Hey everyone! Turns out, as the months go on, school gets harder. Who knew, right? Unfortunately this really bites into the time I have to watch movies and write words, but I'll keep coming at ya whenever I can!
Upcoming on CinemaBeach is an article I wrote recently about the top five scariest movies that you can peruse when you need a good scare, but what if you don't like being scared? This is very possible. In fact, I've heard rumors about people who don't want their films to make them pee their pants at all. I know, right? Whatever. To each their own.
But the fact remains that it is Halloween season and you're not gonna be able to escape the zombie hordes so easily. But if you prefer the lighter side of things, here's
Brennan's Top Seven Horror Comedies
A preface: The Scary Movie franchise is not good, has never been good, and I'm never ever going to mention it again.
#7 Dead Snow (dir. Tommy Wirkola)
A pristine zombie film because Norway really loves churning out great genre pictures for some reason, Dead Snow (Død Snø) is a cheerfully gory sendup up the "cabin in the woods" trope. Taking the idea of your typical battle with flesh eating revenants and pushing it right over the edge with undead Nazis and snarky meta commentary, the film is among the greats (two more of which are also on this list).
#6 Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon (dir. Scott Glosserman)
A mockumentary starring Nathan Baesel as the charismatic Leslie Vernon, a man whose occupation of choice is Slasher Villain. With a unique reinterpretation of the slasher clichés and cameos by Zelda Rubinstein and Robert Englund, this slasher knows its history. I have one small linguistic critique (the phrase "survivor girl" usurps the classic "Final Girl"), but other than that BtM is pretty much perfect for fans of the genre.
#5 100 Bloody Acres (dir. Cameron & Colin Cairnes)
An Australian riff on the backwoods torture genre, 100 Bloody Acres tells the tale of two brothers struggling to make a living selling blood and bone fertilizer. Gross out humor and surprisingly sweet characterizations clash into what could have been an unmitigated disaster but ends up being a riot, thanks to the supervising hand of Down Under's newest directing team to beat.
The first of Edgar Wright, Simon Pegg, and Nick Frost's Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, this wry British zombie picture skewers its characters figuratively by expertly satirizing British culture, romantic comedies, zombie films, and men who refuse to grow up as well as literally by, well, skewering them.
#3 Evil Dead II (dir. Sam Raimi)
Have you ever wondered what it would look like if zombies recreated old slapstick bits from the Three Stooges era? Sam Raimi did and that's what makes him a genius. Bad puns, physical humor, a top drawer campy performance from cult favorite Bruce Campbell, and geysers and geysers of colorful zombie blood make the sequel to his fantastic but more straight laced The Evil Dead a landmark of horror cinema.
#2 You're Next (dir. Adam Wingard)
The modern indie horror film that proves that America's still got it. In an age of increasingly stale October seasons, You're Next is a shot in the arm, simultaneously terrifying and hilarious. The trick is it spends just as much time making fun of its characters as it does playing with genre conventions. Good comedy is about specificity and the character humor, grisly creativity, and stellar Final Girl put this one instantly in the modern horror pantheon.
In the mid-90's, the slasher film had long since drawn its last breath, but in stepped horror maven Wes Craven to reinvent the genre for the second time in his career (after reigniting the slasher boom with A Nightmare on Elm Street). A magnificent postmodern meta satire of the slasher film, a decade and a half before the likes of Leslie Vernon and You're Next, Scream manages the dual pleasures of being sharply witty and deeply terrifying. With its all star cast (for the 90's), veteran director, and fresh faced writer Kevin Williamson, Ghostface's introductory tale was an instant classic, bringing back the slasher in full force and reigning supreme in the box office. In fact, Scream is still the highest grossing slasher movie in film history, for good reason.
If ever a 70's horror film deserved a remake, Herschell Gordon Lewis' The Wizard of Gore was it. A barely there story that merely served as a serving board for mass quantities of blood and guts, the repetitive original film was ripe for a re-imagining, even if it was only to punch up the quality of the gore with modern effects.
This 2007 Crispin Glover vehicle went above and beyond, serving up a halfway to film noir steampunk neo-hipster dark fantasy world in which the plot mechanics are actually given more screentime than the gore effects.
Like... what?
This absolutely works, and puts Wizard of Gore on the map as one of the best (and earliest) horror remakes I've ever seen. Now keep in mind we're grading these on a curve, so it's not The Exorcist or anything, but it's really pretty darn good. Much better than it has any any right to be.
Also it has about ten times the amount of suspenders, which is a plus in my book.
