You Don’t Really Know Much About Halloween 3: The Real Life Season Of The Witch

Readers of this blog will know of my unabashed, un-ironic adoration for Halloween 3: Season Of The Witch. I’m not one of these post-modern reassessment guys either. I saw it back in 1984 or so on TV and loved it from the starting gate, much more than the Michael Meyers vehicles, which I actually didn’t see till I was in college. Traditionally, after taking the kids out trick or treating, I sit in the quiet living room with whoever’s awake and put on Halloween 3 to close out the holiday, knocking back peanut butter cups and Butterfingers till the sweetness overcomes me. I look forward to it every year.

Season of The Witch, if you don’t know, and I’m gonna spoil it here, involves a plot by an insidious witch coven masquerading as a practical joke and gag company to sacrifice the children of America on Samhain night by plunking them and their candy buckets in front of a special TV showing of John Carpenter’s Halloween (followed by a big giveaway!) and pumping out a pseudo-scientific/mystic signal that will cause the chips of a Stonehenge triptych imbedded in a chip in the back of their Halloween masks to activate, causing vermin to erupt from their heads.

Pretty out there? Yeah.

A ludicrously complex plot depending on a set of unlikely and uncontrollable variables that could never hope to line up? Well……except for the Stonehenge bit (“You’d never believe how we got it over here”) maybe not!

Recently, reading some people nitpick the movie on Facebook, a couple criticisms jumped out at me and got me thinking and reminiscing about Halloween in the south Chicago suburbs in the 80’s.

Somebody remarked that The Silver Shamrock corporation had this huge factory in Santa Mira just to churn out three Don Post Halloween masks, the skeleton, the witch, and the pumpkinhead, and that it was highly unlikely three simple mask variations would catch on that big.

But I think, like most people born after 1975, they never heard of Kooky Spooks.

A couple years ago I brought up the flash in the pan Kooky Spook phenomenon on the Six Demon Bag Podcast and it was only a vague memory to my co-host Jeff Carter.

But, a Googling of the term will yield results.

Like this!

OK it was nine variations instead of three, but these things sold like hotcakes. Almost everybody at St. Andrew The Apostle’s in Calumet City, Illinois wanted or had one of these things.

They consisted of a plastic poncho with some reflective tape, an inflatable vinyl character head that perched atop your own head, and matching makeup. As mentioned, you had one of nine designs to choose from;

Wunkin Pumpkin, Wobblin Goblin, Scaredy Cat, Howly Owl, Spacey Casey, Wonder Witch, and Bone Head.

I was Bone Head. It was the only out-of-a-box Halloween costume I ever had. Usually my mom sewed me something. She must have been relieved when whatever cartoon I was watching ended and that commercial (one of MANY I would see that year) aired, and I breathlessly begged for one.

I have vague memories of wearing it trick or treating. I remember the makeup smeared a lot (I guess it was blackface, though I kinda remember wearing white greasepaint…they upgraded the makeup to a creamier variant the year after release, so maybe that’s when I had one. I would’ve been four or five) and my adult family members thought the bulbous, bobbing plastic monstrosity on my head was hilarious. I believe it sprang a leak before the night was out and slowly deflated over my face, which my mom thought was even more hysterical.

So anyway, yeah. Kids succumbing to Silver Shamrock’s marketing bombardment and those three masks flying off the shelves? Totally could have happened in 1980.

The second criticism of the Silver Shamrock plot I’ve heard – how would you ever get a bunch of kids to rush home early from tricks or treats to plunk themselves and their candy buckets down in front of the boob tube?

Easy as Doc Challis’ bedside manner.

In 1982, same year Season of The Witch was released, channel 32 WFLD in Chicagoland, home to Rich Koz/Son of Svengoolie, the pre-eminent horror host of the Midwest, promoted a special 3-D broadcast of Revenge of The Creature. You could get one of a number of collectible cardboard two-tone 3-D glasses at 7-11 (I had the Old Glory ones).

This was historically the first attempt at a 3-D broadcast in the Chicagoland area.

Like Kooky Spooks, this promotion got its hooks in me almost immediately as a religious viewer of Son of Svengoolie and big fan of The Creature From The Black Lagoon. Remember, in 1982 you couldn’t just watch whatever movie you wanted – you had to catch it on broadcast TV. I don’t think we owned a VCR till a couple years later. I wasn’t even aware there was a sequel to The Creature From The Black Lagoon, so I was crazy to watch this not miss television and I remember it was the talk of the kids as school.

Did Nigel Kneale and Tommy Lee Wallace find inspiration in Chicago’s 3-D television event of 1982? Nah probably not. They came out around the same time, so it’s just a funny coincidence.

But I mean, Son of Svengoolie had specific instructions for us kids. What we were to have on our face, what kind of TV we were supposed to watch, where we were supposed to position ourselves.

Sounds familiar….

So yeah, in 1982, Silver Shamrock could have orchestrated the mass sacrifice of the kids of Chicagoland with far less effort than they put into the Halloween Three (The masks. The Halloween 3 of the title were the three masks, don’tcha know.).

I was fully prepared to be in an ideal position to vomit crickets for a black and white 1955 movie. I didn’t even need a Big Giveaway.

So maybe you’re wondering what happened with all that. The 3-D thing, I mean.

Well, I’m told it was a bust, that the glasses didn’t work at all. I don’t know. I think I fell asleep before the broadcast. My aunt and uncle taped it for me, but I never did get a chance to watch it.

I guess I didn’t need Tom Atkins to save me.

Taste The Blood of My Halloween Movie Repertoire

Last year due to a Halloween cruise I fell a couple movies short of my 31 first time watch horror marathon, so we’ll see if I make the grade this time out. Again, no predetermined list, just watching whatever I can get my hands on.

#1 Belzebuth – Years after a Mexican policeman’s baby becomes one of several infant victims horrifically murdered in a hospital nursery by a crazed attendant, he is teamed with a US federal agent to investigate a series of attacks on school children around the Mexican border.  This started as a really intriguing concept, a murder investigation that gradually uncovers an occult conspiracy, but eventually all but abandoned its unique Mexican-Catholic viewpoint in favor of a staid, by-the-numbers good vs. evil/exorcism plot. One really kind of silly and poorly realized digital effect (please guys, just don’t do ’em) about midway through the movie in an abandoned church and it pretty much lost me. Joaquin Cosio (the odious General Madrano in Quantum of Solace) gives a great performance, and there’s a really interesting political angle that gets briefly touched on but thrown out right away. In the end, it just goes on too long.

#2 Tigers Are Not Afraid (Veulven) – When 11 year old Estrella’s school is caught in the crossfire between rival Mexican drug cartels, her teacher gives her three pieces of chalk, each imbued with a magic wish. After her mother is abducted by the cartel, she wishes to find her, and is inextricably drawn to a group of orphaned boys whose own fates are similarly linked to the violent gang. This was a haunting, lyrical ghost story, a dark fantasy superbly realized, which doubles as a sobering look at the lives of the children left behind in the wake of narco violence in Mexico. It made me think of Dante’s quote; “I found the original of my hell to be in the world which we inhabit.”

#3 Count Dracula (1977) This BBC miniseries does a lot with its 70s television constraints, establishing an appealingly dark mood while eschewing the expected Hammer horror look. It cleaves pretty closely to the novel with a few minor alterations in place and character (Quincey P. Morris and Arthur Holmwood become Quincey P. Holmwood, Mina and Lucy are actual sisters) that don’t upset the story. The camera and practical FX are pretty well done (Dracula’s influence is depicted by a superimposition of his red eyed face in negative. I liked that, and I applaud their daring in not skipping the wall crawling scene – the result is pretty creepy!), but the performances are the biggest draw. Jourdan is a pretty great Dracula, and Frank Finlay is probably one of my top three Van Helsings now, up there with Anthony Hopkins and Peter Cushing. It was neat to see the lovely Judi Bowker of Clash of The Titans again, and Jack Shepherd is a great Renfield. I have to single out Richard Barnes’ Quincey P. Holmwood though; his Texas accent doesn’t fare very well unfortunately.

#4 Are We Not Cats – Hard to talk about this one without giving it away. No spoilers. An aimless, chemical addled young man has a torrid impromptu encounter with a quirky musician whose compulsive fetish endangers her life. Kind of a romantic body horror picture, the central kink of this story elicited in me one of the strongest, repulsed emotional reactions I’ve had watching a movie since that one notorious scene in Pink Flamingos. I literally exclaimed aloud in my empty apartment. And yet, it’s not really a repulsive or exploitative movie. In fact, it’s a very well done slice of life. A fringe life to be sure, but in the end it actually has a pretty tenderhearted, positive message; that there may be someone for even the most isolated of us. As a side note, among a host of fully realized side characters, the excited Dr. Mooney played by Thoedore Bouloukos made me laugh out loud as his reaction to the events probably mirrored my own (and, I suspect some audience members).  The closing stinger image was equally hilarious. This was kind of a fun gem, all in all. Long after seeing it, I can’t stop thinking about it.
#5 Beast – An unbalanced young woman living in a rural English island community under the thumb of her domineering upper class family falls hard for a mysterious poacher who may be responsible for a series of murder/rape abductions occurring in the area. Jessie Buckley does great work here as a woman whose rebelliousness against her miserable family may be getting the better of her common sense. Maybe. Compelling, twisty little thriller, if not overly memorable in the end.
#6 Knife+Heart – A producer of gay porn films in 1979 Paris must deduce the identity of a masked killer stalking and murdering her performers, even as his crimes inspire her work. Yann Gonzalez perfectly captures the 70’s Italian giallo style, from its striking color palettes and compositions, to its excruciating kills and bizarre final reel plot twist. Rather than being a simple homage, the movie still manages to compel, and even at times, move the emotions. Great cast, lots of weirdo humor and memorable characters (A loveable, chubby fluffer named The Mouth of Gold was a crack up). Evocative musical scoring. Worth a watch.

