Horrorfest 2012: Slither

2006's SLITHER is a funny throwback to 1950s creature features, cross-pollinating those innocent small-town flicks with the bloodier monster movies of the 80s. It's a good movie to end Horrorfest 2012 on, as it seems to encompass a little bit of everything we've touched on this month. Hell, it even features a clip of TOXIC AVENGER.

Nerd-hero Nathan Fillion stars as a small town sheriff who finds himself fighting alien slugs after a meteor crash lands and infects a local rich guy (Michael Rooker). Rooker's too into his trophy wife (Elizabeth Banks) to willingly infect her in turn, so he preys upon a lonely single mom (Brenda James) who he knows has had a crush on him since they were kids. Meanwhile, Banks suspects something is up with her husband when he mysteriously starts locking parts of the house and growing unsightly deformities on his body.

It turns out these alien slugs can possess a person, turn them into a zombie, and send them marching around town. However, Rooker seems to be the queen-bee and all of the zombie-fied folks flock to him. They all kind of meld together, one by one, until they form a bigger and bigger ever-growing blob with tentacles. I guess the point is to take over Earth.

This all sounds kind of ridiculous, and it is. Luckily, it's played for laughs, and the characters are never too cool or too unrealistic to avoid commenting on how messed s things are. Fillion is particularly good at this sarcastic delivery, maintaining a nice guy charm and not veering into snark-land. Rooker, as always, is a great villain, though I long for the day when he'll be used in some other capacity. Sweet memories of CLIFFHANGER dance in my head ("Season's over, asshole!").

Banks is good, too, in a part that could have been overplayed to the point of parody, but she takes it totally seriously -- she apparently married Rooker for his money, but still feels the need to at least try to be a good wife. This gets more and more exaggerated as Rooker turns into more and more of a monster, but hey -- sometimes real life stuff seems ironically more real when it's blown out of proportion like this.

Throughout all of this, the movie is never boring and never strays too far from its monster movie origins. It's patently absurd, but it knows it and is okay with it.

Okay, now some stats for Horrorfest 2012. As a reminder, this year I stuck with the highest rated flicks on Netflix Watch Instantly that I hadn't already seen.

24 of the movies were in color and 7 were in black and white. 1 was animated. I didn't watch any silent flicks this year, which is kind of a bummer.

21 of the movies were from the US, with 6 from the UK, 3 from Canada, 2 from Germany and 1 each from Hong Kong and Japan. That ads up to over 31 because of co-productions.

This was a more modern Horrorfest than usual, with 7 movies from the 2010s, 6 from the 80s, 5 each from the 70s and 50s, 3 each from the 2000s and 60s and 2 from the 40s.

My least favorite film of the month was probably RODAN.

My 6 favorite in no particular order were:

HOUSE OF THE DEVIL

NIGHT OF THE COMET

THE BLACK SLEEP

THE FOG

THEATRE OF BLOOD

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH

Happy Halloween!

Horrorfest 2012: Piranha

2010's PIRANHA is apparently a remake of the 1978 flick of the same name. I haven't seen the original, but reading up on them quickly leads me to believe there is basically no connection between the two except for the fact that they're both about a school of murderous piranhas.

I remember the ad campaign for this one very well -- they touted the fact that the movie was in 3D and that it featured women in bikinis.

Unfortunately, watching it at home, I was not able to enjoy the 3D aspect, although it was often painfully obvious when I was SUPPOSED to be enjoying it. In movies like these, people are always shoving stuff into the camera -- oars, spilled drinks, vomit, you name it, it gets shoved towards the camera.

However, there were plenty of women in bikinis. PIRANHA takes place in a small lakeside town during Spring Break, as the town is overrun with high school and college aged kids ready to party. I was a little unclear on this but I guess early on there is an earthquake that opens a hole in the bottom of the lake leading to ANOTHER lake, and this is where the piranhas come from. They immediately kill Richard Dreyfuss, who is dressed as his character from JAWS and singing "Show me the way to go home."

Get it? Because JAWS was a popular movie about a killer fish.

Anyway, no more Richard Dreyfuss. So, that's disappointing. Instead we get a teenage kid (Steven R. McQueen) whose mom (Elizabeth Shue) is the local sheriff. He's supposed to babysit his younger siblings instead of joining in the Spring Break festivities, but decides to abandon them and go join a Girls Gone Wild type of crew on their boat, led by Jerry O'Connell in super douche mode. There's also a love interest (Jessica Szohr) who comes along, but they both keep swearing they're not together.

When bodies start surfacing from piranha attacks, a team of seismologists show up to check out the earthquake damage, led by Adam Scott, who takes a liking to Elisabeth Shue when she agrees to guide them around the lake.

One thing leads to another and eventually we have a giant blood bath on our hands. I didn't time it, but I'd guess there's maybe about a 30 minute scene in the middle of this film in which Spring Break kids get mauled by piranhas, one after the other. The gore effects are pretty gross, but look pretty cool, while the fish look like shitty CGI from the late 90s. So, that's another disappointment.

There's a creepy under current in this flick having to do with the dismemberment of girls in bikinis. I'm not sure who decided it was fun to watch girls in bikinis get eaten alive, but this movie really REALLY relishes in that kind of stuff. Characters are constantly referring to the girls as "bitches" and "whores" and the camera lingers on each swim suit death scene as if we're supposed to be glad these people are dying. Meanwhile, they didn't do anything wrong, except party in bikinis. What gives? It's like, misogyny, or something.

This flick is kind of a bummer because it seems like they really wanted to make a "fun", balls to the wall movie without reservations, and instead they ended up making a grim, tasteless one. The cast is good, including Ving Rhames, who I neglected to mention before, as a deputy who takes an outboard motor off of a boat and attempts to kill the piranhas with it. Then he gets eaten.

I feel like PIRANHA somehow has some kind of chip on its shoulder -- the glee it takes in killing all these people is just a little too transparent. If you want to make a movie that says, "Fuck it!" you can't have baggage.

Horrorfest 2012: House of the Devil

HOUSE OF THE DEVIL is a recent low budget horror flick sold as a throwback to classier horror flicks of the late 70s and early 80s. When I first heard these claims I was skeptical -- I've been tricked too many times by supposed homages and throwbacks that were anything but. So, I was glad when I finally watched HOUSE OF THE DEVIL to find that it is not only almost a pitch-perfect homage the golden age of slasher flicks, but also quite good on its own merits.

This is not the splatter movie the name seems to imply. It is a long, slow, suspenseful burn, that only really amps up the horror in the last few minutes. It's a simple enough tale, about a broke college student (Jocelin Donahue) who answers an ad to babysit for a couple during the night of a full lunar eclipse.

So, first of all, I hear the words "babysit" and I think -- oh, great. Here we go. A creepy kid. Let me guess, it's a sullen, pale kid who just sits there and stares all the time, and that's supposed to be scary. Then he turns out to be the antichrist. Right?

No! Turns out there's no kid at all! The creepy couple (Tom Noonan and Mary Woronov) who own the titular house in the isolated woods have lured our heroine there under false pretenses to watch the wife's elderly mother. Or, at least, sit in the house in case of an emergency -- chances are, we won't even see the mother if everything goes according to plan. Sounds easy enough, and after Donahue is offered some extra cash due to the weirdness of the whole thing, we enter the delicious middle part of the film in which we sit on the edge of our seats wondering what horrors await.

Now, I guess your appreciation of the film could hinge on whether or not you find the climax satisfying. I have to admit, I could have used a little more from the climax. I liked the fact that when the shit hit the fan, Donahue turned out to be way smarter and more capable than your average slasher flick heroine, but I didn't feel that the eventual mysteries that were exposed quite justified everything that had come before.

