope that, in true horror fashion, we’ll be treated to a sequel before too long.

Insidious

2011-07-18T18:33:00.000-07:00

Okay, so this used to be a blog where I created fake posters, novelization covers, and VHS art for nonexistent horror films, all under the guise of a made-up dude named Dell Grodak who was obsessed with scary stuff. It was great fun for a while, and I reserve the right to occasionally still use this blog for that purpose if the mood strikes me, but I lost interest in it after awhile and I haven’t updated it in forever. So for now, I’m just going to use this blog to review all things horror that happen to catch my eye. I thought about creating a new blog, but who the hell knows how long I’m going to keep at it this time (I leave abandoned blogs in my wake like a trail of breadcrumbs), so I figured I’d just start this one up again. Let’s see how long I continue with it.

Before I move on to the first article of the ALL-NEW, ALL-DIFFERENT HOUSE OF HAUNTS, though, I’d like to send some props to James White of Signalnoise Design, who graciously provided me with my snazzy logo and then, even more graciously, allowed me to mangle it by taking off Dell Grodak’s name. See more of this ferociously talented dude’s work at his website. Now, on to new business…

Eddie Murphy has a memorable bit in his 1983 comedy concert film Delirious where he pokes fun at white families in haunted house flicks like Poltergeist and The Amityville Horror. He is astounded by the fact that, when these families experience strange phenomena like blood gushing out of their toilet bowl, or their youngest daughter being sucked inside the TV set, they never flee the obviously haunted house—they merely respond with a befuddled “Well, that’s peculiar”. That observation clearly stuck with Saw alumni James Wan and Leigh Whannell, whose latest terror flick, Insidious, could be seen as a response to that nearly-thirty-year-old comedy piece. Josh and Renai Lambert (Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne) and their three young kids move into a new house, and things go from weird to worse almost immediately. Otherworldly voices are heard on a baby monitor. Spooky sounds emanate from the attic. And after precocious youngster Dalton (Ty Simpkins) falls into a mysterious coma following a head injury, all hell breaks loose as ghostly beings begin popping up all over the house. Josh doesn’t believe any of it, but Renai is, quite rightly, freaked out, so they pack up and move to a hopefully less-haunted home, just like any sane family would. Unfortunately, the ghastly goings-on follow them, and the Lamberts turn to a team of ghost hunters to try and drive away the malevolent spirits, particularly the devilish figure seen lurking around Dalton’s bedside—the one with Freddy Krueger fingers, Darth Maul makeup, and goat legs. The key to solving the mystery may lie with token skeptic Josh, who, it turns out, has more experience with these matters than even he knows.

The most remarkable thing about Insidious is its reported budget of $1.5 million, a figure that seems almost impossible unless nearly everyone involved worked on it for free. It easily looks as though it could have cost twenty times that figure, if not more. The film works best in its early domestic scenes, where the talented duo of Byrne and Wilson give endearing, naturalistic performances that would feel perfectly at home in Poltergeist or The Exorcist, two movies that were obviously big influences here. Lin Shaye (best known as leathery neighbour Magda in There’s Something About Mary) shines as Elise, the head ghostbuster; a character that could have easily turned into a Zelda Rubinstein ripoff becomes, in Shaye’s hands, a very credible, likeable, woman who might well be the nice lady next door if not for her oddball profession. I’m still not quite sure why she wears a World War II gas mask during the séance scene, but it does make for a neat visual. However, when the scares start coming fast and furious, Insidious starts heading into sadly familiar territory.

Director James Wan and writer Leigh Whannell (who also appears as one of the paranormal investigators) are clearly compelled by glassy-eyed, smiley-faced mannequin people in the same way that Rob Zombie loves to populate his films with images of clowns, skeletons, and hillbillies. Insidious is fairly crawling with these kinds of specters, who all appear to have escaped from a book of old-timey photography. Sometimes these are used to startling effect, but mostly it’s the same old, same old—creepy dancing kids in newsie attire, pale-faced little girls in white dresses, and skeletal old women in gowns with veils creep around every corner, flickering like faulty projector images (and all announced with deafening piano chords—it’s like a cat keeps jumping on the keys after awhile). I wondered at times if all of these fairly stock ghost types were ever going to amount to anything, and rest assured, they do—the mystery surrounding these spirits is explained in reasonably satisfactory fashion, eventually. But would it have killed the filmmakers to come up with some ghouls who didn’t come straight from an early Nineties Marilyn Manson video? Insidious makes for a nice break from the current onslaught of horror remakes, but in its attempt to bring a modern flair to the haunted house genre, it sometimes mistakes cliche for homage.

