Armed Blobbery

Year: 1972

Director: Larry Hagman

Cast: Robert Walker Jr., Gwynne Gilford, Richard Stahl

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: GP

Let's get this out of the way: I love the Blob. But Beware! The Blob is a balls to the wall just plain terrible movie with almost no redeeming qualities. The sort of thing that was made for a miniscule budget because just about anything could make a couple bucks in those days.

All this can be exemplified by one anecdote: Director Larry Hagman (famous for playing J. R. in the hit TV show Dallas) was next door neighbors with the original film's director. After commenting that he'd never actually seen it, they screened the director's personal copy of the film and Hagman decided he wanted a Blob of his own.

This was a TV actor, mind you. Not an actual director.

And that's how we ended up with a Blob movie that somehow manages to out-cheese the opening credits of the original which, remember, contained this song. In what seems to be a straightfaced presentation with no intentional camp value, the opening credits (accompanied by a song that sounds like an ice cream truck on PCP) are... Well, just look for yourself.

Did you see a cat lying in a meadow? So did I. And so did every single person working on the film, none of whom evidently considered that maybe their horror film about an amorphous blob devouring a small town shouldn't open with a kitten lying in a meadow.

The 70's, man.

Anyway, when last we left our Blob, he had been frozen solid by Steve McQueen and his band of fire extinguishers and airlifted to the Arctic. The film opens with a First Twelve Minutes Couple that would be downright slashery if the genre had actually been invented yet, the male half of which (Godfrey Cambridge) has just returned from laying pipe at the North Pole (?). His pipe laying supervisors allowed him to bring back a sample of a mysterious substance they found which he now keeps in his freezer like a regular person.

Guess what happens next.

The Blob (you guessed it) defrosts and resumes his ravenous beasting ways, devouring the man, his wife (Marlene Clark), and their adorable kitten (who actually was a character in the film, which surprised me to no end). 

Champion Dialogue #1: "You are a total dingaling."

I'm just gonna throw those in there from time to time.

The Blob goes on to devour hippies, bowling alley patrons, a weirdly sexual barber, and bumbling comic relief cops and blaxploitation characters that apparently migrated from the set of Foxy Brown Goes to the Movies. All on sets that look like bad pornos with their thin walls, shallow lighting, and unmistakable aura of having once been a gymnasium.

Most of the time, the Blob is played by a pink gel held in front of the bottom half of the camera (although in the shots where is actually has to move, it does so a sight better than the original film - the only compliment you'll hear me giving in this review) and for the first time the idea that having a Blob as a main villain is fundamentally unscary hit me like a ton of bricks.

It has all the makings of a cult classic: kittens, bad actors, kooky setpieces, a silly monster. If only it wasn't so stupefyingly boring. Oh it has its moments, but for most of the running time, I just sat there slack jawed, daring myself not to fall asleep.

Champion Dialogue #2: "Is that motivation for you? Does that activate your glands?"

Maybe the kitten represents the fragility of youth when faced with a complex and unknowable world.

The film is comprised of nothing but bad 70's haircuts and narrative problems. Not the least of which is that in the opening scene, The Blob is playing on TV. Is this a news report? Is there an actual movie of The Blob, meaning that it's fictional? In that case, how did it get to the Arctic? These are all questions the filmmakers don't care to answer, if they're even aware of them in the slightest.

Technical problems abound as well. Permeated by the ever classic juddering camera that is a favorite of low budget horror pictures, this one also gets a remarkably unsophisticated zoom that looks like a toddler was chewing on the camera.

Champion Dialogue #3: "I don't cut hair. I sculpt it. You want a hair sculpt?"

And then there are the points where you just have to throw your hands in the air and say "Why am I watching a hippie get a haircut?" Or cringe into yourself when a girl holding a birthday cake looks directly into the camera and shouts "HAPPY BIRTHDAY!" and then walks over to the actual birthday boy who is somewhere behind her.

It's really easy to see why nobody ever talks about this film.

Champion Dialogue #4: "Hey, let's go to your place and get an avocado sandwich, huh?"

