This Is Your Captive Speaking

Year: 2005

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Rachel McAdams, Cillian Murphy, Brian Cox

Run Time: 1 hour 25 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Again, let’s revel in our newfound post-Halloween freedom by continuing our post-mortem exploration of he late, great horror maven Wes Craven. As I set out to watch my way through the portions of his filmography that I hadn’t seen or reviewed before, I realized that most of the ones I missed, I’d missed for good reason. Part of why I admire Craven is the fact that he pushes himself to new horizons, even if he is trapped into the horror genre thanks to Hollywood’s compulsive pigeonholing. That experimentation resulted in some gems and some duds, but I always say you’re not growing as an artist if you don’t produce a few clunkers.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I particularly want to be exposed to the clunkers, however philosophically stimulating they may be. But even if I’d already cleared the shelf of out-and-out classics before Craven’s passing, he still left some nuggets of inimitable genre filmmaking behind to refresh the intrepid completist. One such nugget is Red Eye, a star-studded thriller from 2005 and his last feature film of the 2000’s, to be followed by just two final efforts in 2010 and 2011: Scream 4 (a shallow but underrated franchise film) and My Soul to Take (uh… I’ll get back to you on that one).

I try to focus on the positive things in life.

Lisa Reiser (Rachel McAdams) is the manager of a prominent Florida hotel. When a high-ranking government official comes to stay with his family, she rushes from her hometown (where she was attending a funeral) on a late night flight so she can properly accommodate him and his security contingent. Unfortunately her plane is delayed and that duty falls to her anxious coworker Cynthia (Jayma Mays, who is the adorable love child of a puppy and a field of daisies). Lisa meets follow passenger Jackson Rippner (Cillian Murphy), who strikes up a hesitant flirtation.

She quickly learns that y0ou should never trust anyone with the cheekbones of a cadaver, because when the plane takes off, Jack reveals his true intentions. He tells Lisa that, if she doesn’t pulls strings and get the politician to transfer to a specifically targeted room, his agent will murder her father (Brian Cox, the original Hannibal Lecter from Manhunter, who loads around even more than the cellbound cannibal). Thus begins an epic cat and mouse game played on the smallest of scales –a  cramped airplane cabin.

Murder threats are still preferable to screaming babies though, to be honest.

If Music of the Heart hadn’t bowed its way into theaters in 1999, I’d say Red Eye was the most atypical Craven flick yet. A thriller without a whiff of the supernatural (or Craven’s dietary staple of dream sequences) and largely free from gonzo gore, it might still technically be a genre flick, but it’s about as similar to The Hills Have Eyes as Lady and the Tramp. As we’ve learned, Craven would have given his left foot to do another movie that wasn’t horror, and he knew this was one of the last life preservers floating toward non-genre shores. With that in mind, he really put his all into creating the best thriller procedural he could, and it shows.

Without a Craven-penned script, his personality is a little less evident in the film itself, but Red Eye is nothing less than a perfectly functional nail-biting thriller. It’s a well-oiled B-movie machine, performing its job to a T and bleaching every last shred of color from your knuckles in the process. From its unassuming opening credits to its bloody finale, all Red Eye wants to do is get in, jangle some nerves, then jet the hell outta there, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that.

But there is something wrong with people who don’t think twice when a Cillian Murphy character comes on to them.

Red Eye is all about setups and payoffs, with nearly every element in the first act coming into play by the closing credits. This Rube Goldbergian plotting keeps the audience engaged, constantly guessing the next way Rachel Madams will attempt to MacGyver her way out of the situation. It’s clever, satisfying, and frequently intense.

These are perhaps two of the most accomplished actors Craven has ever been afforded the chance to work with (well, them and Meryl. And Johnny Depp’s midriff), and he takes full advantage of their range, maintaining a seething emotional undercurrent beneath the crackerjack thrills. The characters might not be totally three-dimensional, but at the very least they’re two-and-a-half-dimensional, and they sell every twist and turn, even in the strangely distended final twenty minutes. 

The film’s pace never flags, even during the Birds-esque opening sequence that reties to trick you into thinking you’re watching a romantic comedy, or perhaps The Notebook Part 2: We Couldn’t Get Ryan Gosling, and though it’s hardly Oscar-worthy cinema, that is an unequivocally good thing. Red Eye is a taut, tense, no fuss no muss thriller. It’s so efficient, it could have a slot on the infomercial channel. If you want a simple, rip-roaring good time with a sprinkle of heart and a dash of political drama, look no further. Just make sure you buckle your seatbelt before you take off.

TL;DR: Red Eye is a taut, streamlined, nail biting thriller.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 905

The Devil's Playground

Year: 2015

Director:  Jonathan Milott & Cary Murnion

Cast: Elijah Wood, Rainn Wilson, Alison Pill 

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

By every sense of the word, cinematic zombies are dead. The gargantuan success of The Walking Dead (and all the other sub-Romero shows that have latched onto its influence like remora on a shark) has creative a sucking void in the silver screen. Other than decent but hardly exemplary dribbles of undead revenants in flicks like World War Z or Warm Bodies, the gut muncher craze of the 2000s is dead as a doornail (that’s been shot in the head).

And out of death, rebirth. Spectrevision’s zombie comedy Cooties could hardly be considered a massive release, but certainly releases massive laughs, applying a jolt of electricity to the heart of the languishing subgenre.

Just when you thought you were safe.

If you’ve ever wanted a detailed account of how chicken nuggets are made, you’re in luck. Following a sickeningly detailed opening sequence that will get you swearing off McDonalds with the force of ten Super Size Me’s, young substitute teacher and aspiring horror novelist Clint (Elijah Wood, whose career path is always an adventure) discovers that  nugget-borne virus has affected the students in the school, transforming them into ravenous zombies with a taste for human flesh.

