Cardboard Science: Big Beautiful Woman

Year: 1958

Director: Nathan Hertz

Cast: Allison Hayes, William Hudson, Yvette Vickers

Run Time: 1 hour 5 minutes

It's a big day here at Popcorn Culture and our fifth annual Cardboard Science crossover with Hunter Allen of Kinemalogue. We're onto the second 50's sci-fi film he assigned for the season, and it's the first time we've ever had a repeat director! That's right, shlock auteur Nathan Juran (operating, as per usual, under the name Nathan Hertz) directed previous Cardboard Science entry The Brain from Planet Arous, another low budget gem I liked against all odds. For the first time, we're being given the opportunity to not only look at the 50's as a zany whole, but at one particular director and how his involvement in it evolved over the years.

Two things are already immediately apparent. First, his run times are deliciously brisk. Second, he certainly knows how to title a movie, because today we're here to talk about Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman!

Pictured: Me to any apartment that's watching this movie.

With a title like Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman, you'd think the plot would be pretty self-explanatory. But that's where you're wrong, because you should never assume that a movie like this has the budget for a 50 Ft. Woman. So, here we have Nancy Fowler Archer (Allison Hayes), a rich heiress who is hopelessly in love with her lecherous, money-grubbing dolt of a husband Harry (William Hudson). Harry can hardly be bothered to look at her, and he spends all his time at the local bar openly making on his mistress Honey (Yvette Vickers).

When Nancy finally blows her top and ditches him, she drives to their secluded home through that same endless stretch of Santa Clarita desert where they filmed all these movies. Wouldn't you know it, but she just so happens to come across an alien spacecraft and she runs back to town babbling about its occupant, a thirty-foot giant. Harry sees her encounter as an opportunity to have Nancy, a famous drunk, committed. He wants to inherit all her money and drive off into the sunset with Honey, but his plans - which quickly turn murderous - don't go so well when radiation turns Nancy into a jealously violent fifty-foot monster hellbent on getting her husband back.

At about the 53 minute mark of a 65 minute movie.

Now, most reviews you'll hear of Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman will lament how very little attacking of 50-ft. women there really is. But those reviewers are fools for thinking that a 50's B-movie will live up to a title or an incredible poster (and what a truly incredible poster we've been given this time). What they're completely ignoring is the delicious melodrama right before their noses. Allison Hayes enters the frame working at an 11 and she doesn't let up for a single second that she's onscreen, gnashing her teeth, bulging her eyes, and leaning dramatically against doorjambs at every opportunity.

Everything in the movie works along with her to whip the drama into a constant fit of pique, from the delightfully vile sourness Yvette Vickers gives to Honey to the transparent machinations of Harry - who literally steals a diamond straight off his wife's neck while pretending to tuck her into bed - to a news report about Nancy's alien sighting that throws so much public television shade that it's shocking you can even see the frame after the anchor completely wrecks Mrs. Archer. 

I honestly can't resist sharing his Gossip Girl quote in full, it's that f**king brutal: "From the Archers' palatial home away from home comes a report that Mrs. Archer has not only to be seeing a sociable satellite, but its inhabitant as well: a 30-foot giant. Was he pink with big ears and tusks? Well, maybe Mrs. Archer, who has recently been feuding with her husband, Handsome Harry, has finally found a man from out of this world, a man who could love her for herself. Come, come, Mrs. Archer. A man can ignore one million dollars: but, fifty million! That's too much to ask even from the man in the moon!"

OK, yeah, I'd be pissed too.

And buried beneath this scrumptious mountain of camp is a surprisingly trenchant observation of the fate of women who don't behave as they ought. Mrs. Archer is telling the truth, but nobody even gives a second thought to believing her. The men seek to discredit her as "hysterical," and she's already been institutionalized once before for being upset that her husband is a philandering bastard. Her money gives her license to be confident and speak her mind (her tax dollars are the only reason the sheriff patronizes her enough to investigate her claims in the first place), but society doesn't like that and seeks to shut her down at every opportunity. And when her claims are finally proven true, she is chained up, chased down, and shot at. The police, the medical establishment, and every other man in her life can't possibly begin to handle what she's going through.

It's actually pretty easy to draw a straight line from The Brain from Planet Arous to Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman. Both are shoddily made, loosely plotted B-pictures with surprisingly licentious male characters (especially for the time), and both have a lot more thrumming beneath the surface about the societal landscape shifting away from the clean cut 50's and the cookie cutter suburban American dream. Perhaps the most metaphorically powerful moment comes when Nancy escapes from her bonds and goes on her final (read: only) rampage, destroying her entire house in the process. She finally lets go and goes for what she wants (namely, her husband to stay by her side and not be a sleazebag loser), but the effort it takes to break the shackles of society cause the implosion of her life - the destruction of her literal home representing the death of normalcy and her domestic American dream. But for ten blissful minutes, she can't be ignored, and that's maybe worth it after all.