It's resolutely unfunny despite the massive spate of comic relief characters. It's xenophobic. It's homophobic. It's hippiephobic. And it has absolutely no reason to exist.

It is redeemed somewhat by the more ridiculous scenes in the way that syphilis is redeemed by having a funny name. These are such unforgettable moments as the time a chicken lays an egg into the Blob or the weird obsession the leading man has with avocado sandwiches. Or the fact that one of the supporting characters is dressed as a gorilla literally the entire time.

So it's not a total bust like, say, an adaptation of The Notebook where every character is played by Arnold Schwarzenegger (which, actually, I'd pay to see), but dear God does it try awfully hard to be the worst film I've ever seen.

Also, this is the only film in the franchise to say the word "blob" aloud and it absolutely does not earn it.

Champion Dialogue # 5: "I like bacon."

This is what happens to your brain when you watch this movie.

TL;DR: Beware! The Blob is a disgrace to the grand name of Blob, but has some miniscule campy value.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 1039

Reviews In This Series

The Blob (Yeaworth Jr./Doughton Jr, 1958)

Beware! The Blob (Hagman, 1972)

The Blob (Russell, 1988)

Stars In Space

Year: 2013

Director: Alfonso Cuarón

Cast: Sandra Bullock, George Clooney, Ed Harris

Run Time: 1 hour 31 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Do you hear that sound?

That's the sound of Sandra Bullock's maid clearing a space on her Oscar shelf.

Way back when in July when the incredible first trailer for Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity was released, it was hard to imagine that an entire feature film could be as tense and horrifying as that one and a half minute exercise in pure terror.

It's easier now.

Space is the worst.

There are only two (living) faces in the entire film. Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), a computer scientist who has been sent to update the programming on the Hubble telescope, and her crewmate Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), a cocky space jockey who's trying to beat the world record for longest space walk.

The film opens in the middle of their operation and hits the ground running. Within ten minutes a cloud of debris created by a chain reaction of exploding satellites has ripped through their shuttle, destroying their crew and their ride home and leaving Ryan and Matt stranded in the middle of a zero gravity nightmare.

The International Space Station is visible but a hundred miles away. Matt's prototype jetpack is running out of fuel. And the debris cloud is due to return within 90 minutes to rip them apart.

If you think humans belong in outer space, watching these two drifting helplessly and spinning around uncontrollably above the Earth's atmosphere will certainly change your mind. It's impossible to comprehend the abject horror of being adrift in the void and Gravity leaves you with a pit in your stomach before anything even remotely unpleasant happens.

I can't even.

(MILD MID-MOVIE SPOILERS IN THE NEXT TWO PARAGRAPHS) What follows is an 80 minute adventure to return to the Earth's soil before the outer atmosphere turns into a whirling dervish of sharp metal and desiccated corpses. The two are separated early on and the inexperienced Ryan must fight her way through a series of dilapidated and hull-damaged space stations to get to a functional escape pod as her oxygen tank dwindles away to nothing. It's a bare bones escape plot that provides a backdrop to Ryan's rebirth and transformation. 

She begins the film as a shell of a person. Her young daughter died in a playground accident and she no longer has the drive or motivation to do anything with her life. She just exists. She's, dare I say, drifting. The film is heavy on visual metaphors for this rebirth process, starting off with the "umbilical cord" connecting her to Matt and an unforgettable shot that, clear as day, imitates a fetus in the womb. I am loathe to spoil any of the rest of the film or take away the joy that comes with unpacking a film's symbolism, but I'll just say the final act and closing shots of the movie are masterful and elegant.

If you've seen the film and are interested in my interpretation of her development, please highlight here [She is "born" through the atmosphere in the escape pod and "baptized" when she is submerged in the water of the ocean. Her crawling out of the muck and onto the beach, then taking a few shaky steps into the light resembles both the child development process and the evolution of man. She is a different person with a newfound lease on life thanks to her evolution in outer space. And the three times Ryan is pelted with debris mirror the three trimesters of pregnancy. If you want to read that far into that.]