Still, I liked everything that came before. So, while I still like the movie overall, I wouldn't be at all surprised if someone else said, "It was fine until the ending, and then the ending ruined it." I don't agree, necessarily, but I totally understand where that's coming from.

The movie was shot in 16mm which gives it a "real" look, as opposed to the too-slick digital camera work of other low budget horror flicks like EXIT HUMANITY from earlier this month. The filmmakers were wise to design the movie to look like an under-exaggerated version of the 80s -- instead of showcasing every cliche they can think of, they present a world that is clearly still in transition from the 70s. There's a killer soundtrack, as well.

Most of the movie rests on the shoulders of Donahue who spends most of her screen time alone. She turns in a very good performance, no matter what the movie throws at her. She's believable and sympathetic as a put-upon college student who can't even relax in her own room thanks to an unruly roommate. And, later, she's equally believable as someone who could rise up against her captors. I hope she has a great career ahead of her.

Horrorfest 2012: Night of the Comet

And now for perhaps the most cheerful horror movie I've ever seen, 1984's NIGHT OF THE COMET. Sure, it's about the end of the world, but it's also about how you can't ruin a couple of girls' good time.

Opening narration lets us know that a comet that hasn't passed through Earth's orbit since the extinction of the dinosaurs is about to make another fly-by. Some scientists have suspected this might result in death and destruction, so they've entered a safe bunker in an effort to perpetuate the species. Meanwhile, everyone else on Earth views the comet's fly-by as an event warranting the kind of celebrations normally reserved for New Year's Eve.

Of course, the scientists are right, and most of the people of Earth are reduced to piles of dust as the comet passes. There are a few survivors -- a few who made it out okay, and some others who have been turned into zombie-like beings.

Among these survivors are our two heroines, a pair of 80s-tastic teenage sisters played by Catherine Mary Stewart and Kelli Maroney. Stewart's the older and wiser of the two (she's 18 and has a job at the movie theater, after all) and Maroney is a boy-crazy cheerleader. They represent versions of the valley girl stereotype that was so popular in the 80s, but the screenplay allows them to be a little more three dimensional than your average movie teenager, especially for girls. That's not to say they aren't still funny and ridiculous -- they are. They're just human at the same time.

The girls were brought up by a military dad, so they know their way around automatic weapons, which comes in handy as they traverse the almost empty post apocalyptic landscape of Los Angeles. They team up with a trucker (Robert Beltran) and eventually have a run in with the afore-mentioned scientists who turn out not to be quite as on top of things as we were originally led to believe. So, aside from humor and horror, there are some surprises, here.

One of the best scenes is a sequence in which the girls realize they can go through the mall and get whatever they want, now that it's the end of the world and no one is watching. They carefully set down their automatic weapons, then prance through the mall trying things on set to "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" by Cyndi Lauper. The film seems so firmly rooted in the 80s that it's almost as if it was made now, looking back nostalgically at the time. It's not dated so much as it is a perfect snapshot of a moment in time, with all the good stuff and none of the bad stuff.

There is real life to this movie, despite the fact that it is an end of the world story. That's nice and refreshing, since so many of these apocalyptic flicks tend to be cynical and hateful, with an underlying message that they might be kinda glad that mankind is over. This apocalypse is faced down by two teenage girls who are at times appropriately bummed, but plucky enough to get on with it.

Horrorfest 2012: It! The Terror from Beyond Space

The 1950s sci-fi horror flick, IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE, will seem familiar to anyone who has seen any of the several popular sci-fi movies it spawned, specifically the ALIEN franchise. Sometimes the first instance of a story is the best, other times it is improved upon on subsequent outings. How does IT! fare?

Unfortunately, IT! falls short the same way more recent monster movies some times do and that's by having a bland cast of characters. Our hero in this film is square-jawed, bland Marshall Thompson, an astronaut stranded on Mars who is the sole survivor of his mission. When the rescue ship and its crew arrive, he learns he is suspected of murdering his entire crew, and is on his way back to Earth to stand trial.

Thompson maintains some martian creature is the real culprit, though his rescuers don't believe him. It isn't long before bodies start piling up on the ship, however, and it becomes clear they have an alien stowaway. This is the titular IT! -- a tall guy in a monster suit. But, hey, there's nothing wrong with that, THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD was a tall guy in a monster suit, too, and that movie rules.

So what's wrong here? Well, like I said, the characters are boring. You can't tell one from another and no one has anything interesting to say. They might as well be robots. So, that sucks some of the tension out of a stowaway alien hunting down the crew one by one.

It is a little entertaining to watch the crew's various attempts to fight the monster, and the movie has a cool device where the astronauts are forced higher and higher into their rocket-like spaceship as the monster climbs from floor to floor. It isn't long before they're trapped in the uppermost compartment of the ship with nothing to do but listen to the monster break his way through the floors below. There's also a neat device where one of the astronauts is stuck in the bowels of the ship, communicating with his buddies over the radio.

It sounds action packed, but unfortunately the movie is pretty slow and clumsy. The same material in someone else's hands might have been ground breaking. Instead, this idea was one whose time hadn't come yet.

Horrorfest 2012: The Black Sleep

THE BLACK SLEEP is a true gem for any classic horror fan. This late 50s homage to the then-recently ended string of Universal horror classics isn't quite as good as the best Universal monster flicks, but is better than the worst, and just as good as most of them.

Most of the film's allure comes from the incredible cast, a list that reads like a who's who of horror greats -- Basil Rathbone, Lon Chaney, Jr., John Carradine and Bela Lugosi. Even Ed Wood regular Tor Johnson is in this flick. The only one missing is Boris Karloff!

Rathbone stars as a mad scientist in the late 1800s who has invented a drug that puts his victims (I mean patients) into what he calls "the black sleep" -- indistinguishable from death, but as long as Rathbone administers an antidote within an hour, the sleeping patient will come back to life. This device helps with Rathbone's exploratory surgeries, as he dissects living human's brains in an effort to find a way to remove a brain tumor from his comatose wife without killing her in the process. Unfortunately, these experiments, while not killing the patients, leave a string of brain damaged monsters in their wake.

Our hero is probably the least interesting guy in the movie, but that's par for the course when you've got a huge list of great villains -- Herbert Rudley plays a doctor who is unjustly accused of murder and is awaiting execution on death row when Rathbone rescues him by faking his death with the black sleep and smuggling him to safety. In return, Rathbone wants Rudley's help with his experiments, which Rudley is initially happy to do, before discovering the unethical nature of the tasks at hand.

Chaney, Johnson and Carradine are on hand as demented, psychotic, murderous human leftovers of these experiments. Some of them are kept in a hidden dungeon in the castle, but Chaney roams the halls and, swinging wildly from docile to violent. 

The only one of these stars you could say is totally wasted in a worthless part is Lugosi who plays a mute butler. He has one good moment at the beginning of the film when he alarms our heroes by coming to the door to let them in, but other than that he just stands around in the background performing menial chores. It's awesome to have Lugosi's name in the credits and presence on screen, but it's a shame and a waste to see how he's used here. The part could have literally been played by anyone. Ed Wood used Lugosi to much greater effect in an otherwise shabbier flick shot around the same time, BRIDE OF THE MONSTER. Chaney is ALMOST wasted, also in a mute part, except he at least has several good fright scenes.

Rathbone fares better as the made scientist because it is clearly the best role in the film. He relishes each evil line and is unrepentant in his portrayal of a great, underrated screen villain.

THE BLACK SLEEP isn't as stylish as the classic Universal monster movies at their best, but it has a lot of spirit, a great cast and is never, ever boring.