Now, mind you, this rampage doesn't really look very good. The effects are crummy as all get out, except for the few shots where she gets to interact with actual models. The superimposed shots of the giant looming over buildings have that dodgy 50's transparent look, and she walks with this frustratingly slow, overly careful gait that was probably required to make it look even as unconvincing as it was. At least her outfit is an impeccable bit of retro glam adventure movie fun, kudos to the costume designers out there working their butts off.

And I don't need to tell you the science fiction elements of the plot make no sense (why introduce a male giant who's stealing diamonds, only to have him wander off halfway through the movie?).

Also this shot of them discovering his diamond collection likewise parallels Arous. I guess ol' Nathan loves distorting faces through glass, and I can't say I mind.

Honestly, I kinda almost sorta loved this movie, and I would be giving it maybe the best score of the bunch if it wasn't for one thing. Nancy gets sidelined for at least twenty minutes while she's sedated and chained up in her bedroom, and the antics of the men trying to figure out how the hell she got this way just don't compare to Hayes' inimitable performance. Shunting her offscreen immediately drains the energy from the narrative, both on a subtextual level and on the level of just plain interest.

And I haven't quite decided how I feel about the wacky comic relief deputy yet, but I'm erring on the side of liking him, if only for an alarmingly well-executed in-camera stunt where he almost runs over the main characters with his police cruiser. As it stands, even with its many many (many) flaws, Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman is a shockingly socially conscious thriller that sweeps you up with its goofy machinations. Sure that title is a cheat, but it's a tremendously satisfying romp that flies right past your eyes at the speed of light. I couldn't possibly complain about that.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

• There's a hell of a lack of anything resembling science in this movie, but I do love the faux-fancy description of space shuttles as "satellites," because of course they had no idea that that term would come to mean anything else.

The morality of the past, in the future!:

• When the news anchor tells us that the alien spacecraft was spotted in Capetown, he makes sure to mention that it was probably spotted by a Boer (a descendant of the white settlers or South Africa), for no clear reason. Because we wouldn't trust the report if it was a black person?
• The cops spot a giant footprint and attempt to investigate the source because it "sure wasn't made by a Japanese gardener." OK, maybe this movie is a little bit racist. A lot bit.
• According to the doctor, it's so easy for women to get emotional in "this supersonic age." Whatever the hell that means.

Sensawunda:

• The sheriff complains that it's already past midnight when they were clearly shooting during the daytime. Black and white movies are fun.
• "You pulled a boner tonight," is a line that is spoken without a trace of irony.

TL;DR: Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman is a delightful gem that could have been a perfect masterpiece if it embraced its feminist subtext a smidge more wholeheartedly.

Rating: 7/10
Word Count: 1597
Cardboard Science on Popcorn Culture
2014: Invaders from Mars (1953) The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) Them! (1954)
2015: The Giant Claw (1957) It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955) The Brain from Planet Arous (1957)
2016: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) Godzilla (1954) The Beginning of the End (1957)
2017: It Conquered the World (1958) I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958) Forbidden Planet (1956)
2018: The Fly (1958) Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958) Fiend Without a Face (1958)
2019: Mysterious Island (1961) Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)

Census Bloodbath on Kinemalogue
2014: My Bloody Valentine (1981) Pieces (1982) The Burning (1981)
2015: Terror Train (1980) The House on Sorority Row (1983) Killer Party (1986)
2016: The Initiation (1984) Chopping Mall (1986) I, Madman  (1989)
2017: Slumber Party Massacre (1982) Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987) Happy Birthday to Me (1981)
2018: The Prowler (1981) Slumber Party Massacre II (1987) Death Spa (1989)
2019: Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge (1989) Psycho III (1986) StageFright: Aquarius (1987)

Shoo Fly

Year: 1965

Director: Don Sharp

Cast: Brian Donlevy, George Baker, Carole Gray 

Run Time: 1 hour 26 minutes

Ah, here we're getting back to familiar territory. A six-years-later sequel that doesn't star anyone from the original, has a completely confounding continuity with the previous entries, and was produced on the cheap by a completely different company in England. Is this a Children of the Corn movie? Nope, it's just Curse of the Fly, a flick where absolutely nobody turns into a giant fly.

Also, the entire opening credits sequence rolls over shots of a woman running through a field in her underwear. Y'know, for science.

