Horrorfest 2016: The 7th Victim

Val Lewton, one of the greatest horror producers of all time, who did so much with so little, returns to Horrorfest with THE SEVENTH VICTIM. This 1943 noir horror was directed by Mark Robson and is yet another example of Lewton's style: leave a lot to the imagination and still deliver.

Kim Hunter stars as a young woman who leaves her boarding school to look into the disappearance of her only living relative, her sister (Jean Brooks) who lives in New York. She arrives in the city to find her sister's company has been sold, there's an ominous noose hanging in her apartment, and to her surprise, meets her sister's secret husband (Hugh Beaumont).

A detective looking into the disappearance turns up dead and it isn't long before it becomes clear Hunter and co. are dealing with a group of Satanists! Why'd they disappear Hunter's sister? Who were the first 6 victims? Will Hunter be the 7^th?

Well, that'd be a spoiler, wouldn't it? I will say this: the flick has an even more downbeat ending than your average post-code noir, and that makes it even more badass than it already was. If you like shadowy cinematography and serpentine plots, you'll love this one.

Horrorfest 2016: In the Mouth of Madness

One nice thing about Horrorfest is if I keep doing this long enough I eventually end up checking out the entirety of certain directors' filmographies that I might not normally get around to. John Carpenter is a good example: I'd seen plenty of his movies before I started Horrorfest, but deliberately going out of my way to watch them has helped me see a lot more than I probably would have left to my own devices.

I've put off Carpenter's IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS for a few years because for whatever reason H.P. Lovecraft shit annoys me. I realize I've seen a million things inspired by Lovecraft, and that I've liked plenty of them, but I also think Lovecraft kinda gets a pass from enthusiasts. Certain people just like Lovecraft, and therefore anything that even nods towards Lovecraft is praised, and so a movie like IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS about a horror author who brings about an apocalypse of ancient beasts blah blah blah will obviously be well liked whether or not it sucks.

So, it kind of sucks. But it's also kind of good. The good stuff: Sam Neill stars and he rules. He's an insurance investigator hired to track down a missing Stephen King-esque author (Jurgen Prochnow) by the author's publisher (Charlton Heston). Seems this author's books are known for driving certain people insane. We know from the movie's opening that Neill eventually ends up in an insane asylum, and he tells his tale to a visiting doctor (David Warner). So, you can see, the movie's rife with talent.

That's the good stuff: the talent and the premise. Once Neill tracks Prochnow down in a weird town that may or may not exist and seems to be populated by the author's characters and other beasts, where the author can control things as if he's God (or Satan), the movie loses some of its charm. That's because it doesn't really have a plot. Don't get me wrong: I like a good non-plot as much as the next guy, but this flick is basically just Neill seeing one weird thing after another, with little or no meaning tying these things together, until it eventually stops.

This is where some Lovecraft aficionado would come in to say that if only I'd read this short story and that short story by Lovecraft then I'd totally understand what the movie was about and who the monsters are and that it all means something and blah blah blah. That might be true, or it might not, but it doesn't really matter, anyway, does it? Lovecraft is a red herring, here: the movie should be good whether or not I'm familiar with the greatest works of the racist misogynist himself.

Anyway, nice try John Carpenter, but this one's a miss.

Horrorfest 2016: The Addiction

Now we go from werewolves to vampires with THE ADDICTION, the 1995 film by Abel "Bad Lieutenant" Ferrara. This movie starts off super-promising: it's shot in beautiful black and white, features a cool hip hop soundtrack and stars Lili Taylor.

Taylor is a philosophy student in New York who is bitten by a vampire (Annabella Sciorra) while she's walking home from class. Her fellow student and friend (Edie Falco) watches in horror as Taylor seems to disintegrate from a healthy young woman into a strung out junkie. Little does Falco know that Taylor is a junkie... FOR BLOOD.

Taylor preys on some strangers, her professor (Paul Calderon), and eventually meets up with Christopher Walken, perfectly cast as an older, more experienced vampire, who preys on her.

Most of the movie is taken up with Taylor's observations of herself and the world around her as she goes through the painful transformation from regular human to creature of the night. She has no reflection, can't go out in the sunlight, craves blood, all that good stuff. But, she's a philosophy student with a predisposition to examine the hell out of her own existence, so there's a lot of intellectual (or maybe pseudo-intellectual) babble padding out the run time. This is simultaneously part of the movie's charm, and a drawback -- you get the impression it's all meant super seriously, but after sitting through enough of it, it starts to play as satire.