Sorry about spoilers. Does this picture of George Clooney make it better?

Gravity manages to be a high octane action thriller and a subtle meditation on the nature of being thanks to Alfonso Cuarón's delicate visuals. His predilection for long tracking shots has never been put to better use than this film (the majestic and detailed opening shot is a staggering 17 minutes long), with its sinewy zero G camera that suggests weightlessness almost as much as the manifold angles with which we view the characters. There's no gravity here, it doesn't matter if the characters' feet are pointing up or down or any which way but loose. Cuarón knows this and his camera moves with the grace of a pirouetting ballerina.

And about the 3D: I had my doubts about it going in, but it absolutely wouldn't be the same experience without it. In 3D, you can peer through the curved glass of an astronaut's helmet, cower in fear at the shrapnel flying out of the screen (in a way that avoids the gimmicky side of "things coming straight at your face" and opts for the more organic approach of "Holy crap we're gonna die!"), and have space to sit back and marvel at how the hell they did any of this.

But the film's images, nimble and refined though they are, can barely hold a candle to the gale force that is the soundscape. Gravity is an out and out miracle of sound design. An entire satellite is smashed to bits, ripped apart by flying scrap metal and all we hear is breathing and a heartbeat. There's no sound in space, yo. Every single thing you hear apart from the score (which is wonderful as well, by the way) is a noise either produced by the human body or within the confines of the suit. Suck on that, Star Wars.

The lack of noise on visuals of massive destruction provides a dissonance that racks the tension up to eleven in an already supernaturally anxiety-producing film. And the surround sound. Oh, the surround sound! I beg you to see this film in theaters, where every little blip and click has a precise location that throws you headfirst into the world of Gravity.

Though that may not be desirable. 

So why is Miss Congeniality in this massively beautiful film? Frankly, because she earned it. Sandra Bullock's performance is an exquisite ballet of physically challenging and precise action and utterly breathtaking and natural emotion, injected with a raw humanity that will penetrate your soul. This is a one woman show, and nobody but Sandra Bullock (I honestly never thought I'd be saying this) could be that woman.

Gravity is a marvel of engineering, suspense, performance, and storytelling. And, like I always say, no good story can't be told in 90 minutes. Cuarón knows how not to overstay his welcome and the film zips along at an unprecedented clip. It's taut, airtight, and manages to avoid being a bloated and overwhelming ego trip (couugh cough 2001: A Space Odyssey cough).

I'm well aware that it must not be perfect, but so help me I can't seem to find a single flaw. In the middle of one of the worst runs of Hollywood filmmaking in the history of the medium, Gravity has singlehandedly restored my faith in cinema.

It's one hell of a ride.

TL;DR: Gravity is about as close to a masterpiece as a sci-fi/action film could ever be. If the pile of Oscars this film wins doesn't weigh more than my car, I'll be surprised.

Rating: 10/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Absolutely yes, go see it now. In 3D. Surround sound. Before it's too late. Hurry. Right now.

Word Count: 1233

Thy Will Be Done

Year: 2013

Director: Kimberly Peirce

Cast: Chloë Grace Moretz, Julianne Moore, Gabriella Wilde

Run Time: 1 hour 40 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

There is, of course, only one question that any review of Carrie needs to answer: Is it as good as the 1976 Brian De Palma classic?

The answer is of course not, but the film itself is nothing to scoff at.

I'm just as shocked as you.

Let's switch things up and start with the problems for once so I can actually end this review on a good note. And there are a number of them, but they aren't nearly so critical as all that.

1) Chloë Grace Moretz is not an outsider.

This girl's a superstar and she can't entirely shake that charisma, which I suppose isn't a bad thing for Chloë. But occasionally it's hard to watch this amazing girl cowering in the corner without thinking "Stand up straight and take charge, you got this girl." Also her shower scene was way more sensual than the story called for. Sorry girl, you're awesome. But Carrie White... isn't.

2) The film is a little too eager to punch those early moments.