Curse of the Fly at least follows another leg of the Delambre family, so we're in somewhat familiar territory, even if nobody in the cast is remotely French enough to pronounce the name properly this time around (we get a lot of "de-lom-BRAY," sledgehammering that final syllable). Martin Delambre (George Baker) is the son of Henri Delambre (Brian Donlevy). It is explicitly mentioned that Martin's grandfather is the original Fly, which would make him Andre's grandson. But then you remember that Andre only had one kid before he died, and his name was Philippe. And then you immediately stop caring to preserve your sanity.

Anyway, Martin meets Patricia (Carole Gray), the aforementioned underwear runner, along the side of the road and takes her to Montreal where they fall in love over the course of the week, get married agreeing that they both don't want to know anything about the other's backstory, and return to his secluded mansion as husband and wife. While this seems like a sweet deal for a penniless wanderer at first, not all is as it seems at the Delambre abode. 

First off, Martin's devoted servants Tai (Burt Kwouk) and Wan (Yvette Rees in yellowface, boo) seem to be hiding something, and Wan especially seems dead set on gaslighting Patricia straight out of that house. And we see Martin and his father fiddling with their teleportation machine. It seems to be working just fine, but their first failed tests may have resulted in whatever is being locked away in those cages in the backyard.

...Perhaps.

Something we must face before we press on: Curse of the Fly is not a Fly movie. It's a mad science movie, certainly, using a lot of the trappings of the first two movies. But it's not a Fly movie. If you can push past that fact, there's enough here to keep you watching, but you must be made of sterner stuff to swallow this one. That said, it's actually a quasi-remake of Rebecca hybridized with The Island of Dr. Moreau that takes you on a lot of bizarre twists and turns. Fly-less turns, yes, but reasonably interesting ones nonetheless.

Curse of the Fly is more of an abstraction of the Fly concept, running with the idea that this family's obsession with developing teleportation will constantly be its downfall. It's all about the stupid hubris of man and science (and movie producer, evidently). So we're at least back to familiar 50's-esque territory in that regard. If anything, this movie takes the science-fear one step further, directly positing that scientists are inherently murderers by doing what they do.

And the Rebecca-ness of it all is actually pretty satisfying. I wish Carole Gray could achieve a facial expression beyond "vacant surprise," but the plot she is funneled through has some extremely creepy, almost gothic atmosphere. And Wan, the Mrs. Danvers analogue, is an epically evil presence (insidious racial undertones aside, it's a great performance). Her efforts to depose the new Mrs. Delambre are unsubtly maniacal in the best way possible, only further servicing that constant undertone of a lot of these movies, where men completely ignore the fears and experiences of women for their own sinister purposes.

There's pretty clearly only one purpose Patricia has been brought here in the first place.

The story of a woman being taken to a creepy old house where secrets are buried and everyone is working against her might not be what we signed up for, but it's what we get and it ain't half bad. And we aren't completely deprived of monstrous special effects, they just come in the form of the [spoilers, sorta] irradiated monsters kept in the back garden. The makeup used doesn't really vary between the two main creatures, but it's a fun bit of prosthetic work that makes their faces seem half-melted, a sight that works perfectly within the black and white aesthetic.

In color, this would probably just look like a Nacho Libre spinoff.

And anyone who's seen 1958's The Fly is no stranger to a dour ending, but this one is just grim. It doesn't land quite as well, because we still don't really have a grasp on these characters or why we should care about them (except for Wan, who gets a deliciously psychosexual moment in the back garden), but it's still impressively dark for a film of its vintage. It might be cheap and shakily performed, but it's unrelenting in its way.

Plus, this is the first Fly movie that doesn't think you'll be obsessed with its scientific process. The amount of time we're forced to sit there and watch random lights flash is kept to a minimum, with the small addition of welding masks instead of goggles so you know this time we're Super Advanced (for anyone who has taken on the unenviable task of keeping up with the timeline here, we're now a good two generations down from the original, with the youngest being fully grown, so this movie takes place in, oh, about 2008).

This one also actually seems somewhat aware of its treatment of women, which is saying something considering that, and I repeat, the entire opening credits roll over a scene of Patricia in her bra and panties running through a dewy field. We do get a hilariously ill-conceived line where Henri finds out Martin has a new wife and tells him to "send her back," but for the most part Patricia is the protagonist of this movie, much in the same way that something like I Married a Monster from Outer Space is accidentally, inherently about the female character it sets out to terrorize.