Watching the movie I wondered if it was an inspiration for A GIRL WALKS HOME ALONE AT NIGHT, a similarly black and white vampire flick that draws parallels between vampirism and drug addiction. I prefer A GIRL WALKS HOME, but THE ADDICTION was still a unique, artsy take on the old myth with some great performances and cinematography.

Horrorfest 2016: The Howling

The problem with THE HOWLING is that AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON exists. That's not THE HOWLING's fault and not really a fair way to start talking about it, but that's what I kept thinking while watching the film, especially during the climactic werewolf transformation scene.

Still, I'm glad I finally saw THE HOWLING, Joe Dante's werewolf flick from 1981, because it's one of those movies that's a pop culture touch stone that constantly comes up in nerdy movie conversations. You'd think with the number of movies I've seen I'd have seen it by now, but nope.

THE HOWLING stars Dee Wallace of E.T. fame as an investigative television reporter hot on the trail of a serial killer (Robert Picardo of Kevin Arnold's gym teacher fame) who is stalking her. She's using herself as bait to capture him and hopefully get an exclusive in the process. He's seemingly shot to death after an attack on her that is too close for comfort, but then his body goes missing from the morgue.

Wallace suffers from amnesia after the attack and is sent by her therapist (Patrick Macnee)  to a retreat in the country he runs called "The Colony." When she gets there she meets all kinds of great people like a creepy nymphomaniac (Elisabeth Brooks) with designs on her man (Christopher Stone) and a suicidal old guy (the great John Carradine) who howls at the moon before attempting to end by walking into a campfire.

The whole thing is weird and cult like, and there seems to be lots of wolves and wolf-like activity going on, so Wallace enlists her friends from back home (Belinda Balaski and Dennis Dugan) to come out and do some research and see if they can figure out what's up.

SPOILER WARNING: everyone at the retreat is a werewolf and Robert Picardo the serial killer is also a werewolf and is far from dead!

The first half of the movie is cool because you get to see early 80s downtown Los Angeles in all of its seedy glory. When the movie moves to the retreat it loses some of this luster and is kind of slow when it should be suspenseful. It picks up again in the end when all werewolf hell breaks loose, and the afore mentioned transformation scene IS cool, it's just not AS cool as AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON from the same year.

The very end of the movie is especially cool as Wallace decides to prove to the American public that werewolves are real and must be stopped by giving a graphic demonstration on the live evening news, so it's worth sticking around for that.

Horrorfest 2016: Sleepaway Camp

I've never seen SEEPAWAY CAMP?!?! Nope. Well, now I have. This 1983 cheese-fest from director Robert Hiltzik is considered one of the best slasher flicks from the prime era of slasher flicks, and it's easy to see why. Yes, I called it cheese, but that's to the movie's benefit: it doesn't take itself too seriously, and in doing so, seems more sincere and realistic than FRIDAY THE 13th or any of its clones.

For one thing, SLEEPAWAY CAMP has a cast of kids who seem like actual kids and not 25-year-olds playing people who are supposed to be kids who don't act like any kids you've ever met. Some of the performances might come off as a little amateurish, but again, that's to the movie's benefit, as you feel like you're watching authentic people and not chainsaw fodder.

Speaking of chainsaw fodder, most of the kills in this flick are super unique and the sparingly-used gore effects are good, too. I've said so much but I haven't said what it's about.

Felissa Rose stars as a shy tween who watched her family die in front of her in a tragic boating accident and is adopted by an off-putting and eccentric woman (Desiree Gould). As the movie opens, Rose is being sent off to the titular camp with her cousin (Jonathan Tiersten), who is outgoing and well-adjusted by comparison, and also knows the ins and outs of camp life as he's a camp vet. He's also nice and actually cares about his cousin, and this relationship also serves to ground the movie in a more real place than many others of its kind -- although Rose goes on to face her fair share of bullies, her cousin is not one of them. He's actually a cool dude.

The problem is, the people who start turning up dead at camp each had problems with shy Rose, so you immediately start thinking Rose is behind it. The pervy cook (Owen Hughes) makes a move on her and ends up boiled alive, a bitchy counselor (Katherine Kamhi) ends up shower-stabbed, and so on. But Rose seems so sincere you also think, how could she be the killer? There's gotta be a twist. Well, there's a twist, but it's not any kind of twist you are thinking of. It is a mind-blowing ending, though. This is the first solid recommendation for Horrorfest 2016.