Horrorfest 2012: I Bury the Living

What a title -- I BURY THE LIVING is a late 50s horror flick that makes a lot out of a modest budget. Richard Boone stars as a man who finds himself overseeing a cemetery. The previous groundskeeper (Theodore Bikel) keeps a map of the cemetery in the office, showing all of the plots, and marking the "occupied" plots with black-headed pins and the purchased but still empty plots with white-headed pins. 

It isn't long before Boone carelessly places a couple of black-headed pins where a white-headed pins should be. To his horror, the real-life owners of these plots turn up dead the very next day. These coincidences keep happening until Boone becomes obsessed with the cemetery map and convinced that he is able to control whether people live or die depending on what pins he places in their grave plots. 

This is a brilliant idea for a story, and it is told very well. The movie does a great job of keeping the viewer guessing -- is this a coincidence? Is it all in Boone's head? Is there something supernatural at work here? Or, is there another explanation? You don't know until the last few minutes of the film, and I couldn't have guessed it.

The central visual element of the movie is the cemetery map itself, which starts off as a modest bulletin board on the wall of the office. As Boone becomes more obsessed and paranoid, the map seems to grow until it covers the entire wall of the office, dwarfing Boone in one dramatic shot after the other. Lighting tricks are also used to give the map character, sometimes just making it glow supernaturally in the background so you can't help but look at it, and other times playing with the shadows of the pins so they seem to dance menacingly across the surface.

This is a good example of a small, modest flick that, despite the great premise, could have been bland and uninteresting if the writer and director didn't have some creative ambition. Thanks to the way they've approached the story, this B-horror movie stands out as unique and won't soon be forgotten like so many others.

Horrorfest 2012: Rammbock

Now we head to Germany for a recent zombie flick called RAMMBOCK. The title translates to "battering ram," which refers to a scene in the film in which a couple of the characters fashion a rudimentary battering ram in order to travel from one apartment to the other without entering the hallway. Why this is important enough to get title status, I'm not sure, though at least RAMMBOCK sounds kinda cool.

The problem with zombie movies is that they're all pretty similar. This was all right when you'd get maybe one per decade, but over the last 10 years or so it seems to have become the go-to subgenre for horror filmmakers and fans. Now, as long as a movie is good, I don't really care whether it is original or unique or anything like that. A good example of a tried and true formula is good enough for me. Still, when there are so many others like you, it just becomes that much harder to stand out from the crowd or rise above the level of mediocrity.

I'm afraid RAMMBOCK never really rises from mediocrity. It doesn't have very much new stuff to add to the zombie formula, and the stuff it cribs from other flicks is done competently enough but never really rises to the next level.

The main character is a put-upon, shy, awkward regular guy (Michael Fuith) who has just arrived in Berlin to return a set of keys to his ex-girlfriend (Anka Grazczyk). It's clear that he is hoping for this reunion to transform into a new beginning for his relationship, but when he arrives at the apartment he finds that she isn't there. Before he can figure out where she is, he's forced to barricade himself inside the apartment due to the untimely zombie apocalypse unfolding outside.

One kind of unique aspect of this flick is the way it uses the apartment building as a setting. The apartments are built around a grim courtyard, so the tenants are able to open their windows and yell back and forth to each other, requesting food, medicine, whatever. They're also able to witness the carnage below when zombies wander into the courtyard and take out unfortunate victims. This sense of several different people isolated in individual boxes, all witnessing the same horror, amplified the usual approach of one group of survivors barricading themselves inside a house or mall or whatever. The futility of how close yet how far away these people are from each other served to heighten the tension and add to the drama.

The other interesting aspect of this flick is how it uses the zombie outbreak to focus on the main character's relationship problems. He's so lovesick and obsessed that even as the world is ending, all he can think about is whether or not his ex-girlfriend might be calling him on the phone. This relationship and coming of age stuff was also touched upon in the far superior SHAUN OF THE DEAD, but it was an interesting angle here, just the same.

Horrorfest 2012: The Vampire Lovers

Ah, yes, it's nice to see the names "American International" and "Hammer Films" in the opening credits of a horror film. It's not necessarily a quality assurance thing so much as it is a sign that whether or not the following flick is any good, it's going to be entertaining as all hell.

This time it's THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, an adaptation of the gothic story CARMILLA which was one of the original inspirations for DRACULA, about a female vampire feeding on other females. You know what that means -- homoerotic implications. For a flick from 1970, this one is fairly up front with its nudity and sexual situations, making it fairly clear we're dealing in same-sex love territory. So, the movie is kind of ahead of its time while also being just about what you'd expect from its time since it wastes no opportunity to exploit its subject.

Anyway, this one stars Hammer regular Peter Cushing as a 19th century General whose daughter (Pippa Steele) is seduced and eventually killed by a visting beautiful woman who happens to be a vampire (Ingrid Pitt).

Later, the vampire moves on to another household, where she seduces another innocent girl (Madeline Smith) before Cushing comes back with the help of a vampire hunter (Douglas Wilmer) to put an end to everything.

Technically, I guess, the movie isn't much to write home about. However, it is colorful, well acted, features great costumes and set design and is never boring. So, you've got a solid piece of entertainment here, especially if you like pretty girls who fall out of their dresses.

Ingrid Pitt is great as the seductive vampiress in a rather thankless role -- she doesn't get to gloat evilly over her kills, but she does get to slink around suggestively and manipulate just about everyone on screen, and you believe she could get away with it the whole time. The other women are good as well, playing the innocent victims of seduction without too much self-parody, walking the line carefully to remain alluring as virginal waifs while still being somewhat believable as actual characters.

Cushing is the best, here, even though he doesn't have much to work with. He's not a strong personality here like his famous iterations of Van Helsing and Dr. Frankenstein, but he does prove that he can dominate the screen simply by appearing on it. He has that kind of face.

Horrorfest 2012: Rodan

I'm not sure what to think of all these Japanese monster movies where giant monsters destroy cities. It seems to me that most of them aren't very good at all, but they have legions of fans.

When I was a kid one of the few VHS tapes I had was KING KONG VS. GODZILLA, so I watched it about a million times. Now, this isn't a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, but it is funny and entertaining. The original GODZILLA is not funny at all, but it is a grim and suspenseful disaster story.

RODAN, on the other hand, is... I don't know. Boring?

The movie opens on Japanese miners being attacked by giant insects and leads to the discovery of two winged prehistoric monsters, both named Rodan, who terrorize Japan with their super sonic flight speeds. As usual, we get a scene with a scientist who explains that he is pretty sure nuclear bombs are responsible for reawakening these beasts.

George Takei reportedly did some of the voices in the overdubbed version, which is the one I watched, but I'm sorry to report that I only recognized his voice once or twice. It was nice knowing he was there, though.

The film climaxes with endless shots of missiles being fired into a mountain from every angle you can imagine, over and over again. This is accompanied with hissing, annoying sound effects. If you can stay awake during this "final battle" for the surprisingly sad ending, you win extra points.

So what is it that made this flick a hit both in Japan and the US? There had been plenty of superior special effects flicks before this one. It's not like the sub-par effects in this flick blew anyone's minds. Maybe it just had a killer ad campaign. Who knows.

Horrorfest 2012: The Fog

I’m slowly but surely checking off John Carpenter’s movies on my list of things to see and whenever I get to one I’m always excited because they’re always good. THE FOG is no exception.

Carpenter has a way with horror, of course, being famous for HALLOWEEN and THE THING, and he also has a way with making a modestly budgeted indie flick look like a million bucks. THE FOG takes place in a coastal Northern California town, and almost every shot takes advantage of local scenery and flavor.

The movie opens with an example of possibly the beginning of all horror stories, the campfire story – John Houseman delivers a creepy monologue about sailors who were murdered 100 years before, that very night, and how they were destined to return. Sure enough, a mysterious fog rolls in and weird stuff starts happening – inanimate objects seem possessed and a boat seems to disappear.