Curse of the Fly is probably the weakest of the bunch so far, especially when you measure it by the metric of being a f**king Fly movie, but for the most part it's still worth a look. It's probably better the less 60's horror cinema you've seen, because you have less to compare it to, but for a rote B-picture in a time when those movies were starting to become out of vogue, you could definitely make a much much worse decision than this one.

TL;DR: Curse of the Fly is more of an abstraction of the franchise's concept than anything, but it's a mildly satisfying one in spite of that.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1161
Reviews In This Series
The Fly (Neumann, 1958)
Return of the Fly (Bernds, 1959)
Curse of the Fly (Sharp, 1965)
The Fly (Cronenberg, 1986)
The Fly II (Walas, 1989)

The Shape Of Things To Come

Year: 2018

Director: David Gordon Green

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak

Run Time: 1 hour 46 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I've already done some revisiting of previous franchise marathon entries this October, so it's only appropriate that the fun should continue with an actual movie in theaters! What a treat! We haven't seen good ole Michael Myers on this blog since we concluded our marathon with Rob Zombie's Halloween II a year late in 2016 because I could not convince myself to watch that one. And we haven't seen that pale blank face in theaters since the very same film when it was released in 2009, almost a full decade ago.

Well, here we are at a new entry that has already made so much money I wouldn't be surprised if the sequel is being rushed into theaters next weekend. That is unequivocally good, because if there's one thing I love it's a sprawling horror franchise. But as for the movie itself? Well, let's take a look.

At the very least, I'm glad Michael and Laurie are getting in on the ABBA craze.

It's Halloween, 2018. It's the only Halloween that matters other than the one back in 1978, when Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) was stalked by masked murderer Michael Myers (Nick Castle) while she and her friends were babysitting. Nothing else happened in between then and now, we promise.

Laurie Strode is now a reclusive shut-in at her survivalist compound in the sticks of Haddonfield, IL. Her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) has gone ahead and had her own daughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak). But having a teenage child in Haddonfield is never a good idea, because Michael escapes imprisonment while being transferred to a different facility (which he's already done twice before, once in this very timeline) and immediately begins stalking around town in his good ol' Shatner mask mowing down as many passersby as he can in the process.

Laurie, Karen, the cops, and Michael's new caretaker Dr. Sartain (Haluk Bilginer) run around Haddonfield in a state of general distress while Michael wreaks as much havoc as one might expect after being cooped up for so many years.

Oh, how we've missed the big lug.

So, this is the third film in forty years to be titled Halloween. Those are some big shoes to fill, but at least the presence of Rob Zombie's remake means that it could never be the worst one. Unfortunately, this entry barely rises to the middle of the franchise ranking at large.

Halloween has certain good ideas it's working with, but it doesn't seem to have found its own personality. It's actually a lot like Halloween H20, which is now as old as the original Halloween was when it was released: We finally have Jamie Lee Curtis back to play one of her most iconic roles, but this is still a Halloween movie and we need a slate of nubile teens to be offed in the background while she does her thing. H20 very clearly had two different plot threads like this, but it wove them together with reasonable success and cemented the whole thing with a heavy dose of Kevin Williamson snark. 

In Halloween, unfortunately, the threads just unravel before your eyes. The movie can barely maintain its focus on Allyson, let alone her slate of friends, who exist in disjointed scene fragments usually in pairs but never all together. This slasher movie is really missing a unifying element, and the Halloween dance setpiece they feature early on completely fails to be that. The cast splinters off into a series of stalker vignettes which don't tie together at all, or really make much sense as to how Michael managed to get himself between them. Instead of making a mosaic, these scenes just seem like a bunch of shattered glass littered on the ground at random.

Pictured: The screenwriting process.

Even more unfortunately, none of these fragments are pulled together under a unifyied tone. We get some action hero set pieces with random shards of comic relief sprinkled in (these tend to work, actually, thanks to David Gordon Green and co-writer Danny McBride's familiarity with comedy filmmaking, though one horny teen character in particular gets a monologue that I think is supposed to be funny but it completely odious and made me want him to die all the more), and it occasionally cuts to horror sequences of the most brutal and unrelenting variety.

To that end, I will say that this is certainly the goriest Halloween film ever made, and a lot of the kills are incredibly well-realized. As a bit of a gorehound myself, it was nice to see Michael making a play to join the big boys of gruesome slasher killing (usually he's a bit of a bore, going with a couple swipes of the kitchen knife and not much else), but the murders here seem unusually mean-spirited and difficult to watch. Slasher films are supposed to be fun, especially when the other scenes are as silly or high-octane as they are attempting to be. Halloween is kind of miserable at times, making choices that do up the full-tilt horror, but feel more in tune with Rob Zombie's take on the material. Which I hardly expect anyone was actually asking for.