Horrorfest 2016: Alice, Sweet Alice

1976's ALICE, SWEET ALICE, from director, Alfred Sole, is a movie that has almost made it into Horrorfest many years in a row but kept getting bumped down the list. I guess that's something a lot of the movies for 2016 have in common: the more years I do this, the smaller the pool of movies I'm choosing from gets. But don't worry, I'll never run out.

Alice Paula Sheppard stars as the titular 12-year-old, Alice, who is not really that sweet, it seems at first, as she bickers with her mother and delights in ruining her sister's stuff and scaring the shit out of her. Check this out: her sister is played by 9-year-old Brooke Shields in her film debut. but Shields is bumped off early, showing up dead to her own first communion, murdered by a raincoat wearing, creepy-masked girl who fits Alice's description!

Alice has a penchant for keeping somewhat macabre mementos, and running around in a creepy mask and raincoat, so she's the prime suspect. At first we're like, yeah it's obviously Alice. But then we start to wonder: maybe Alice is just a slightly maladjusted but otherwise okay kid, and something else is afoot.

Her mother (Linda Miller) doesn't know what to think but her aunt (Jane Lowry), who is also attacked but survives, is sure Alice is behind it all. Also on the list of grown ups who have it in for the child is Mildred Clinton as the local priest's housekeeper, even as the priest himself (Rudolph Willrich) attempts to help Alice's mother and her estranged father (Niles McMaster) get to the bottom of things.

A review of ALICE, SWEET ALICE would not be complete without mentioning the striking presence of gay night club bouncer turned actor Alphonso DeNoble as Alice's family's landlord - a morbidly obese child molester who lives in squalor and is exactly the kind of guy who would end up on Alice's hit list, if indeed she is the killer. Whenever this guy is on screen he steals the show. He was only in a couple more movies after this one before he died, but this performance should cement his place in the horror hall of fame.

The movie itself is only okay. The gritty 70s style, the creepy mask the killer wears, and all the performances are great. Unfortunately the flick is probably about 30 minutes longer than it needs to be, so it drags in spots that should be full of suspense.

Horrorfest 2016: Inside

Welcome to Horrorfest 2016. I'm going to try to watch and review 31 horror movies in 31 days to celebrate the month of October and Halloween. This year I sourced my movies from 5 different "best of" lists from Slant, Hitfix, Indiewire, Rottentomatoes and even Forbes. The lists ranged in theme from best horror movies of all time to best horror movies of the 21st century, so we'll have some old stuff and some new stuff.

This year we start with the 2007 French flick INSIDE, directed by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo. This was a fairly gruesome flick to start with so my apologies, but here we go.

It's Christmas Eve and Alysson Paradis stars as a pregnant widow on the eve of her scheduled appointment to have labor induced. She lost her husband while she was pregnant in a car accident. There were no other survivors... OR SO SHE THINKS. Spoilers. Too late. Oh well.

She's understandably depressed, given the circumstances, but things get worse when a mysterious woman (Beatrice Dalle) appears outside of her isolated home and starts harassing her. Our hero scores some points by calling the cops butt he cops lose some points by showing up after the intruder has left and deciding everything is cool and to leave our hero alone, again.

So, the intruder shows back up and that's where things get gruesome. Turns out, the intruder wants Paradis' baby, and is willing to cut her open with a giant pair of scissors to get it. Gross, right? Well, it gets even more gross. The rest of the movie is basically the crazy lady vs. the pregnant lady, with the pregnant lady spending most of the time locked in the bathroom and the crazy lady spending most of the time dealing with everyone who shows up at the house -- Paradis' boss (Francois-Regis Marchasson), her mother (Nathalie Roussel) and some more cops, this time with a handcuffed perp in tow (Ayman Saidi).

The central conceit is effective as both a taboo subject you don't expect to see in a movie, necessarily, as well as an inherently primordial skin-crawler -- threatening to the child, the mother, and violating the only thing we can really control, our own body. But it's also so outrageous that the movie is hard to watch at times, and even harder to enjoy.

The biggest misstep in the movie is the computer-generated shots from within Paradis' womb. We see the fetus reacting to the violence from outside. This is an ambitious and original approach, but the execution is a little lacking. The CGI is not great, and with something as weird as this, you need it to be perfect to avoid it being exploitative or unintentionally funny. The movie might have worked better if the filmmakers had backed it off a little bit and just made it a more conventional thriller.