The opening shot (a man dressed as a 1920's newspaper man is arranging letters in an old fashioned printing press, dripping blood into the ink from his drenched outfit) establishes the tone of the film, which is something I never thought I'd be saying about a modern horror flick, but there you go. It's a loving throwback to the Olden Days but don't think for a second they're gonna be afraid to taint the waters with a nihilistic modern twist.
The art design is really tremendous here, establishing spaces and characters that are immensely tactile, grubby, and coarse yet completely surreal - rooms and people that almost certainly don't exist in the real world but you don't doubt for one second that they could.
Our protagonist for the evening is Edmund Bigelow (Kip Pardue), a young man with a penchant for wearing period clothing who was raised by a trust fund. He has devoted himself body and soul to the publication of his underground newspaper, and if that's not enough to clue you in on a certain subculture he belongs to, take a look around at his rabbit ear TV and his rotary phone.
When he takes his girlfriend Maggie (Bijou Phillips) to some sort of rave/mandatory sex party hybrid, they witness a magic performance unlike any other. Montag the Magnificent (Crispin Glover, who is... Crispin Glover for crying out loud!) seeks to strike fear into the hearts of the nihilistic and unempathetic youth culture he sees before him. He stages gory spectacles in an attempt to get them to feel something... anything.
Nevermind the unrelenting misogyny of his act, which involves getting a volunteer to strip down before getting violently mutilated. Although totally unjustifiable, it's just a sad reflection of his audience, a group of disillusioned rich kids who dress up as Nazis and go to bejeweled orgies with topless women on their arms because... why not?
Gender equality finds a voice in Maggie, who vehemently denounces the magician's patter, much to the consternation of her boyfriend, who drinks it in like a fine summer wine.
Interlude: It's nice to know that Crispin Glover's hair can still do the thing.
Ed has become unduly fascinated with Montag's exploits and drags Maggie back the next night. But not before he has a bizarre nightmare about last night's volunteer being mutilated while she gives him a lap dance.
(Boobs are a major theme in this movie, as you can probably tell. It's not quite as justified by Maggie's denouncements of misogyny as the film seems to think, but it at least feels like part of the atmosphere of the subculture its trying to depict than tawdry pandering.)
As Ed becomes more and more engrossed in the illusions, his violent nightmares get stronger and stronger (giving us one of the movie's scariest sequences) and when the girls start turning up dead under highly suspicious circumstances, he begins to investigate, interrogating the local drug dealer (Brad Dourif - aka the voice of Chucky from Child's Play) and Montag's assistant (Jeffrey Combs, none other than Herbert West, Re-Animator), a savage looking man with a predilection for biting the heads off rats.
The bodies keep piling up as his nightmares and realities collide and his carefully curated life begins to tear at the seams, fueled by dark fantasies, the resurgence of half faded memories, and rumors of the mind control drug tetrodotoxin changing hands.
As he gets closer and closer to unraveling the mystery of Montag's illusions, he finds himself in danger of completely unraveling mentally as well.
As evidenced by his neck tattoo.
As the film draws to a close, the entire construct of Ed's life comes flying apart and crashing down around him as he becomes more and more convinced that he's committing these murders himself under the influence of tetrodotoxin.
Is he killing these girls?
Is he who he thinks he is?
Is Maggie who he thinks she is?
What is real?
Does he feel... anything?
The Wizard of Gore is everything people imagined Inception to be: a mind-bending, surreal exploration of the line between dream and reality that never seeks to definitively resolve what is real or imagined. Now WoG didn't have a Christopher Nolan master plan behind it, so it's not quite as good as all that, but gee whillikers, this is a dark and twisted ride.
Unfortunately set in a world without Tide To Go pens.
Director Jeremy Kasten (whose entire pedigree seems to be Behind the Scenes documentaries) brings a great deal of atmosphere and fevered intensity to what by all means should have been just a gorified retread of ancient Grand Guignol style material.
Crispin Glover walks a tightrope between Vincent Pricey hamming and dapper menace with an over the top, precisely calculated performance that it's a real shame many people never got the chance to see. The other actors, most of them alumni from the Hostel franchise, do their best but Glover steals the show, even blowing original Montag Ray Sager out of the water.
Although the high amount of practical effects (as opposed to CGI, which still doesn't seem to have worked out how to properly render blood) were enough to win me over any day of the week, The Wizard of Gore won me over with tight control of tone and atmosphere, suitably mind-bending but not altogether implausible twists, and a sense of glee at getting to play with a classic story.