During the chaotic night and the morning that follows we’re introduced to a lot of the key players in the small town, who will eventually end up solving this supernatural mystery and battling demonic ghosts. It’s a great cast, and kudos to Carpenter for giving top billing to three women – Jamie Lee Curtis as a hitchhiker just passing through town, Adrienne Barbeau as the local DJ who broadcasts from the top of the lighthouse and horror icon Janet Leigh as the head of the committee celebrating the town’s 100 year birthday. We’ve also got Hal Holbrook as a priest with a shameful family secret that influenced the town’s past and could influence its future if things aren’t rectified.

There’s something about these flicks from the late 70s and early 80s that seems so real and lived-in. Spielberg’s early movies always have this feel as well, along with flicks by Joe Dante, Ivan Reitman, John Landis and Tobe Hooper. It’s the best way to do a supernatural movie, because it makes the horror seem so much more real when it is set against a backdrop that doesn’t seem alien or weird, but seems just like a place you’ve been inhabited with people you’ve met.

Horrorfest 2012: Theatre of Blood

All right, another Vincent Price movie! It’s like every time I see the guy in a flick I like him more and more. This time, Price stars as a Shakespearean actor out for revenge in THEATRE OF BLOOD.

Price considers himself the greatest actor of his generation, but unfortunately none of the critics in London agree with him. After he’s deprived a prestigious award, Price seemingly commits suicide. A year later, the critics who kept the prize from him and plagued him throughout his career start showing up dead, one by one, each in a murder scenario inspired by the wide variety of creative deaths featured in Shakespeare’s plays.

Ian Hendry plays the most level-headed of the critics who starts to put the puzzle together, and Diana Rigg is on hand as Price’s devoted daughter. How devoted is she, you ask? Well, I can’t tell you, you have to watch the movie to find out.

THEATRE OF BLOOD is as funny as it is tragic with plenty of black comedy lightening up the otherwise dreary business of gory revenge. Price can play anything – most of his Shakespeare readings are appropriately over the top, his comic timing is dead-on and everyone knows he can be creepy. But there is one moment, in particular, where the proceedings are elevated from the run of the mill to the sublime, as Price delivers Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech before plummeting off of a balcony and into the Thames.

Horrorfest 2012: Pontypool

PONTYPOOL is another recent Canadian horror flick, which makes 2 for Horrorfest 2012 after EXIT HUMANITY. PONTYPOOL is a little more effective in its ambitions, I think, because it plays things closer to the chest. Both flicks are ostensibly zombie movies, but both handle the idea of a zombie outbreak in different ways.

The movie is named after the Ontario town it takes place in, and Stephen McHattie stars as the local morning drive-time guy. A lot of the descriptions I've read of the movie call him a shock-jock, which made me think of guys like Howard Stern, but this DJ is more of a late-career Don Imus, cranky and cowboy-hatted.

The whole movie takes place at the radio studio during the morning broadcast. After encountering an ominously delirious woman on the road on the way to work, McHattie's DJ commences what seems like a normal morning with his producer (Lisa Houle) and her assistant (Georgina Reilly) until phone calls start to come in about alarming, unexplained riots.

Any filmgoer instantly recognizes that this is some kind of zombie outbreak. Or, if not zombies, a virus that turns normal humans into cannibals. Something along those lines. It has all the earmarks. But, the radio crew is bewildered and doesn't know what's going on, and just goes about their morning slowly beginning to realize the apocalypse is unfolding outside their doors.

The confined setting leads to a few questions -- the studio is in a basement, but why not run up to street level during a commercial (or send the assistant) to see what's going on outside? No one even discusses it until late in the film. There also appears to be a TV in the studio, but they keep it on the BBC, who doesn't seem to know what all is happening. I find it hard to believe affiliates from Toronto or something wouldn't fly over in a helicopter.

Anyway, all that stuff isn't really a big deal -- the movie is good at what it does, which is create a claustrophobic climate and let the actors go at each other. McHattie and Houle are really good as the aging DJ and beleaguered producer. Hrant Alianak is perhaps less effective as a doctor who conveniently shows up to halfway explain the epidemic. His performance seems to strive for some comic moments that are out of place.

The nice thing about this flick that differentiates itself from other zombie flicks is not the confined radio station setting, but the method of transmitting the virus, which has something to do with language. Infected people start obsessively repeating a word as if they've gotten "stuck" on it, then babble incoherently, and, eventually, like mocking-children, repeat whatever they overhear their potential victims saying. It takes a while before this becomes clear, so it adds an additional element of mystery to the movie that is sometimes lacking in zombie flicks, especially now that you can't turn around without running into one.

As the movie progressed I couldn't help but think how much more powerful it would have been as a radio production, along the lines of Orson Welles' version of WAR OF THE WORLDS. Unfortunately there isn't much audience or even medium left for that. Still, after the film was over, I was pleased to read that a version has actually been broadcast as a radio show.

The fact that the main character is a radio jock, the film takes place in a radio station, and the zombie plague is transmitted through verbal communication adds up to a nice little statement about -- something. I'm not 100% sure what that is, and I'm also not 100% sure what the filmmakers think, either, but that's kind of nice, actually. I like it when things ALMOST tie up into a bow, but not quite. You don't want your horror movies too neat and tidy. They should be a little messy.

Horrorfest 2012: Absentia

The recent indie flick ABSENTIA was a nice little surprise. This micro-budget horror movie looks like it was a much more expensive production than it was, and acts like it, too. There's none of that, "Hey, we're indie so we can do whatever we want and you have to like it because we're indie!" mentality, here. This is a professional, mature flick.

I think one of the biggest pitfalls facing a low budget horror flick is the temptation to do more than you should on a small budget. I've seen so many micro-budgeted flicks fail simply because the filmmakers wished they were making big budget sci-fi or monster flicks. This leads to shitty effects and dumb costumes. Don't get me wrong -- I'm not against innovation. EVIL DEAD, for instance, is the perfect balance between filmmakers doing what they could with what they had while also throwing in a little extra. But, that's a hard balance to hit.

ABSENTIA does not fall into this trap, because it is content to play almost as if it is a serious character driven drama. It just happens to end up being a horror movie.

Courtney Bell stars as a woman whose husband (Morgan Peter Brown) mysteriously disappeared years ago. As the story begins, her recovering drug addict sister (Katie Parker) is coming to visit to help her finally put the missing husband thing to rest. Parker notes that Bell is pregnant, but Bell dosn't seem to want to talk about it. There's definitely something weird going on, as Bell begins to see creepy visions. Are they real, is she crazy, what's up?

Meanwhile, there's a foreboding pedestrian tunnel built into the side of a hill right in the girls' neighborhood. The first time I saw it, as Parker's character innocently went on a morning jog, I thought -- DUDE! Don't jog in THERE! Someone's going to KILL you! And that's even without any supernatural stuff, I mean, come on, anyone could be in there! Weirdos, even. Sure enough, Parker does come across a weirdo -- but is he just homeless and sick or undead or what? What's going on?

To the movie's credit, it keeps you guessing for a long time, and eventually delivers some unexpected answers.

Horrorfest 2012: Burn Witch Burn

This is the second film of Horrorfest 2012 in a row that starts with narration, but unlike THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD, the opening narration of BURN WITCH BURN is interesting. A voice comes over blackness to warn the audience that the movie deals with witchcraft, and then reads a magic spell to ward off demons that might come out of the screen while the movie is being shown. Needless to say, this got my attention.