He must band together with the other teachers, including macho gym coach Wade (Rainn Wilson), his girlfriend and Clint’s crush Lucy (Alison Pill), right wing Sarah Palin clone Rebekkah (Nasim Pedrad), socially awkward biology teacher Doug (Leigh Whannell, who also co-wrote the script), and Jack McBrayer character Tracy (Jack McBrayer), as well as the few surviving students, to attempt to beat back the horde and survive the day. So, basically, a regular shift for a substitute teacher.

Ask not for whom the school bell tolls, it tolls for thee.

Whenever one is assessing a horror comedy, it’s always important to get a bead on which genre it favors. It just wouldn’t do to go into Ghostbusters expecting spine-chilling frights (unless you’re six-year-old me, in which case it might just cause some detailed emotional scarring). So I’m going to let you know right now that Cooties is primarily a comedy, trafficking in horror scenarios and carnage, but always more content to tickle your ribs than wrench them out.

The element that separates Cooties from your average horror comedy is that it’s actually pretty damn funny. It’s of a sophomoric and irreverent bent, but if you open your heart broad enough, it’s a ray of sunshine. Only the main characters are developed to any point past a particularly funny SNL sketch, but they provide such consistent humor that it’s hard to complain. In fact, the best moments of the film come from when it just lets the characters be themselves. Their rowdy caricatures match the heightened tone of the film, bouncing off of one another in epically silly displays.

The real strength of Cooties is its cast, most of whom are seasoned comic performers. However, their experience comes from such different mediums (sitcoms, sketch comedy, feature films) that bringing them all together leads to a tangle of unexpected directions. Leigh Whannell is perhaps the standout here, because his character is so deliciously strange (either he saved the best part for himself or he’s growing into his front-of-the-camera talents), but there’s not a sour note in the entire cast. Even Elijah Wood, whose experience lies farthest from the wacky, provides a clueless earnestness and a keen awareness of his character’s buried flaws that he’s a more or less perfect straight man and audience entry point with a few good punchlines of his own.

He’s the one ringer to rule them all.

Although the comedy is the focal point of Cooties, it’s still a pretty terrific film in other respects: We all know by this point that I’m a sucker for a bold color scheme (“You had me at that red wash”) but the block color lighting present in many sequences highlights the childish fantasy aspect of the film with lurid primary colors. At its heart, Cooties is about the generational war between younger adults and children, and these highly saturated hues emphasize how these character are desperately clinging to their juvenile motivations and antics. They’re forced to take responsibility and grow up when the new generation rises up, forcing them to assume more adult roles. And you thought that this was a movie about zombies.

I mean, yeah, it totally is. The gruesome, pigtail ripping, entrail gnawing “suffer the little children” gore setpieces kind of betray that. But Cooties is smart enough to use the Romero approach to its undead revenants, bringing them into a social and political context that elevates the film from its bare bones survival plot.

Isn’t horror fun?

Unfortunately, the effortless entertainment of Cooties has an expiration date. By the time the third act drags itself to the finish line on bloody stumps, much of the film’s high quality has deteriorated, It just plain has no earthly idea how to end, wandering from setpiece to setpiece as it attempts to find the missing link that wraps this whole story up It never does, and the film does end so much as it peters out. It’s like a song fading on its chorus, slowly deflating until it vanishes completely.

During the course of this lamentable excursion, a major thematic throughline (Clint’s horror novel) is abruptly dropped like a Beyoncé album, and the film introduces an unnecessary tertiary character that is both trite and kinda racist. Generic third acts betray a lot of quality horror films, but the chasm between the final twenty minutes and the rest of the film is dizzyingly wide.

However, Cooties pulls through on life support. The sheer exuberance of the first hour makes up for the creative deficit of the final third and it’s short enough not to painfully overstay its welcome. I do wish it closed at a much clearer point, but I’m happy it opened in the first place, delivering us plenty of insight, belly laughs, and irritating children getting what they deserve along the way.

TL;DR: Cooties is an exuberant, fun horror comedy with an unfortunately lame third act.

Rating: 8/10

Word Count: 1040

Boy Toy

Year: 2004

Director: Don Mancini

Cast: Jennifer Tilly, Brad Dourif, Billy Boyd

Run Time: 1 hour 27 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Hey, remember when I was reviewing Chucky movies? I must confess, I’ve been consuming media far faster than I’ve been able to produce reviews. Especially with the 12 extra commitments provided by my Halloween retrospective and Cardboard Science crossover, writing this blog has been a little like trying to knock down Mount Everest with a hair dryer.

Luckily, now that Halloween is behind us, my rampage shall slow slightly and I’ll have a chance to catch up with the embarrassing number of flicks that are rolling around in my backlog like cheerios in the bottom of a mom’s purse. Of course, we’re barreling full tilt into the Christmas and end-of-year wrap-up season, so this reprieve is but a brief one. Let’s get started,

Seed of Chucky, the follow-up to the spectacularly successful Bride of Chucky, is the first Chucky flick to actually be directed by longtime series screenwriter Don Mancini. It’s also his first film ever, as you can certainly tell. But while it might have the vibe (and budget) of a TV movie, it’s one of the wettest and wildest Chucky entries yet.

The franchise just hit its 16th year, so puberty is kicking in.

The film opens on Sh*tface (Billy Boyd), the bastard offspring of Chucky (Brad Dourif) and Tiffany (Jennifer Tilly). A living doll that looks more like a Tim Burton reject, he’s been making money as the world’s best ventriloquist dummy. But when he sees a promo for a film detailing the exploits of Chucky and Tiffany, he mistakenly thinks the animatronic recreations are his real parents. He heads to Hollywood and, using the same over-the-top voodoo curse that Dourif probably mumbles in his sleep after all these years, restores their souls into these new bodies.