This Wizard is a step above its predecessor, a noteworthy accomplishment in a decade that also saw Rob Zombie's Halloween. I'm just so proud. This is what remake culture is about. Creativity. I mean that unironically. To successfully tell the same story while making it something completely new and twisted while maintaining tonal similarities is no small accomplishment.
It's nothing less than magic.
TL;DR: The Wizard of Gore is something that every horror remake wishes they were - a creative and successful re-imagining that enhances the source material rather than detracting from it.
Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1198
Reviews In This Series The Wizard of Gore(Gordon Lewis, 1970) The Wizard of Gore (Kasten, 2007)
Cast: Kether Donohue, Stephen Kunken, Kristen Connolly
Run Time: 1 hour 24 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
The found footage genre gets a lot of flak. Some people get motion sickness due to the handheld camera work. Some people like their cinema to be crafted with at least some measure of elegance. But it's mostly because the found footage genre is an easy out. Any crappy director can grab a GoPro and shoot a found footage movie in a week for about ten dollars.
This is unfortunate, because found footage is one of my favorite genres. Cinéma vérité is an interesting way of putting the audience in the driver's seat and (to paraphrase my blogging idol Tim Brayton's views on film musicals), since it seems like we're stuck with movies as an entertainment medium, we might as well do something cool with it.
The found footage genre does have a lot of turds, but if you sift through the refuse, you can find some true gems. For every The Devil Inside, there's a Paranormal Activity. For every Zombie Diaries, there's a [REC]. For every V/H/S, there's a V/H/S 2. And it'd just be too obvious to mention The Blair Witch Project here, wouldn't it?
However, the modern found footage boom ignited by 2008's Cloverfield has left the genre in a base and dirty place with increasingly diminishing returns. That problem is solved here quite admirably in The Bay which, along with being one of the first ecological horror films in history (only three other films are credited as such - two forgotten and slapdash works from 2006 and 1978 and M. Night Shyamalan's oxymoronically titled The Happening), breathes fresh life into the genre.
In spite of its protagonist, who sounds like she stepped out of a "Californians" SNL sketch.
Purportedly collected from hundreds of various digital video devices (camcorders, webcams, cell phones, security cameras, etc.) that were confiscated by the government following The Incident, The Bay solves the twin problems of found footage simultaneously by providing a credible source for the footage (Why does Hud keep the camera rolling when the Cloverfield monster is on his tail?) and allowing itself a way to use multiple perspectives and angles, and even throw in a little spooky music when they feel like it without taking away from the realism of the film.
These avenues have been explored in the likes of Paranormal Activity 2 and George Romero's Diary of the Dead, but they are synthesized much better here. This is perhaps due to the film's totally weird pedigree. Director Barry Levinson is no stranger to cinematic success, due to having won a freaking Academy Award for directing Rain Man.
I know. I double checked that four times to make sure I wasn't lying to y'all. How this guy ended up directing a found footage horror picture is beyond me, but I sure am glad it happened, because this is without a doubt the best found footage picture of 2012, a year that saw 13 of the flipping things.
The film depicts the events of July 4, 2009 in the Chesapeke town of Claridge, Maryland. The bay is a vital source for the population, providing income, leisure, and thanks to the new desalination plant, drinking water. Unfortunately those crystal clear blue waters harbor a dark secret (Be proud of that pun, please. I'm a sad blogger. Punning is all I have.).
The local chicken farm has been pumping steroids into their water supply and wouldn't you know it, but their feces landfill is awfully close to a runoff point. Compound that with a slight nuclear leak from a couple years back and blammo! You got yourself a dead fish stew, spiced to perfection with rapidly growing flesh eating parasites.
That are actually kind of adorable.
That fateful Fourth of July, the celebrating townspeople prematurely end their lively splashing and bayside activities to flock to the local hospital in record numbers, complaining of bizarre rashes and lesions.
And being outrageously sexy.
To add insult to injury, not only are the poor victims being eaten by the water-dwelling isopods, they are also being devoured from the inside by massive insects who snuck into the drinking water through the desalination plant as microscopic larva.
D'oh!
For most of its runtime, The Bay eschews the modern trend of throwing monsters at the camera to make you shriek (although a couple of the bugs gave Sergio and I the willies big time by bursting out of places they patently weren't supposed to be) and opts for some deep seated body horror. A fabulous choice, if I do say so myself, because nothing scares Brennan more than even remotely plausible disease pictures.