A la carte, though, I can accept the gore for being a very good example of the form. And John Carpenter's new original score is full of bangers, especially the droning alarm bell of his most frequently used new theme. And I'll never complain when Jamie Lee Curtis or Judy Greer are onscreen, even though the former is stuck in a retread of a character she already pulled off twenty years ago in H20. This is the rare example of a horror movie that actually gets better as it goes along, as it pares down its cast so we can focus on three generations of Strode women, all well-performed, and all kicking ass, fighting for their lives in solidarity with one another. 

And wearing wigs like the dickens.

If the whole movie was just a home invasion with the three of them squaring off against Michael Myers, it might have been the best in the entire franchise, including the first. Unfortunately, there is far too much fat on this one, and the filmmakers - especially in the first act - seem focused on delivering scenes that are quite self-evidently shaky ideas, like tremendously misguided pre-credits sequence. 

It's one I'll almost certainly visit again at some point and re-evaluate, unlike the previous two modern entries in the franchise, but there are a lot of other ones I'd prioritize for a rewatch over it. I will be first in line for any and all sequels that Halloween spawns (and it certainly will, if that record breaking box office weekend has anything to say about it), because I think there's a good movie in there, or even a lot of good movies. This one just doesn't happen to quite hit the nail on the head, and that's fine. Almost is better than nothing, and "nothing" is what we've gotten for too long.

TL;DR: Halloween is a middling entry in the franchise with many decent highs and some tremendous lows.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1211

Reviews In This Series

Halloween (Carpenter, 1978)
Halloween II (Rosenthal, 1981)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (Wallace, 1982)
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (Little, 1988)
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (Othenin-Girard, 1988)
Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (Chappelle, 1995)
Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (Miner, 1998)
Halloween: Resurrection (Rosenthal, 2002)
Halloween (Zombie, 2007)
Halloween II (Zombie, 2009)
Halloween (Green, 2018)

Halloween Kills (Green, 2021)

Corn This Way

Year: 2001

Director: Guy Magar

Cast: Claudette Mink, Kyle Cassie, Michael Ironside 

Run Time: 1 hour 22 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

I'm starting to think that the period of me liking the Children of the Corn movies, which lasted much longer than anyone could have possibly anticipated or hoped for, is well and truly over. The general response I get when I tell people I've set out to watch all ten of these movies is "ugh, why?" and now at part seven, "ugh, why?" is unfortunately kind of becoming my mantra. 

My face as the credits have rolled on the past two movies.

Children of the Corn: Revelation is one of those ever-unpopular Dimension cash-in sequels where they presumably took a script for some unproduced movie, spruced it up with some corn and a passing mention to He Who Walks Behind the Rows, and passed it off as an entry in a franchise nobody had any reason to care about anyway. Hooray!

So here we have Jamie (Claudette Mink), a young woman with so little inner life that even the corn husks are more engaging presences. She has arrived at the Hampton Arms condominium in Omaha to search for her missing grandmother. The building was recently condemned, and for good reason. It's a rotting mess filled with "eccentric" characters who are also rotting messes. 

Her most friendly and likable new neighbor is Tiffany (Crystal Lowe of Final Destination 3), the stripper whose character trait is "takes off her shirt later." But we also have Jerry (Troy Yorke), the stoner building manager; a hilariously awful paraplegic who rolls around in his wheelchair cursing at the top of his lungs and is billed as Cranky Man (John Destry); and the truly mystifying Stan (Michael Rogers), who is a mostly shirtless paranoiac and is illegally growing tomatoes in the basement for unexplained reasons. Not that I asked.

While Jamie enlists the help of local detective Armbrister (Kyle Cassie) to dig up dirt on her grandma, she keeps seeing creepy blonde children wander around the complex and as the residents begin to be murdered one by one after receiving corn husk wreaths on their doors, she... well, she doesn't really notice for a very long time, but it might just be connected to her grandmother's disappearance. Spoiler alert: It is.

Also Michael Ironside is in approximately 22.3 seconds of the film as a priest who does exactly nothing. Honestly, I'd take Karen Allen doing nothing any day, because at least her hair was great.

It's really difficult to pinpoint what exactly is the worst thing about Revelation (and oh, how telling it is that they've finally stopped numbering these movies), but I think I'd like to start with Jamie. Her complete lack of interiority is endemic to every aspect of the film. We know nothing about where she has come from, what she did or how she lived before this moment where we get to watch her be creeped out by ten-year-olds with bags under their eyes. Everyone in the movie is like this, from the lazily archetypical boy preacher Abel (Sean Smith) to the detective who is so weakly positioned as a love interest that you might be mistaken for thinking he's just an extra. It's damning that the character who gets the most backstory is Tiffany, who gets two scenes and one of them is a bubble bath where she gets murdered by stalks of corn.

