Yellow Fever

Year: 1999

Director: Kari Skogland

Cast: Natalie Ramsey, Gary Bullock, Alix Koromzay 

Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Alright, alright. I know I was asking for too much by hoping that Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return would be good. But against all odds I've been having a good time with these movies, including the objectively crappy previous entry Fields of Terror. But I maintain that John Franklin was one of the few shreds of a justification for people remembering the original film with any sort of fondness. And this one was even directed by a woman, only the second time in Popcorn Culture franchise marathon history that this has happened (Rachel Talalay scored a more prominent entry with Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare).

I wasn't wrong to hope, was I?

Let me answer that by telling you that this is the most dynamic shot I could find from the film.

In Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return, we follow Hannah Martin (Natalie Ramsey) as she arrives in Gatlin, Nebraska several days before her 19th birthday, which also happens to be Halloween. It's the town where she was born, but she was adopted and kept away from it her entire life. She has come to seek her birth mother, but her presence also brings the spark that resurrects former child preacher Isaac (John Franklin, who also co-wrote this film), who has been in a coma for 19 years.

The town now seems populated exclusively by people too old to be there, a couple grown up children of the corn - including Rachel (Nancy Allen, the sole famous face slumming it in this one), the child priestess who provides the jump scare at the end of the first film - and a bunch of teen boys, one of whom is the firstborn child of the children, who Isaac wants to mate with Hannah and birth a master race of children, who presumably will rise up and destroy him and everyone else, because that's how this works, right?

It's a whole thing, I don't pretend to know the inner workings of He Who Walks Behind the Rows.

The fact that I could barely get through the plot synopsis without tripping over myself and breaking a leg should give you some insight into how deeply incomprehensible this entire experience was. Not a lick of it makes sense, down to the timeline and everyone's relative ages (one teen mentions his genetic line can be traced all the way back to Isaac, which shouldn't be too hard, considering they're exactly one generation apart). When Texas Chainsaw 3D has a more legible timeline, you've got a serious problem.

Plus, this film attempts to have a bunch of creepy children scuttling around in the background, even though the cult has clearly gone dormant so they're not murderous or even especially rude. The entire film is replete with decision-making like this that values what might be coolest [sic] in the moment, and thinks about the big picture so infrequently that it shrinks into microscopic dust.

It's an illegible mash of things I wouldn't even deign to call clichés because it's stuff nobody has ever included or would want to include in a horror film, like a random rap song during a suicide scene or a killer reveal where the character goes full Robin Williams in Aladdin. And anything that might have even been a little scary is constantly deflated by Ramsey, whose performance would seem to indicate that she's mildly irritated by everything that's happening, as if it were a mosquito bite, or a fridge that doesn't have her favorite flavor of La Croix.

"Ugh, this dead body is really gonna interfere with my brunch."

And as much as the film is stuffed with a billion tiny details that don't make sense, the plot moves like tar being blown through a twenty-foot hose. The Children of the Corn franchise has only ever had an on-and-off relationship with the slasher genre, but there are a paltry handful of infrequent kills here, which only start to happen 40 minutes into an 82 minute movie. 

Fortunately, one of those kills is worthy of the impressive effects that mark at least a couple scenes in all of these sequels. A young woman gets her face split open with a scythe in an effect that's terrifyingly brutal and in-your-face. It's like Lucio Fulci stepped in to direct thirty seconds of this otherwise Z-grade paranormal flick. But that's not to say the director is really the problem here. Skogland does land some attempts at atmosphere that thwarted the previous film's director, including a quite pretty shot from beneath the bars of an EEG machine that starts to come to life, or a Raimi-esque moment of an imaginary body spraying blood all over Hannah from a tree.

Although I must say, whoever decided that the entire film needed to be shot through an orange filter should have to write a personal letter of apology to every single person who has ever sat down to watch this film. I have a photosensitivity and use a blue-light-blocking program called Flux on my computer that turns the screen orange to help reduce eye strain, and I was halfway through checking to make sure that function was turned off when I realized my computer wasn't even in the room because I was watching this movie on DVD. It's just that orange.

This isn't a student film set in the Old West, as far as I can tell. What's even happening here?

Other than the head-splitting scene, I have exactly one good thing to say about Children of the Corn 666: There's a scene where two men kiss. It's completely unjustified by anything set up in the script [sic] or the characters [sic], but I'll take whatever representation I can get in my 90's horror cinema.

OK OK, and there are a couple scenes that are sort of creepy completely by accident, because the way the dialogue completely fails to match what's happening onscreen is a little off-putting and the aggressively liberal application of slow motion makes you feel trapped. So that's nice, I guess?