Aside from being actually pretty terrifying, The Bay boasts a magnificently large cast that dilutes the more irritating quirks of some of the characters. Featured protagonists include Donna (Kether Donohue, who has a small part in the opening of Pitch Perfect), a college reporter caught in the middle of the outbreak and Our Humble Narrator; Dr. Abrams (Stephen Kunken), the medical professional whose efforts to alert the CDC are in vain (the CDC is portrayed as a vastly incompetent body, at one point Googling a type of isopod - Commentary!); and Stephanie (Kristen Connolly, the Final Girl from The Cabin in the Woods) and Alex (Will Rogers), a young married couple who are traveling to Claridge via boat with their baby in tow.
There's also a pair of police officers, a young girl on Facetime, and the town's mayor, as well as various townspeople who make brief appearances to flesh out the widespread impact of the infection.
Your backne is out of control, girl.
Although there are some brief moments where it doesn't seem like the filmmakers quite understand how modern technology works like a laughably illiterate text conversation between two young girls in addition to some unnecessary recaps, there are hard-hitting emotional moments (grandma's phone call will make you cry), a reliably creepy atmosphere, and a fun DIY horror vibe.
Don't get me wrong, this is no Jaws. We're still in the found footage realm here, a disgusting swamp ruled by the powerful tyrant [REC], but the slow burn horror and surprisingly sharp social commentary pack a whallop that puts The Bay in the top tier of its brethren.
TL;DR:The Bay is way way way better than it has any right or reason to be.
Rating: 7/10
Should I Spend $1.20 On This? Heck yeah, if you're in the mood for horror a little more subtle than an in-your-face haunted house flick, the likes of which seem to be flourishing this season.
Cast: Roy Abramsohn, Elena Schuber, Katelynn Rodriguez
Run Time: 1 hour 30 minutes
MPAA Rating: N/A
Because it's uncouth to tell personal anecdotes on official review sites: Sergio and I got a chance to see a sneak peek of this movie at the Cinefamily Theater with the cast and crew for free because I have connections.
Namely, being on an email list. (Shhh, don't tell anyone.)
It was a really exciting experience, especially considering that we almost didn't get in at all.
See the notepad in my pocket? That's how official I am, yo.
Also we got free Mickey and Buzz Lightyear masks, which make everything worth it.
For those of you not in the know, Escape From Tomorrow is a psychological horror film that was shot guerrilla style at Disneyland. For over 45 days, the cast and crew snuck around Disneyland and Walt Disney World (each of them were given a year-long park-hopping Disney pass which must have accounted for about half the budget), shooting on a handheld camera and keeping their scripts on their iPhones so as to avoid detection by the Disney police.
You see, Disney is a ruthless corporation that rules over exhibition of its trademark images with an iron fist. If caught (and they very nearly were on several occasions), the consequences could have been dire, ranging from being shut out of the parks permanently and thus being unable to complete the film (or ride Splash Mountain ever again) to being sent to jail. Shots has to be extensively choreographed using sun charts to most effectively utilize natural light. Out of fear of being found out, director Randy Moore even took the measure of editing his film in South Korea, far from the watchful eye of The Mickey Mouse Chain Gang.
The film premiered at Sundance and reviewers and doubts were raised that the film would ever receive a release, limited or otherwise. At this moment in time, Escape From Tomorrow is slated for a simultaneous limited release and Video On Demand release on October 11. Disney wisely has decided to avoid taking legal action at this time, hoping not to inadvertently drum up publicity for the film.
The film opens on Jim (Roy Abramsohn) on a Grand Floridian balcony (one of the film’s few manufactured setpieces) receiving news that he has been let go from his job. Determined to nevertheless make the most of his final day of vacation, he drags his nagging wife (Elena Schuber) and two kids (Katelynn Rodriguez and Jack Dalton) around Walt Disney World, only to be haunted by disturbing visions (like glaring evil eyes sprouting from the “It’s A Small World” dolls). A pair of young Parisiennes (Danielle Safady and Annet Mahendru) capture his imagination and his increasing obsession with them is mirrored by his decreasing attachment to his family and the candy-colored World around him.
While the first act of the film is largely aimless, it charms with nostalgic trips to the classic rides that have defined American youth for decades (a personal joy of mine was deciphering which sequences were shot at Walt Disney World and which were shot at Disneyland – a geography I am intimately familiar with, having grown up in Anaheim). There is some simmering family drama at work here, but the joy is found in little moments (little by necessity, due to the nature of the filming) of snappy wit and infrequent but gleefully weird effects sequences.
