31 Days Of Horror Movies 2012! (Part One)

For a third year in a row, I'm planning to spend the weeks leading up to Halloween watching 31 horror movies and blogging about the experience (you can check out my previous two October horror marathons here and here. I got off to a head start bright and early this morning, and you can find my report below. As with before, at least half of the movies will be ones I haven't seen before. I've been working up a tentative list of films since the summer, and stockpiling movies of every conceivable genre, nationality,and level of quality, so there are definitely good times ahead. Without further ado, let's wade right in with the two I watched this morning...

TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE: THE MOVIE (1990): Often considered the unofficial Creepshow 3 (having been produced by original Creepshow director George Romero and featuring one installment adapted from a short story by Creepshow screenwriter Stephen King) Tales From The Darkside: The Movie will, to me anyway, always be the R-rated movie I tried to sneak into when I was 16, was denied access, and had to see Ernest Goes To Jail instead. Directed by Romero collaborator John Harrison (who composed the score for the original Dawn Of The Dead, and would later direct the Sci-Fi Channel's Dune miniseries), this semicomic anthology spins three terror tales, framed by a bizarre story about a suburban cannibal housewife (played by Debbie Harry!). The first story, featuring a young Steve Buscemi as a nerdy college student who uses a murderous mummy to enact revenge on his enemies, was adapted from a short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The second, based on Stephen King's short story "Cat From Hell", stars David Johansen (AKA Buster Poindexter!), as a hit man tasked with the unusual job of whacking an infernal feline. The final installment stars James Remar (Ajax from The Warriors!) as an artist who falls in love with a mystery woman (Rae Dawn Chong) after a run-in with a murderous gargoyle. This is a pretty slick production all around, a solid example of early Nineties big studio horror, and the cast is full of familiar faces like Christian Slater, Julianne Moore, William Hickey, and Mark Margolis (best known these days as Hector Salamanca on Breaking Bad). The creature and gore effects by KNB EFX Group (The Walking Dead, plus countless other film and TV projects) are top shelf. But the script by Beetlejuice and The Nightmare Before Christmas screenwriter Michael McDowell) is neither funny or scary enough to be truly memorable. Stick with the original Creepshow instead to see it done right.

ANTS (1977): I've always been a sucker for Seventies nature-gone-wild flicks like Prophecy and Day Of The Animals, so a movie about rampaging swarms of poisonous ants featuring Robert Foxworth (star of Prophecy) and Lynda Day George (star of Day Of The Animals) was a no-brainer for me. But this slow-moving eco-thriller ("The Picnic Is Ruined!", screams the film's tagline) is pretty tough going for even the most dedicated fan of Seventies cheese. Construction at a resort hotel unleashes an army of insecticide-mutated killer ants who aren't particular about who they chow down on, whether it's the kitchen staff, the resort guests, or a sleazy developer and his arm candy (a pre-Three's Company Suzanne Somers). Throw in a dinky-sounding synth score and a slumming star of Old Hollywood (Myrna Loy as the resort's owner), and the formula for run-of-the-mill Disco-era horror/disaster movie is complete. The bloodless ant attacks, low body count, and uninspired direction by small screen veteran Robert Scheerer reveal that Ants was originally a made-for-TV movie almost immediately. Dramatic tension is represented by awkward reaction shots and slow zooms into expressionless faces. The supposed swarms of ants often look like the special effects department simply smeared raisins all over the resort walls. The only remotely funny/surprising scene occurs when, after a triumphant rescue, a helicopter's rotor blades blow the killer ants all over a crowd of onlookers. Unintentional hilarity notwithstanding, and even at a reasonable running time of just over 90 minutes, sitting through Ants is no picnic.

Does An Inside-Out Bear Shit In The Woods?

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.