31 Days Of Horror Movies 2012 (Part 8)

TERROR TRAIN (1980): This was the second Jamie Lee Curtis slasher movie I watched this year that began with a prank gone wrong, resulting in a killing spree. Terror Train opens with the scream queen playing the bait in a hazing stunt that goes too far-- a hapless weirdo named Kenny is lured into climbing in bed with a pilfered cadaver by a group of cruel med students. He then suffers one of cinema's most memorable spaz attacks, spinning around & getting caught up in the bed sheets while shrieking girlishly (as the credits begin, the footage goes to slow-motion and his screams become a slowed-down moan). Cut to several years later, and the med students are having a costume party on a train to celebrate New Years' Eve...however, a masked killer has other ideas about what constitutes a good time. Terror Train is a somewhat better-than-average entry in the deluge of post-Halloween slasher fare, mostly due to the nowhere-to-run setting and the killer's cool gimmick of shedding his disguise in favour of the one worn by his last victim. The cast is decent--along with Curtis, there's Ben Johnson (The Wild Bunch) as the train's conductor, a pre-Die Hard Hart Bochner as the sleazeball ringleader of the prank-happy pre-meds, and David Copperfield as an intense illusionist who is something of a forerunner to Arrested Development's Gob Bluth. The biggest problem with the film is that there's never really any doubt as to who the killer is, despite the efforts of director Roger Spottiswoode (who would later direct Tomorrow Never Dies, The Sixth Day, and... Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot!?!) to package the proceedings as a whodunit. The reveal of the killer will surprise no one, but the revelation of how he got on the train in the first place is a neat twist. Terror Train is another of the retro horror titles newly available on Blu-Ray for the first time courtesy of Scream Factory, complete with a shiny new transfer an and eye-catching illustrated cover (the also-memorable original box art is featured on a reversible sleeve). It's no Halloween, but Terror Train is a cut (slightly) above most of its peers.

THE PACK (1977): More evil dogs, and this time, only Joe Don Baker can stop them! The Pack takes place on a resort island where summer families have an unpleasant habit of buying dogs for their kids to play with all season, then leaving them behind when it's time to go home. The forsaken dogs, mad with hunger, band together into a pack of ferocious killers, intent on turning the island's remaining inhabitants into puppy chow. The Pack was directed by Robert Clouse, who helmed Enter The Dragon four years earlier. Sadly, he's incapable of doing for roving packs of dogs what he did for martial arts battles--the dog attacks are pretty vicious, but they're mostly preceded by endless slow-motion montages of the killer pooches running happily through the forest. The cast, headed by the aforementioned Baker, also features some other folks who keep turning up in this year's 31 Days Of Horror lineup--Bibi Besch and R.G. Armstrong appear, both of whom would later star in The Beast Within, and Armstrong also starred in Devil Dog: Hound Of Hell (making this the second evil dog movie I've seen him in this year). Watch for Paul Wilson, best known as Paul on the later seasons of Cheers, as a cowardly nerd who gets what's coming to him. The Pack is a middling entry in the subgenre of 1970s nature-run-amok horror films, and it probably won't do much to convert anyone who isn't already a fan of that type of film.

THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935): "The human heart is more complex than any other part of the body", says Dr. Pretorius in The Bride Of Frankenstein, which may be why the assembled Bride screams in terror when she meets her monstrous groom. What's her problem, anyway? After all, they were made for each other. Hollywood's first sequel (and still one of the best), James Whale's follow-up to the legendary 1931 original improves upon the mad doctor's tale in pretty much every way. Boris Karloff's performance as the tragic, now-speaking monster is even more tortured, inhuman, and ultimately sympathetic than it was the first time around. Franz Waxman's rousing score lends a fairy-tale quality to the story of weird science and doomed romance. Ernest Thesiger's wickedly campy turn as Frankenstein's mentor, Dr. Pretorius, lightens the tone while amping up the blasphemous elements of their experiments ("Sometimes I have wondered whether life wouldn't be much more amusing if we were all devils, no nonsense about angels and being good", says the doctor at one point). And Elsa Lanchester (who does double duty here, also appearing as Mary Shelley in a prologue sequence), even with her limited screen time as the monster's intended mate, is unforgettable in both design and performance.

