Horrorfest 2013: House by the River

Ah, a film by Fritz Lang – what better way to end Horrorfest 2013?

1950's HOUSE BY THE RIVER is another combination of noir and horror from Lang, a master of both. The film stars Louis Hayward as an unsuccessful (but well to-do) novelist who accidentally murders his maid (Dorothy Patrick) after she resists his advances. Hayward talks his brother (Lee Bowman) into helping him cover up the crime before his wife (Jane Wyatt) gets home.

The duo sinks the body in the nearby river, but it isn't long before the body surfaces and things start to go wrong. The disappearance of the maid becomes a media circus and the brothers react quite differently, with Hayward relishing in the attention and taking advantage of it to rekindle his career and fuel his next book and Bowman becoming more and more withdrawn with guilt.

Like Lang's earlier work, HOUSE BY THE RIVER is a master class in cinematography. Here Lang teams with Edward J. Cronjager to turn Hayward's house into a dimly lit cavern.

The best part of the movie is Hayward's performance as the truly creepy main character. This guy is totally unsympathetic, becoming more and more depraved and evil the longer the movie runs. Instead of learning his lesson, he courts more and more potential disaster, seemingly willing to do anything to cover up his crime. Hayward is great at being fake-nice one minute and then transparently manipulative the next.

Bowman is also good as the brother, basically the exact opposite of Hayward, a super-sympathetic character who is lonely and reserved and usually wants to do the right thing. This contrast serves to make Hayward seem even more evil by comparison. It could have been a bland role, but Bowman makes his character real enough that he doesn't come off like a saint or anything phony like that. Just a regular guy.

So ends Horrorfest 2013 – 31 horror movies in 31 days, in honor of Halloween. I'll list my 5 favorites below, and just for fun, the one I liked the least, as well.

Top 5 (in no order):

Targets
Mad Love
Scream of Fear
Island of Lost Souls
House by the River

The worst:

The Conjuring

And some quick stats:

Of the films watched this month, 13 were black and white, 18 were color and 2 were silent. 14 of them were from the U.S. with 4 each coming from the UK and Spain, 2 each from Czechoslovakia and Japan, and 1 each from Korea, Russia, Denmark, Poland and Sweden. 7 were from the 60s, 5 from the 80s, 4 each from the 40s and 2010s, 2 each from the 20s, 30s and 2000s, 3 from the 90s and 1 each from the 50s and the 70s.

In the interest of full disclosure I should note that I also watched DRACULA, BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN and CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON this month, all on the big screen – but of course they don't count because I'd already seen them. And tonight, FRANKENSTEIN is on the menu.

Happy Halloween!

Horrorfest 2013: They Live

Continuing my slow but sure viewing of every single John Carpenter movie ever, I’ve now landed on 1988’s THEY LIVE.

Here’s the thing: THEY LIVE is a weird movie. It gets off to a slow start with Roddy Piper as a homeless unemployed drifter who rolls into Los Angeles, is welcomed into a shanty-town, wanders into a church that isn’t quite what it seems and eventually stumbles upon a pair of sun glasses that let him see “the real world” around him.

Turns out the “real world” is infested with alien beings who have the faces of ghastly skulls. With the glasses off, they just look like regular people. Also, with the glasses on, Piper is startled to see that advertising billboards and magazines actually carry messages like “Watch television” and “Obey.”

The two weirdest things about this movie are its offbeat main character played by Piper and its stubborn refusal to follow anything recognizable as a usual film narrative. Both of these things work in the movie’s favor, ultimately.

The movie gets off to a slow start, but once Piper finds the sun glasses and starts rebelling against the alien overlords, things pick up. The thing is, Piper plays a total asshole who, without thinking, immediately goes to war against the aliens. Even before he has any explanation as to what’s going on, he’s blasting the aliens with shotguns and car-jacking civilians to get away from the cops.

In a lot of ways Piper is his own worst enemy – any chance he has to progress in the plot, he totally ruins by being a dick. In some ways this is realistic – you have to imagine your average real life homeless drifter would probably not be the most apt person to investigate an alien invasion.