Look, I always celebrate women who managed to fight through the trenches of 80's and 90's horrordom to earn such a prominent director's spot, and I'm so glad Skogland has gotten herself a thriving TV career thanks to this opportunity, but I'm not progressive enough to pretend I liked this movie, nor recommend that anyone ever turn their eyes toward even a frame of its unholy existence. OK, maybe the gay kiss scene, but that's it! Promise me that.

TL;DR: Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return has exactly two scenes that are watchable, let alone comprehensible.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 1129

Reviews In This Series

Children of the Corn (Kiersch, 1984)

Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (Price, 1992)

Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (Hickox, 1995)

Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering (Spence, 1996)

Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror (Wiley, 1998)

Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return (Skogland, 1999)
Children of the Corn: Revelation (Magar, 2001)
Children of the Corn (Borchers, 2009)
Children of the Corn: Genesis (Soisson, 2011)
Children of the Corn: Runaway (Gulager, 2018)

Census Bloodbath: Fashion Victim

Year: 1980

Director: Brian De Palma

Cast: Michael Caine, Angie Dickinson, Nancy Allen

Run Time: 1 hour 45 minutes 

MPAA Rating: R

The slasher genre in 1980 was full of belated riffs on Alfred Hitchcock’s seminal slashterpiece Psycho, from the sleazy motel settings of Silent Scream and The Unseen to the All-American killers of Fade to Black and Schizoid. Hell, Don’t Go in the House is literally about a mother-obsessed killer who takes orders from her corpse and murders women in his secluded home. But if you want to see a Hitch rip-off done right, look no further than his premier acolyte Brian De Palma.

De Palma’s 1980 feature Dressed to Kill almost doesn’t count as a slasher movie. The body count is anemic, and if the investigation into a single murder qualified a film as a slasher, we’d be stuck reviewing hundreds of crappy whodunits and nobody wants that. But Dressed to Kill is so eagerly, flamboyantly translating Psycho for the modern era that there’s no way it could be excluded. If you haven’t seen Psycho, tread no further, because the spoilers are instant and abundant.

Anthony Perkins was an alien the whole time!

From the first-act murder of the apparent main character to the transvestite villain to the Dr. Explain-o character who arrives at the end to dump a heaping pile of exposition for the slower members of the audience, Dressed to Kill doesn’t just pay homage to Hitchcock’s film. It mugs it, beats it to a pulp, and rummages through the pockets of its broken, bleeding form, feverishly searching for another fix of suspense. It’s tarted up with certain, more 80’s-oriented details, blood, and nudity, but it’s a bald-faced, brazen act of copycatting.

When frustrated housewife Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) is slashed to death by an enraged transvestite, the only witness and prime suspect is high-end escort Liz Blake (Nancy Allen). In order to clear her name, Liz teams up with Kate’s son Peter (Keith Gordon) to solve the murder. They start by investigating the records of her therapist Dr. Robert Elliott (Michael Caine), who ahs been receiving threatening phone calls from a transsexual ex-patient of his but has hidden this fact from the police.

He’s the doctor Kate deserves, but not the one she needs right now.

Fortunately, one good thing Dressed to Kill has going for it is that of the very few contemporary directors with the chops to remix Hitchcock, De Palma is one of the best. He brings enough of his own personality and aesthetic to the table that it frequently doesn't feel like a trite imitation, which is really something of a miracle.

De Palma’s chilly, precise style is more or less the defining feature of Dressed to Kill, a film that’s intrinsically about surfaces and how they reflect and refract reality. The fractured identity of the killer is represented by the use of deliberately placed mirrors in the corners of shots, giving us a distorted second angle of the character in the frame. On top of that, we get a bunch of gooey cinematic gloss that glides right off the screen, from the director’s signature split-screen effect (which he only utilizes once, though frequently some element in a single frame like a wall or a doorway will also act as an in-shot splitting device) to an elegantly-timed series of smash cuts.

Dressed to Kill finds a cinematic master at the top of his game, so much so that you almost don’t notice the tawdry, shallow nature of the plot. I really don’t want to launch into a political diatribe and I won’t, except to say that the transsexual antagonist is a blatant case of vilifying the Other that lacks the relative sensitivity and/or lampshading that makes it slightly easier to swallow a film like Silence of the Lambs. But even beyond that, Nancy Allen is a protagonist with very little agency, being yanked through a plot that could have easily gone on without her. A plot which also ends ten minutes too late, going all-in on a tacky shock gag that lessens the film’s impact and drains every last drop of energy the film has accumulated.