#7 A Tale of Two Sisters – Inspired by a Korean folktale, a young woman returns from an extended stay in a mental institution to live in a big dark house with her distant father, beloved younger sister, and estranged stepmother. It’s apparent early on that some unspoken family trauma has occurred as the main character begins to experience horrific visions. This drips with commendably executed gothic mood. I guessed early on that the movie was telling one of two ‘twist’ stories. It turned out I was wrong; it was telling them both, and I feel that in doing that, it overextended itself. The result was kind of confusing and unfocused, unfortunately.
#8 One Cut of The Dead – In this comedy, a film crew sets out to make a low budget zombie movie and is set upon by actual zombies. The first twenty five to thirty minutes of this is kind of a sloppy low budget mess full of weird little inexplicable character choices, and had me checking the time (though I do believe it was all shot in one take, which is always an impressive achievement). Be advised that at that thirty minute mark it takes a really unique turn and becomes one of the most enjoyable watches I’ve had this season. I was smiling for the remainder of the run time. If you have any love for indie filmmaking or low budget horror in particular, you’ll get a kick out of it. Just stick with it.

#9 The Curse of La Llorona – A court-ordered social worker recommends the separation of a Mexican woman from her two children and unleashes the wrath of the titular folklore legend, a phantom woman who once drowned her own children and whose arrival is preceded by her ghostly sobbing. It’s pretty by the numbers jump scares. That doesn’t make it a bad movie, necessarily, just not a great one. The biggest surprise for me was that it apparently takes place in the Annabelle horror universe. I did like the curandero character (I’m a sucker for Van Helsing types) and the mythology invented to combat La Llorona (including wind chimes to alert you of her appearance!). It reminded me of Curt Siodmak’s contributions to werewolf lore, and I wonder if they’ll catch on in the oncoming years.

#10  – All The Colors Of The Dark – A woman flees a menacing blue-eyed stranger straight into the arms of a Satanic cult. She begins to question her sanity, as I questioned how I managed to sit through this underwhelming (though admittedly well shot) giallo to the end.

#11 – Ma – A group of teenagers avail themselves of a middle aged woman’s hospitality (and basement) to hold a bevy of underage drinking extravaganzas, blissfully unaware that she has a dark ulterior motive. I’m glad I was never so absolutely desperate to drink before I was eighteen to throw all common sense out the window when I was a kid. Seriously, these are some oblivious kids. This was an interesting, skeevy watch for the first half, but takes a sudden turn that isn’t quite warranted in the script about midway through, and never really rights itself. Most characters continually make inexplicable actions (returning to party again and again in the face of their patroness’ increasingly erratic behavior), while others just kind of drop out of the picture. Octavia Spencer is always watchable and manages to keep this flick afloat, but only just.

#12 – Don’t Leave Home – An artist’s exhibit exploring mysterious disappearances receives a crushing review, but she’s invited by an ex-priest and his wife to stay in their palatial Irish estate while he cuts a check for one of her works, a diorama depicting the vanishing of a young girl he bore witness to decades ago. She starts seeing a hooded figure around the place at night, and weird shenanigans happen. Unique supernatural occurrence, but I was bored by the end.

#13 Brightburn – An awkward, outcast ten year old kid living on a farm in Kansas begins exhibiting superhuman talents, and soon learns the truth of his parentage; that he fell to earth in a spacecraft. With increasingly sociopathic fury, he begins flexing his newfound powers against the peers who have rejected him and eventually the adults who seek to control him. Basically, this is what would happen if Superboy went bad, and the end result is a very watchable horror movie with predictable, but entertaining results. Jackson Dunn really sells the flat affect of a sociopathic kid, and Elizabeth Banks does a great job as his self-delusional adopted mother. My one gripe; as my wife’s a family therapist, I know the aunt would never be assigned as the kid’s school therapist. They’d send him to somebody out of district. Still a fun watch.

#14 – Return of The Blind Dead – Tombs Of The Blind Dead was one of my top watches last year. The blind undead Templars return in the sequel, with some nifty sequences like an all-out attack on a raucous rural folk festival, the memorable fake out killing of an idiot lookout, and the requisite hunting of a terrified family by sound, but nothing quite tops that train sequence from its predecessor. There’s a bit too much dumb humor in this one too. Feels like a Godzilla movie cutting away to humans nobody really cares about. I did like the bit where the woman tried to escape on the stolen Templar horse. Worth a watch, but not as good as the original.

#15 – In The Tall Grass – A brother and his pregnant sister stop near a roadside chapel and answer the cries for help of a boy coming from a field of surrounding tall grass, only to find themselves lost in a time and space warping purgatory with a few other misplaced souls. An OK time waster, but nothing too memorable.

#16 – Room For Rent – A lonesome, elderly widow opens up a room in her house as a BNB to pay off her late husband’s debts and becomes infatuated with her tenant. This is a low budget endeavor that suffers from a pretty bad, inexplicable secondary character’s moral choice about midway through that really seems to exist solely to move the plot along, and the total abandonment of the tenant’s plot line (I really feel like there has to be a lot of excised footage concerning the contents of his trunk and the nature of his phone calls). And yet, the whole production is buoyed by winsome lead Lin Shaye’s stellar performance. I genuinely felt for the character of Joyce, a lonely hearted woman just out of a loveless marriage and desperate for affection and companionship. Shaye really makes Joyce breathe and that makes this worthwhile viewing.

#17 – The Lift – I occasionally develop an unabashed, inexplicable, unironic love for some inarguably bad movies (Night Of The Lepus, Gymkata, The Green Hornet). This preposterous Dutch film about a murderous elevator and the heroic repairman trying to stop its killing spree played dead serious is now one of them. FOR GOD’S SAKE, TAKE THE STAIRS!

#18 Black Moon – An executive sends his hilariously loyal secretary Fay Wray to accompany his wife Dorothy Burgess and curly headed little daughter back to her family’s old Haiti-adjacent island plantation house, where Burgess’ fixation on the local Voodoo cult which murdered her parents in front of her as a girl start to reawaken with disastrous results. This is an odd one, a pre-code Voodoo horror movie without any mention of zombies. Here, the monsters are basically the local natives, half-wild savages beholden to an unexplained need for regular sacrificial rituals (cause that’s what they do in Voodoo, don’t cha ya know?) and apparently unable to function without the leadership of their high priest or priestess. Twice a character blows away the officiant of a massive congregation of perhaps a hundred fervent worshipers and never once do they react in any way. Blacks have no agency in this movie. They react to the doings of the white characters, and you get the sense (with perhaps the exception of Clarence Muse, playing a ‘loyal’ and a least partially fleshed out black man from Georgia) that they just stand around like dolls waiting to be played with when there are no white people in the room. There is a great deal of white xenophobia and racism obfuscating what could be a decent story about the assumption of cultural identity by outsiders with just a little more effort and research somewhere in here, but it’s difficult to relate to the privileged, pompous main characters, who display all the depth of a patronizing bumper sticker on your racist uncle’s truck for much of the movie. Some surprising twists, good acting, and striking cinematography, but leave the 21^st century at the door if you sit down to watch. We’re talking blackface here.
#19 Seoul Station – Tense follow up to South Korea’s magnificent Train To Busan, the events of this animated feature run concurrently to its predecessor, following a prostitute, her no-good boyfriend, father, and a homeless man fleeing the zombie outbreak. Boasting some pretty nail biting sequences, great sound design and voice acting, it’s relentlessly more depressing than Train To Busan. I do have an issue with the big reveal. Without spoiling anything, I just don’t buy that a character like that would go to the lengths they did for such a mundane reason. Still a great diversion.

#20 – Amsterdamned – After The Lift I had to seek out more of Dick Maas’ oeuvre and watched this thriller I remembered seeing ads for on Cinemax as a kid. It’s a pretty solid murder mystery about a killer frogman (in SCUBA gear, not a Bullywug) stalking the canals of Amsterdam, but the reveal was a bit of a letdown and although competent, it never quite lives up to its memorable opening sequence.

#21 – Creature From Black Lake – A pair of anthropology students from Chicago head to the Louisiana bayou country to investigate reports of a hairy anthropoid attacking swampers. A likeable, talented cast including Dennis Fimple, Jack Elam, and Dub Taylor make this watchable, but it’s not enough. Pretty rudderless script and the monster is as low budget as it gets.

#22 – The Ghost Galleon – As part of a publicity stunt, a pair of supermodels stage a fake accident at sea at the behest of their boss and wind up lost in a mysterious fog, where they bump into a 16th century ghost ship that contains the coffins of some undead Templars who split off from the main group in this, the third installment of the Blind Dead series. After the models fail to check in, the employer leads a noisy expedition to find them. Chaos ensues. The first half is kind of a misery, but the climax is neat, especially when the ‘cleric’ successfully turns the Templars and the party does the smartest thing they could do….to no avail.

#23 – The Golem (2018) – When The Black Plague strikes a neighboring village of Gentiles, the Jewish inhabitants of an insular Lithuanian hamlet are given an ultimatum; reverse the ‘Hebrew curse’ that has been laid upon the Christian headman’s dying daughter, or be slaughtered. A headstrong woman who has been learning the Kabbalah in secret takes it upon herself to create a golem to defend the village, but the creature soon proves uncontrollably murderous. Readers of my Merkabah Rider series will know what delight I take in Jewish folklore, so I was ready be sold on this little tale of minyans and shofars from the get-go. It’s very well done, and doesn’t disappoint, though it does kind of inexplicably borrow some things from an unexpected source; Pumpkinhead. Bonus points for mentioning the Pulsa di Neura, but half a point off for not exactly depicting it. Good stuff!