Thus begins another hunt for human hosts. Tiffany sets her sights on the film’s star, Jennifer Tilly (Jennifer Tilly) while Chucky goes after Redman (Redman), a rapper-cum-director that Tilly is sleeping with in order to get the role of the Virgin Mary in his new Bible epic. By now you already have a grotesquely thorough preview of the film’s sense of humor and have likely already decided whether or not it is for you. Oh, and they try to impregnate Jennifer with doll sperm in order to provide a host body for Sh*tface, whom they have named Glen or Glenda, depending on who you ask. His groinal area is totally Ken doll smooth, so nobody knows what gender to assign him.

As far as I know, this is cinema’s first nonbinary character. In a Chucky movie. This is why I love horror.

Obviously, this gender issue is hardly treated with respect and tenderness in Seed, the film where Chucky jerks off to a Fangoria magazine. But it is approached as a valid decision for Glen/Glenda to make, which is fascinating territory for a slasher film to mine. Of course, as driven by psychosexual penetration as the genre is, there’s nary a shred of doubt that Glen will end up as a boy. But the fact that the discussion is even being entertained is one of the most unique elements I’ve ever seen in a fifth franchise entry.

Of course, the entirety of the film is utterly unique, and not always for the better. Here, the post-Scream self-referential humor of Bride of Chucky is pushed to the braking point. There are some undoubtedly clever moments, including any time Jennifer Tilly and Tiffany interact (to their mutual pleasure), but the whole thing takes on the quality of a zany cartoon. It’s enormously difficult to take Seed seriously as a feature film and not an 11-minute adventure laboriously stretched on the rack to ill 80 minutes.

It’s just downright weird, is what it is. Overlit by what could only be three separate lighting kits, the film’s bright wash renders it flat and stagebound, eliminating any clinging wisp of scariness. But the sheer lengths the movie takes to entertain can’t help but work in spurts and starts. Seed has absolutely no place in the canon of the (admittedly goofy) Chucky movies with its wildly divergent tone, but it stays true to itself and never ceases to be diabolically fascinating. Between a John Waters cameo, Tiffany attempting to become a role model by curbing her urge to commit homicide, and Glen’s assumption of his heritage thanks to a stamp reading “Made in Japan,” Seed is the slasher like you’ve never seen it before. And one gag that calls back to The Shining is the most unexpectedly hilarious moment in perhaps the entire franchise.

You could say that Seed of Chucky is The Shining of… toy films? I got nothing.

As you may have been able to piece together, Seed of Chucky is astoundingly cheap. Double cast actors, low rent rappers, and hellaciously basic lighting plots do not a blockbuster make. This low-fi attitude also unfortunately extends to the puppeteering. Or doll-eteering, I guess. While the Chucky animation effects had been exponentially improving since the original film, Seed oversteps its modest means by attempting to breathe life into three entire plastic creations, forcing the quality to take a quantum leap backwards. Once again, the suspension of disbelief hangs from a gossamer thread, rather than the might iron cables achieved by the Bride crew.

Luckily, we’re not skimped on the gore. Though Chucky and his brood might have the lip elasticity of Tara Reid, the blood is just as gooey and gushy as ever. In fact, there may be more carnage in this flick than ever before. Despite the dolls’ attempts at cutting back on killing, they accomplish a truly impressive array of splatter, including one of the best severed heads I’ve ever seen in a low budget film.

In the finale of Seed, Chucky decides that he doesn’t want to possess a human body. It turns out that he quite likes being Chucky. I think this film has come to that realization as well. Instead of being something it’s not, it flings itself bodily into the cesspool of bawdy, loudmouth humor and zany, drippy murder. It’s far from perfect, but it’s Chucky and Mancini reunited to have a blast and push the envelope. 

This entry is often written off as being the worst of the franchise. Well, that might be true, but in a series as inexplicably consistent as this, that’s not a damning statement. Remove your brain and unbox Seed of Chucky. It might just do you good.

Body Count: 10; the first two occurring in a dream, the third in a movie, and not counting three skeletons hidden in a closet.

1. Richard is stabbed in the chest.
2. Mrs. Richard slips and falls in the shower.
3. Santa has his throat slit.
4. Mechanic is decapitated with wire.
5. Britney Spears dies in a car wreck.
6. Pete gets his head dissolved with acid.
7. Redman is disemboweled.
8. Joan is blasted with aerosol fire and falls down stairs.
9. Stan is stabbed in the chest.
10. Fulvia is beaten to death with a doll.

TL;DR: Seed of Chucky is zany and ridiculous, but a charming diversion.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1200

Reviews In This Series

Child's Play (Holland, 1988)

Child's Play 2 (Lafia, 1990)

Child's Play 3 (Bender, 1991)

Bride of Chucky (Yu, 1998)

Seed of Chucky (Mancini, 2004)

Curse of Chucky (Mancini, 2013)

South Of The Border

Happy Halloween! This may not have been the treat you were expecting from a horror blog, but despite my postponed horror ambitions, I had to get something out for you guys. I love you all. Have a spooky day!

Year: 2015

Director: Dennis Villeneuve

Cast: Emily Blunt, Josh Brolin, Benicio Del Toro

Run Time: 2 hours 1 minute

MPAA Rating: R

When Sergio took me to see Sicario, he said it was this year’s Gone Girl (in that it took him by surprise and earned his #1 slot for the year). He had no idea how right he was. Sicario is this year’s Gone Girl, because it has received unanimous adulation from critics and audiences alike, yet – while I recognize its skill and quality – I personally can’t seem to get purchase on it.

Though my bladder survived Sicario, so it already comes off better in my esteem.