We get it. She's discovering her powers. When she gets angry, things start to move. We figured that out with the tampon hurricane in the locker room. And the water cooler exploding. And the mirror shattering. And the door cracking. And the fact that we've all already seen Carrie. It's just like Twilight drawing out the part where Bella discovers that Edward is a vampire. Yeah, you're your own story, but calm down. American audiences aren't as dumb as the Zac Efron trailer before the film would have you believe.

3) Really? This is high school?

This is Carrie's friend Sue.

This is Carrie's enemy, Billy.

If those two are high school aged, I really missed out.

4) The film relies too much on creaky CGI.

How hard is it to unspool some fishing line and go to town? The visual effects really show their seams and it all ends up feeling too glossy and sharp, like licking a page of a magazine.

That last flaw is the most evident and comes closest to dampening the movie's effect but where Carrie has strengths, Carrie has strengths.

Pictured: Strengths.

Now that we have those out of the way, we can talk about nice things and plot! If you are one of the few people who doesn't know this story (And they're out there. There are tens of them!), Carrie is about a young woman named Carrie White (Moretz) who lives under the iron fist of her devoutly religious mother Margaret (Julianne Moore).

One day when she gets her first period in the locker room, she is mercilessly mocked by a gang of girls led by Chris Hargensen (Portia Doubleday), a Regina George if there ever was one. In her anger, Carrie discovers that along with her period has come a mysterious power to make things move with her mind.

Sue Snell (Gabriella Wilde) has extreme guilt about having been part of the group that made fun of Carrie and she talks her boyfriend Tommy (Ansel Elgort) into asking Carrie to prom to make her feel better. Meanwhile, Chris and her hot boyfriend Billy (Alex Russell) make a plan to ruin Carrie's special night via a lovely pig's blood facial.

High school is like being pelted with bloody tampons every single second of your waking existence. My grandfather claims it was the best time of his life. He must have been really hot back then.

One of the most exciting things about Carrie is its old fashioned approach to horror. There's no jump scares here, just plain old nerve wracking creepiness. Now, a lot of the tension is lost because you know exactly what's going to happen (The Statute of Spoiler Limitations has long since run out on a 1976 film based on a 1974 novella), but the film still packs plenty of punch, mostly in the scenes where Julianne Moore and Chloë Grace get to square off.

The decisions to cast Moore and Moretz were the first and third most effective choices for the film, the second being Judy Greer as Ms. Desjardin, the gym teacher who just wants to see Carrie succeed. Greer (whose career highlight thus far has been as the inimitable Kitty Sanchez on Arrested Development) works in a pitch perfect comic register that balances out the film quite nicely and her motherly affection toward Carrie is utterly compelling.

Between that, Moore's gut-wrenchingly terrifying and zealous histrionics, and Moretz's naïve charm (her nervous smile put me in the mind of Boris Karloff in Bride of Frankenstein more than a few times), Carrie has more than enough legs to stand on.

Two. You only need two.

And frankly this is a story that, although simple, deserves to be retold. Openly lesbian director Kimberly Peirce (whose biggest feature by far is her debut film Boys Don't Cry) updates the timeless themes (namely: teenagers suck) and pulls them into a new world pervaded with social media and cyberbullying.

This past decade, the dangers of bullying have been receiving a lot more press and activist groups are becoming much more numerous and involved with high schools across the country. People are beginning to stand up for themselves and fight against something that has up until now merely been seen as an unpleasant but expected institution in the lives of young men and women.

Essentially, the time has never been riper for a reinvention of Stephen King's fabulous freshman debut, and although the film feels somewhat insubstantial when held to the light of his masterwork of exploring a young woman's development, at the end of the day it has something to say, it's disturbing when it wants to be, and it never slows down.

Carrie is enjoyable to the very end, no matter how many times this story has been reworked.

The devil never dies, it just keeps coming back. And this devil of a tale is unstoppable.

TL;DR: Carrie is perhaps unnecessary, but not even remotely unenjoyable.

Rating: 8/10

Should I Spend Money On This? Yes, especially considering this is the only wide release horror film of this year (gag me with a spoon). Support horror! Happy Halloween!

