31 Days Of Horror 2012...PART THIRTEEN! The Final Chapter!

CARRIE (1976): The shadow of Carrie loomed large over several of the movies in my lineup this year. Obviously, Prom Night, with its prom-themed massacre and its teaming up of a bitch queen and a clueless bully thug owes a debt to it, as does Trick Or Treat, which features a similar scene of high school tormentors getting their supernatural comeuppance (only at a Halloween dance instead of the prom). In a way, it even seems that We Need To Talk About Kevin sort of begins where Carrie ends (taking into account Kevin's time-shuffled structure, that is), with a small town full of angry, grieving parents dealing with the aftermath of a high school massacre; it's easy to draw a line from the empty lot emblazoned with the legend "CARRIE WHITE BURNS IN HELL" to the red paint-splattered house Tilda Swinton's pariah protagonist lives in. I hadn't seen Brian DePalma's breakthrough adaptation of Stephen King's blockbuster first novel in over a decade, and I was pleased to find that it only gets better with age. Sissy Spacek is heartbreaking as the telekinetic teen, and her performance is nothing short of remarkable--she sells her character's transformation from wallflower to prom queen to, tragically, angel of vengeance, with no visible effort. DePalma's visuals are pure eye candy as well. Each beautifully-composed shot is packed with detail and teeming with vibrant colour. The tone of Carrie always struck me as a bit odd, but the way it transitions from high school soap opera into supernatural horror heightens the story's ultimate tragedy--you can't help but get lulled into the fairy tale myth of Carrie's transformation into a prom queen, just in time to get sucker-punched by the cruelty of her classmates. Carrie is also a strange sort of female empowerment movie, and not just in reference to the title character's burgeoning psychic abilities, either. The women are unquestionably in charge here, whether it's Chris (Nancy Allen, never better or bitchier) using fellatio to convince Billy (John Travolta) to slaughter a pig for her, or Sue (Amy Irving) convincing Tommy (William Katt) to take Carrie to the prom. Watching it again, I also realized that Frank Darabont's new, much bleaker ending for his adaptation of King's The Mist wisely brings his film into line with Carrie's ultimately horrible truth--the worst, scariest thing in the world would be if the religious wackos in both stories were right, and they sort of are. Sacrificing your kid will make the monsters go away, and if you go to the prom with Tommy Ross, they are all gonna laugh at you.

MANIAC (1980): Character actor Joe Spinnell (The Godfather, Rocky) scripted the role of Frank Zito in Maniac for himself to play, which I guess makes this grindhouse favourite the Good Will Hunting of slasher-trash cinema. Gene Siskel famously walked out of the movie theatre a half-hour into William Lustig's depraved bloodbath, and he probably wasn't the only one. This intimate portrait of a lonely psychopath who murders women and takes their scalps to adorn his mannequin collection is one grimy, unpleasant little movie. Maniac unfolds mostly in slight variations on three scenes: 1. Spinnell's Zito stalks a woman (or a couple) around for awhile, breathing labouriously in some of the cinema's most enthusiastic foley work. 2. Zito then murders the woman (or couple) in spectacularly gory fashion. 3. Zito returns to his crummy apartment to attach the fresh scalp to one of his mannequins, then talk to himself, the mannequins, and the spectre of his dead mother until he throws a fit and breaks down crying. The pattern breaks when Zito meets a sultry photographer (former Bond girl Caroline Munro), and improbably enough, starts dating her. But old habits die hard, and Zito's return to his murderous ways lead to a freaky climax/dream sequence complete with the killer's decomposed mother busting out of her grave, not to mention the murdered women returning from the dead for revenge. The effects by Tom Savini are pretty impressive despite the shoestring budget--particularly a super-graphic exploding head (the one belonging to the character Savini also plays, no less!). You almost get the sense that Spinnell and Zito didn't really think they were making a horror movie, but instead were capturing an intimate yet gritty character study on film, not unlike Taxi Driver (which Spinnell also had a small part in). Borderline inept at times (the film is unbelievably murky, with awkward editing and occasionally incomprehensible audio), but weirdly effective at others, Maniac is most assuredly a memorable experience--just not one everyone will be up for.

DRAG ME TO HELL (2009): I remember being bummed out that Drag Me To Hell didn't perform better at the box office when it was released in 2009, but upon revisiting it this year I can kind of see why it didn't set the box office ablaze. As a big fan of Raimi's Evil Dead films, particularly the gonzo, Three Stooges-inspired second instalment, I immediately responded to the haphazard outbursts of humour in Raimi's return to horror. However, to a new generation of thrillseeking moviegoers, the tone of this movie must have been fairly strange (Drag Me To Hell is rated PG-13, to give you an idea of who it was aimed at). This tale of an ambitious bank employee (Alison Lohman) cursed by an old gypsy woman is jam-packed with Raimi's pet obsessions--broad physical comedy, gleefully evil demonic spirits, and slimy bodily fluids spewing out of people and into the faces of other people. It's pretty light stuff, for the most part. A lot of the shenanigans that bedevil the protagonist are of the social-awkwardness variety--the demonic torments that Lohman's Christine suffers threaten the promotion she's seeking at work, or the opinion of her potential in-laws. In a weird bit of coincidence (or homage on Raimi's part?), the final scene echoes the finale of one of the earlier films on my list, Curse Of The Demon, as both films feature a character on a railroad track beset upon by a demonic apparition. I'd only really recommend this one for diehard fans of classic, pre-Spider-Man Sam Raimi, or younger horror fans looking for a lightweight scare fix.