Here’s the sitch: Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) is a by-the-book FBI operative fighting the war on drugs. After a mission that succeeded in its goals but ended in tragedy, she is asked to join a special task force helmed by the too-casual Matt Graver (Josh Brolin). She agrees out of a sense of duty and a personal drive to end drug trafficking from across the Mexican border, but when she discovers that one of the team members is Alejandro (Benicio del Toro), a grizzled former prosecutor for a Colombian cartel, she’s not so sure.

She quickly discovers that the team’s methods are more than a little shady, involving illicit border crossing, public shootouts, and plain old torture. Thus begins her journey of being righteously indignant while watching bad things happen around her and eventually to her. Does she change? Sort of.

Does she bang Jon Bernthal? I wish.

While Sicario’s political agenda is clear, I can’t help but feel as if I’m bing kept at arm’s distance from the characters. Yes, it exposes the realities of when bad people do bad things to one another and good people get caught in the middle. The film shines when it depicts loss of innocence, on either side of the border. But the questions the film really wants us to ask just aren’t present beneath the boilerplate Badass with a Vendetta material.

It just feels like an action picture with a slightly elevated scope of geopolitical context, which is totally fine. Benicio del Toro successfully portrays a man emptied out by crimes of greed and vice, but as a character he functions more like The Shape from Halloween – an archetypical figure of pure symbolic force. There’s not exactly an opening to climb on into his psyche. And Emily Blunt (who, by the way, between this and Edge of Tomorrow, needs to star in every action flick from now on) skillfully portrays the heartbreak of a woman who has always played it safe discovering how dangerous the world can be. But she too is a cypher, and as skilled a Blunt is, she can’t break through the flatness of the page to construct a character who is genuinely worth caring about beyond her natural charisma.

But you know what genre works perfectly with flat, overfamiliar characters? Action! Sicario’s intense sequences might not all be guns-a-blazing high octane material, but they’re brutal and real, refusing to allow the catharsis of film violence and shoving your face right in the muck. The film opens on one such scene, and they never do lose their impact even as they get pared down to more intimate levels as the plot progresses.

Think of it as a reverse Mad Max.

Although many elements aren’t quite there for me personally, the one pristine banner I can stand behind is the cinematography. A climactic sequence is captured with real thermal and night vision cameras, alternating seamlessly between traditional and guerrilla shooting techniques to create an expansive visual universe that underscores the gritty realism of the plot. Sicario is also populated with cold, detached aerial shots that glide across city and desert alike as though it were John Carpenter’s barren tundra from The Thing.

You know what? I think Sicario is just trying to be a John Carpenter movie. Deliberate pacing, a buried political agenda, stunning yet chilly camerawork…

All it’s missing is the sense of fun.

Sicario is an intriguing piece, that’s for certain. It attempts to a – and clearly does – reach an audience with a harrowing emotional journey, yet the characters it puts through its paces are clean Etch-a-Sketches, ready to be twirled according to the personality and political temperament of whoever happens to be watching. It’s a beautiful vase, a sleek but empty vessel ready to be filled with your own thoughts and feelings. There ain’t nothing wrong with that. I just feel like that prevents certain Brennans from wholly accessing the film.

Check it out if you’re so inclined and/or want a very good reason never to do drugs. It’s like an anti-tourism commercial for Juarez. Directed by John Carpenter.

TL;DR: Sicario is a slick but empty action thriller with a massive political agenda.

Rating: 7/10

Word Count: 848
Reviews In This Series
Sicario (Villenueve, 2015)
Sicario: Day of the Soldado (Sollima, 2018)

A Quick Note

Due to illness and a deranged schedule, the epic conclusions to both my Halloween retrospective and Cardboard Science crossover have been postponed. But don't cry for me, Argentina, you'll get them by mid-November! 

You Can't Kill The Boogeyman

Year: 2007

Director: Rob Zombie

Cast: Scout Taylor-Compton, Malcolm McDowell, Tyler Mane

Run Time: 1 hour 49 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

Steady breathing helped me through Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers. During Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, I bit the bullet so hard that I blew off my lower jaw. But if there’s a franchise film waiting for me that is somehow more unendurably agonizing than Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake of Halloween, I’d rather slit my own throat with a steak knife like Kellan Lutz in A Nightmare on Elm Street 2010 than put it in my eyes.

I actually tried to approach this one with an open mind, considering that I knew it was inevitable in my marathon and that my opinion may have changed in the six years since I saw this film. Guess what? It didn’t. It makes me physically ill to think about the fact that I own this film, curse my completionist compulsions. Well, might as well get this review over with, so I never have to think about this film ever again.

Let the healing process begin.

Halloween tells the sordid tale of masked murderer Michael Myers (Tyler Mane) and his pursuit of Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) and her friends Annie (Danielle Harris, who played seven-year-old Jamie Lloyd in Halloween 4 and 5) and Lynda (Kristina Klebe) one fateful Halloween night in Haddonfield, Illinois. Oh, but first let’s give that faceless cypher of pure evil a backstory – because we saw Halloween but didn’t actually understand it. Could it even be possible that Dr. Loomis didn’t monologue hard enough on that topic?

Cue 45 minutes of pointless shrieking and bloodshed, where young Michael Myers (Daeg Faerch) deals with his stripper mom, his abusive stepdad, his skanky sister, and school bullies while trying to care for his baby sister Laurie. Yep, of all the things to grab from the Halloween sequels, they picked that little nugget. Why not just throw in Paul Rudd and the Cult of Thorn for good measure? I could accept this meaningless diversion as a new, if unappealing, take on an iconic character except for the fact that, halfway through, the film abruptly slams into a Cliff’s Notes speedthrough of John Carpenter’s Halloween.