#24 Drácula (1931  – Spanish) – The Great Pumpkin smiled on me this year, in the form of Facebook buddy Eric Dietz who caught me lamenting that I’d never been able to see the legendary 1931 Spanish version of Dracula, and suggested I see if the library had it. They did, as a bonus feature on the Lugosi Dracula set from Universal, and I finally managed to sit down and view this nearly lost film (it was only rediscovered in the 1970s in a vault) after years of hunting it up in vain. For those who don’t know, Universal allotted the sets, props, and costumes of its 1931 production to a Spanish speaking cast under director George Melford and the two films were shot simultaneously. As production wrapped each day on the Todd Browning/Lugosi picture, the Spanish cast would come in and reuse everything, shooting long into the night. The result was a movie that, although it reused some of the establishing and FX shots, music, and only altered the script a little, is admittedly superior to its English counterpart in most respects in terms of tone and presentation.  Melford’s Drácula benefits from a longer run time, is more vibrant and robust, with Lupita Tovar oozing sensuality as Eva (Mina), and Pablo Alvarez Rubio (as much as it pains me to say) giving my beloved Dwight Frye a run for his money as an absolutely maniacal Renfield. The comedy works better, the FX are more innovative and explicit, and there is overall more passion to the production. I have to say though, I still prefer Lugosi’s reserved menace to Carlos Villar’s occasionally for-the-back-row theatrics, and Edward Van Sloan is a better Van Helsing than Eduardo Arozamena. A top watch for this marathon.

#25 Dracula’s Daughter – This sequel to Todd Browning’s Dracula picks up immediately where the previous installment left off, with Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan! Yay!) standing over the body of poor Renfield as the London police bust in and arrest him for Dracula’s murder (I guess the lovestruck Harkers don’t stick around to defend him, but apparently go right off on their honeymoon). Van Helsing sticks to his story about vampires and calls up a favor from an old student, a prominent psychiatrist, to come to his defense. As the urbane Dr. Garth and his plucky assistant head to London, a mysterious woman, the Countess Zaleska, drifts into the police station and hypnotizes the coppers, making off with the body of Dracula, which she burns and consigns to the hell that awaits him, thinking her own curse, as his vampiric daughter, has ended. She’s wrong though, and soon returns to the business of bloodsucking, luring men (and memorably, in one scene dripping with homoeroticism, a young woman) all the while coaxing the stricken Dr. Garth further under her power. This was a neat find. Gloria Holden and Irving Pichel (as her grim, wannabe vampire assistant Sandor) are fun to watch, with Holden exuding an austere, tortured self-loathing. Is this the first reluctant vampire on screen? I think so. I even enjoyed the bickering 30’s Thin Man-style rapport between Otto Kruger and the assistant, Marguerite Churchill. I wish Edward Van Sloan had a bigger part, but you can’t have everything.

#26 Son of Dracula – Count Alucard (Lon Chaney Jr – possibly a descendent of Count Dracula, or else Dracula himself under an assumed name) arrives at New Orleans plantation house Dark Oaks, invited by Katherine Caldwell, the supernaturally inclined daughter of the wealthy patriarch. He soon sets out to seize hold of the Caldwell lands and fortune, intent on feasting on the ‘young, virile race’ (Americans?), but, his plans soon go awry when his victim attempts a doublecross! A really fun, twisty, turny plot. The FX of this one are also a big draw. They’re done by John Fulton, who made Claude Rains into The Invisible Man. Here, we see Dracula’s classic powers on full display; he turns to mist, transforms onscreen to and from his bat form, and in one memorable scene, bullets pass through him, killing a character hiding behind him!

#27 St. Agatha – A young expectant mother in the 1950s submits herself to the care of an isolated convent for wayward girls officially divorced from the Catholic Church, who follow a strict regimen of self-denial and servitude with daily doses of excruciating physical and psychological torture from the mother superior and her nuns. All is not as it seems. A compelling thriller horror with an odious antagonist played by Carolyn Hennesy. Worth watching, but not really a must-watch.

#28 House of Dracula – Count Dracula arrives in the night and requests a cure for vampirism from the brilliant Dr. Edelmann. Soon Larry Talbot shows up wanting a remedy for lycanthropy and Frankenstein’s Monster is discovered in a cave beneath the doctor’s estate. Practically a sanitarium for monsters now, Edelmann sets out to cure Dracula with blood transfusions and the Wolfman with some kind of spore found in the cave. Things go awry when Dracula takes a hankering to Edelmann’s assistant Milizia and tries to nip her. Dracula pulls a switcheroo during one of his transfusion treatments and pumps Edelmann full of his corrupt blood. Edelmann destroys the vampire, but it’s too late….Dracula’s blood infects him, influencing him to do evil (and of course, to wake up Frakenstein’s Monster). This was a passable monster-buffet legitimized by John Carradine, Lionel Atwill, and Lon Chaney Jr returning as Larry Talbot, and the interesting casting of the lovely Jane Adams as a sympathetic hunchback. Plus, I LOVED the concept of Dracula’s blood corrupting the doctor. A fun time.

#29 3 From Hell – It turns out Otis, Baby, and Captain Spaulding, the three unrepentant sadistic psychopaths who rampaged through The Devil’s Rejects, managed to survive that movie’s bullet-riddled climax (which is kind of a ‘they never got out of the COCK-A-DOODIE CAR’ moment, but OK, we didn’t actually see them die, so fair enough) and have been incarcerated since. Captain Spaulding is executed by lethal injection (and we bid a heartfelt adieu to the great Sid Haig here and in a later reminiscence), but before the same can happen to the brother and sister duo, a heretofore unseen Firefly family member, namely Otis’ younger half-brother, Winslow ‘Foxy’ Coltrane, busts them out and they flee for Mexico. The Devil’s Reject was a masterful recreation of amoral 70’s exploitation horror whose main characters repelled and fascinated me. In this sequel, I find myself liking the killers a little more. They show some heart and sentimentality towards each other and some of the people they meet (like Pancho Moller’s appealing, diminutive Sebastian), and they’re more akin to outlaw anti-heroes here than how they were portrayed before, as if the testimonials of the obsessed fans in the beginning have bled over into the reality of the movie. I guess near death mellowed them a little? I mean, yes, they still slaughter a couple innocent people, but in the main their victims themselves display moral failings (a corrupt warden who cheats on his wife and/or sexually harasses a guard for example), making their deaths almost cathartic. There’s a playfulness in this one that the previous movie didn’t have too, with an army of masked Mexican killers making a show. It’s fine, but mainly for Zombie completists. Rob Zombie still clearly loves his wife Sheri Moon-Z, a fact I find charming in all his movies.

#30 The Monolith Monsters – A strange, black glass meteor crashes in the California desert and shatters, spreading out radioactive shards which induce a slow, black petrification in any living thing that touches it. When a rare rainfall occurs, the H2O makes the shards grow to gigantic proportions, which then waver, topple, and fall, smashing into yet more fragments, which then repeat the process. Soon a mass of deadly black crystal monoliths is drawing up the accumulated moisture from the rain soaked soil and advancing over the mountains toward a sleepy town. The inhabitants rush to find a way to stop it as another round of precipitation looms. The absolutely bonkers and unique concept combined with the truly unsettling sight of tottering black spires wavering over the mountaintops in a thundering rainstorm made this a really welcome find this Halloween. There’s some sharp writing in it as well. Recommended!

#31 Crawl – A young competitive swimmer drives to a rural Florida town to check on her estranged and recently divorced father in the face of a category five hurricane. She finds him hurt and bleeding in the crawl space cellar, and is soon trapped by a gaggle of ravenous alligators blown in by the storm. Father and daughter must make their escape as the water level begins to rise. A deceptively simple setup allows for some nice character moments in a lean, mean script that reminded me somehow of Die Hard. There’s no fat on this. Everything feels entirely logical and every setup leads nicely to the next payoff. Genuinely thrilling in points. Easily one of my favorite watches this month.

BONUS:

Now, since, as I said above, I fell three movies short of my thirty one first time watch goal last year, I decided to push through and watch a few extra:

#32  Orphan – A troubled married couple, having suffered the loss of an infant, decide to add to their family by adopting a precocious young Russian girl, who soon turns out to be not at all what she appears. What seems at first like an evil child movie in the vein of The Bad Seed or The Good Son soon escalates into something unexpected (well, if you’ve never heard of it. It’s been out awhile and I already knew the big reveal – I actually watched this because of a recent court case in Indiana that was close to the movie’s events). Worth watching, with believable, mainly grounded characters and an out of the park performance by Isabelle Fuhrman as the titular orphan.

#33 Wounds – A New Orleans bartender finds a cell phone left behind by a group of college kids after closing. On the phone are horrific images and videos which slowly begin to affect his mind and seemingly, the behavior of those around him. Armie Hammer does a fine job descending into obsessive, paranoid madness in this compelling bit of Lovecraftian occult body horror, which nonetheless, might leave you a little bit wanting in the very end.

#34 Count Yorga, Vampire – Bulgarian mystic Count Yorga preys upon the daughter of his ex-girlfriend and her yuppie friends, in a pretty straightforward, but well done modern (well, in 1970) vampire tale. The strength of this is in the dialogue and the performances of the cast of unknowns, who play everything completely straight. Good flick, believable characters. Some genuinely chilling sequences and a good shock ending.

#35 Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers – Angela (played with charming glee by Pamela Springsteen), the killer of Sleepaway Camp is at it again, this time on the counseling side of things, setting her sights on correcting the naughty behavior of a bevy of swearing, smoking, fornicating campers. This doesn’t have the stinger of its predecessor, and goes the tongue-in-cheek route. Fine as a schlocky time waster, but not as enjoyable as the original.

#36 The Trollenberg Terror (AKA The Crawling Eye) – A Swiss mountaintop is consistently shrouded by a mysterious cloud into which mountain climbers enter but don’t come out. A psychic has bad feelings about the cloud and a group of scientists detect an alarming amount of latent radioactive activity. Then one of the climbers wanders down from the mountain, and things swiftly get really hairy. This was a real gem; a very Lovecraftian mystery with some ingenious effects, and a surprising amount of violence for movie from 1958.

And there we have it! A happy and rewarding Halloween season was had. My top ten horror watches for October 2019 (in no particular order):

Tigers Are Not Afraid, The Lift, The Monolith Monsters, Are We Not Cats, The Trollenberg Terror, Crawl, Knife+Heart, Dracula (Spanish), House Of Dracula, One Cut Of The Dead.