The film is interrupted halfway through by a prolonged fight scene between Piper and Keith David as one of the shanty town residents. All Piper wants David to do is try on the glasses and see what’s up, but David won’t have it. So, they two beat the shit out of each other for what feels like roughly 15 minutes of the movies 94 minute run time.

This fight drags on so long it starts to get hilarious. Even the actors look like they can hardly believe what’s happening. So here we’ve got this alien invasion movie and more attention is given to these two guys beating hell out of each other than anything else. You’d think the movie would spend more time on the thrilling climax, but no. Let’s lovingly shoot every second of this little alley fight and linger over every single punch.

Like I said – it’s weird. But, it’s charming. Like Piper himself, the movie is mostly likable for how aggressively unlikable it is. If that makes any sense.

Horrorfest 2013: Bedevilled

Based on a couple brief synopses of BEDEVILLED I’d read online, I wasn’t really looking forward to watching it, but hey – it’s on my list, so it must be watched.

This 2010 Korean film stars Ji Sung-won as a young woman working in a bank who heads to a remote island where she once visited her grandmother for vacation. There she meets her childhood friend (Seo Young-hee) who is one of the only young women on the island and is treated as a second-class citizen and slave by everyone else.

It’s really a terrible situation, involving brutal rapes and lots of violence. That’s the part I wasn’t looking forward to. It’s not easy to watch, that’s for sure.

If you make it past the slow opening and the brutal middle passage, you’ll eventually get to the part where Seo Young-hee seeks her bloody revenge. Again, it’s hard to watch – very graphic, very violent – but at least now the tables have turned.

Probably the best part of this film and its main redeeming quality is the performance from Seo Young-hee. It must not have been easy to play out a lot of the more intense, ugly scenes, and the role could have been thankless if it had been handled differently. But, Seo Young-hee is able to get a lot of range out of it and show a lot of emotions that you don’t often get to see in movies. This is a real three dimensional character, even if she is at the center of degradation.

Horrorfest 2013: White Dog

Samuel Fuller’s WHITE DOG is a notorious horror film because of how little-seen it is. It barely had a release at all in the U.S. because Paramount was afraid it would be deemed racist. It played on cable and overseas, but didn’t see a home video release until relatively recently. So, the movie is more famous for having not been seen than it is for its actual content.

This is one of those cases where people have confused a movie ABOUT racism with a movie that IS racist. Turns out, it’s possible to discuss race and racism and admit that racism exists without actually being racist. Crazy, huh?

Anyway, WHITE DOG stars Kristy McNichol as a young actress who hits a dog with her car and takes it in after it recuperates and pays her back by fighting off a home invader. She becomes concerned there’s something wrong with the dog when it attacks a co-worker of hers for seemingly no reason.

McNichol takes the dog to a wild animal trainer (Burl Ives) who sizes it up as an attack dog and recommends having it destroyed. The dog attacks yet another person for seemingly no reason and… guess what? Both victims of unprovoked dog attacks are black!

Enter Paul Winfiled as another trainer who explains to McNichol that her dog is a “white dog” – a dog specifically trained to hate, fear and attack black people. Winfield takes it upon himself to correct the dog’s training, even though he admits that it’s probably impossible.
The dog escapes, there are more killings, etc, etc. You can probably figure out how this thing goes.

In any case, it’s a good movie, with a cast and direction that elevates the story above its borderline exploitative aspects. Winfield is particularly good as the trainer who takes the deprogramming of this dog personally.

Fuller always chooses shots and setups that take an interesting angle on the story. There’s one particularly well shot scene in which the dog has broken loose and is foraging through trash in an alley. The camera is at the corner of the alley and the main road, and we can see a young black kid walking down the street toward the dog. The kid can’t see the dog, the dog can’t see the kid, but we can see both. As the kid draws closer, we can’t help but cringe at the thought of the potential upcoming attack.

The movie isn’t offensive or shocking, really. Its reputation precedes it. Still, it’s a solid suspense flick that has balls.