Laurie Strode’s greatest hits play out, careening from scene to scene with exact shot matching and dialogue quotations. This crude summation of the source material completely undermines the opening sequence. It’s difficult to imply that your serial killer has a dark backstory when you’re carbon copying a story that requires none at all. The film’s absurd sympathy for its central psychopath utterly obliterates the character of Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), who is yoked to the psychological damage perspective of the material yet forced to contort into the Donald Pleasance mold of frantic harbinger of doom. It’s an embarrassing mess too keen on paying grubby homage to the original to properly tend to its own machinations.

I guess it’s too much to ask that one of these marathons end on a high note.

To say that this film tarnishes the legacy of the original is to merely scratch the surface of its film-disintegrating flaws. Rob Zombie extends every sequence to a punishing length, attempting to drive his points home via sheer quantity. This is a relatively streamlined slasher tale that takes 110 grueling minutes to tell, all because Zombie can’t throttle his self-indulgent excess. Halloween is a monument to the director’s inflated ego, and I didn’t even watch the extended cut, many scenes of which are actually necessary to understand the chopped-up storyline, but which sours the pot with an unnecessary, ugly rape sequence. Also, it’s not like I’m champing at the bit to spend more time with this flick. It’s sweltering this far up Rob Zombie’s ass.

The experience of watching Halloween is just brutal. Not in a Last House on the Left “show me violence to abhor violence” way, but in a pointlessly mean attempt at shoving the series over the top. Michael’s relentless pounding (he traffics in Costco kills – you might only need one stab or head slam, but you’re gonna get twenty) pushes and pushes until it’s just a dull, monotonous roar that ceases to be unsettling or even recognizable as distinct action. Of course, this is a damn sight preferable to the actual roar of noise that accompanies the film, a ceaseless cacophony of demented shouting, sirens, screaming, screeching, and thumping that will takes twelve Advils and a lifetime of therapy to forget.

It’s – quite literally in some cases – overkill.

Of course, this all plays into Rob Zombie’s deranged redneck aesthetic. In his world, every human being is either a lewd, angry lowlife or a lewd, shrieking harpy. His M.O. seems to be “do exactly the same thing as before, only more vulgar.” We get a wholly arbitrary scene of Michael’s mom stripping, implied incest, a sweatily extended topless sequence of almost every female character (including Danielle Harris, who is definitely not seven years old anymore), and a heaping pile of F-bombs thrown at innocuous scenes – including the “grave is missing” and “get me a beer” sequences, inexplicably. 

Some lines seem to be constructed entirely by spinning  wheel of vulgarities, like the sublimely nonsensical [NSFW “That’s some deep-ass serious faggoty-ass shit.”] Even virginal Laurie is a shrill wretch who likes to joke about molestation and mock her babysittee Tommy Doyal (who is also a little turd, though his screen time is far shorter). They even manage to muck up offscreen sweetheart Ben Traemer. It’s heartbreaking.

Unfortunately, Zombie’s attempt to create a Tobe Hooper-esque atmosphere of cultural depravity merely fosters an environment where the evil of Michael Myers utterly fails to stand out. Among this leering, lecherous bunch, Michael is about as provocative as Mr. Bean. And with Laurie off pretending to bang Annie in front of some third graders, there’s no force of good to root for either. Halloween is completely rudderless.

It’s downright repugnant, but worst of all, it’s graceless. I could handle a nasty flick with dirty intentions, but the thing isn’t even made particularly well at most levels. The script is a bludgeoning tool, slamming the audience with exposition like Laurie telling Tommy, “I’m your babysitter.” The documentary-like shooting style only surfaces when it will most wrench you out of the movie (sometimes obscuring entire scenes behind irrelevant foreground objects). And it has the sheer gall to drag Carpenter’s score into this mess, lifting entire tracks in a futile attempt to polish the turd. 

The film’s wretched devotion to the original even forces the young actresses to use corded phones, which are about as foreign to 2007 as the cotton gin. I don’t know which is worse, the blatant copying or the tactless additions. Every second you watch this movie without turning it off, the devil’s fist grips your soul a little tighter.

They even disembowel “Mr. Sandman” when you least expect it. RIP.

OK, now’s the time where my shriveled heart grows three sizes and I scrape up some reluctant praise. Occasionally, Zombie will compose a shot that doesn’t repel the eye – including my favorite, a frozen-in-time shot of the paramedics arriving at the Myers house. Though of course it is deflated by a finale that sees young Michael turn directly to the camera like he’s Kevin Spacey in House of Cards. And I must admit there’s some pretty decent acting going on. 

Taylor-Compton has enough charisma to garner a modicum of sympathy for her plight (though she isn’t even in the same dimension as Jamie Lee Curtis), Danielle Harris throws herself full tilt into the physicality of her role so well that she earned an unscripted survival for her character, and Malcolm McDowell does what he can to keep the Loomis character from totally splitting in two, and delivers one of the film’s funniest lines with an excellent, off-the-cuff earnestness. Of course, he butchers the iconic Boogeyman line. Though let it be know that I blame absolutely none of the actors for any deficiencies in bringing this putrid, inhuman script to life.

OK, I’m calming down. The one unequivocally good element of the film is Michael Myers’ design and stature. Tyler Mane is a staggering hulk of a man and his sheer size provides intimidation that the scrip can only reach in its wet dreams. Honestly, the scariest thing about the film is that Mane is actually that size in real life. 

I’d hate to have been on his high school basketball team. 

And the mask itself is a pretty slick design, with an edgy decayed look that actually helps me understand what Rob Zombie was attempting to accomplish when he set out on his project. Then there's the rest of the film, which just makes me want to rage vomit. 

So there you have it, Michael Myers has been pulled into the modern age, however unsuccessfully it may be. I’d be celebrating the end of another successful marathon, but of course this puddle of donkey milk was so lucrative, they went ahead and asked Rob Zombie to shoot a sequel.

Scratch what I said. Pure evil is real.