The mostly pleasant but meandering first two thirds of Escape From Tomorrow spends its time spewing up intriguing symbols and subplots like a bad flu outbreak, a mysterious and hypnotic evil witch, and eerie premonitions. This all promises to tie up if not totally neatly, at least in an enjoyable and unstrenuous manner but then all hell breaks loose.
The plot points that have until now been gliding along smoothly begin to smash into each other, piling up in a devastating fiery wreck as a panoply of grandiose setpieces and ambitiously inscrutable symbols come crashing down on the relative peace of what was an otherwise totally workable narrative. Not one single loose end gets any sort of closure and the film resolutely refuses to end, sprinting along and leaking psychotropic absurdities for a good fifteen minutes past the natural endpoint.
But man, what a method of filmmaking. It might be just a gimmick, but here in the Happiest Place on Earth the gimmick is everything. Filmed in crisp black and white to accentuate the nostalgic aspects of the exploration of Disneyana, the film is buoyed half on fond memories of the theme parks and half on slack-jawed utterances of “How did they do that?”
Because there certainly isn’t much more to it than that. The acting is wooden across the board (pun absolutely intended) and the film suffers unduly from a lead actor who is content to mug at the camera in feeble attempts to approximate human emotion. The only standouts are Alison Lees-Taylor who chews the scenery as an evil witch and, of all people, young Katelynn Rodriguez, an actress who hasn’t even made it to double digits yet who outshines every single adult member of the cast.
It’s a shame such detailed work went into making what turns out to be a rather scattershot mess, because it very clearly means something important to Randy Moore. Unfortunately his immense passion for complex themes and symbols far outweighs his ability to communicate them. Attentive viewers can maybe glean some subtextual analysis of the artificiality of the Disney Empire, but that would be giving too much credit to a man whose ambition knows no bounds and is not bound by the laws of narrative clarity.
There’s a terrific movie in there somewhere, but it would take a much less green filmmaker to dig it out of the muck. Nevertheless, Escape From Tomorrowis an undeniably fun film to watch. Whether you’re there just to stick it to Disney or to see some top notch cinematic tomfoolery, this film should be your October go to. If that doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, take the money you would have spent on the movie and buy yourself one tenth of a Disneyland ticket instead.
TL;DR: It's a miracle that Escape From Tomorrow Exists at all, but coherence is sacrificed to radical methodology. Rating: 5/10 Should I Spend Money On This? It's definitely worth seeing for film buffs or bad movie lovers. The guerrilla style is fascinating and the brain-melting twists reek of camp. Word Count: 1100
Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Nicole Kidman, Matthew Goode
Run Time: 1 hour 39 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
"To become adult is to become free."
So begins Stoker, the first English language film from acclaimed South Korean director Chan-wook Park. What follows is a winding tale of intrigue, lust, murder, lust, betrayal, and lust set to the tune of the coming of age of India Stoker (Mia Wasikowska), a girl who can hear and see things beyond the abilities of your feeble eyes and ears.
On her 18th birthday, India's life is turned upside down when her father dies in a mysterious accident and her Uncle Charlie (Matthew Goode), a man she never even knew existed has come to stay with her and her mother (Nicole Kidman). Mrs. Stoker doesn't seem to be too cut up about her husband's death, not with his sibling around to comfort her.
What a sweet body - I mean - brother.
The Hamlet parallels don't stop there as the film dives more or less immediately into more incestuous undertones than your average episode of Arrested Development. As India begins to suspect foul play, Charlie's attentions turn to her and their two journeys intertwine in a symphony of violence and sensuality, beginning with the porniest piano duet in human history.
And possibly monkey history.
For you see, Charlie isn't your typical uncle. If somebody threaten's India's well-being, they're not going to be well for much longer.
There's also a lot of business with India dealing with teenage hoodlums at her high school and investigating family secrets, but Stoker is a film that's much more impressed with its atmosphere than the story it's telling, something that it and I have in common. A modern thriller mystery incest romance dressed up in Victorian trappings, Stoker is one of the (if not the) most aesthetically complex films of 2013.
This is one of those films that allows me to use terms like symbolism and mise-en-scène without a trace of irony, for every single element of the film works together to create a beautiful and singularly creepy world.
The camera dances an intricate ballet of light and shadow one image fading into the next with grace, the infinitely complex sound design explores the world of a girl who can hear even the tiniest crack of an egg, the editing joins the game to provide a pulsing, freewheeling rhythm, and the art design reigns supreme, full of rich, dark colors, and symbols out the wazoo that are there in spades for those who wish to analyze them but aren't so obvious as to be distracting.
You see shears, I see a phallus. The life of a film major.