 

 

The Slasher Cycle Theory

Today some deep thoughts on slasher cinema from that deep thinkin’ pumpkinhead, Jeff Carter, author of Criterion from Crossroad Press and keeper of the Compendium Of Monsters.

Hallowe’en greetings, Ed-Heads.

I like to watch and review an entire horror franchise every October (see previous posts here and here). While every franchise has its ups and downs, nothing could prepare me for the mind shattering downward spiral of the Howling sequels. To spare you that suffering, I’ve pulled back for a wider look at the franchises in general.

In film school we were taught about Christian Metz’s ‘Genre Cycle Theory’. He wrote that each film genre begins in the Experimental Stage, evolves into the Classic Stage, devolves into the Parody Stage and ends in its Deconstruction Stage. With luck, the genre is reborn and the cycle continues.

You can see these rhythms play out across all forms of cinema. Without the masterful deconstruction of the Western genre in Clint Eastwood’s ‘Unforgiven’, we would never have received Paul Hogan’s ‘Lightning Jack’.

In my analysis of the great horror franchises, however, I have discovered strange mutations undreamt of by any stuffy French film critic. I give you Jeff C. Carter’s ‘Slasher Cycle Theory’.

These are more than just common tropes. They are essential rites of passage, and every great horror franchise must eventually pass through some or all of them:

The Original

Hilarity Ensues

3D!!!

Die Monster Die

Missing Monster

Magic!

Spaaaaaaace

Return to Roots

Das Preboot

Hilarity Ensues – while this sounds like Metz’s ‘Parody Stage’, these are not outright parodies like the Wayans brothers’ ‘Scary Movie’ series. This is when humor is injected into the horror, for better or worse.

Examples: Nightmare on Elm Street Part 4, Friday the 13^th Part 6, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, Child’s Play 4, Howling 3, Phantasm 2.

This doesn’t even scratch the surface of Howling 3: The Marsupials

3D!!! – For a genre that must constantly innovate, the gimmick of jumping off the screen is irresistible.

Examples: Nightmare on Elm Street Part 6, Friday the 13^th Part 3, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 7.

Get ready to dodge Dream Demons.

Die, Monster, Die – Slashers are notoriously hard to kill, but sometimes a tired franchise needs the promise of a ‘final chapter’ to get its viewers back.

Examples:  Nightmare on Elm Street Part 6, Friday the 13^th Part 4, Halloween H20

Fairly convincing….

Magic! – Sometimes the monsters are human, and sometimes there is a supernatural evil at work. During the Magic! stage, however, we get into some Harry Potter sh*t. I’m talking spells, dream demons and magic swords.

Examples: Nightmare on Elm Street Part 6, Friday the 13^th Part 6, 7, 9, Halloween 5 & 6, Howling 2

When being a werewolf is the least interesting thing about you…

Missing Monster – Probably the strangest mutation is when sequels lack their own main character.

Examples:  Friday the 13^th Part 5, Halloween 3, Hellraiser 8

Doesn’t count.

Spaaaaace – In these movies, no one can hear you scream.

Examples: Jason X (Friday the 13^th Part 10), Hellraiser 4, Leprechaun 4

Houston, we have a problem.

Return to Roots – With luck a franchise will shake off the gimmicks and return to its roots. Unlike the ‘Classic Stage’, which codifies the core elements, this is a hard won perspective about what audiences love about the series. Next to the originals, these are often the only scary movies in the franchise.

Examples: Nightmare on Elm Street Part 7,Halloween 7,Child’s Play 6, Phantasm 5

You can’t keep a Good Guy down.

Das Preboot – The unhallowed graves of infamous monsters are rarely left undisturbed. More often than not they are desecrated, updated and demystified with lousy prequels and reboots.

Examples: Nightmare on Elm Street 9, Friday the 13^th Part 12, Halloween 9, Howling 4, Texas Chainsaw Massacre 5.

How can the ‘Slasher Cycle Theory’ help you? Let the growing pains of our favorite franchises inspire you. The next time you’re feeling stale, try some magic, or take a trip to space. If that doesn’t help you return to your roots, perhaps you can go Back 2 Tha Hood.

My Halloween Movie Repertoire Must Be Destroyed!

Hey ghouls and ghasts, I’m trying once again to watch a new horror movie every day for the month of October. No predetermined list this time out, just whatever I can get my hands on.

Day #1
Never Take Sweets From A Stranger – It’s from Hammer and it’s horrific, but not strictly horror. Every year a couple non-horror movies somehow make it into my viewing, and this year I kicked it off that way.  A British family moves to an insular Canadian town so the father can assume the position of principal for the local high school, only to go head to head with an untouchable old money family and their supporters when their daughter and the little girl next door falls prey to the lecherous, pedophilic old patriarch. A sobering and bold take on the subject for 1960, well done.

Day #2
The New York Ripper – Well I guess this is one of those misogynistic movies all the kids are always talking about. A homicidal maniac who taunts the police in a duck voice stalks the women of NYC. Every other line of dialogue drips with contempt for females, to say nothing Fulci’s horrendous (if admittedly well executed) gore sequences, which seem particularly geared towards maligning the female form. Interesting to see the Big Apple in all its early eighties sleazy glory, but I felt like I needed a shower after this one.

Day #3
Alone In The Dark (1982) – Four homicidal mental patients take advantage of a power outage to besiege a family in their home. It was neat to see Dwight ‘Murdock/Barclay’ Schultz in a leading role, and Jack Palance, Erland van Lidthe, and especially Martin Landau play their psycho roles with aplomb. Of course Donald Pleasance as yet another bad psychiatrist is always fun to watch. And I liked The Bleeder, a killer who hates to show his face and gets a nose bleed whenever he kills, but a winning cast and some neat moments don’t entirely make this a success.

Day #4
Possession (1981) – A bizarre, surreal, and hypnotic study of the deterioration of a marriage. Sam Neill is the cuckolded husband, and as usual, it’s fun to watch him lose it. Isabell Adjani fully commits to her role, shrieking and rolling in milk, blood, and bile. There is some great psychological and really effective body horror, but eh, this is for the Mother! crowd.

Day #5
Tombs Of The Blind Dead – My first real ‘find’ of the season! In this Spanish film, a band of Knights Templar looking for a ticket to immortality begin worshiping Satan and drinking blood. Hanged for their crimes until crows pick out their eyes, when the bell of their ruined abbey tolls in the night, they rise blind and undead from their graves, hunting the living by sound. A really neat and imaginative premise and a killer ending. Really enjoyed this one.

Day #6
Dead Of Night (1945) – A man arrives at a house in the British countryside full of people and can’t help but think he’s been there before. The guests tell four supernatural stories. Most of them are pretty familiar, and seem to have been tapped for Twilight Zone episodes (“Room for one more!”). One humorous story about two golfers comes off a bit tedious, but the ventriloquist story at the end makes up for it.  My favorite Batman villain is The Ventriloquist and Mr. Scarface, so maybe I’m biased. BUT! It’s the nightmarish resolution of the bookend story that really elevates this movie into something special.

Day #7 – Taste of Fear – A paralyzed young woman returns to her father’s house only for her stepmother to inform her he’s gone missing. His corpse starts appearing to her in odd places around the estate, but by the time she informs someone, the body is always gone when she returns. Neat little thriller with a good twist ending and some great photography. Christopher Lee plays the family surgeon.

Day#8 – Sadako vs. Kayako – The ghost from Ringu meets the ghosts of Ju-On. I’d been anticipating this little ‘grudge’ match for a while. I’ve had a deep love of these monster mash crossovers dating back to Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman. This one plays like a Godzilla movie with a lot of human story build-up and a measured fraction of monster action, but I was expecting that, so I wasn’t really disappointed. Had a lot of ‘oh s_it!’ moments, particularly when the heroine pops in the VHS tape and little meowing Toshio gets lassoed into the TV.  Worth it for the Seikima-Il theme song alone.  

Day#9 – Prom Night – Dull as dishwater amalgam of Friday The 13th, Halloween, and Carrie with not much original to recommend it and nary an actual teenager in sight. The killer is so unmemorable that when they’re unmasked I had to check wikipedia to even realize who they were. The repeated three disco tracks are so monotonous they eventually come back around the other side to being catchy. Jamie Lee Curtis and Leslie Nielsen are in it….yeah, that’s all I got.

Day #10 – The Invasion – It seems like it’d be hard to screw up yet another remake of Invasion of The Body Snatchers, but this one almost does it with some choppy, bizarre editing choices and a weird ‘happy’ ending that doubles as a condemnation of humanity as a whole. The viral infection eschews the previous movies’ creepy subtlety of succumbing through sleep by adding on infection via projectile vomiting. Also, the process being reversible sort of negates the horror. I was reminded of the remake of Village of The Damned or Dawn of The Dead for some reason, where tweaking minor ‘rules’ established in the original renders the whole premise nonsensical. Stick with the 70s remake or Abel Ferrara’s Body Snatchers (my personal favorite).

Day #11 – The Addiction – Speaking of Abel Ferrera, I watched this stylish, starkly composed vampirism-as-drug addiction movie, about a philosophy graduate student who is pulled into an alley and bitten, rendering her somehow even more insufferable.  Seriously, Lili Taylor’s great, and Christopher Walken shows up, as well as Fredro Starr of Onyx and a couple of Ferrara’s regulars. It’s interesting if you’re in the mood for its deep (and often very Catholic) questions, but it’s a slow, heady burn.

Day #12 – Malevolent – The trailer for this Netflix supernatural exclusive drew me in but beware, it pretty much spoils three fourths of the movie, and the remaining quarter isn’t all that good. A team of ghost hunting/spiritualist hucksters make money off the grief of families till one of them begins seeing actual ghosts. They are hired for more than their usual amount by an elderly lady in a big country estate who ‘just wants a quiet house.’ An intriguing premise at the start and an interesting twist  midway through unfortunately doesn’t quite click together as it devolves into unwieldy PG-13 torture porn and  a pretty basic escape scenario. Had promise, but gets clumsy and falls on its face in the end. It does boast one very good jump scare, but again, it’s spoiled in the trailer.