Killer: Michael Myers (Tyler Mane)

Final Girl: Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton)

Best Kill: About five seconds in, the spirit of John Carpenter’s Halloween is eviscerated.

Sign of the Times: Awful remakes were pretty much the cinematic currency of the mid to late 2000’s.

Scariest Moment: Right when it seems to end, you realize there’s 20 minutes left.

Weirdest Moment: Michael performs his first murder in a KISS T-shirt.

Champion Dialogue: “I got a Taco Deluxe Supreme talkin’ back at me, so I’m gonna be a while.”

Body Count: (Before reading this number, remember that high body counts are usually a sign of desperation and that the original Halloween boasts a measly 5) 21, not including 2 bloody attempted murders.

1. Wesley is beaten to death with a tree branch.
2. Ronnie gets his throat slit.
3. Steven is beaten to death with a bat.
4. Judith is stabbed in the gut and slashed to death.
5. Nurse has her throat slashed.
6. Mrs. Myers shoots herself.
7. Security Guard #1 is smashed with a chain.
8. Security Guard #2 is smashed with a chain.
9. Security Guard #3 has his head smashed into a wall.
10. Security Guard #4 is shot.
11. Security Guard #5 has her throat slit.
12. Gloria has her throat slit.
13. Ismael is downed and has a TV slammed onto his head.
14. Joe Grizzly is stabbed in the gut.
15. Bob is pinned to a wall through the chest.
16. Lynda is strangled.
17. Mr. Strode is punched in the face with a knife.
18. Mrs. Strode has her neck snapped.
19. Paul is stabbed to death.
20. Cop #1 is stabbed in the back.
21. Cop #2 is stabbed to death.

TL;DR: Halloween is a vicious, inept film that destroys every last bit of goodwill the franchise had left, which wasn't much to begin with.

Rating: 2/10

Word Count: 1818
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, 1989)
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)

Cardboard Science: Insane In The Membrane

Year: 1957

Director: Nathan Hertz

Cast: John Agar, Joyce Meadows, Robert Fuller

Run Time: 1 hour 11 minutes

MPAA Rating: N/A

Welcome back to our second annual crossover with Hunter Allen over at Kinemalogue! It’s time for our second 50’s sci-fi flick, and either I’m building up a tolerance or Hunter picked titles with more Brennan-y appeal this time around (I’m still nursing wounds from Invaders From Mars). Our newest foray into the vast thicket of B-movies is 1957’s The Brain From Planet Arous, a schlock spectacle of otherworldly proportions.

Pun always intended.

Here’s the skinny: Steve March (John Agar) is one of America’s leading nuclear scientists, because the movie would have its 50’s sci-fi license revoked if the A-bomb wasn’t in there somewhere. When he and his sex-on-a-stick partner Dan (noted Western actor Robert Fuller) make a trip to investigate the high levels of radiation at the nearby Mystery Mountain (which was apparently named by the guys who wrote Lone Ranger radio serials), they encounter a giant floating brain named Gor (Dale Tate). Two guesses as to what planet he’s form.

Gor possesses Steve’s body via a clumsy superimposition effect that jerks the projection back and forth until it lines up properly. He’s hellbent on using his magical explodey powers and superior intelligence to take over the world and force Earthlings to build a fleet of ships to launch an attack on his home planet, the name of which slips my mind. However, once he meets Steve’s fiancée Sally (Joyce Meadows), he falls instantly in love and gets distracted attempting to tonguelessly kiss her as hard as the Hayes Code would allow.

I guess you could say he’s from Planet AROUSED.

Sally and her father John (Thomas B. Henry) investigate Steve’s sudden fit of tumescence and come across Zol (also Dale Tate), an Arousian policeman (would that be the Thought Police? Buh dum chh), who’s on a quest to capture Gor. He inhabits the body of their dog George (and I will hug him and pet him and squeeze him), and together they team up to find out Gor’s plan while keeping watch on him. He can only be destroyed when he leaves his host body to gather oxygen, which he only does once every 24 hours.

i.e. About as often as the budget allows.

The plot has two modes: “Sally fretfully fakes love for ‘Steve’ while he cackles and drops hints about his evil plans,” and “Gor explodes some stuff in the Santa Clarita desert and makes demands of the UN.” This back and forth gets a tad dull but at 70 brisk minutes of content that’s about as racy as Basic Instinct for 1957 audiences, it more than makes up for its redundant repetition.

The Brain From Planet Arous boasts all the hallmarks of a cheesy 50’s crapfest. Gor immediately outlines his evil plans to Steve, so thoroughly that he would have used a PowerPoint if he could. The acting is stilted and overly indicating. And the special effects are charmingly cheap, like an action film made by the kids in your English class. Hair dryer radar guns, perfectly healthy looking “charred” corpses, and big ol’ brain models wobbling around on strings abound in the film. At least the overly simple ending lacks the absurd abstraction of the antimatter nonsense of The Giant Claw. However, depending on your outlook, this can either go in the pro or con column.

We obviously know where Hunter stands, and I’ve been trained to love DIY filmmaking by my abysmal slashers, so for me at least, I enjoy the cut of Brain’s jib. The only truly distressing element is the film’s insistence on showing every detail of the characters slowly traipsing through the desert and tripping over rocks, papering it over with blibbering string music designed to make you feel like something is actually happening.

Spoiler Alert: It’s not.

I can forgive a bit of padding if it’s in service to a film this utterly bizarre. The eerie calmness with which our protagonists accept the idea of a giant floating brain is just the tip of the iceberg. For one, the dialogue is still astoundingly clever Much like The Giant Claw before it, the screenwriters have an inherent skill for banter hat they can’t seem to shut off, even if their plots fly mightily off the rails. The fact that any part of this movie was accomplished with skill leads to the sneaking suspicion that maybe other people on set also had talent.