John P. Fulton's visual effects still pack a how'd-they-do-that punch to this day, in a memorable sequence where Dr. Pretorius showcases his attempts to create life in the form of tiny homunculi displayed in jars. Probably still the best of the classic Universal Monster Movies, The Bride Of Frankenstein remains a potent combination of atmospheric thrills and gallows humour.

31 Days Of Horror 2012 (Part Five)

SINISTER (2012): I try not to be too hard on modern American horror movies, but movies like Sinister don't make it easy. This slow-moving turkey from the producers of Paranormal Activity and Insidious crosses The Shining with 8 MM and has only about one decent scare in it (it's the one with the lawnmower). A true-crime writer named Ellison Oswalt (really?) and his family move into a house whose most recent inhabitants, a family of five, met an unhappy end--four of them were hung to death, while the youngest daughter has disappeared. Oswalt, played by Ethan Hawke, plans on solving the murder himself, and writing a new best seller about it. Things get weird when he finds a film projector and several film reels that show the final moments of the family, as well as the murders of several other families in other towns. In each case, one child has never been found. A pasty-faced spectre can be glimpsed lurking around in each of the films, who is later identified by a college professor (Vincent D'Onofrio, in an irritating, overly-affected performance) as some sort of creepy deity named B'Gool. Now, I'm no true crime writer, but I had it figured out about ten minutes in that the missing kids were committing the murders and filming them under the influence of B'Gool, but it takes Ellison Oswalt almost the entire running time of the movie to put it together. The movie is filled with seemingly endless scenes of Oswalt bickering with his inexplicably British wife and comparing notes with a helpful deputy (a nice supporting turn by James Ransone--Ziggy from Season 2 of The Wire!), bookended by footage of the doomed families being inventively bumped off while Oswalt gets drunker, sweatier, and more obsessed. Skip this one unless you enjoy feeling smarter than the protagonists of the movies you watch.

CURSE OF THE DEMON (1957): My DVR menu unhelpfully described the story of Curse Of The Demon thusly: "An American psychologist travels to London for a symposium." Ooh, scary! Not being too overly afraid of symposia, I ventured forward into this classic chiller (which is sometimes known as Night Of The Demon) from director Jacques Tourneur excited to finally see if the film's titular demon--whom I'd glimpsed in many a book about movie monsters growing up--was as cool and crazy looking as I'd hoped he would be. And he was! The satanic beastie rears his shaggy head pretty early on too, conjured up by a practicioner of black magic named Karswell (Niall MacGinnis) to destroy his enemies. Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews of The Day The Earth Stood Still) comes to London to help expose Karswell as a fraud, and finds himself the object of the demon's curse. This highly atmospheric flick relies mostly on the suggestion of supernatural shenanigans rather than showing it all that often, with the exception of the demon's appearances at the beginning and end of the movie. The demon, represented by a pretty cool animatronic that emerges from a cloud of smoke to burn and maim its victims to death, looks otherworldly in a way that must have blown people's minds back in 1957. No stuntman in a suit and visibility-blocking headpiece here. This is a classy, briskly-paced spookshow with a genuinely suspenseful third act.

TRICK OR TREAT (1986): I'm a little surprised that Trick Or Treat didn't really catch on back in 1986, and furthermore, that it's kind of faded into obscurity now. It has a premise that's kind of perfect, while being a clever little time capsule of sorts. Eddie Weinbauer, an angsty teen mullethead, (played by Marc Price--Skippy from Family Ties!) finds solace from his hellish high school bullies and pranksters in the heavy metal stylings of his hero, Sammi Curr (Tony Fields). When Curr, whose dislikes include censorship and whose likes include delving into the occult, perishes in a hotel fire, Eddie is crushed...until a local DJ named Nuke (Gene Simmons!) gives him a studio pressing of the rocker's final, unreleased album. When Eddie plays it backwards, he finds he can communicate with the now-ghostly Curr, who helps him wreak supernatural revenge on his preppie tormentors. Things start getting a bit too dark for Eddie, but Curr still manages to resurrect himself as a vengeful spirit with a penchant for shooting purple lightning out of his guitar. Curr turns the high school Halloween dance into a heavy metal hell, while Eddie and the girl he has a crush on (Lisa Orgolini) try to find a way to pull the plug on him. Directed by Charles Martin Smith, the actor (American Graffiti, The Untouchables) turned director (the pilot episode for Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and, um, Air Bud) shows a flair for the material, which he treats with kid gloves; one missed step and the whole thing could be either too silly (it's inherently goofy stuff already, but it never quite devolves into parody) or too real (although the relentlessly bullied Eddie does allude to some suicidal thoughts in a fan letter to Curr that opens the film). There's also a pretty funny cameo by Ozzy Osbourne as a right-wing evangelist crusading against the evils of rock and roll, and a not-bad metal score by Fastway.