Day #13 – Stephanie – Effective little monster movie about a little girl hiding from an unknown threat all alone in a large suburban house with the corpse of her older brother and ominous news reports flickering in the peripheral. Then mom and dad come home.  Decent performances and a slow reveal of the nature of the antagonist make it hard to talk about this without spoiling anything, but I enjoyed it.

Day #14 – Night of The Creeps – I wasn’t too ‘thrilled’ in the end by this schlocky but self-aware 80’s B movie about a college campus plagued by body snatching slugs from space, but Tom Atkins elevates it in a quirky performance as a haunted police detective with a pack of quotable one liners.

Day #15 – Await Further Instructions – A xenophobic British family is less than welcoming to their son’s Muslim girlfriend over the Christmas holiday as news reports intimate the onset of some kind of terrorist attack. A wall of black chords encircle the house in the night, trapping them inside, and a series of ever-increasingly odd instructions start coming in over their television set. Despite the world’s strongest and most secure interior doors, this has a great cast (David Bradley is particularly scummy in his jerky patriarch role), and some surprising, cringe inducing turns. Echoes of Lovecraft and Cronenberg. I recommend.

Day #16 – The Haunting Of Hill House – I’m breaking a rule a bit here and posting, well, I can’t call this a television show, because I can’t imagine a reason for it to have a second season. I’m thinking of it as a miniseries. It’s a revisit of The Haunting, one of my all time favorite ghost movies, based on the novel by Shirley Jackson. This series and Hereditary are the two finest works of horror entertainment I’ve seen this year thus far. This is an imaginative take on The Haunting from the perspective of a family attempting to ‘flip’ Hill House over the course of one summer. It spans two timelines, playing deftly with notions of space and time, familial love, loyalty, dysfunction, and loss, and delivering in the end, a really moving family drama ensconced in deft allegory and some of the most genuinely disturbing scares I’ve experienced in recent years. I’m not speaking solely of FX and jump scares, of which there are a few very effective ones, but of harrowing existential reflection. Some of the most terrifying imagery is implanted in the mind via the stories told by tertiary characters, an example of really masterful writing and acting. Unforgettable. Wonderfully realized.  Something I hope to revisit with my kids during some future Halloween season.

Day #17 – Paranoiac – Oliver Reed is a rich, alcoholic good for nothing, next in line for the family fortune after the accidental death of his parents and disappearance of his older brother – only his neurotic sister stands in the way. Until his long lost older brother Anthony returns. Some nice shots but pretty by the numbers and predictable.

Day #18 – Revenge (2017) – Brutal, borderline gonzo rape-revenge-survival thriller about the careless young mistress of a rich French reprobate raped in his desert love nest by one of his two lowlife hunting buddies and left for dead. Gobsmacking, pulpy ultraviolence stylistically realized, it builds to the most blood soaked, tense climax I’ve seen in years. The camera goes from worshiping actress Matilda Ann Ingrid Lutz to practically fetishizing her brutalization. I loved how her transition from thoughtless trophy girl to resourceful, red-painted peyote-fueled valkyrie is gradually depicted right down to the loss of her blonde hair dye. Not for everybody, but I was wowed.

Day #19 – Hostel – Three entitled jerks backpacking across Europe are enticed into visiting a Slovakian hostel by a pimp and soon find themselves participating in a brutal ‘art show’ in which the sadistic wealthy pay to torture people to death. In spite of my avowed dislike of all things Eli Roth (I haven’t enjoyed Green Inferno, Cabin Fever, or Hemlock Grove), I decided to give this a shot. Although it started off supremely annoying, in the end I was pleasantly surprised. This really isn’t the gratuitous ‘torture porn’ movie I had been led to believe it was. Although there is some Italian level gruesomeness, it’s not the bulk of the movie. However, I can’t tell if this is an extremely xenophobic, homophobic, misogynistic bro-movie or if it’s actually a self-aware satire of American exceptionalism. Anyway, the increasingly grisly fate of the utterly unlikable main characters amused me, as did the quick Takashi Miike cameo. And of course, revenge against the unscrupulous 1% is cathartic.

Day #20 – Hostel Part II – The Hostel ‘mythos’ is expanded pretty well in this sequel, which spices it up by changing the protagonists to three young women and includes a look from the other side of the….pliers?…..by following a pair of rich alpha dawg a-holes who have taken a weekend in Slovakia to indulge their basest urges. All the familiar faces from the first movie are back and get fleshed out a bit more, including the mop-haired desk clerk and the weird gang of half-feral kids. Some neat script-flips in this one, including a couple laugh out loud moments. I have to admit at this point I’m a fan.

Day #21 – Hostel Part III – I guess the ‘magic’ of Hostel was assuredly Eli Roth, because this direct to video sequel doesn’t seem to quite ‘get’ the other two. The action moves to a Las Vegas chapter of the Slovakian ‘Elite Hunting Club,’ and instead of isolated backpackers or tourists, the victims are a bunch of American dudes on a bachelor party weekend – which doesn’t really make sense at first, till the ‘twist’ happens and kinda excuses it. I think it just would’ve been more interesting to follow a vacationing foreign couple instead. There are a couple cool ideas and kills, and they do alright with the obviously cheaper budget, but it’s easily the weakest entry.

Day #22 – A Nightmare On Elm Street (2010) – Well, I never had much use for Freddy Krueger. At first I thought it was the bad one liners and lame jokes. I was terrified of the TV spots when I was a kid, and had nightmares about silhouetted Freddy chasing me around a pool, his face obscured by the shadow of his hat. When I finally worked up the courage to watch the movies in high school, I found them pretty silly. I halfway enjoyed New Nightmare (till Freddy actually showed up, cracking jokes again). But now, in adulthood, I think I have always disliked the character because, well, he’s a child molester. In TCM, F13, Halloween, you tend to kinda root for the killer. Of them all, Jason Voorhees is the one I’ve always liked best. He’s got a legit grievance (at first), and actually, never attacks any children, being a kind of child himself (in Part IV he goes after Tommy yeah, but mainly because Tommy interferes in the killing of his mother and sister. And in VI, the only movie where kids actually show up at the camp, he spares them every time). This remake with Jackie Earle Haley doesn’t pave over the character’s skeevy origins, which results in me finding Freddy even more unlikable. As to the movie itself, it’s aptly executed, and the stupid puns are thankfully missing, but it’s kinda ho-hum. Same old same old.

Day #23 – Apostle – An ex-priest heads to a remote island to rescue his sister from an Utopian commune and winds up face to face with its occult secrets. I think my favorite subgenre of horror is folk horror. I love The Wicker Man and Curse of The Demon, love Kill List, Black Death, The Devil Rides Out, The Witch, Lair of The White Worm, Viy….masked cults out cavorting in the fields give me life. I also love Gareth Evans, who blew the top of my head off with The Raid and put it back on upside down with The Raid 2 (I still firmly believe Gareth Edwards got a Star Wars job because he was mistaken for Gareth Evans). So why don’t I like Apostle? I can’t really put my finger on it. It’s overlong, at two hours and change, but I usually don’t mind that if the story’s compelling. It’s well made, looks great, has a suitably gruesome central secret….I just don’t know. It feels….restrained. I’m all for an artist trying something new. My own writing jumps all over genres. But it just feels like a movie by somebody uncomfortable in the constraints of the genre. There are flashes of frenetic, violent action that seem out of another movie. The brawls are where Evans shows flashes of his brilliance. I’m thinking of when the priest disarms and stabs two guards with their own spears, and the knock down drag out fight in the mud near the end, and when a would-be assassin gets checked by the cult leader’s pike bearing guards. But this isn’t an action movie, so those little scenes feel out of place. I guess it feels like a guy not too thrilled with the subject matter being overjoyed when he gets to depict the ‘good parts.’ I detected a lack of passion. I’m making it sound bad, but it’s far from that. I just found my attention wandering a lot.
Day #24 – Seven In Heaven – OK this is a great premise. Two teenagers at a house party play the seven minutes in heaven game where they get randomly put together and shoved in a closet for seven minutes, only to emerge in a parallel reality where everything is different. But don’t watch it. It took me a week to finish it. The mechanics of the universe hopping are nonsensical and somehow involve old fashioned nudie playing cards (not actually nude, because this is PG-13), the acting is bland (maybe a fault of the uninspired writing), and the plot is uninteresting. Seriously. It sucks. You got me again, Netflix.

Day #25 – The Witch In The Window – A man takes his internet-scarred son from his estranged wife in the city to the country to help him restore a rural home, only to find the previous occupant has not quite abandoned it yet. Very well done, introspective drama with fully realized characters and some bona fide creepy moments. Surprisingly warm familial message. Definitely a worthwhile watch this season.

Day #26 – Captain Clegg – This Hammer movie, also known as The Night Creatures, was billed as horror, but isn’t in the least, unless it’s in the Scooby Doo vein. Basically it’s an adventure potboiler about the Navy using a deaf and dumb pirate to hunt down his old captain, who may be hiding in the peaceful island community led by a goodly parson (Peter Cushing) and haunted by these skeletal night riders that look a bit like the Cobra Kai on Halloween night.  It’s fine, but 100% predictable.

Day #27 – Mr. Boogedy – A made for TV Disney movie about a novelty gag salesman and his family who move into a house haunted by Pilgrim-era spirit with a magic cloak and a young boy with a runny nose. Imaginative 80’s style FX and a compelling central mystery, though the goofy humor wears kinda thin at times. I liked that the shop vac was  an instrumental ghost fighting device.