However, as BURN WITCH BURN started, I began to wonder if this narration had been added after the fact. After all, the credits say the film is from American International, heroes in the world of cinematic exploitation, and only a couple moments into the film it becomes clear that this is not a home grown schlock production at all, but a classy flick from England. After the movie was over I did some reading and confirmed my suspicions -- not only was the narration added at the beginning, but the title was changed from NIGHT OF THE EAGLE. I gotta say, NIGHT OF THE EAGLE just does not get the job done the way BURN WITCH BURN does.

Anyway, the movie is from the early 60s and takes place during then-contemporary times. Peter Wyngarde stars as a young sociology professor, new to his university, and we meet him in a somewhat Indiana Jonesy moment as he explains to his students that black magic, witch craft and other superstitions only have power if you believe. "I do not believe," is underlined on his chalk board. This is my kind of guy.

The rest of the professors and their spouses seem to waver between tolerating the new guy and being outright jealous of him. It seems although he's young and new, he's likely to take the coveted position of chair of the department. His wife, played by Janet Blair, seems acutely aware of this departmental bickering and in-fighting, though Wyngarde doesn't sweat it, too much.

That is, until he picks up on a few clues that tell him his wife might be using black magic and witchcraft to get him his way. He confronts her, she admits it, and he destroys all of her fetishes and talismans, despite her warning that bad things will happen if he does so. She doesn't want to hurt him, she wants to help him, but she is afraid of the dark forces working against him that she feels she has been warding off. There is a particularly creepy moment when a spider his wife kept as a talisman is thrown into the fire, and then crawls back out again.  Sheesh.

No sooner have the demonic items been destroyed than bad stuff does start happening to the poor professor. He's almost run over, a female student accuses him of untoward advances, her boyfriend assaults him, and it all escalates until it gets to the point where it seems his own wife wants to kill him. But, not everything is as it seems, as we find out in the thrilling climax.

BURN WITCH BURN is a really well made film with some good central performances and a lot of surprises. It's great to go into this kind of movie having no idea what your'e going to get -- the title made me picture medieval witch trials, but instead I got a little horror story about faculty politics. Now that I think of it, that sounds like a bit of a disappointment, but it was the exact opposite.

Horrorfest 2012: The Monster that Challenged the World

Now we head directly into 1950s atomic-scare territory with THE MONSTER THAT CHALLENGED THE WORLD, in which radioactive mollusks (yes, you read correctly) are the titular monsters in question.

These mollusks don't really challenge the world so much as they do the Salton Sea, an interesting setting for a flick of this kind. The setting is one of the few things the movie has going for it -- what better location for a paranoid 1950s flick than a creepy, geologically odd, abandoned sea in the middle of the desert?

Unfortunately the movie starts with a narrator telling us all about the Salton Sea, which is boring. That's the biggest weakness of the movie -- it's boring.

Basically, we've got a Naval test site on the edge of the Salton Sea, blasting it with radiation, when an earthquake awakens prehistoric mollusks who go on a killing spree. The Navy teams up with scientists to solve the mystery and destroy the creatures. Not much new territory covered here.

Aside from the setting, the best part of the flick is the creatures themselves -- they truly are monsterous and are not cheap props or costumes. Clearly a lot of ingenuity and work went into making the monsters as cool and effective as possible, so the brief moments they're on screen are always exciting.

Those moments are too brief, though, and we're left without any real interesting heroes or victims to follow. So, while the flick isn't outright bad, it is certainly bland, which is a shame -- too bad these cool creatures couldn't have been in a flick with a little more get up and go.

Horrorfest 2012: Dream Home

DREAM HOME is a recent flick from Hong Kong that has some ambitions to tell a story that's a little deeper than your average slasher movie, but ultimately gives in to gore and mayhem to the disservice of the rest of the movie.

The film stars Josie Ho as a young woman who dreams of living in a luxurious condo with a view. Because the story is told out of chronological order, we know early on that at some point in the narrative she becomes a ruthless killer. We just don't know exactly how or why.

Inbetween murder sessions and scenes of Ho's unsatisfying love life and jobs, we get flashbacks showing how her family was forcibly moved by a crooked government when she was a child, how her mother died before she could make good on a promise to get them a nice place, and how her father eventually became ill and the medical bills skyrocketed.

The nice thing about this set up is it has a little commentary about the state of the world today, or more specifically, the state of the world on the eve of the housing crisis and recession. It's an interesting idea, showing a young woman struggling to earn enough money to achieve her dreams against a backdrop of  an unstable and always-changing economy. It's one of the few movies I've seen that deals honestly with the giant gap between what people expect to get as they grow up (a home, a family, security) and what they can actually afford (basically nothing worth while). It is believable that this conundrum might drive someone to a desperate act, or even a cold and calculated unethical act.

Unfortunately the acts shown in this movie are so over the top, so gory and so unrelenting that I had a hard time believing Ho's character would come to this. Murder is probably messy and unwieldy, sure, and I respect the movie for making it clear that it is not easy for Ho to go on a killing  spree. However, after the first grueling murder, you'd think she'd throw in the towel, rather than continuing on a spree for the rest of the night, with multiple victims including a young pregnant woman. We get glimpses into some of these lives before they are destroyed, but they are rarely sympathetic and usually satirical views of the privileged class. So is Ho a kind of anti-hero for viciously killing them? I don't think so.

But even if this was the point of the movie, and even if it worked, I'd still have a hard time believing the hard ships she went through in her life led to this kind of cold blooded savagery.  Yes, I realize similar things happen to real people in real life, but this is so extreme that it is a little hard to swallow. The movie betrays its own premise by making Ho such an extreme killer. Maybe if they backed off the gore a little, simplified the murder spree, stretched it out over a period of time, anything to make it more believable, then they'd really have a chilling point.

Horrorfest 2012: The Mummy's Curse

Now we skip to the last real entry in the Universal MUMMY series (not counting the Abbot and Costello flick) for THE MUMMY'S CURSE. This time, monster-master Lon Chaney, Jr. takes on the part of the mummy. Unfortunately, the movie's not very good.

First of all, like Jason from FRIDAY THE 13th or Michael Myers from HALLOWEEN, the Mummy could be played by just about anyone and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.  Lon Chaney, Jr. was used to great effect in a lot of the Universal flicks, usually as the Wolf-Man and his put-upon alter ego, Larry Talbot (the poor bastard), but whenever he had to jump into other monster makeup, it was usually a waste. And that's a shame, because although Lon Chaney, Jr. is not the legend his father was, he was a great actor in his own right.

In this installment, we have more of the business with the magic leaves, and more of the business with Egyptian high priests using the Mummy as their thug, and more of the stuff about the dead princess and guarding her tomb, etc. Somehow between the previous MUMMY flick and this one, the action has moved to the swamps of Louisiana. Granted, it's a locale ripe with atmosphere and superstition that has been exploited to great effect in other horror flicks, but it's not the first place that springs to mind when you think of mummies.

In THE MUMMY'S CURSE, we actually get two mummies, as the dead princess (Virginia Christine) and object of Chaney's desire also rises from the dead. The best segments of the movie involve her, especially one genuinely creepy sequence in which she slowly lowers herself into a swamp to clean off the dust and decay of thousands of years.

We also get another look at the flashback footage of Boris Karloff from the original Mummy flick. It seems even more out of place in this movie than it did in THE MUMMY'S HAND, and served once again to highlight the flaws of this flick by showing some key scenes from a much better. You also have to wonder what exactly the filmmaker's are up to when their movie runs less than an hour and contains about 10 minutes of flashbacks.

As an Ed Wood fan, I was interested to note that Peter Coe plays the villainous Egyptian high priest in this flick. In his later years, Coe was one of director Ed Wood's last friends who was there right up until the day Wood died.