DEATH RATTLE

2008-04-01T04:51:00.000-07:00

This here's one of the scariest horror pictures I ever seen. DEATH RATTLE, it's called. You ever see that movie? DEATH RATTLE. It's about this family that buys a rattle for their new baby at this rummage sale, right, only it turns out that this rattle was used by natives during ancient Incan human sacrifice rituals thousands and thousands of years ago. So it's possessed by vengeful Inca spirits that take over the baby and go on a horrific murder spree. The special effects were some good, too--this picture features the most realistic-looking rubber demon baby puppet I ever seen, and I seen a lot of those! This movie right here is the reason I never had kids, just in case they got possessed and tried to smother me with a plastic bag like the demon baby in this movie does to his own older sister.

LUST OF THE YETI

2008-03-10T19:03:00.000-07:00

What do you guys think of my new logo? I got this guy named James White to design it for me after I seen him in some magazine called FACES. For some reason, everybody calls him Gijantic Jim. It sure looks cool, though, eh? Would you say that's the best one of those you ever seen?

This here's the poster for LUST OF THE YETI. It was a movie that come out in 1976, and it starred Tanya Freeling and Burt Melman. It also starred Ted Nagel as the Yeti. He played a Bigfoot in THE BRIDE OF BIGFOOT, a Sasquatch in I, SASQUATCH, and a Wendigo in DON'T HIDE IN THE CLOSET.

THE MUFFIN MAN

2008-03-02T19:11:00.000-08:00

This’s a good one, man. THE MUFFIN MAN. You ever see that movie? I got the VHS tape of it at the Bargain Harold’s closing-out sale for $2.99. This guy, right, this baker guy, he has a psychopathic breakdown and he starts baking people into a giant cake. There’s this one part where this girl finds a muffin, right, and she takes a bite out of it, only to realize there’s a severed finger poking out of it. This one was an Italian movie, but it had some American stars into it. The female lead was Jessica Weaver, before she got famous on the TV show THE BIRDS AND THE BEES. The Police Chief was played by Fred Dunphy, who was a well-known character actor in the 60s and 70s. I first seen him in ESCAPE FROM INCARCERATION ISLAND. I heard somebody might do a remake of this movie where they delve into the psychology behind the Muffin Man’s homicidal insanity. Man, I’d like to see that movie.

The Wafting

2008-02-24T13:22:00.001-08:00

This one here’s the paperback novel of THE WAFTING, which got made into a movie in 1982 by the same guys who made THE SEDUCTION OF SARAH SPECTOR and GHOST MOTEL. It’s about a chemical plant that leaks an experimental gas and when people smell it they turn into psychotic lunatics. The government wants to study it and use it as a weapon against the Russians, right, but this scientist lady traps in a lab with herself and then blows up the lab and sacrifices herself. It was so scary that when I first saw it on TV, I tried to see how long I could hold my breath so the gas wouldn’t get me. I don’t know how long I held it for, but eventually I passed out and hit my head on the coffee table. I still got a scar from it.

Planet of the Frankensteins

2008-02-24T13:17:00.000-08:00

Oh, man, this’s an old one. PLANET OF THE FRANKENSTEINS, it’s called. I got this one on video, but the tape broke ‘cause I played it so much and they never put it out on DVD yet. This spaceship crash lands on this planet, right, and the planet is overrun by Frankensteins, and when they catch you they turn you into a Frankenstein too. The special effects were done by Nelford Ramsay, who also made the effects for ROCKET ZOMBIES FROM SPACE. I just got that movie from the three-dollar bin at Wal-Mart. You ever see that movie?

The Cobwebbing of Coldwater Grove

2008-02-24T11:42:00.000-08:00

Hello, my friends, and welcome to my House of Haunts. This here’s the place to come if you love classical horror movies like I do. I got the biggest collection of classical horror movie stuff around, and this is where I get to share it with everyone.

This here’s a good one, man. I got this when the old Casino Theatre on Gottingen St. closed down. They were just throwing it out, and I asked if I could have it, and they said they didn’t give a care so I took it. It’s the original poster for THE COBWEBBING OF COLDWATER GROVE, which is a great movie that come out in 1980. They took it from a short story that come out in the fifties, but they put in lots more naked women and sex to make it more modern. I seen that one at the drive-in. It was some scary, too, especially if you’re scared of spiders. I’m not, but man, these are some big spiders. There’s one scene where this guy, right, he’s on the toilet, and this giant spider comes right up from behind the toilet tank and gets him. I tell ya, man, I never felt safe on the toilet after that.