Day #28 – Castle Of Blood – Edgar Allen Poe convinces a skeptical journalist to spend the night in a haunted house where he witnesses its ghostly inhabitants reliving their final, violent hours…and there’s something they desperately need from him. Sergio Corbucci and Antonio Margheriti bring forth a masterful ghost story dripping with mood and sensuous texture. Ingenious FX. I loved the ‘breathing’ corpse and black humor of the mercenary denouement, right out of one of Corbucci’s spaghetti westerns. “I’m sorry, but I need to collect my wager. Now you can mourn.” A brilliant Halloween watch.

DT Moviehouse Review: The Offence

Time once more for my blog feature, DT Moviehouse Reviews, in which I make my way through my 200+ DVD/Blu-Ray collection (you can see the list right here) and decide if each one was worth the money. I was previously doing this alphabetically but decided, since I was watching some of these anyway, to review them out of order. Today I take a look at The Offence.

Directed by Sidney Lumet

Screenplay by John Hopkins

Tagline: After 20 Years, What Detective Sergeant Johnson Has Seen And Done Is Destroying Him.

What It’s About:
British police Detective Sergeant Johnson (Sean Connery) beats a suspected child molester, Kenneth Baxter (Ian Bannen), to death in an interrogation room and is suspended. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn the truth of what pushed him over the edge.

Why I Bought It:

Forget his seminal James Bond, forget Ramius in The Hunt For Red October, forget Ramirez, forget William of Baskerville, Daniel Dravot, or Malone in The Untouchables; forget the innumerable charming, memorable characters in Sean Connery’s long career – this is his finest performance, though admittedly, it’s a difficult role to warm up to.

This is Rashomon in one man’s mind; a story about the varying degrees of personal truth which are uncovered as a single desperate action plays out again and again; something that in the hands of a lesser team of creators might have been a simple character defining moment of righteous outrage, but gradually becomes something more tragic and renal. The Offence is a sharp character study that distills the totality of a man’s existence into the actions of one night, and does it masterfully.

We are introduced to Johnson in the interrogation room, beating an already bloody suspect, kicking the chair out from under him as he tries to collapse into it, and letting him fall as his fellow officers burst into the room. Johnson is a man who has just leapt over a personal precipice, and for the rest of the runtime, we follow his rapid psychological descent. Johnson is a cop who has exposed himself again and again to the very worst society has to offer. He is a monster, but Connery makes him a not an entirely unsympathetic one.

In the first of three flashbacks, we backtrack to what has brought him to this dark place. When a fourteen year old girl turns up missing (the latest in a string of child abductions and molestations), Johnson seems to take the case as a personal affront, and pursues it with furious determination. As part of a police search party, he personally discovers the missing girl, Janie Edmunds (Maxine Gordon) cowering in the woods at night.

She is hysterical, and obviously in physical distress. Johnson restrains her. There’s something in Johnson’s treatment of the girl that’s unseemly. His attempt at calming her almost plays like a molestation itself. He exerts his formidable bulk to straddle her, hold her down. He clamps his hand over her mouth to stifle her shrieking, but finally softens and wraps her in his coat.

During the ambulance ride, he attempts to question her, but she begins to wail about her pain. Johnson asks the paramedic to hold off sedating her so he can question her, but the man shoots him a disapproving look and does so anyway.

Arriving at the police station, he finds an elderly female witness giving her statement. When he learns the woman saw Janie with a stranger out in the field a full four hours earlier, he flies into a rage and storms into the interrogation room, where the inspector has decided to let the suspect they’ve just picked up, Baxter, a man with muddy clothes and thin bloody scratches on his forehead, cool in the stir.

Johnson returns, dismissing the uniformed guard on duty, and the beating plays out again.

We next see the aftermath, as Johnson is suspended and sent home.

During the drive, Lumet gives us our first visual cues as to Johnson’s mental state, as he imagines a series of heinous, unconnected crime scenes apparently spanning his career from a beat cop on up to detective. He pictures various bloody, beaten women, a man with his head through a windshield, a rotting corpse hanging from a tree, the bloody arm of a mewling toddler protruding from a crib, and a man apparently being pitched off the roof of a building (possibly by Johnson himself).

He returns home to his put upon wife (Vivien Merchant, in an understated, but noteworthy performance), and begins to drink, though he laments that each drink seems to make him more sober, and indeed, more brutally honest and self-reflective. He confesses to her his crime, then berates her for not being beautiful, for not listening, for not being something good he could come home to. Finally, when she begs him to let her in, to share his woes with her, he launches into a heinous litany of atrocities so terrible she excuses herself and vomits.

This sets Johnson off into an increasingly incoherent tirade that begins with her not being able to simply listen to him, to accusations that she would rather make love to Baxter, all while the scene of his discovery of Janie replays in his mind, yet slightly altered, where he seems to be caressing her face and ravishing her.

The police arrive at his flat to inform him that Baxter has died, and he must now be questioned by the Superintendent (Trevor Howard).

The Superintendent questions Johnson about the incident in the interrogation room, and gradually taps into his broken state of mind. Johnson is baffled as to how his superior managed to keep his personal life separate from the things he’s done and witnessed.

The beating plays out in full now, from Johnson’s attempt at coercing Baxter into a confession, to the realization that Baxter lures him into, which ultimately sets him off. He has pursued this crime with such an extreme level of violence that it points to self-hatred.

“Nothing I have done can be one half as bad as the thoughts in your head,” says a bloodied, gloating, impish looking Baxter, who is probably guilty of the rape of Janie, though it is never discovered for certain. “Don’t beat me for thoughts in your head – things you want to do.”

Johnson, in a moment of extreme weakness, collapses against his prisoner and says miserably;

“I can’t stop thinking. Help me.”

When Baxter laughs and calls him pathetic, Johnson unleashes all his pent up frustration and rage, even striking at his fellow policemen when they enter and attempt to take him into custody. Like a wild animal he shakes them off, and stands as they stare up at him, agape, the fluorescent lights flickering.

“It makes me sick what you did,” says the Superintendent in the present time. “And what you are turns my stomach.”

“Everything I’ve ever felt. Ever wanted to feel,” Johnson confesses. “I had to hit him again.”

This movie was based on a stage play by John Hopkins, and was part of the bribe Connery demanded of the studio to return as Bond in Diamonds Are Forever, a role he had grown tired of by then. The studio agreed to produce two movies under a million dollars for Connery’s production company, but I believe The Offence, shot for about 385,000 pounds, so underperformed that the studio reneged.

Lumet directs everything with minimum interference, lending the whole production that stark, 70’s verite style, well-suited to the subject matter. The flashbacks to the titular offence seem to be depicted in steadily clearer focus though, as the initial sequence plays out against some kind of soft spot on the lens, or a superimposition of a ceiling light that produces a weird, mersmeric, unfocused effect.

As I said, the thing really that makes The Offence worth seeing is Connery’s total commitment to the engrossing subject matter. This is not his typical movie star fare, but for my money, it’s his greatest performance in a lifetime of great performances.

Best Dialogue/Line:

“All those bodies. Bodies stinking swollen black putrid with the smell of death. Shattered, splintered bones. Like filthy swirling maggots in my mind. Eating my mind.”

Best Scene:

In my opinion, the scene from which the above dialogue is culled; that somber, brutal scene where Johnson tries to force an emotional connection with his wife. Both actors are stellar in it, and it’s actually more cringe inducing than any of the physical violence depicted in the rest of the movie.

Would I Buy It Again:
It’s dark stuff, and not something I watch often, but it’s worth seeing Connery in a rare, nuanced performance, so yes.

Amandla Ngawethu!

So I’ve been boning up on Black Panther in anticipation of the movie – have read the character’s two initial appearances in Fantastic Four, the Ta-Nehesi Coates run (too dry – didn’t care for it), Christopher Priest’s (innovative and cool but a little bit too pop culture-y at times for me), and now Reginald Hudlin’s (AWESOME). It inspired me to sit down this morning and write this.

In Hudlin’s TPB there’s a really brilliant piece he wrote in the back, The Black Panther: A Historical Overview and Look To The Future, in which he writes –

“The Black Panther is the Black Captain America. He’s the embodiment of the ideals of a people. As Americans, we feel good when we read Captain America because he reminds us of the potential of how good America can be, if, of course, we have the convictions to live by the principles the country was founded on. As a black person, the Black Panther should represent the fulfillment of the potential of the Motherland.”

There’s a great exchange between King T’Chaka and a representative of a global economic conference in issue three…

Rep: Your Majesty, we’ll pay whatever price you set for your goods.

T’Chaka: They are not for sale until the spiritual advancement of the West catches up to their technological prowess. It would be irresponsible to share our scientific discoveries with you.

Rep: What? Are you calling everyone here irresponsible children?

T’Chaka: No. More like sullen teenagers who feel more mature than their behavior warrants. The fact that every conversation here is framed in terms of profit and power says it all…you could have made half these breakthroughs yourself, but there’s too much money to be made in misery. Why cure a disease when people pay for medicine? Why provide cheap energy when…

Rep: We get the point, T’Chaka. Heh. I’ve never met a socialist with a crown on his head before, but I guess there’s a first time for everything…

T’Chaka: Who gave you permission to use my first name?

Rep: I…I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend…

T’Chaka: I understand your frustrations in dealing with a black man who can’t be bought with a truck load of guns, a plane load of blondes, and a Swiss bank account, but hold onto what little class you have.

Rep: Your Majesty, I truly apologize…

T’Chaka: This meeting is over.

* * *

That scene really hit for me. It’s everything I hope the Black Panther movie is, and why I’m really nervous about it failing. Black Panther needs to be political as all hell, safeties off. I love that it’s on the cover of Time, and that people are excited for it. I love that it’s going to be a celebration of black culture, as Luke Cage was, and I hope it lives up to the cultural touchstone people really want it to be. But I hope it goes a step further. I hope it inspires people. I hope it blindsides them with a truth they themselves suspected, but one that needed to come in under their wires somehow; that a nation becomes great when it cares for its people. I hope people come away thinking….”hmmm….that wouldn’t be so bad. Why don’t we have that? (and I don’t just mean the flying cars)”

Ah, it’s a lot of hope to put on a Disney movie about a comic book character. Probably way too much.