THEY LIVE (1988): I had planned to finish off my 31 horror films with a screening of the Criterion Collection's new Rosemary's Baby blu ray on Halloween Night, but my copy didn't arrive on time. Thankfully, I got my hands on an advance copy of Scream Factory's new hi-def release of John Carpenter's 1988 classic, They Live, so that helped ease the sting. They Live isn't really a horror movie--I'd file it more under science fiction or action (with a touch of comedy), but it always seemed to end up in the scary section of the video store when I was a teen, so I feel like I can get away with including it. The story of a construction worker (none other than the legendary Rowdy Roddy Piper himself!) who finds a pair of special glasses that allow him to see the skull-faced, silver-eyed aliens pulling humanity's strings continues to be relevant today. In Carpenter's America, the 99 % are enslaved by an extradimensional 1% who maintain order with subliminal messages in the media, coding billboards and magazines with slogans like CONFORM, STAY ASLEEP, and MARRY AND REPRODUCE (even dollar bills are emblazoned with the legend THIS IS YOUR GOD). Of course, since the movie's star is a bona fide WWF superstar, the only way to free mankind from unknowing enslavement is to resort to brutal violence and cartoonish smack-talk (hence Piper's immortal pronouncement "I have come here to kick ass and chew bubblegum...and I'm all outta bubblegum" right before he empties a shotgun into a bank full of the invaders). Carpenter regulars like Keith David and Peter Jason (I guess JC enjoyed working with guys who have two first names and no last names) fill out the cast, along with Meg Foster (Leviathan) and her creepy blue eyes. Scream Factory's new disc features a crazy new cover by Tom "The Dude" Hodge (designer of the theatrical poster for Hobo With A Shotgun), but also thankfully preserves the original, iconic poster art on a reversible sleeve.

There's also a commentary by Carpenter and Piper, which I believe was recorded for the Region 2 DVD but makes its official North American debut here. Come for the message about the disappearing middle class and the rich feeding on the poor. Stay for the one-liners, the cool aliens, and that incredibly overlong alleyway fight scene between Roddy Piper and Keith David.

31 Days Of Horror 2012 (Part 12)

WHO CAN KILL A CHILD? (1976): The opening credits of Who Can Kill A Child? play over a montage of documentary footage that chronicles how some of the most unimaginable tragedies of the last century--the Holocaust, the Korean conflict, the Vietnam war--have been hardest on the children of the countries involved. This lengthy sequence (one that surely rivals Once Upon A Time In The West for the title of Longest Opening Credits Sequence In Cinema History), which combines footage of real-life corpses and atrocities with the sound of kids laughing and singing, is meant to set up the film's central idea--the murderous children in the movie are theorized by the hero to have taken some sort of evolutionary leap, and are ensuring their own future survival by killing every adult they see. It's a bit of a jump to make to come to this conclusion; one imagines that the protagonist must have watched the same opening credits sequence as the audience in order to reach that hypothesis. There may have been more to it than that--the version of the film I watched had no English dialogue other than the opening voiceover and the dialogue spoken by the two leads, who are thankfully British (and one of them doesn't speak Spanish, so her husband needs to translate for her). But I digress. Who Can Kill A Child? opens as a married couple, pregnant Evelyn and moustachioed Tom, vacationing on the Spanish coast, decide to visit a tiny island with a population of just a few hundred people. They arrive to find the place mostly deserted, except for the occasional smiling child or two. Those children are smiling because a kind of contagious madness has come to the island--one that only affects the preteen set. The grownups are all missing because the happy-go-lucky tykes have happily slaughtered them all, and Tom and Evelyn are next. The movie's title comes from the central dilemma posed to Tom and Evelyn--can you justify killing a child, much less a small army of them, if they're hellbent on killing you first? Tom is pushed to that limit out of self-preservation, but Evelyn is hesitant because of the child in her belly (an enemy in their midst, as it turns out). At nearly two hours, Who Can Kill A Child? is a bit of a slow burn, but it really ramps up in the last half hour. The minimal use of music adds a spooky atmosphere, and the smiling, giggling children are definitely unsettling--they're a bit like the avian killers in The Birds in that you'll see one or two, then dozens surrounding the hapless adults. The final waterfront showdown is brutal, and the ending is a classic downer in the mold of the original Night Of The Living Dead. Highly recommended, but not if the content implied by the movie's title makes you at all uneasy.

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2012 (Part Two)

THE ENTITY (1983): Martin Scorsese called The Entity one of the 11 scariest movies ever made, alongside indisputable classics like The Exorcist and the original version of The Haunting. For my part, I can't say that I found it very scary--it could be that Scorsese was responding to the lead performance by his sometime collaborator Barbara Hershey, who he worked with on Boxcar Bertha and The Last Temptation Of Christ. Hershey's fearless, strong-willed performance is the best thing about this supposedly true story, which sees a working single mother of three repeatedly assaulted and raped by a ghostly assailant. A sympathetic psychiatrist (played by a decidedly Pacinoesque Ron Silver) is convinced that the attacks are all in the woman's mind--a result of an abusive childhood and a troubled adult sexual history--but that doesn't stop a team of paranormal researchers from hatching a plan to try and physically trap the beast. The attacks are shockingly graphic, aided by a pounding musical score and startling special effects by Stan Winston (high-pressure air jets were used to make it appear that Hershey's skin is being groped by invisible hands). There's also some cool uses of split-focus photography, where characters and objects in both the foreground and background are simultaneously in focus (Brian DePalma used this technique plenty in Blow Out). But the triumphant, over-the-top climax, culminating in a powerhouse scene where Hershey faces the demon down with steely determination, is undercut by a final scroll which reveals that the attacks continued for years afterward. The Entity is a defiantly perverse bit of early Eighties studio horror, but a somewhat maddening one due to the unresolved nature of its antagonist.

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

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)

31 Days Of Horror Movies, Part VI

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 III

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

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!

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?