Phallic and Yonic imagery abound throughout, capturing the central theme of burgeoning sexuality and coming of age and compounding it with the darker tang of bodily violence.
You thought slasher movies had the monopoly on "sex = death" philosophy? You're dead wrong. Stoker has sharp penetrative weapons, rhythmic pounding violence, unbelting preceding murder, womb imagery to represent rebirth, and a bloody act that marks India's emergence into womanhood (a metaphor for getting her period).
Womb.
Vagina.
Penis.
Sex.
I think I'm getting my point across.
It's quite a shame the plot isn't really that great.
Because that's what we're here for, isn't it?
The film drags for quite a bit in its middle half and never really achieves a sense of closure, largely because it never felt like it ever truly opened in the first place. The film is so enchanted by its own decadence that it falls prey to the arthouse mentality of presenting a film as a sequence of beautiful paintings rather than a coherent story.
It's no surprise Stoker alienated audiences and failed to be the smash hit it so easily could have been if the dialogue or events matched the intelligence and fervor of the film's more artistic elements. This disparity largely seems to be due to the veteran film director Chan-wook Park bringing his masterful film aesthetic to the rather green and clumsy first screenplay of Prison Break's Wentworth Miller.
Stoker is a visual treat for the critics and the filmmakers, but a drowsy bore for the rest.
Oh well.
You win some, you lose some.
You spin around on some.
Also, a shout-out for Sergio for correctly identifying a hunting cooler. He rocks.
TL;DR:Stoker has a stunningly beautiful aesthetic in service of a bum narrative with just enough intrigue to keep the film afloat.
Serendipitously, over the past two weeks in my horror class, we've been focusing on 50's horror, which is a genre that had, I think, zero entries in my "Movies I've Seen List." I'm well on my way to being the most celebrated horror scholar of 2025.
I will accept applications to be my personal assistant starting Monday.
Please, no signatures. The Thing From Another World
Year: 1953
Director: Christian Nyby & Howard Hawks
Cast: Kenneth Tobey, Margaret Sheridan, James Arness
Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes
MPAA Rating: N/A
When oh when will we start remembering movies correctly? Vader never says "Luke, I'm your father." Jason kills zero people in Friday the 13th. Dr. Frankenstein's assistant is named Fritz, not Igor.
And it turns out the Thing doesn't shapeshift! John Carpenter, you misleading scoundrel!
That said, turning the Thing into a shapeshifter in the remake is a work of brilliant genius, especially considering that he shows no inclination for doing so in the original film. Good work, John. A+.
Many important horror directors cite The Thing From Another World as a major influence, perhaps because all the other films from the decade were even worse. In the immortal words of my professor, "The best thing about the 50's was that they ended."
Not that The Thing is bad, it's just egregiously slow and overwhelmingly optimistic by today's standards. The state of horror in the 50s was at an all-time ebb and it really shows. In the aftermath of World War II, nobody felt the need to watch scary movies, the real horrors were out there across the pond.
And now that the war was over and the Great Depression was a quickly receding memory, things began to look up for the American people and we entered an age of consumerism and complacency. The advent of TV was a massive blow against Hollywood and the studios hadn't quite gotten on their feet yet.
The Thing From Another World, one of the best films of the entire period, was turned down by all of the major studios until the relatively dinky RKO Pictures finally picked it up with a budget of $40,000.
The fact that it's the best is very indicative of the time period because by God does it take a long time to start up. The Thing doesn't make its first move until about an hour into the film.
Oh, the plot?
An Arctic military base investigates a nearby explosion and finds that a flying saucer has crash landed in the ice. They excavate a body and, when the ice accidentally melts, release a bloodsucking creature out into the snow. They argue about whether to research it for the betterment of mankind or squash it before it can squash them.
Then they fight it and they win because screw you, Science, this is the 50's.
The single best element of the film is Nikki (Margaret Sheridan), the sexy and capable love interest of Our Hero, Captain Patrick Hendry (Kenneth Tobey). Howards Hawks was known for his style of the women being just as tough as the men and in the age of housewives and suburbia the idea of a strong, sexy woman was downright radical.
You go, Howard Hawks.
The Thing is a pretty fun film when all is said and done, but if I were you, I'd go with John Carpenter's 1982 remake and watch that guy's stomach turn into a mouth again.