The whole movie is just empty, wandering aimlessly through a mystery that solves itself via a dream sequence before the halfway mark and then wandering aimlessly through a spate of murders that feature not one wisp of the fun special effects that have marked at least one scene in every previous entry (most deaths involve dummies falling from high places, and the aforementioned Tiffany death - which is by far the most interesting - is much too dark and poorly edited to have any sense of what's actually happening). It doesn't even pull in very many markers of the mythology of the previous films, not that any of these movies have been particularly consistent or good about that. But any link to those entries that I kinda sorta occasionally liked would have been more satisfying than this unmoored wreck that drifts off into infinity for 82 minutes.

At the very very infinitesimally least, they remembered that these kids MUST have weird hats.

There are only two reasons that I haven't consigned this movie to the purgatory of evacuating every single detail of it from my brain immediately, much like I have done with the previous entry Isaac's Return. First, there are a couple non sequitur gags that would have been satisfying in a movie that took its "killer kid" concept to a campy fun extreme (a game of pattycake with a severed hand, and a girl playing hopscotch on a Pentagram). Second, there at least is an attempt at atmosphere here. The crumbling apartment complex is in all honesty not a bad setting to have around, and the flashing green light in the emergency stairwell gives it a bit of character that shows at least one person was attempting to do something with this movie.

Mind you, that's the only attempt at style that actually succeeds in any way. Two late sequences where characters discover a herd of evil children in the hallway as presented via alternately a swim fisheye lens and night vision goggles cut incessantly back and forth and drill their attempt at spooky imagery so far into your skull that it shoots right out the back.

And as much as the effects have been dodgy in this franchise from the beginning, nobody should have told this team about CGI. We're treated to a million useless shots of CGI corn rising from the ground that have zero weight or physicality and could have just used actual corn. It's corn! It's not expensive! 

It's ironic that so little effort was put into the movie, because it takes such a Herculean effort to sit through the entire thing without drifting right to sleep. If you see this movie in your local Walmart discount barrel, walk the other way immediately and don't look back.

TL;DR: Children of the Corn: Revelation is not as much of an abomination as the previous entry, but that's the only thing keeping it going.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 1064

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)

I Used To Sit And Talk With You

I know we're full-tilt into our Children of the Corn marathon and you're just dying to know what happens next, but first I think it's due time we catch up on the newest entry in last year's marathon, which got kicked around the schedule so much after it was filmed in 2014 that I was pretty well convinced it would never actually be released at all. I was wrong.

Year: 2017

Director: Franck Khalfoun

Cast: Bella Thorne, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Mckenna Grace 

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Previously on The Amityville Horror...

Following a trilogy of mediocre but increasingly entertaining films, the franchise goes nuts with a half dozen increasingly inane direct-to-video and TV movies, the best of which involve evil objects from the original house (keep an eye out for a haunted clock, a haunted floor lamp, and - my personal favorite - a haunted mirror), until it hits the mid-2000's and one truly egregious remake. Cue the rise of Redbox, when filmmakers realized the name "Amityville" wasn't copyrighted and churned out about a quarter million knock-offs that I couldn't bring myself to watch. 

Amityville: The Awakening is not quite a sequel, not quite a remake, but it's the first film in over a decade to even seem like a valid part of the franchise proper, whatever that even means. At the very least, it was picked up by Blumhouse, a for-real production company, and its weird half-stab at a meta angle reveals that they at least have the rights to mention and engage with the original Amityville entries. So I'll take it.

Do I have to, though?

So here we have Belle Walker (Bella Thorne), a surly teenager who has moved into a new Long Island home with her little sister Juliet (McKenna Grace), her mother Joan (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and her brother James (Cameron Monaghan), who is wasting away in a coma he will probably never recover from. Wouldn't you know it, but the house they move into just happens to be the very same eyeball-windowed home where one Mssr. DeFeo shot up his family forty years ago. 

James' condition seems to improve almost immediately, but is he really getting better, or is his hollow shell of a body the perfect conduit for whatever demon/ghost/CGI blob wants to gain human form and wreak bloody havoc? I daresay it wouldn't be a spoiler to say that yes, it's totally a demon ghost thing. Bella wants to do what's best for James and mercy-kill him, but her super intense mother refuses to allow that to happen.