But Nancy Allen gets naked, so apparently this scene’s presence is justified.

Dressed to Kill certainly boasts its share of suspense, especially in the central setpiece of Kate’s murder in an elevator. The deliberate pacing and gorgeous cinematography are reminiscent of the best of the Italian giallo, and this approach works wonders once more in a scene set in the flickering, claustrophobic interior of a subway train.

Occasionally, this pacing will hit a snag and drag on a bit too long, like in the part-stalking, part-seduction sequence set in a museum (this scene is also littered with completely inscrutable, unmotivated actions that dilute whatever emotion its attempting to convey), but for the most part Dressed to Kill is a tightly-wound thriller working with clockwork precision.

It’s far from a perfect film, and I’m not tempted to retroactively add it to my Best of 1980 list, but it is nonetheless a movie without peer in its station within the rise of the slasher. This kind of glamorous, upscale approach to the subgenre would become quite common in the early 90’s (Sleeping with the Enemy, Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct), but at the time the idea of a slasher rising from the gutter of grindhouse cheapies was a far-off dream.

Dressed to Kill is a contradiction: ahead of its time and tragically retrograde, classy and tactless, a cheap rip-off and an aesthetic triumph. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s definitely unique, and that’s always worth something,

Killer: Bobbi [(Michael Caine)]

Final Girl: Liz (Nancy Allen)

Best Kill: It’s not like there’s really a choice here, but the elevator slashing is quite gorgeous.

Sign of the Times: Kate’s conquest has a newfangled digital clock that’s s elaborate it looks like a nuclear device.

Scariest Moment: Liz is chased through the subway by a gang, leading her right into the arms of the killer.

Weirdest Moment: Kate tries to convince her son that the general Napoleon invented the baked good napoleon.

Champion Dialogue: “You’ve got a lot better motivation than I do: your ass.”

Body Count: 2

1. Kate Miller is slashed to death with a straight razor.
2. Nurse is choked to death.

TL;DR: Dressed to Kill is a beautiful piece of filmmaking, but the plot is a downright shambles with a tasteless core.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 1075

Fright Flashback: They Made A Third One?

Welcome back to Fright Flashback, where *ahem* "every" week until the end of summer we will visit an older horror film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to an upcoming new release. This week we are were anticipating Insidious: Chapter 3, the third entry in a non-R-rated haunted house franchise. In celebration, we'll be revisiting Poltergeist III, which reached that point in its own franchise about two and a half decades earlier.

Year: 1988
Director: Gary Sherman
Cast: Heather O'Rourke, Tom Skerritt, Nancy Allen
Run Time: 1 hour 38 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG-13

1988 may have been the perfect year for a Poltergeist sequel. The original film was so iconic and intensely personal (though to whom it was intensely personal is up for debate. *cough cough Spielberg*), that its inevitable followup necessarily lacked it luster and thematic appeal. So there MGM was with a horror franchise already run into the ground thanks to a perilously dull second part, while meanwhile Freddy and Jason were racking up body counts in the hundreds and box office receipts in the millions.

In order to keep their property afloat, they upped the ante. And, seeing as this was the late 80's, that means pure lunacy. They transplanted the story to a Chicago high rise, boosted the body count, and pulled out all the practical effects that not very much money can buy, draping everything in fashions so untowardly ridiculous, they went out of style the second principal photography shut down. Maybe even the second the costume designer stepped out of the department store with their credit card in hand.

Each individual layer of that outfit doesn't even match itself.

This oddball approach to the story gave it just enough juice to cap off the trilogy on an exciting and lasting note. Thank you, 1988.

Poltergeist III puts Carol Anne Freeling (Heather O'Rourke) in the custody of her Aunt Pat (Nancy Allen) and Uncle Bruce (Tom Skerritt), because sometimes successful adult actors don't want to return to a horror series for a third time. Carol Anne has been enrolled in a school for child prodigies which is headed by the wicked Dr. Seaton (Richard Fire), who believes that the ghosts haunting the young girl are a result of a mass hypnotic suggestion perpetrated in a desperate bid for attention. The fact that he firmly believes in hypnosis but not ghosts is but the smallest logical leap the plot makes. They's starting us off easy, you see.

When Carol Anne is left alone with her cousin Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle) during her aunt's art gallery opening, Donna ditches to go to her crush Scott's (Kip Wentz) party downstairs, leaving Carol Anne alone with the ghost of Reverend Kane (Nathan Davis), who is inhabiting the mirrors and has taken supernatural control of the building. When Donna, Scott, and Carol Anne are sucked into the mirror dimension, Pat, Bruce, and Dr. Seaton (who is also Scott's father) must team up with the medium Tangina (Zelda Rubinstein) to put an end to this haunting business once and for all.