Word Count: 1053

Blob Me Blind

Year: 1988

Director: Chuck Russell

Cast: Kevin Dillon, Shawnee Smith, Donovan Leitch

Run Time: 1 hour 35 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

You can never have enough Blob.

This is an opinion held by many, as evidenced by the popularity of Blobfest, a yearly convention in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania that has been going strong since 1958, the year the original film came out. The festivities include four double features (one half of which is always The Blob), 1950s Makeover and Costume contests, special guests, a Fire Extinguisher Parade, and the Friday Night Run Out, where the entire audience runs out of the Colonial Theatre, the location the Blob attacked at the end of the film.

That was all one sentence.

Anyway, it's nice to be reaffirmed in my love for the Blob, the topic I have chosen for my essay in my Horror Genre class. To complete this five page essay (which will shortly become available to you on this blog, should you wish to read an actual academic analysis of a dumb movie about a Blob that eats people), part of the assignment is to watch the sequel (Beware! The Blob) and the 1988 remake.

Since I was already planning on doing that anyway, it was an obvious choice of essay topics.

And since B!tB is stuck in the mail somewhere, I decided to begin with the remake, released exactly 30 years after the original Steve McQueen film.

Things have changed since then (although making a pile of silicone look like it's rolling around is still just as hard as before, evidently). Visual effects have improved tenfold. Horror has risen to prominence as the genre to beat. The beginning of the decade saw the invention of the slasher film.

That last development more than anything else is what informs The Blob of the 80's. This film is about one topless scene away from being a Census Bloodbath entry.

There's a Final Girl, a couple making out in a car and getting Blobbed, a man bursting from the shadows brandishing an axe, not to mention that half of it takes place in the woods. This is no accident. The movie showing in the cinema in the climactic scene is one of the most spot on parodies of the genre I've ever seen. Also, let's not forget about Chuck Russell, whose previous directing gig was none other than A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (The Blob also shares screenwriter Frank Darabont with that lovely late era slasher film).

Coming so late in the 80's, there was no way the new Blob could be anything other than a slasher riff. That's what was selling and had been selling for a decade at that point. If that makes it sound stale, trust me it absolutely isn't. Yes, it's a slasher framework but how many "teens in the woods" movies choose a ravenous gelatinous monster as their villain?

As a preeminent slasher scholar, I can tell you: Not a lot. 

Meg (Shawnee Smith of the first three Saw movies) is a sweet young cheerleader from the struggling off-season ski town of Arborville, California. Although the town's economy is troubled, she still has something to cheer about - cute jock Paul Taylor (Donovan Leitch of the Brad Pitt slasher abortion Cutting Class) has just asked her out on a date! Gee whiz! A great deal of time in the first act is spent on teen hijinks (including a bizarre reworking of this ancient joke) in a barely disguised Meet the Meat sequence.

There's Scott (Ricky Paull Goldin), Paul's douchey best friend (his best analogue is Ted from Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, and I'll bet my life's savings that the Blobmakers have seen that film); Brian Flagg (Kevin Dillon, who has made something of a name for himself with Entourage), the leather clad motorcycle rebel; the town weirdo Reverend Meeker (Del Close); Diner owner Fran (Candy Clark); and her suitor, Sherriff Geller (Jeffrey DeMunn, perhaps best known as Dale from The Walking Dead. This won't be the last time he'll pop up somewhere you least expect it - he'll appear in Christmas Evil, one of our upcoming Census Bloodbath features).

This is a remake after all, so although most of these characters are original, it's obvious that Meg and Paul are the stand-ins for teenybopper heroes Aneta Coursaut and Steve McQueen. Oh, also a meteor crashes to Earth containing a ravenous Blob. That too.

(SPOILERS IN THIS PARAGRAPH) The movie follows the original for a while with the couple driving a Blob-afflicted old man to the doctor. Then the movie tips its hand when it freaking kills Paul dead in just about the most violent manner possible. We just got Psycho'd hard, guys. Our young hero has joined Marion Crane and Casey Becker in the special Heaven for top billed characters who die before the 45 minute mark. Now that the movie has thrown a wrench in the works, Brian Flagg steps up to the plate, teaming up with Meg to help save the town, but the movie has already proved how far it's willing to go - anything can happen.