In any case, this is not one of Universal's best, and it is not a great showcase for Lon Chaney, Jr. Still, I've gone years without seeing any of these MUMMY sequels, so it's about time I had a brief overview.  They just keep making me want to watch the original Boris Karloff MUMMY more and more.

Horrorfest 2012: The Mummy's Hand

So far this month I’ve been counting down the top 31 highest rated horror flicks on Netflix Watch Instantly that I haven’t seen yet, and I’ve been going in order. Today I’m going to skip ahead a little – two movies in the Universal MUMMY series are on my list, and I wanted to watch them in order of production.

It wouldn’t be Horrorfest without at least a little Universal horror. Unfortunately, THE MUMMY’S HAND, the second in Universal’s MUMMY series, isn’t an example of their best work. Still, it isn’t an example of the studio’s worst work, either.

As a follow up to the original Boris Karloff chiller, THE MUMMY, THE MUMMY’S HAND pales in comparison. Not only does the story have nothing to do with the original, but the film lacks all of the creepy atmosphere and deliberate, suspenseful pacing that put the original right on par with more famous monster flicks like DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN.

Of course, Karloff was one major element that made the first MUMMY work. He’s absent here, with the exception of a couple of flashback scenes, and cowboy actor Tom Tyler takes the role instead. It’s not much of a role, in this flick, as the mummy just lumbers around, silently stalking his prey. In the original, the Mummy was able to regenerate into a Dracula-esque gentleman to go under cover with the rest of human society in order to carry out his dastardly plans.

THE MUMMY’S HAND concerns two bumbling archaeologists, one less dumb (Steve Banning) than the other (Wallace Ford), who stumble onto some clues leading them to the secret location of an ancient Egyptian princess’ tomb. In order to fund their expedition, they recruit a drunk stage magician (Cecil Kellaway) and his skeptical daughter (Peggy Moran).

Meanwhile, a dying Egyptian high priest (Eduardo Ciannelli) tasks his successor (George Zucco) with keeping this princess’ tomb undisturbed. In order to do so, they enlist the undead mummy (Tom Tyler) as a bodyguard/hitman. See, back in the day, when the mummy was alive, he was in love with the princess. After she died, he stole secret magical leaves to help bring her back to life, but was caught in the act and buried alive for his efforts. Now, he’s doomed to protect her tomb for eternity as a member of the walking dead, a slave to whoever controls the magic leaves that bring him life.

Anyway, the archaeologists look for the tomb and the mummy limps around the hillsides killing people off. A lot of time is wasted on the comic duo of Ford and Kellaway, but the comedy is not as funny as they probably want it to be. The scares aren’t as scary as they could be, either, although there is a legitimately chilling effect used on the Mummy to render his eyes and mouth as creepy black holes.

So, we’re left with a rather bland adventure film, though it does have its moments and is far from outright bad. The flashbacks re-used from the original MUMMY film made me want to watch the original again, and made it clear just how much this sequel lacks compared to its predecessor.

Horrorfest 2012: Creepshow

CREEPSHOW is yet another in a series of movies I've always heard of but only just recently got around to watching. This is an anthology horror flick directed by one of my favorites, George Romero. Unfortunately it doesn't live up to the promise of his NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD series, among the best horror films ever made.

Inspired by horror comics and written by Stephen King, CREEPSHOW tells 5 stories of varying quality, mostly combining campy humor with horror. On one hand, the movie does a great job of framing things in a comic book style, using lots of inventive visuals to tell the story the same way a classic comic book would, changing the size of the frame to emphasize different shots, etc. On the other, I think a lot of the casual, sloppy, "kidding" attitude comes from the comic book angle, as well, which is disappointing, because you'd think a couple guys paying homage to something would be able to take it at least a little seriously.

You can see just how seriously Stephen King takes the material right there on the screen in the second story, THE LONESOME DEATH OF JORDY VERRILL in which King himself plays the title character, a hayseed who discovers a meteor that turns him into a human vegetable. King has all the subtlety of Jim Varney here. If I wasn't watching this to review it, I probably would have turned it off at this point.

I'm glad I didn't, because I think the third story was my favorite, SOMETHING TO TIDE YOU OVER in which jealous husband Leslie Nielsen captures the man (Ted Danson) who has stolen his wife and tortures him by burying him neck deep in sand and allowing the tide to drown him. This segment is played the straightest of all of the segments, which is ironic, considering you've got Nielsen and Danson as stars, as opposed to the likes of Ed Harris, Hal Holbrook and E.G. Marshall in some of the lighter segments.

The final 2 stories concern a college professor who discovers a beast in a crate and sets it loose on his wife and a neat freak whose impeccably clean apartment is overrun with vengeful cockroaches. The first story, which I skipped over, has an abusive father returning from the grave.  There's also a framing segment in which a kid (King's son) gets revenge on his father for throwing out his Creepshow comics. Most of the stories contain numerous references to booze, with characters constantly carrying around bottles of hard-A, so we know where King's mind was at when he was scribbling this down.

I guess it sounds a little dumb for me to be complaining about how the filmmakers didn't take this material seriously. I mean, what do I expect, right? Still, even if they approach it as a farce with a wink and a nod, they should do THAT as seriously as possible. It's the only way for it to work. Nothing is worse for comedy than when people act like they're being funny (hear that, Stephen King?). Romero's own LIVING DEAD flicks have their funny moments, but they're nuanced and subtle, the stuff of satire. Not mugging and slapstick and wacky sound effects.

Horrorfest 2012: The Masque of the Red Death

I was excited to watch THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH this year because the film's star, Vincent Price, never lets me down. Even though he plays terrible villains, there's something reassuring about his presence, almost like a seal of quality -- this film is Vincent Price approved.

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH is yet another of the Roger Corman produced/directed movies loosely based on Edgar Allen Poe stories that came out in the 1960s. This time around, we have a good follow up to BLACK DEATH, as the flick takes place in medieval times and involves another plague, the fictitious Red Death.

The movie opens with a somewhat abstract scene almost worthy of Ingmar Bergman, as an old peasant woman encounters a mysteriously red-shrouded figure on a desolate mountain side and receives a prophetic message -- the day of deliverance is at hand.

Although modestly budgeted compared to major Hollywood releases of the time, this flick is thick with atmosphere from shot one, and the color is put to great use as the red-shrouded figure pops off the screen surrounded by gray scenery.

Turns out the old woman lives in a small village overseen by a local Prince, Prospero (Vincent Price) who is not only a total dick but also a Satanist. Upon his visit to the village at the beginning of the film, he almost runs over a child, punches one of his own guards, sentences two dudes to death, kidnaps a chick and ultimately burns the whole place down.  This is the kind of Prince we're dealing with.

Prospero discovers evidence that the Red Death has infested the village and holes up in his castle to keep himself safe, promising safety to a band of nobles he invites over to school in the ways of Satan and party with. The chick he kidnapped from the village (Jane Asher) turns out to be the daughter/lover of the two dudes who were initially sentenced to death (Nigel Green and David Weston). Prospero dedicates his time to wooing the otherwise Christian beauty to the dark side, while his wife (Hazel Court) seeks to marry Satan in an effort to make Prospero pay attention to her.

All the while the mysterious red-cloaked figure lurks on the mountainside overlooking the castle, and you begin to think maybe he has it in for Prospero. As the movie ramps up to its spectacularly satisfying climax, we see just who the red-cloaked figure is.

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH is a good example of how you can do a lot with a little -- I shit-talked THE TOXIC AVENGER not because of its modest origins but because of the way it squandered its ingenuity and ambition on bullshit. Roger Corman is a much better low-budget role model than the guys at Troma, in case you're looking for an indie hero.