But so what?

Wakanda is a sovereign nation unconquered, great because of its dedication to instilling pride in and bettering its own citizens with education and innovation, who holds its leader to a strict moral principle which then inspires them to emulate that principle themselves. There’s no want, no ignorance, no lack of compassion in Wakanda. In elevating one, all are elevated. Wouldn’t Wakanda be a great place to live? Couldn’t we come together to make Wakanda wherever we are?

New Years Movie Roundup 2017

I didn’t get to the movies as much as I would have liked this year.  Missed out on a lot what with traveling and family. Slept on Mother!, Last Flag Flying,
Professor Marston And The Wonder Women, Lady Bird, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, The Disaster Artist, Happy Death Day, The Shape Of Water, Hostiles, All The Money In The World, and Molly’s Game.

However, there was a lot of great stuff released this year. My top ten new release viewings of the year were –

1. Blade Runner 2049 – I was never clamoring for a Blade Runner sequel, but Villeneuve’s masterful revisitation of Ridley Scott’s seminal dystopian noire was far and away the finest movie I saw in 2017. For the first time in years I sat through the end credits not because I was waiting for some cutesy fan stinger, but because I was completely flabbergasted by what I’d just seen and in awe of the achievement of everybody involved. An instant classic, even, I would venture to say, surpassing the original.

2. I Am Not Your Negro – Documentary narrated by Samuel L. Jackson about the unpublished writings of James Baldwin regarding the civil rights movement in America. Literate and harrowing, this film should be required viewing not just for everyone trying to understand the histrionics of the racial divide in this country, but by every American period.

3. Your Name (technically a cheat as it really came out end of last year in limited release) – What I expected would be a cutesy lark of an anime about a boy and a girl randomly switching bodies turned out to be the most moving and heartfelt fantasy film I’d seen in years, and easily the best Japanese animated movie to come along since Miyazaki. I was honestly riveted by the unguessable twists and sometimes dark turns it took.

4. T2 Trainspotting – Another sequel I didn’t know I wanted till I was once again immersed in the lives of Ren, Begby, Sickboy and Spud. A punchy, raw, honest and at times hilarious look at the onset of middle age in characters who had so encompassed the frenetic wildness of youth. Seeing them again was like going home.

5. Coco – Vibrant, glorious, passionate Mexican fable from Pixar about a boy who pines for a life of music in a family where past tragedies have driven all music from their lives. The comparison to the Del Toro produced Book of Life is unavoidable, but while there are some similarities, this stands admirably on its own as a loving meditation on family, art, and reconciliation.

6. Brawl In Cell Block 99 – I wasn’t a fan of Bone Tomahawk, but S. Craig Zahler’s crime thriller followup about a reluctant crook forced to do dirt behind bars to keep his pregnant wife safe was a top watch, with a brutal, intimidating performance by Vince Vaughn, brilliantly cast against type – well, I can’t say that. Vaughn is a big guy, and it just took a stroke of genius from Zahler or his casting director to recognize in him the capacity for such a violent, physical role.

7. Alien Covenant – A lot of people have completely hated Ridley Scott’s enigmatic prequels to the Alien franchise. I’m not one of them. I still think Prometheus is a flawed masterpiece, and I derived giddy enjoyment from the followup, which subverted my expectations of another mysterious exploration of the Engineers and instead presented itself as a grand guignol Hammer Frankenstein movie set in space while still continuing the underlying theological themes of its predecessor.

8. Lego Batman Movie – Possibly the single funnest Batman movie ever made, sending up every iteration of the character while never devolving into mere thoughtless parody, and thus displaying more genuine love for the character than any filmmakers have shown thus far. And there was even a Gymkata joke. 

9. A Cure For Wellness – This was a gem of a horror picture about a man trapped in a remote mountain sanitarium boasted some of the most staggering visual compositions outside of Blade Runner 2049 and perhaps Killing Of A Sacred Deer, but it was much maligned for a perceived tonal shift in the last reel. I didn’t get the hate. I was hypnotized by the dread and like Alien Covenant, found the ending appropriately Hammer-esque. I still can’t believe people preferred The Void to this. 

 10. The Girl With All The Gifts – I might be the last guy on earth that’s still open to a good zombie movie. This one was very good, from its gripping opening to its Richard Matheson-esque denouement.

Let’s hope 2018 brings some happy watching. Feliz ano nuevo.

31 Days of Halloween Horror Viewing

It’s that time of the year for Halloween fear. No pre-prepared watch list this time, I’m just jumping in and checking out stuff I haven’t seen. Follow along!

Day 1 – The Hand – So if CERN really did shunt a bunch of us into another universe, the fact that I had never heard of a Michael Caine movie by Oliver Stone in which a comic book artist’s severed hand goes around killing people is proof enough for me. After a really grisly and well done hand loss the movie meanders a bit, but remained watchable, if absurd.

Day 2 – Sole Survivor – A woman emerges unscathed from an airliner crash, but is haunted by silent strangers stalking her everywhere. I found this to be a more consistently coherent It Follows. A bit of a slow burn, but enjoyable.

Day 3 – Gerald’s Game – I never read the book, but this movie is carried by its performances, particularly that of Carla Gugino. It’s a great and at times infuriating study of character, history, and gender, but the final scene in the courtroom is a bit pants, to use a funny expression from across the Pond. I understand it happens in the book, so I guess it’s a faithful adaptation.

Day 4 – Pieces – The VHS box for this one has stuck with me for years. Absolutely bonkers giallo with some lovely ladies getting cut to…well….pieces. There’s a totally bizarre ethnic ‘kung fu’ joke in the middle of it for no apparent reason and the left field ending stinger has to be seen to be believed. This has got to be the single biggest influence on the classic parody movie Student Bodies.

Day 5 – Vampire Circus – I had been wanting to see this one for a long time and it was worth the wait. Top drawer Hammer movie about a staked vampire who lays a curse on his slayers which a band of odd circus performers/minions begin to enact in hopes of resurrecting their undead master. Some really inventive FX, beautiful actresses as always, and ingenious scenes of vampire slaying. This is gonna be a top watch for me for the season for sure.

Day 6 – Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde – Another late Hammer outing. London chemist Dr. Jekyll, seeking a life prolonging formula, figures out how to chemically change sexual characteristics (maybe because unmarried women live longer?) and promptly begins assuming a vampish, female form who may or may not be his darker self. Points for including both Jack The Ripper and Burke and Hare, but otherwise kind of middling.

Day 7 – Child’s Play 3 – Chucky, rendered to a molten blob at the end of Part 2, gets reconstituted into a new body when an unscrupulous toy manufacturer decides to re-christian the Good Guy line. I think I would’ve enjoyed this if it had been about Chucky running rampant through the upper corporate echelons as some kind of cathartic, anarchistic statement on the evils of unfettered capitalism, but instead he just went after Andy (this time play by Justin Whalin from the D&D movie) at a military school and I spent three quarters of the movie trying to remember if I’d seen this already or not. The always good to see Andrew Robinson was memorable as a weirdo military barber, but that’s about it.

Day 8 – Don’t Deliver Us From Evil – French film about two Catholic school girls who dedicate themselves to Satan. Their deliberate sins gradually escalate from minor pranks and infractions to their logical outcome. Widely regarded, it reminded me a bit of The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane. An engaging movie, but frankly, a bit too sleazy with the underage girls.

Day 9 – Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Might be the low point of the ‘meets’ series for me so far. Just not particularly funny, though it has moments. And the song and dance routine of the suffragettes kicking up their heels and lifting their skirts like can can girls was pretty cringeworthy, even for a guy who likes Willie Scott the best of Indiana Jone’s lady friends. The boys are American cops inexplicably working in some kind of exchange program (a la Black Rain?) with the British coppers in Edwardian England. They get fired and wind up chasing Dr. Jekyll’s (Karloff) alter ego to try to get their jobs back. Costello turns into both a mouse man AND a Hyde monster.

Day 10 – Eyes Without A Face – There’s a reason this one’s got a Criterion release. A French surgeon, responsible for a car crash that leaves his daughter Christiane horrifically disfigured, sets out to make amends by kidnapping beautiful young girls with the help of his assistant and attempting to graft their faces onto hers with varying degrees of success. Incredibly well realized and astonishingly graphic for 1960, this is another top first time watch for me this year. I’m trying to talk my wife into going next Halloween as Christiane!

Day 11 – Boys In The Trees – This Australian picture turned out to be less of a horror film as advertised and more of a dark fantasy. That’s not a knock on it. It’s a great little movie, about teenaged boys on the cusp of manhood, and in particular, two former best friends on Halloween night, one an aspiring photographer who compromises himself to fit in with the local crowd, yet has dreams of leaving their small town, and the other an imaginative, bullied pariah who doesn’t want to grow up. The two reason through why they drifted apart and the movie becomes a meditation not just on masculinity, but on identity and memory. Extremely well done and affecting. Almost as if written by a brokenhearted Ray Bradbury.

Day 12 – The Resurrected – Dan O’Bannon captains this practical FX gorefest, loosely inspired by Lovecraft’s Case of Charles Dexter Ward and starring Chris Sarandon as the necormancy-obssessed doctor being hunted up by a private detective hired by his wife to figure out just what he’s been up to. Suprisingly moody and fun, with some neat lore and grotesque creations.

Day 13 – Personal Shopper – Kristen Stewart is a personal assistant for a Parisian celebrity, but she’s also a medium staying in Paris to hear word of her late twin brother. Then she starts getting mysterious texts on her phone urging her to give into her wild side. So I watched this because I’d heard good things….but it felt like three different stories vying for my attention, and Stewart’s character just wasn’t interesting enough to make me care about any of them. It was a total slog.

Day 14 – The Hour of The Wolf – Bergman’s a great filmmaker. The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring are amazing. This was pretty, but very, very boring.