I know it’s a ridiculous notion, but I can’t help but find that certain scenes lend credence to it. A shot of Steve’s distorted face through a water cooler is one such moment, a visual triumph that’s far out of the movie’s apparent league. It obfuscates reality, creates a sense of unease, and – in short – succeeds where the giant rubber brains intrinsically fail. And the film does have one cool effect: Whenever Gor activates his power, Steve’s eyes become glassy marbles of evil. It’s a very low fi, Village of the Damned trick, but that’s exactly why it works so well even to this day. It might just be a pair of contacts, but there’s something so ontologically wrong with that look that it short-circuits your wiring.

Once you get into this mindset, you start considering the possibility that maybe the brain movie people were actually using their own brains as well as the ones they borrowed from the neighbor kid’s model maker kit. This approach works wonders, unearthing a glittering deposit of potential subtext While TBFPA’s approach to nuclear woes isn’t as cut and dry as, say, Them!, there are several veins of more personal horror to mine.

There’s the obvious parallel between Gor and egotistical, powerful leaders who claim to have the “power of pure intellect,” but use it to coldly strike people down for the greater good. But his possession of Steve’s body and mental faculties creates a Jekyll and Hyde/Wolf Man scenario. Gor acts as Steve’s ravenous id, pushing the civilized man into the pursuit of money, power, and sex. In the buttoned-up 50’s, these primitive drives were especially discouraged, and Steve’s main struggle is for control over the desires that threaten to rule his genteel body.

On the flip side, from Sally’s perspective, this could represent women’s fears of the changing societal and sexual mores as America slipped implacably into the 60’s. Sally is hardly a strong character, whimpering and weeping every chance she gets, but she gets some of the most screen time and her triumph lies in asserting the roles of a clean cut, heteronormative suburban couple. Think about it.

Well, either that or producers had two weeks and some brain puppets and decided to make a movie.

The brilliant thing about The Brain From Planet Arous isn’t its intelligence, but the fact that there could be more beneath the surface. It works on an analytical level and it works – to a point – on a structural level, so either way you choose to take it, it delivers. How come assembly line filmmaking seemed to work so well back then, and today we’re stuck with a half dozen Transformers movies? The world is a scary place.

That which is indistinguishable from magic:

• Yeah, definitely follow that berserk Geiger counter into that cave without a protective suit on. You’ll be fine.
• Steve’s high tech radio turns off immediately after delivering relevant information.

The morality of the past, in the future!:

• India and China are the only non-white countries that exist, according to Gor.
• Sally’s dearest, most desperate wish is to receive a dishwasher for her birthday.
• At one point, Sally legitimately calls Steve “Master.” If this film got into the hands of Tumblr, we’d have an all-out war on our hands.
• Sally’s conviction that another brain was inhabiting the body of their dog is written off as “you and your imagination,” despite the fact that Steve has literally every reason to believe that body-hopping brains exist.

Sensawunda:

• In the opening scene, Dan reads a book titled “Science Fiction.” In case you weren’t sure what movie you were watching.
• Robert Fuller’s plunging neckline might be the most revealing outfit in cinema history up to that point.
• Lead actor John Agar would cap off his career with yet another instantly dated nuclear flick, the magnetic late 80’s treasure Miracle Mile.
• That poster is honestly the single best design I've seen in my entire life.

TL;DR: The Brain From Planet Arous is a short and sweet camp picture with an occasional burst of talent.

Rating: 6/10

Word Count: 1435

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)

Plenty Of Room For Activities

Year: 2015

Director: Gregory Plotkin

Cast: Chris J. Murray, Brit Shaw, Ivy George

Run Time: 1 hour 28 minutes

MPAA Rating: R

So, here we are. The final Paranormal Activity film. A landmark franchise is finally departing us… Ha! I couldn’t even get through that. Yeah, let’s wait to see the box office receipts before we pull the plug on that gold mine. If there’s one thing I learned from being a student of Jason Voorhees, it’s that pulling the “Final” card actually increases your chances of making another sequel. People eat that crap up and producers just can’t say no to nostalgic profit margins. Even if your movie is technically a flop, you can still rake in the cash if you spend next to no money on it. Paranormal Activity actually has a leg up, because they cast complete unknowns. Though I’m fairly certain Corey Feldman wouldn’t say no to PA7.

But here’s the thing. Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension is desperately clinging to a precipice. The sixth entry in a series that already forewent numbering their titles to avoid reminding people of the disastrous Paranormal Activity 4, it has been bullied and pushed around by nervous studios, surfacing a full two years after its intended release date. Other than the spin-off Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (which was actually pretty good, but had a miserable reception), this is the first film in series continuity since 2012, a deadly long stretch in the lifespan of a nascent franchise. And it’s in 3D, the last bastion of money-hemorrhaging franchises everywhere. So even though Blumhouse’s “final” announcement is a load of hogwash, there’s a lot riding on this one.

You’d think they’d have hired someone who actually knew how to tell a story.

In Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, it’s Christmas for some reason. Young couple Ryan (Chris J. Murray) and Emily (Brit Shaw) live in an absurdly massive Southern California house with their daughter Leila (Ivy George). Staying with them over the holidays are Ryan’s brother Mike (Dan Gill) and the sexy blonde Skyler (Olivia Taylor Dudley of Dude Bro Party Massacre III and therefore the biggest name in the film), who is on a “yoga retreat” and may or may not be Leila’s aunt, though the ferocity with which Mike tries to get in her pants would hopefully indicate that she’s just a friend of the family.