But it's a Jennifer Jason Leigh character. The descriptor "intense" can be assumed.

As I briefly touched on earlier, this film is aware of both the events of the Amityville murders and the film franchise that sprung from it, in a twist that is reminiscent of the other Blumhouse remake-quel The Town That Dreaded Sundown. Of course, it does almost nothing with this. The fact that the movies exist has exactly as much impact on the story as the fact that the original case happened in the first place. But we do get a scene of the requisite teen friends having an ill-advised slumber party to watch the original 1979 film in the living room of the actual Amityville house.

I'm suddenly having a bad acid flashback to last year's marathon.

But of course this goes nowhere. Nothing in the movie goes anywhere. Not even the character pictured above, who vanishes from the film along with a third, female friend (good riddance though, because he's a textbook example of a toxically annoying randy teen). All we get for the entire first 70 minutes of this features are dream sequence after dream sequence in an endless display of tired scare gags that are so dull and repetitive that they might as well be the cast of Cheers for how familiar and un-scary they are.

And I know the movie has been on the shelf since 2014, but it feels like the script has been sitting there since the mid-90's, especially as it concerns Bella Thorne's character. She wouldn't be out of place as one of Cher's classmates in Clueless, and her black lipstick with matched endless angstifying wear thin within seconds. The only human being in this movie with any sort of personality is Jennifer Jason Leigh, who's in just enough of the movie to make you feel like it's not a cameo but you still want way more. Sure, she's coasting, but JJL on autopilot is worth a hundred fake CGI scares.

Scarewise, at least the finale sequence has some tension to it (because that's the only time in the movie that anything is actually happening to our protagonist without her waking up in bed and shaking it off the millisecond the jump scare is over), as well as above-average special effects, but it's certainly not enough to recommend a movie that is this painfully lethargic. And none of it ever reaches the point of actively scary.

MAYBE it's scary if you remember that the little girl she's clutching also played Young Tonya Harding in last year's I, Tonya.

Amityville: The Awakening is like a horror film on Xanax. Everything is ground down into a gently monotonous sea with no highs or lows to speak of. Even the cinematography seems to reflect this, with the daylight scenes being just as grey and washed-out as the scenes set in the basement in the middle of the night. 

The film doesn't even feint at the potential to pick up on the original's theme of economic despair and update it for the health care struggles of the current time. Ditto the tossed-off line referencing Belle's trendily dark backstory involving revenge porn. But that's probably too much to ask for a movie that thinks exposition is a character reminding her own mother that she has a twin. 

Amityville: The Awakening isn't the worst of these (how could it be?), but it's definitely a waste of precious time and chock full of people both in front of and behind the camera who deserve a much better showcase of their talents. Or any showcase at all, because this is hardly a film, just a loose burlap sack of horror tropes that were already weathered and aged back when the original Amityville came out thirty-nine years ago.

TL;DR: Amityville: The Awakening isn't the worst film in the franchise by a long shot, but it's a weak entry that doesn't justify its return after twelve long years.

Rating: 3/10

Word Count: 1094

Reviews In This Series
The Amityville Horror (Rosenberg, 1979)
Amityville II: The Possession (Damiani, 1982)
Amityville 3-D (Fleischer, 1983)
Amityville 4: The Evil Escapes (Stern, 1989)
The Amityville Curse (Berry, 1990)
Amityville 1992: It's About Time (Randel, 1992)
Amityville: A New Generation (Murlowski, 1993)
Amityville Dollhouse (White, 1996)
The Amityville Horror (Douglas, 2005)
Amityville: The Awakening (Khalfoun, 2017)

Superfly

Year: 1959

Director: Edward Bernds

Cast: Vincent Price, Brett Halsey, David Frankham

Run Time: 1 hour 20 minutes

This just in, I'm an idiot, and I love what I do way too much. This October I'm already running a Children of the Corn marathon in addition to our annual crossover with Cardboard Science at Kinemalogue. But I did a bad thing. After Hunter assigned me to watch 1958's The Fly, I looked at my shelf and realized I owned the Cronenberg remake, even though I'd never seen it. Then I researched the franchise and learned that the original had two sequels and the remake had one. What's this? A franchise I'd never seen before and barely even knew about? You know I had to get on that crap. 

I was already feeling kind of bad that this Corn marathon coincides with the series we're currently running on my podcast Scream 101, so it's kind of redundant if someone both listens to the podcast and reads my blog (even though that's assuming a lot on your part to begin with). Because of that, I thought I'd do something extra special. So hey! Whatever the twisted genesis, this October I'm running a bonus series on the five entries in The Fly franchise. Maybe I'll get a P.O. box so you can send me those straitjackets with more convenience.