Rating: 6/10
Creature From the Black Lagoon
Year: 1954
Director: Jack Arnold
Cast: Richard Carlson, Julia Adams, Richard Carlson
Run Time: 1 hour 19 minutes
MPAA Rating: G
Television at this time was still stealing viewership from cinemas, so movie theaters fought hard against those tiny black and white boxes with big screen color spectacles, the likes of which were impossible to recreate in one's own home. Thus was born Creature From the Black Lagoon, Universal Studios' second 3D picture and their only successful monster movie of the decade.
The film centers around two ichthyologists, David Reed (Richard Carlson) and Kay Lawrence (Julia Adams), who are not quite married (a weak stab at feminine independence that dissipates as Kay goes from Smart Science Woman to Damsel in Distress, alternating between "standing there and shrieking" and "schmooping with David in his swimsuit") and are currently working for Mark Williams (Richard Carlson), a wealthy man whose lust for the pursuit of science is only matched by his lust for the massive profits he makes off of it. When an archaeologist discovers a partial fossil of a webbed foot deep in the Amazon (despite the fact that the natives are ludicrous Mexican stereotypes), the three travel down to the Black Lagoon, a tropical paradise from which no explorer has ever returned in pursuit of The Missing Link of Man's Evolution from the water.
Black Lagoon is essentially a mashup of the anti-Science themes from The Thing (Man shouldn't interfere with nature! Nature will eat you!) with the forlorn misunderstood monster found in Frankenstein. The Creature (Played by Ricou Browning in water and Ben Chapman on land. Heaven knows what they did in the scenes where he climbs out of the water onto the boat. Maybe they shared halves, like a horse costume.) spies on the scientists from his underwater dwelling and more or less immediately becomes enamored of Kay. His pursuits of her lead to a series of unfortunate crew member killings and the group has to decide whether to capture the monster for Science or kill it in order to, you know, keep being alive.
They end up deciding on Getting the Hell Out of There while they still can as their crew is whittled down in record time, but the monster won't give up that easy. This is a fairly entertaining entry in the Dude in a Rubber Suit Chases People Around genre, but by the third or fourth time the scientists put on scuba gear to go dump chemicals on the monster, I was ready to backstroke my way outta there.
But what of The Creature? What made this movie more successful than any of Universal's other horror attempts in this time period?
Although the stiff rubber suit doesn't do wonders for the monster's credibility, the performance of the men inside is inspired. Somehow while simultaneously drowning in a heavy suit and being blinded by a mask, Browning manages to swim in a manner that suggests that this Creature hasn't evolved for thousands of years and is intimately familiar with its watery environment. That's quite a feat of physical acting for a man who isn't even credited.
Although the suspense slowed down at the two-thirds point (the film did actually creep me out in an early sequence - a rare feat for the film's age and pedigree), the Creature's travails resonated with audiences and both men's performances allowed theater patrons to attach emotions to a frankly ridiculous looking bug-eyed monster.
A quick note before we go: please admires director Jack Arnold's handiwork for a moment. 3D cameras in the 50's were bulky affairs, with two cameras attached side-by-side to an enormous rig. To shoot his majestic and ambitious (and frequent) underwater shots, not only did they have to waterproof both cameras, they had to stick this entire contraption underwater and move it around, all for the sake of a gimmick that is used to sell Smurfs merchandise.
The clincher? Arnold is blind in one eye. He can't even see in 3D.
All the awards.
Rating: 6/10
The Blob
Year: 1958
Director: Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr. & Russell S. Doughton Jr.
Cast: Steve McQueen, Aneta Corsaut, Earl Rowe
Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes
MPAA Rating: N/A
Before you read the rest of this review, please press Play.
This revoltingly twee Burt Bacharach composition is the theme song to The Blob and there has not been a single second since I first heard that is hasn't been playing in my headphones, on my car stereo, or quietly somewhere in a back corner of my mind.
I bothered Sergio with it when we were in line for Escape From Tomorrow (more on that... tomorrow) and Henri and I have practically choreographed an entire routine that involves us leaping up and down and waggling our arms like a Native American rain dance.
This resolutely unterrifying song is but the first toe in the waters of The Blob, a campy classic sci-fi B movie, and my absolute favorite film screened in class so far.
The film opens like all good 50's movies - at Make Out point, where Steve (Steve McQueen) and Jane (Aneta Corseaut)'s night of passionate starlit smooching is interrupted by one of the aforementioned stars comes hurtling down to Earth. At the crash site, an old man (Olin Howland) finds a gelatinous mass that isn't a big fan of being poked with sticks. It gloms onto his hand and Steve and Jane rush him to the doctor's office.