While setting up decorations, Ryan and Mike stumble upon a camera and a box of tapes. The former is built for spirit photography and detects strange presences around the house. The latter is composed variously of tapes from Paranormal Activity 3 and weird cult rituals with young Katie (Chloe Csengery) and Kristi (Jessica Tyler Brown) that 1) were put on tape for some unfathomable reason, and 2) confidently and efficiently contradict the events of Paranormal Activities 1 and 2, the only reliably good entries in the franchise. It soon becomes apparent that the same coven of witches that kidnapped the sisters has targeted Leila. Toby the demon is once again dispatched, though Leila’s connection to any previous Paranormal film is tenuous at best and blindly infuriating at worst. Also he may or may not be attempting to build a magical demon tunnel back to 1992.

Possibly because he wants to return to a time when Destiny’s Child was still on the radio.

Now, there’s something you need to now and probably suspect about Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension. It is profoundly, hyperbolically stupid on a level that approaches the mythical. To approach the film on any level whatsoever, you must accept the fact that you will encounter nuggets like a grown man who needs the Bloody Mary game explained to him, or the suggestion that an eight-year-old might never have heard of the Bible even though her mother has one in the house and is religious enough to own a rosary and they’re celebrating Christmas what the hell. I’m surprised these people even know how to tie their shoes without help. But the first step to entertainment is admitting that the film has problems.

Seeing as the franchise from Part 3 on has been constructed almost exclusively from narrative and structural flaws. The Ghost Dimension’s anemic storytelling is hardly a shock to the system. Six films in, they’ve utterly given up even attempting to justify why an otherwise normal seeming family man would suddenly record his every move (even when hanging out and watching tapes with his brother), or why the hell he doesn’t look over the tapes once they’ve witnessed the overnight activity, even though he set them up for that express purpose. The found footage tropes have long been wearing thin, but here in 2015 the subgenre is hanging by the thinnest of threads, a Sword of Damocles over the heads of low budget producers.

However, there is one and exactly one unique idea that pumps a little helium into the film’s deflated stature: the spirit photography camera provides an interesting (though hardly explicitly mentioned) justification for continuing to record once the Toby hits the fan. The parents need to be able to see the demonic presence in order to run away from it properly. It’s simple but effective, and the camera also introduces the movie’s only unique visual premise. Of the half dozen high-def cameras the family can somehow afford to scatter around the house despite not having any discernible form of income, only one can actually see Toby himself. Of course, he manifests as a crappy screensaver-esque CG effect, but cutting between the true activity and the invisible antics that the other cameras record provides a feeling somewhere within the realm of tension.

It’s like the generic Safeway Select brand of fear.

As a jack-in-the-box horror picture, The Ghost Dimension is decent enough. There’s a long pause, the spooky thing goes boo, and you go home for a good night’s sleep. It won’t haunt you for a nanosecond following the closing credits (especially if your theater decides to jam an obnoxious Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse ad right in there like mine did), but it keeps the adrenaline pumping at an acceptable rate. There are at least two scenes that are striking, the first being the actually pretty beautiful tunnel shot spoiled by the poster, the second being an incredible gag involving a sheet that proves that implied monstrosities remain far superior to substandard CGI. Another good gag involving the old cult tapes is totally ignored by the film, so I shall follow suit here.

Yeah, that’s only two and a half moments, but in a Part 6 you take what you can get. The film’s other major accomplishment is the character of Mike, who Dan Gill plays as a sort of Joe Blow answer to Michael Cera. He’s a bald-faced comic relief character, but his naturalistic charms really gel with the movie’s atmosphere, though one line in particular slides a little too far toward Schwarzeneggerian quippery.

So, there’s that. The Ghost Dimension is a totally tolerable horror picture thanks to those unique elements, but the entire remainder of the film is made up of pure, jumbled, cinematic fecal matter. Allow me to run trough some choice grips in a feature I shall dub The Ghost Dissention:

• First off, that title is putrescent garbage. There are neither ghosts nor a dimension in the film, unless you count shoddy 3D effects, of which there are 4, all of which require Toby to lunge at a camera tripod for no particular reason.
• The film abrupt slams full tilt into exorcism territory, a useless attempt to incorporate silly religious iconography that the series had largely avoided up to this point.
• Every time the camera cuts. Ryan magically acquires more knowledge about Katie, with covens, and demons, attributed to “research.” No matter how hard he Googles, even he can’t connect Part 4 to the rest of the series.
• Series mainstay Katie Featherston makes not a single appearance, except to imply that somehow included among her demonic activities is the acquisition of a real estate license. Actually, that might be the evilest thing she’s ever done.
• They never do know how to end these films save for batting a camera about like a ping pong ball, but I dare you to find a worse acted BS anticlimax than this film.
• If you’re trying collect a child for a ritual in 1992, why go to the trouble of building a magic tunnel to Christmas 2013? Just grab someone off the street!
• [SPOILERS How the hell did Katie and Kristi grow up within a cult but somehow forget it all in time for the first two films? And how the hell could Toby gain corporeal form in 1992 if he still haunts them as an invisible presence in 2010? I feel like the screenwriters haven’t even heard of their own franchise, and that is intensely frustrating.]

Sometimes being a horror fan is like trying to find hay in a needle stack.

Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension is a blithering excuse for a motion picture that ignores most of what made the franchise unique in the first place. But it hits its mark and performs its duty without being as offensively unscary as PA4, so at least that’s something. It’s a film that’s impossible to recommend on any level, but as a late franchise piece, it’s an acceptable – if bland – treat. Like a Fig Newton.

It must be said that I dearly hope that this film makes enough moolah not to be the true final chapter, because fans of the franchise (they exist, for some reason) deserve much more than this contradictory dreck.

TL;DR: Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension is an utterly stupid, but basically enjoyable routine horror picture.

Rating: 5/10

Word Count: 1628
Reviews In This Series
Paranormal Activity 4 (Joost & Schulman, 2012)
Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones (Landon, 2014)
Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension (Plotkin, 2015)