He never lived to see the advent of the selfie. It's hard to tell if this is a bad thing.

It also proves how far gore effects have come in the last 30 years. This is still massively tawdry and cheap stuff, mind you. It's no The Thing, but The Blob is exactly everything a 50's style sci-fi horror flick transplanted into the late 80's should be - tremendous fun with a gonzo flair for increasingly outrageous gore setpieces.

A man gets his arm ripped off as the rest of him dissolves in the Blob, a diner worker is pulled into a sink drain, a woman in a telephone booth is completely engulfed. Faces melt, bones are crushed, and the Blob gushes around with gusto, squealing and thrashing and crushing townspeople with its enormous tentacles (a new and appreciated addition - this feels so much like all the best parts of a cheesy black and white monster movie).

The final third of the film has some commentary on the US government (the monster being a failed biochemical warfare experiment) and it's all well and good but the most important part is the middle, in which nothing much happens but various people around town getting Blobbed. This is fantastic and worth the price of admission even without the witty repartee and cute meta humor.

Blobbed.

Blobbed.

I regret to inform you that you've just been Blobbed.

Blobbed Nightmare on Elm Street style.

The Blob avoids the modern remake habit of grittifying everything (Imagine if you will: a grey and world-weary Blob wearing sunglasses and dissolving townspeople as revenge for his dead bride. He keeps going out of a sense of duty but can't shake the nihilistic idea that maybe it just isn't worth it anymore. He's the Blob this city wants but doesn't need anymore.) and embraces its camp pedigree. 

There was hardly a better time for sci-fi/action/horror camp than the 80's, and this Blob turns it up to 11. Sillier. 80's-er. Gorier. Blobbier.

There's a motorcycle chase.

Somebody actually says the words "Chew on that, slimeball!"

A manhole cover is exploded with a bazooka because everything explodes in the 80's.

When nothing is taken seriously it's really quite hard to be even a little scared, but it's even harder to not have a good time. 

Who doesn't have a good time at the movies?

Also, the film isn't shoddily made at all. (What?) In fact, the editing is even rather brilliant at times, keeping in mind the campy tone. The opening shot of a cemetery pans over to a rowdy crowd cheering on a high school football game; a particularly Blobby scene cuts right to a kid slurping up Jello; and Brian's attempt at an Evel Knievel style stunt is intercut with the cheerleading squad chanting "GO! GO! GO!"

Not quite Academy Award level work, maybe, but it shows that a lot of thought and love went into this film. And if you don't agree, you can go Blob yourself.

Body Count (and the very fact that it needs a body count is telling): 21; also half of the audience of the movie theater and a multitude of random townspeople.

TL;DR: The Blob is a perfect remake, capturing the tone and humor of the original but ramping up the visual effects with modern flair.

Rating: 9/10

Word Count: 1418
Reviews In This Series
The Blob (Yeaworth Jr./Doughton Jr., 1958)
Beware! The Blob (Hagman, 1972)
The Blob (Russell, 1988)

Laugh Yourself to Death

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).

Read my review here.

#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.

Now on DVD! Read my review here.

#4 Shaun of the Dead (dir. Edgar Wright)

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.

On DVD November 2013. Read my rave review here.

#1 Scream (dir. Wes Craven)

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.

Read my Scream essay here.


Have a happy Halloween, and if you stick with this list, I can ensure that you will!

(If you watched one of these movies and loved or hated it, please let me know in the comments!)
Word Count: 805

If Ever A Wiz There Was

Year: 2007

Director: Jeremy Kasten

Cast: Kip Pardue, Bijou Phillips, Crispin Glover

Run Time: 1 hour 34 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

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)

DreadBox: It's Not Easy Being Green

If you're new to DreadBox, click here.

Year: 2012

Director: Barry Levinson

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.

Word Count: 1127