Pictured: Me grappling with my inner completist demons.

Return of the Fly arrived just one year after The Fly sucked a solid chunk of money up through its B-movie proboscis. The studio did what any self-respecting company would do in this situation: rush through a follow-up and slash the budget, reverting this entry to the much cheaper black-and-white, which also helped cover up any seams in the special effects.

So, the plot. The hero of the last film obviously being dead, we pick up with his son, who was eight years old in 1958 but seems to be in his mid-to-late 20's at this point, which would seem to set this film in the late 70's if the filmmakers paid a single shred of attention to detail. But judging by the fact that no fewer than two times we see a door destroyed, only for it to be fully functional and whole in the very next scene, they maybe didn't care too much about such pesky little nuisances as details.

Anyway! The son in question is Philippe Delambre (Brett Halsey, and I certainly don't mind the time jump because he is the cutest), who against the wishes of his uncle François (Vincent Price, the only returning performer) continues his father's research to develop a teleportation device. He does this with the help of his assistant Alan Hinds (David Frankham), who might not be as nice as he seems. Oh, and one of these people is gonna turn into a half-fly half-human monster, but did I need to tell you that?

At cross purposes, the two scientists and the reluctant François pick up their work in a secluded mansion left to Philippe by his grandfather. Also left to him is the housekeeper and her lovely daughter Cecile Bonnard (Danielle De Metz), who becomes an extremely half-assed love interest for Philippe.

But who could blame her?

Return of the Fly certainly indulges in the sequel sin of "the same, only worse" in a lot of aspects (more on that later), but the thing that surprised me is that it's almost as delightful an entry in the 50's science fiction canon. The scenes where the movie shines err on the side of melodrama more than horror, but the first two acts are perhaps even superior. The original has a killer opening but once the filmlong flashback begins, there are many stalls and starts before anything meaningful happens. Here, we don't see any fly action before the 50-minute mark, but the movie is already operating on all cylinders. 

[EN: Be prepared for some medium spoilers, folks, throughout the remainder of the review.]

It is pretty quickly revealed that Alan Hinds is a criminal on the lam who wants to make his fortune by stealing the plans for the teleporter, and his duplicity adds a layer of tension to the repetitive science experiment scenes that wasn't there last time. All three of the characters working on this project have their own purposes and motivations that chafe against the others, and the sheer amount of peering through window curtains and tailing each other in cars is pure confection to any fan of intrigue.

Because Lord knows we won't be sated by eleven more scenes of flashing Science Lights.

There are even two scenes in the pre-fly portion of the film that are extremely effective and harrowing. The first involves a splicing accident that gives a guinea pig human hands in the film's most existentially terrifying special effect. The second is the immediate preamble to the fly-ification (which is actually brought on by duplicity rather than scientific hubris, for a nice change). You see the character in question realize exactly what's about to happen to him, and the dawning horror on his face is almost too much to bear.

Of course, as soon as the fly thing happens, the movie falls the f**k apart. For one thing, it doubles down on a lame element that was only implied in the original film. This film basically posits that the only reason flies aren't bloodthirsty serial killers is that they're too tiny. As soon as it gains human form, it goes on an ill-motivated rampage through town that combines boring shots of him wandering through forests with bizarre slasher-esque kills that don't even involve his giant fly mandibles, which are pretty freaking cool (the fly head here is a much better mask, and while the film indulges in showing it perhaps too much, it nevertheless deserves closer inspection).

Unfortunately, the human-head fly-body situation is a microscopic fraction as chilling as the last time,  and is shown far too early in the third act to be particularly useful toward chilling the spine. And speaking of things from last time that are even worse, we all know Vincent Price was wasted in The Fly, but Return of the Fly treats him like a featured extra, having him deliver a good fifty percent of his performance from bed. The ending is also entirely perfunctory, an unsatisfying button to a film that immediately began deflating the second the horror actually started happening in earnest.

Return of the Fly fails to accomplish its largest goals, but it's still a satisfying romp through the annals of sci-fi history and I'm glad I made the trek. Plus, if nothing else, it gave me a guinea pig moment I'll never forget.

Behold!

TL;DR: Return of the Fly is a reasonably satisfying sequel that ups the ante in pretty lame ways but delivers 50's sci-fi tension like you wouldn't believe.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1150
Reviews In This Series
The Fly (Neumann, 1958)
Return of the Fly (Bernds, 1959)
Curse of the Fly (Sharp, 1965)
The Fly (Cronenberg, 1986)
The Fly II (Walas, 1989)

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)