Horrorfest 2013: The Lodger

Here’s another stab at noir-horror from John Brahm, THE LODGER, a 1944 remake of one of Hitchcock’s silent flicks inspired by the real-life story of Jack the Ripper.

Laird Cregar stars once again as the killer, this time a nervous, socially awkward lodger living in the attic of a nice family’s house, leaving at night with his medical bag to cut up women.

There’s another lodger in the house, a singer played by Merle Oberon, who Cregar gets a dangerous crush on and quickly becomes obsessed with.

Like HANGOVER SQUARE, THE LODGER is expertly shot in black and white and features some great performances and set pieces, not least of which is the final showdown between the killer and his captors backstage at a cabaret.

This was the second remake of Hitchcock’s attempt and though I haven’t seen the two earlier versions, it is my understanding that this is considered the best of the three. So, keep that in mind next time someone tells you all remakes suck.

Horrorfest 2013: The Fearless Vampire Killers

Roman Polanski's horror comedy, THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS, is interesting in that it's positioned within his filmography right after the super dark REPULSION (a Horrorfest alum) and right before the equally stark ROSEMARY'S BABY, but it doesn't seem to match either of those.

THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS seems more like a first film than a stop-gap between two horror classics. Granted, it's well loved among audiences and critics, alike, but I didn't get it.

Thing is, it's not funny enough to work as a real comedy and not horrific enough to work as real horror. It just sits kind of in the middle, too flabby the skip along like the early works of Mel Brooks or Woody Allen, and not sinister enough to join the ranks of... er, early Polanski.

The film takes place in 19th century Transylvania and stars Polanski himself as a nebbish assistant to a Van Helsing by-way-of-Van Winkle vampire hunter (Jack MacGowran) who enter a vampire's (Ferdy Mayne) castle on a rescue mission when the pneumatic daughter (Sharon Tate) of an inn-keeper is kidnapped.

The cast is great, the movie looks beautiful, and it's not boring, but for whatever reason it just never took off for me. Maybe on the right day I'd see what others see in it, but not today, I'm afraid.

Horrorfest 2013: Little Otik

Here's another, more recent, flick by ALICE director Jan Svankmajer -- LITTLE OTIK, another surreal, creepy flick that verges on horror, blending live action with off the wall stop motion animation.

This time we have the story of a Czech couple who desperately wants a baby, but is having a hard time conceiving. The husband (Jan Hartl) ends up carving a weird-looking baby out of a stump removed from the yard, and much to his chagrin and surprise, his wife (Veronika Zilkova) starts taking care of it as if it was a real child and names it Otik.

It isn't long before the thing does seem to come alive, and this is where the stop motion comes in. The tree stump has one hole in it that it alternates to use as an eye or mouth, depending on what it needs at the moment, with a creepily real looking tongue that's constantly lolling out and a set of chompers that seems a little too animal for a kid.

The stump cries like a baby, gets pushed around in a stroller like a baby and generally acts like a real baby. Except when it comes to food. First, the couple is disturbed when Otik seems to want to eat his own mother's hair and then they're even more disturbed when he eats the couple's cat. It's only a matter of time before the human bodies start piling up.

This is also an apartment horror movie, so we have a whole community of snoopy neighbors that are witnessing the action in one way or another. Chief among them is a little girl (Kristina Adamcova) who reads a fairy tale that has striking similarities to the Otik situation and thinks she's figured out what's going on.

Where things go from there I'll leave for you to discover. I will say this takes the disturbing pieces of ALICE to a much higher level. Again, the movie is funny in parts, and not outright scary so much as it is just vaguely unsettling. The animation is other worldly and creepy, and you always feel a little on edge watching the flick. I guess part of that might be due to the constant baby cries. In that sense it's similar to ALICE -- the animation and sound design keeps you on edge even though nothing particularly frightening happens in the film. You just can't relax.

Eve though the movie has funny moments and is definitely surrealistic, the cool thing about it is that it takes its premise about as seriously as anyone could expect. It definitely exploits every potential aspect of its insane situation and doesn't lack imagination at all.