Horrorfest 2012: Black Death

The recent British flick BLACK DEATH was waaaay better than I thought it was going to be. That's why it's nice to watch movies so arbitrarily, based on lists and whims and things like that -- it's the only way to really find pleasant surprises.

BLACK DEATH takes place in medieval England during the time of the Plague, and follows a young novice monk (Eddie Redmayne) who joins a group of Christian mercenaries led by a knight (Sean Bean of LORD OF THE RINGS fame) in their search for a nearby village that seems to have been spared by the plague. Is this because they've made a pact with the devil, in which case they must be destroyed? Or, do they have some other secret?

The novice monk is having a crisis of fatih of his own. He's in love and has already broken his vows by sleeping with a woman (Kimberly Nixon) who he sent away to safety when the plague struck his town. Now, he's joined this group just to get back to her.

Meanwhile, Sean Bean's knight character is the exact opposite -- although he can be a cold blooded killer, he's so certain in his faith that he doesn't question it for a moment.

The movie is heavy with atmosphere, beautifully shot, and suspenseful as hell, especially in the final passages when the whole "test of faith" angle is really amped up after a somewhat lagging middle section. I was never able to guess which direction the story was heading, and was constantly surprised with the territory and ideas that it explored, which is always refreshing. On top of all of this, all of the performances were solid and all of the characters were well drawn, so I always cared about what was happening and who it was happening to.

The only potential flaw in the flick, aside from the lagging middle section I mentioned before, is the fact that the story is framed in such a way that it deals with Christians being persecuted at the hands of Pagans, when in reality I'm pretty sure it was almost always the other way around. Still, this isn't supposed to be a history lesson, it's a specific story about a specific group of people, and I liked that however superstitious all the characters were, and however much the film seemed to take place in an apocalyptic time, it never strayed from the realm of reality.

Horrorfest 2012: The Toxic Avenger

I first heard of the B-movie schlockmeisters at Troma in the pages of Filmfax magazine, that newsprint Godsend of all things cult and classic, one of my few gateways to the world of psychotronic cinema in the days before the Internet came into its own.

In the 90s, Troma released TROMEO AND JULIET, a sleazy, anarchic, punk-rock, gutter-trash attempt to cash in on the popularity of the Baz Luhrman ROMEO + JULIET that was so successful. It was praised in the pages of Filmfax, so I took their word for it, rented the movie, and was... appalled? Embarrassed?

I guess it wasn't so much the content of TROMEO AND JULIET that disturbed me. It was how shitty the movie was. It was clearly thrown together on a shoe string with absolutely no signs of ambition or creativity. Just images put in front of a video camera. I'd sat through shit before, but this was the bottom of the barrel.

Still, the studio name Troma kept popping up here and there and I thought, hey, maybe they started out with some quality flicks and really had something to say, and then descended into trash in their later years.

So, that's just a long-winded way of getting to the point where I watched THE TOXIC AVENGER the other night, probably the most famous Troma flick and one of the first. And it was still terrible. There was no descent to trash -- it was trash from the beginning. To be fair, I guess that's what people like about the stuff that comes out of Troma, but also to be fair, that is dumb.

Anyway, THE TOXIC AVENGER is the story of a nerd (Mark Torgl) who is picked on by the hunks and babes who frequent the health club he works at as a janitor to the point that they eventually end up dumpig him into toxic waste. He emerges with hideous burns and boils on his flesh, somehow grows in stature and strength, develops a kind of Spidey-sense for misdeeds occurring nearby, and becomes The Toxic Avenger (Mitch Cohen in body, Kenneth Kessler in voice).

The Toxic Avenger goes about splitting his time between cleaning up the town by fighting gangsters and muggers, and hunting down the gang who wronged him. On the side, he romances a blind woman (Andree Maranda) who he rescues mid-rape. Lots of shitty blind jokes ensue.

The unique thing about the Toxic Avenger as a "superhero" is that he dispatches the villains in particularly gruesome and murderous ways, the likes of which Freddy and Jason would be proud of. The crooked mayor (Pat Ryan, Jr.) puts a hit out on the Toxic Avenger, and it isn't long before the national guard is called in. The movie and the citizens of town want the Toxic Avenger saved because of his good deeds in cleaning up the town, but I wasn't so sure. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if the Toxic Avenger was... taken care of?

The movie attempts to be a parody, but it's not funny or smart enough for that, and most of the good will goes out the window with the extensive gore and general mean-spirited tone of the whole affair. I'm a fan of grass roots film success stories in which independently-minded mavericks take on the system and get their vision out there while breaking all the rules, but I'm not a fan of movies with the kind of editing mistakes I used to make when I was 9.

Horrorfest 2012: The Gate

THE GATE was a pleasant surprise that I had never heard of before -- a 1987 horor film clearly aspiring to fit into the Spielberg sub-genre that was so popular at the time. It's not entirely successful, but it's a shame it's not more well known.

Young Stephen Dorff stars as a young kid who accidentally opens a gate to hell with his best friend (Louis Tripp) and must close it back up again with the help of his older sister (Christa Denton) who is babysitting while their parents are gone for the weekend.

The hole starts as the remnants of an uprooted tree in Dorff's backyard, but weird stuff starts happening soon after it is opened. Several seemingly coincidental elements (a cut hand, a dead dog) begin to add up as Dorff and his friend have nightmarish visions. It isn't long before Tripp's best pal character notices his favorite heavy metal album has instructions embedded in the lyrics both on how to open and how to close just such a hell gate.

With all the wide-eyed shots of kids with their hair blowing in supernatural gusts of wind, and atmospheric flashlight beams slicing through foggy nights in suburban -- but still creepy! --neighborhoods, it is clear that director Tibor Takacs must have been familiar with the then-popular Spielberg brand of horror. Still, this works in the movie's favor and doesn't render it simply as a dated clone.

I guess part of this is due to the special effects work -- there are some delightful throwbacks to stop motion monsters, and some tiny, menacing creatures played by men in costumes with the aid of camera tricks. All of this stuff is very memorable, even more so since it all happens to a group of kids while their parents are out of town, without a single grownup in sight to help. All of this stuff calls back easily to  the common elements that show up in our collective nightmares.

I liked the balance of small and epic. On one hand, you're dealing with 3 kids in one house with a hole in the backyard. On the other, you're dealing with a gateway to hell and unleashing demons that might lead to armageddon. But to the movie's credit, they never have to get the authorities involved or even really explain what exactly is going on. These kids just know they have to get it taken care of before Mom and Dad get home.

Horrorfest 2012: The Last Exorcism

THE LAST EXORCISM is yet another in the "found footage" genre popularized by THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. It's a horror mockumentary about an exorcist who has lost his faith and wants to take a film crew on his "last exorcism" to show just how fake everything really is.

Interestingly, this exorcist (Patrick Fabian) breaks the rules of horror movies by being Protestant instead of Catholic. He's a young family man who only kind of takes his own job as a reverend seriously and views the rural Louisiana family he's setting out to visit as the film begins as a bunch of superstitious hayseeds.

So, right away we have a couple interesting twists on old material. Putting the mockumentary style of the film aside for a moment, it's interesting to note that the skeptic in this film is also the core religious presence -- usually this genre sets up a struggle between a secular skeptic and a "wise" religious leader who knows the secrets of the spirit world. It's also interesting to note, again, that this is not an exorcist of the Catholic variety seen so often in films of this genre (whether portrayed accurately or not), but instead, the reverend of a mainstream mega-church, modern as can be, attacking the pulpit with the fire of a preacher and the savvy of a salesman.

Fabian is great in the lead, which helps with some of the creakier, less believable moments of the pseudo-documentary -- there are many chinks in the armor of "realism" where a quick viewer might think, "Wait -- if this is supposed to be a documentary, how did they...?" Ashley Bell is also great as the teenage victim of possession, believably vulnerable in her "normal" scenes and suitably creepy in her "possessed" scenes.