This lost relic of a bygone era, currently out of print on DVD, badly deserves a Collector's Edition reissue (I'm looking at you, Scream Factory!). Crank this one up to eleven.

HALLOWEEN II (1981): Picking up directly where John Carpenter's 1978 classic left off, Halloween II follows Michael Myers as he continues his October 31 massacre. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis once again, doped to the gills and confined to a bed for most of the movie's running time) is rushed off to the hospital after the events of the first film, and Myers is in hot pursuit while Donald Pleasance's Dr. Loomis continues to bumble around Haddonfield, chasing false leads and ordering the local cops around. Halloween II has a significantly higher body count than its predecessor, and a much more sadistic tone--early on there's a joke (I guess?) involving a trick-or-treater who had the misfortune to bite into an apple with a razor blade hidden in it. Rick Rosenthal takes up the directorial reins here, keeping the film's style close to Carpenter's trailblazing original: there are plenty of steadicam POV shots and nice widescreen compositions for Myers to creep in and out of (having original Halloween DP Dean Cundey on board doesn't hurt). A somewhat forced revelation about a connection between Laurie and Michael explains his obsession with her, but ultimately doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Halloween II is not as skillful or original as Carpenter's classic, but it carries over enough elements of the inaugural film to make it a decent example of state-of-the-slasher-art circa 1981, and it brings enough of its own sick inventiveness to the table to justify itself somewhat. Should you want to own Halloween II in high definition, you've got your work cut out for you. Universal's release from last year comes with a cool bonus not available anywhere else--the 1984 clip show/documentary Terror In The Aisles, a breezy show reel of great scenes from most of the classic "terror films", as hosts Donald Pleasance's and Nancy Allen insist on calling them. Also, the aforementioned Scream Factory just issued their own extras-packed competing edition of Halloween II as part of their ambitious and thoroughly welcome slate of classic '80s horror flicks. The decision is ultimately up to you. Or, you could just buy both...

31 Days Of Horror Movies 2012 (Part Three)

PROM NIGHT (1980): Since we Canadians basically invented the slasher genre with 1974's Black Christmas, you'd think we'd be a bit better at it. This shameless Canuck entry borrows liberally from that seminal fright flick (threatening phone calls are made to the lead characters), as well as Carrie (the prom setting, the bitchy blonde who teams up with the dopey bully for revenge on somebody), and, of course, Halloween (Jamie Lee Curtis in a key role, pretty much everything else). A prologue explains how a prank gone wrong resulted in the death of a little girl, and how the group of children responsible covered up their involvement. Six years later, they're all high schoolers headed for the prom (which is based around a "Disco Madness" theme just a few years too late), and a vengeful somebody is bumping them off. Is it the local pervert who was wrongfully accused of the original murder, and who was disfigured while escaping from the police? Is it the creepy high school handyman who enjoys peeping on the girls in the locker room? Or is it one of the other half dozen red herrings the movie throws at you? This movie is a veritable time capsule of butt cuts, perms, and high tight pants, and it features Leslie Nielsen, as the principal, attempting to disco dance (this was the same year as Nielsen's comedic breakthrough in Airplane!). There's also a fat guy named Slick who comes to a fiery end behind the wheel of his Shaggin' Wagon, a detective who provides intermittent voice-over narration (which feels less like an artistic choice and more like worry on the filmmakers' part that the audience would be confused), and any number of awkwardly-choreographed disco sequences. Pretty silly stuff, but it does feature a character who gets beheaded with an axe and his lopped-off melon rolls down the ramp intended for the Prom King & Queen's grand entrance, which is kinda worth sitting through everything else for.