They are sent out on an errand and return to discover the doctor and his nurse have vanished, and Steve thinks he might have seen the doctor being dissolved in a mass of goo through a side window. Or maybe it was a Jello dessert he made for a potluck, who knows? The cops certainly don't believe him.
On their quest to discover the truth, a friendly gaggle of rowdy schoolboys races them in the streets and assists them in their journey, but not before quipping and goofing and malt shopping and whatever else it is those dang kids did in the 50's when they weren't rock 'n rolling and roller skating.
The Blob is basically American Graffiti with a gelatinous blob monster and this is great.
The effects are astounding considering the time period, Steve McQueen makes his handsome movie debut, a giant blob comes bursting out of the projection room and devours a movie theater, the monster is destroyed with fire extinguishers and airlifted to the Arctic...
What's not to like? This is camp sci-fi at one of its highest points.
Before this day, I had no interest in the film but I have seen the error of my ways. Consider me a Blob convert. Soon you'll see me going door to door asking people if they've found Blob.
My holiday season has begun, and I'm so excited to get out to theaters and go watch all the chilling, creepy, terrifying... Carrie.
Wait, hold up.
That's right, the totally unnecessary reboot of Brian De Palma's 1976 classic (which I'm still actually really excited to see) is the only wide release horror movie in October 2013. Who decided this? I don't know, but I am seething. Come on, Hollywood. Milking audiences for money is the one thing you do! No horror for Halloween? Screw you guys.
I feel like a splintery wooden stake has been jammed through my heart.
So, as much as I'm excited for Carrie, let's show those corporate tools what's what.
Five Indie Horror Releases You Should Check Out This October
#5 Don't Go to the Reunion
Release Date: October 5, 2013
Synopsis: A prank goes too far for the popular students at Hamilton High as they begin to pay for their actions 10 years later at their high school reunion.
Trailer:
OK, so this one really doesn't look very good. But hey, it's a slasher so I'm gonna go see it anyway. Also, Hamilton High? Total Prom Night reference. Also, the character list on the IMDb page continues the venerable slasher tradition of naming characters after famous horror directors. We've got classics like Craven, Lynch, and Carpenter, as well as more in depth cuts like Cunningham (Friday the 13th), Holland (Child's Play), Miner (F13 Parts 2 and 3), Buechler (F13 Part VIII), and even Wynorski (Chopping Mall) and Kaufman (the co-founder of Troma).
The movie is likely to be just as rife with references so I'll dig it no matter what.
#4: Haunter
Release Date: October 18, 2013
Synopsis: The ghost of a teenager who died years ago reaches out to the land of the living in order to save someone from suffering her same fate.
Trailer:
Basically a spin on (SPOILER ALERT) the twist ending from The Others, but with an actual antagonist. But hey! Abigail Breslin! The high concept is sure to spark at least a few interesting scenes and the trailer makes it look like a 6/10 or above, even with the strikingly bad teen acting on Blondie's part.
#3 Skinwalker Ranch
Release Date: October 30, 2013
Synopsis: A scientific research team investigates and documents the supernatural phenomena surrounding the disappearance of a cattle ranchers 10 year old son. Inspired by true events that shocked the paranormal community around the world.
Trailer:
Here we go! The day before Halloween... Found footage with a seemingly pretty good budget. Now we're talking. This film is the closest we'll get to our annual Halloween tradition of a new Paranormal Activity movie but with a chance of maybe not being blisteringly insipid.
#2 All the Boys Love Mandy Lane
Release Date: October 11, 2013
Synopsis: A group of high-schoolers invite Mandy Lane, a good girl who became quite hot over the summer, to a weekend party on a secluded ranch. While the festivities rage on, the number of revelers begins to drop quite mysteriously.
Trailer:
You know how You're Next was kicking around in Lionsgate's back pocket for two years before getting a wide release and being totally awesome?
You know how Cabin in the Woods got stuck in Production Hell for three years before getting a wide release and blowing open the horror genre?
Well, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane has been languishing for seven years. Now that it's going into (limited) release, you do the math.
#1 Escape From Tomorrow
Release Date: October 11, 2013
Synopsis: In a world of fake castles and anthropomorphic rodents, an epic battle begins when an unemployed father's sanity is challenged by a chance encounter with two underage girls on holiday.
Trailer:
Filmed guerilla style at Disneyland and Disney World, this film manages the astonishing feat of merely existing. Disney is a soulless corporation that rules its lands with an iron fist, and the Disney Secret Police are everywhere. The fact that it looks pretty good is an extra bonus.
So go out and prosper! Support indie horror! Throw rocks at Hollywood executives!