One of the most interesting things about this movie is that it keeps the viewer guessing for almost the entire running time as to whether or not this girl is really possessed. Since the exorcist main character doesn't even believe in his own trade, we're left wondering for much of the time whether or not this movie will end up proving the exorcist wrong or right. I don't want to give anything away, but I will say that I was pretty impressed with the movie up until the final minutes, when the story came to a solution that I felt was a little less interesting than some of the other solutions they entertained before making up their minds.

Still, THE LAST EXORCISM is better than it might sound on paper and is a little more than just a few previous classics stitched together. Not much, but a little.

Horrorfest 2012: Killer Klowns from Outer Space

KILLER KLOWNS FROM OUTER SPACE is a movie I remember seeing on video store shelves for years as a kid, but never got around to actually watching it until just now.

It's about what you'd expect -- a spoof of the paranoid sci-fi/horror flick in which invaders come from beyond the stars to capture/destroy humanity, and it's up to a group of kids to inform the authorities, who won't listen. Only this time, the alien invaders happen to look like circus clowns and have a spaceship that looks like a circus tent. The cocoons they trap their victims in look like cotton candy and their laser guns shoot popcorn. Am I forgetting anything? Oh yeah -- they also have balloon animal bloodhounds.

This movie works mostly because of the acting -- Grant Cramer stars as the lead teenager (or twenty-something? Hard to tell in these movies) and sets the tone with the right balance of "gee whiz" naivete and "aw shucks" incredulousness. He teams up with a local good-guy cop (John Allen Nelson) to rescue their mutual girlfriend (Suzanne Snyder) from the invading Klowns. John Vernon is on hand as a cranky cop who refuses to believe in the invasion, and Michael Siegel and Peter Licassi appear as a pair of horny brothers who hatch a scheme to drive an ice cream truck in an effort to get chicks. Whether or not they succeed I'll leave up to you to discover.

I think the star of this movie was meant to be the effects, and they did lead to a career for the team of writer/director/producer/everything else brothers, the Chiodos. There are a lot of inventive and effectively executed special effects scenes, but the Klowns themselves probably look better in stills than they do in motion.

To their credit, the Chiodo Brothers fully exploit their premise. They do not fall into the all-too-easy trap of coming up with a great premise and then failing to deliver. Instead, the milk the idea of killer clowns for all it is worth, checking off each clown cliche dutifully as they move along, from pies in the face all the way to clown cars. I guess that's the most important thing for a viewer of weird, low budget cult films -- you don't want to feel like you care more about the movie than the makers do. And it is clear the Chiodo Brothers put everything into KILLER KLOWNS.

Horrorfest 2012: Mad Monster Party?

Time for a bit of weirdness thanks the guys at Rankin/Bass with MAD MONSTER PARTY? You might recognize the names Rankin/Bass from the string of stop motion (and traditionally) animated holiday specials that are shown dutifully around Christmastime every year, like RUDOLPH THE RED-NOSED REINDEER and A YEAR WITHOUT A SANTA CLAUS.

I had never heard of MAD MONSTER PARTY? until just now, and I'm pleased to report that it is actually better than almost all of the more famous Christmas specials these guys put out. I've long decried the shittiness of these specials, each one more tacky and annoying than the last (with the possible exception of RUDOLPH), yet each one loved by those who haven't really watched them since they were 6.

Just what is it about these much-beloved specials that annoys me so much? I guess it's a combination of creepiness with crass commercialism. They each take a religious holiday and reduce it to the broadest, least emotionally meaningful stories possible. Meanwhile, the stop motion animation, while technically probably about as good as can be expected, given the circumstances, renders the supposedly cute subjects of these stories, like Santa Claus, creepy and weird thanks to their lack of timing and inherent jerkiness. You're left with nothing but unpleasantness, when you should be watching something nice.

This is just a long winded way of explaining why MAD MONSTER PARTY? works -- instead of working with cute subjects, Rankin/Bass is working with monsters, here. Instead of working with deeply meaningful faith-based holidays, this is the stuff of Halloween. Granted, some out there may take Halloween as a deeply meaningful faith-based holiday, but I've yet to meet them and if I ever do I'll assume they're full of shit.

So, ironically, MAD MONSTER PARTY? ends up being cute and charming, basically the opposite of every other Rankin/Bass production.

The story concerns Dr. Frankenstein (voiced by none other than Boris Karloff himself) discovering a potion that can destroy matter instantaneously, and holding a monster convention at his castle both to prevent this potion to his peers and to announce his retirement. The usual suspects show up for the convention, including Frankenstein's Monster, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, the Invisible Man, the Werewolf and others, and it isn't long before they're bickering about who gets to take over after Frankenstein retires.

One candidate to take over for Frankenstein is his buxom assistant, Francesca (Gale Garnett). But, not if the Monster's Mate (Phyllis Diller) can help it. Unbeknownst to them, Frankenstein plans to hand his legacy down to his nephew, a naive young pharmacist whose only monstrous quality is his allergies (Allen Swift).

Speaking of Allen Swift, he supplies most of the voices, here, and imbues Frankenstein's nephew with a nice Jimmy Stewart impression and Frankenstein's butler with the voice of Peter Lorre.

The movie starts out charmingly enough with lots of pun-based monster jokes penned by Mad magazine writer Harvey Kurtzman. However, the story often gets bogged down by uninspired song and dance numbers and runs about a half hour longer than it needs to.

Still, it's nice to know Rankin/Bass turned out something worth while inbetween bouts of making Santa Claus seems like a creepy dickhead.

Horrorfest 2012: Exit Humanity

Today we go back to zombies for EXIT HUMANITY, an ambitious but flawed recent Canadian indie flick about a zombie outbreak during Civil War times.

It's tough to judge a movie like this. On one hand, after one look, you know you're in for some amateurish filmmaking.  On the other, the filmmakers have such lofty goals and almost hit the mark so many times, you want to give them a pass. Is it good enough that a grain of salt puts it over the top? Or, is it "nice try, better luck next time."

The movie follows a Civil War vet (Mark Gibson) who has already lost his wife to the zombie plague and is now searching for his son. Along the way, he falls in with another survivor (Adam Seybold) who is searching for his sister (Jordan Hayes). She has been captured by an evil Confederate General (Bill Mosely) who is attempting to find a cure for the zombie outbreak with the help of an unethical surgeon (Stephen McHattie). Dee Wallace, of E.T. fame, is also on hand as a local recluse rumored to be a witch.

Although it has that "fake" look at times, much of the film looks very good. First time director John Geddes obviously has an eye for striking visuals. Still, it's hard to get over that undefinable "home video" look that comes with so many digitally shot indies these days. The makeup effects are great, and all of the acting is good, most especially Mark Gibson in the lead, who has some long stretches in the beginning of the film to carry single handedly.

About these long stretches -- maybe not the best way to start a movie. That's the main flaw here, beyond the look of the thing -- the pacing. This film is under 2 hours long and seems like it's 3. It gets tough to give a film a pass on good will alone when it feels this long and unwieldy.

There's also a somewhat clumsy framing device involving the main character's journal that is found some time after the events of the story. This journal provides the voice over narration (by Brian Cox!) that tells much of the story. Although it is often times quite well written, the ponderous, self-important voice over seems a little superfluous. I found myself wondering, during some of the slower passages, what the film would be like if it was just images. Would my mind be more engaged if I was putting things together myself, rather than listening to Brian Cox explain stuff to me? I wonder what the purpose of the narration was, at all. To remind us of that Ken Burns documentary, maybe?

So, anyway, ten million points for trying, but it was hard to keep my eyes open.