Honestly, I wouldn't mind if that awful red jumper got banished to the shadow dimension.

First and foremost, the practical effects that went into the mirror work is stunning. They're not quite as extravagant and state-of-the-art as any individual effect from the first film, but they're admirably timeless. They don't show any seams because they don't have any.

The other special effects are likewise pretty consistently superb, though there are a few minor slip-ups, especially when it comes to recreating Kane. The original actor, Julian Beck, died of stomach cancer in the middle of shooting Poltergeist II: The Other Side, and the film's feeble recreation of his chilling, gaunt face looks no spookier than an old potato.

In addition to having a generally more consistent pacing than Part 2 when it comes to showcasing special effects, some of the gags in the film are pure nightmare fuel. Only read this if you've seen it or have absolutely zero interest, but in moments like when [Donna bursts screaming from Tangina's shriveled corpse], Poltergeist III transcends from being a kooky special effects thrill ride to a balls-trippingly horrifying hell dimension.

I LOVE THE 80'S, YOU GUYS!

Although this is all terrific, there was a trade-off made when the Poltergeist franchise finally succumbed to the influence of the 80's. In exchange for zanier fashions and a more consistent, creepier effects palette, the film had to sacrifice depth. The original Poltergeist had a novel's worth of comments and criticisms on the state of American suburbia and the sequel, while dull, at least attempted to follow in its footsteps.

While Poltergeist III does have some interesting material to chew on in the form of the high rise building containing everything a person could possibly need so they never have to leave a single building (home, jobs, shopping, and dining - it's the ne plus ultra of comfortable suburbia hidden within the city), the idea of distant relatives being reluctantly incorporated into a loving family, as well as the possibility that Carol Anne might accidentally be creating the ghosts within her own imagination, it just doesn't have anything matching the level of analysis of the previous films. There are some terrific raw elements in there, but they aren't synthesized into anything particularly meaningful.

Rather, the film favors a series of abrupt stop-and-start plot beats that play second fiddle to the terrific and sometimes bone-chilling effects. One minute, Aunt Pat is begging to ditch the Evil Little Brat, the next she is proclaiming her undying love for her. One minute Tangina is soliloquizing about some nonsensical Power of Purity or some such, the next she's appearing in a cloud of water, tossing magical necklaces about like she's Oprah and giving cryptic advice. It's all a fascinating jumble, but it ain't classical storytelling.

The power of Poltergeist III lies in its ability to be a stunning jack-in-the-box without the subtext. That's why it'll never be a classic like the original. But at least it sloughs off the dreary monotony of its immediate predecessor in favor of a thrilling roller coaster ride. You won't catch me complaining about that.

You won't catch me. I'm too fast.

So, yes. This movie has flaws. A great many of them, in all honesty, including the fact that it doesn't make full use of the opportunities presented by its setting and that, if you're not a fan of people screaming "Carol Anne!" then this movie isn't for you. I have it on good authority that her name is repeated 121 times throughout the film, and if you cut out every line that's reiterated two times or more, Poltergeist III would be a short film.

But! But! The cinematography is daring, at times reminding me of Shock Treatment, which is secretly high praise, considering that film's penchant for wrenching terrifically ambitious shots out of a staggeringly low budget. And director Gary Sherman coaxes far superior performances out of O'Rourke and Rubinstein, leaving the limp Poltergeist II dead in the water.

And once more, I'd like to remind you that this film is a living catwalk of the apocalyptic anarchy that was taking hold of the fashion market in 1988. Nobody is safe from the denim jackets, pastel scarves, garish costume jewelry, neon eye shadow, and towering piles of crunchy, starched hair that you could snap off and pick your teeth with. It's daring, it's bold, it's pandemonium. And it's glorious. The scenes with the teenagers are like a cross between a Go-Go's music video and the first act of a slasher, all perfect chemistry and terrible pattern clashing. It's a wonderful treat, and Poltergeist III is better for it.

It's not a well thought-out movie, no. But it's so unabashedly fun and has such surprising skill behind its construction, it deserves a place in the pantheon as one of the better sequels to come out of the back half of the decade. Don't let this one pass you by.

TL;DR: Poltergeist III has a gibberish plot and strange theology, but it has an inestimable 80's charm.
Rating: 6/10
Word Count: 1357
Reviews In This Series
Poltergeist (Hooper, 1982)
Poltergeist II: The Other Side (Gibson, 1986)
Poltergeist III (Sherman, 1988)
Poltergeist (Kenan, 2015)