Day 15 – Eyes Of The Cat – I stumbled across this one completely by accident (was looking for the Hammer movie, Shadow of The Cat). An ambitious hairdresser recruits the estranged bon vivant nephew of a clingy, ailing San Francisco socialite in a bid to alter her will then murder her and steal her millions. Seems pretty straightforward, except the nephew is terrified of cats and the woman’s will currently leaves her inhertiance to a mansion full of felines. When the (perhaps incestuous) aunt gets rid of all the cats and then a sack full of kittens so as not to offend her beloved nephew, one particular orange tabby seems to take a preternatural interest in the proceedings. Lots of neat twists and turns (perhaps, in the very end, just one too many), good dialogue, and some inventive camera work.

Day 16 – Frankenweenie – A first time watch with the kiddies. Not bad remake of the live action original, though I preferred the first iteration with Barret Oliver. The catpoo-o-mancy was a little much.

Day 17 – The Sorcerers – Interesting picture starring Boris Karloff and Catherine Lacey about a pair of married, aging scientists who invent a process that allows them to experience another’s thoughts and feelings, and exert a degree of control over them. The pair test their process on an unsuspecting London swinger, Ian Ogilvy, and proceed to push the experiments into new territories, Ogilvy blacking out when they take over. Lacey becomes more and more addicted to inhabiting Ogilvy….good movie.

Day 18 – The Berlin Syndrome – An Australian tourist winds up the the latest captive of a psychopathic German sports school teacher in east Berlin. A well done thriller.

Day 19 – Snuff – Weird ass schlock take on the Manson murders turned in the last five minutes into a faux-cinema verite ‘snuff’ film where the camera crew ‘unexpectedly’ films the director murdering an actress (who, if I’m not mistaken isn’t in the movie) on camera. Obvious head and hands through the bottom of the bed and fake body trick. I guess people fell for it back in the day.

Day 20 – Night Of The Devils – Neat Italian horror of a man who stumbles upon a remote, isolated family dealing with a witch and the legend of the verkolak.

Day 21 – Crystal Lake Memories – Thorough, epic 7 hour documentary of the Friday The 13th film series, from Part 1 through the recent remake. I have a deep, abiding love for this series, and Simon Hawke’s novelization of Part 6 is one of the books that inspired me to start writing. This loving analysis delved deep and left me with a new appreciation for the movies, even the remake. I really hope Derek Mears, who played Jason, gets another crack at the part, and I totally agree with the notion that Part 13 should bring back ALL the final girls and Tommy Jarvis. A top watch.

Day 22 – Pirates of The Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales – It’s got ghost pirates, so I say it counts. A vengeful Spanish pirate bent on avenging himself on Jack Sparrow seizes control of the high seas and the cursed Will Turner’s son sets out to find the loopy rogue and find an ancient artifact that could break his father’s curse. Very inventive and neat at times, though I sometimes lost track of the character motivations and decisions. Javier Bardem was cool as always and I’m glad they moved away from that Jack Sparrow is a lord of pirates business. Nice callbacks to the superior original. Young CGI Jack was a little wonky in an otherwise killer scene.

Day 23 – Seed Of Chucky – Chucky and Tiffany’s innocent doll son escapes a freakshow and goes to Hollywood to find his parents. What the heck did I just watch? It actually started off pretty amusing and strange, but I didn’t need to see Chucky jerking it in silhouette, and eventually Billy Boyd’s Glen/Glenda became annoying. Jennifer Connelly and Redman are good sports.

Day 24 – Diabolique – French classic about the wife and mistress of a boorish French headmaster who plot to do away with him. Pretty great, but I wish the twist had not been telegraphed early on by the mistress.

Day 25 – 1922 – Chilling Stephen King adaptation about a farmer who enlists the aide his own son to murder his wife to prevent her from selling off their land. An epic, macabre gothic morality tale. Very well done.

Day 26 – The Babysitter – Amusing horror comedy about a shy, out of step boy who learns his idyllic babysitter is not what she seems to be….but c’mon, once she showed such a passion for Billy Jack I knew she had to be evil. The black character was a little bit too stereotypical at times, but the movie was fun overall.

Day 27 – Funny Games (1997) – A well to do Austrian family has their vacation home invaded by a pair of young psychopaths. “[Director, Michael] Haneke states that the entire film was not intended to be a horror film. He says he wanted to make a message about violence in the media by making an incredibly violent, but otherwise pointless movie.” He succeeded. But it wasn’t really that violent either.

Day 28 – Curse of Chucky – A huge step up from the previous sequels. Somebody sends a Chucky doll to a disabled heiress and shenanigans quickly ensue. Moody and well done. The fan service end stinger got me hyped for Cult, which is what I’ve been slowly working towards.

Day 29 – Cult of Chucky – The girl from Curse of Chucky is tormented again by the killer doll in the asylum to which she has been committed. I liked seeing Andy in a more Tommy Jarvis role, but the mechanics of Chucky’s plan didn’t make sense to me. Curse and the original remain the best of the series.

Day 30 – Behind The Mask: The Rise Of Leslie Vernon – I got what the filmmakers were going for, but horror comedy is a tough sell for me and rarely works. Plus I just couldn’t get bast the twerpiness of the killer. Maybe if he’d lost the soul patch.

Day 31 – And I wrapped my 2017 Halloween first time viewing marathon with The First Power.  Lou Diamond Phillips pursues a body jumping serial killer. Jeff Korber’s always interesting to watch, but this is pretty paint by numbers, even with a magic Catholic crucifix dagger.

Six Great Foreign Westerns You Might Have Missed

A while back I did one of those lists, 7 Gritty Westerns You’ve Probably Never Heard Of, shedding light on a fistful of down and dirty 70’s era western movies in the cinema verite style which I hadn’t heard a lot of hooplah about but really enjoyed.

I recently watched a spate of fantastic western movies from the other side of the world and have similarly been inspired to list them here. I know some western fans tend to denigrate the efforts of non-American filmmakers in the original American art form, but they’re definitely missing out.  These pictures prove that some of the most innovative and interesting horse operas being made to day are being imported to our shores, just as in the early days of the much lauded Italian spaghettis.

1. Brimstone – If ever there was an anti-Searchers, it has to be Dutch filmmaker Martin Koolhoven’s sprawling, nihilistic epic about a crazed Reverend (Guy Pearce, in yet another great performance that by all rights should be a breakout part for him but like everything else he does, somehow isn’t given its due) relentlessly pursuing tongueless midwife Liz (Dakota Fanning) for reasons that only an attentive viewing of the slowly unraveling nonlinear tale as it unfolds make clear, and which I wouldn’t dream of spoiling here.

Brimstone is a dark, demented masterpiece, almost a psychological horror movie, and the less you know about the plot going in the better I think it is. It demands patience, but definitely rewards the viewer with a tragic, operatic story in the best bloody, grand guignol style. The gradual reveal reminded me of Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West.

As I said, Pearce delivers an apocalyptic performance as the fanatic man of an increasingly mad and evil god. Emilia Jones gives a great turn, particularly for a young actress in such a stark, weighty part, and the cast is liberally peppered with vivid, memorable characters, including Kit ‘Jon Snow’ Harrington as a fugitive outlaw and Paul Anderson as a loathsome pimp.

2. Slow West -The joint British and New Zealand production of John Maclean’s Slow West presents one pie-eyed young Scot’s (Kodi Smit-McPhee, in a winsome, earnest performance) bildungsroman journey to reunite with his true love Rose (Caren Pistorius), who has fled the accidental killing of his own landowning father for the wilds of Canada. Jay, the kid, falls in with a cynical bounty hunter (Michael Fassbender) secretly out to collect a bounty on her head.

Slow West is a lyrical coming of age story peopled by unique characters and featuring some absolutely eye popping cinematography.  There’s a great illusory action sequence of Ben Mendelsohn’s outlaw gang popping up from an unbroken field of tall golden wheat like whack-a-moles to exchange gunfire and then seamlessly vanish again that had my eyes bugging. Little moments are focused and lingered upon; blood pooling beneath a dead clerk, a nail catching on a corpse’s trousers as it’s desperately dragged across a porch so that a door may be shut against the hail of gunfire outside, the progression of a bright caterpillar across a camoflagued Indian warrior’s painted face. It’s a beautiful movie, and an affecting portrayl of innocence and responsiblity lost and regained.

3. The Salvation – Kristian Levring’s lavish Danish western begins with an explanation of the migration of veterans of the Second Schleswig War of 1864, an event that hearkens to the westward flight of Confederate veterans to Texas following their parallel defeat at the hands of the Union, to the American frontier.

Mads Mikkelson’s Jon and his brother Peter (Mikael Persbrandt), having eked out a stable living, have sent for Jon’s wife and ten year old son after a separation of seven years. Tragedy strikes on the stagecoach to the homestead when a pair of violent ex-convicts board and force Jon off. Jon walks through the night in the ruts of the stage, finally discovering his son murdered and then his wife brutalized and killed. In short order he kills the two perpetrators, but finds that one of them was the brother of powerful local gang boss Delarue (a really oily and odious Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who takes the nearby town hostage until the killer of his brother is turned over to him.

Sort of an alternate take on High Noon’s theme of the lonely good man against bad odds, I found the alternate viewpoint of Danish settlers really interesting and the action inventive and top notch.  There’s a particularly great bit involving a guy shooting through the ceiling of a hotel at a sniper on the roof and a can of kerosense that you’ll know when it comes.

Likewise, The Salvation’s look is really unique, eschewing the typical dull beige pallette of most modern westerns for a bright, brilliant sun baked hue of sandstone that really makes it stand out.

4. The Dark Valley – This bleak, moody German-Austrian revenge tale from Andreas Prochaska doesn’t take place in the American west at all, but I’m still including it here as it has all the trappings of the genre.

The mysterious stranger, photographer Greider (Sam Reilly), who rides into the remote mountain town hiding a secret only to systematically unleash a hell that turns out to be well deserved in the final reel reveal reminds me a lot of High Plains Drifter, and its snowbound gloom recalls Corbucci’s classic The Great Silence.

The Dark Valley is a quiet, brooding movie, where the violence comes smashing down like an unexpected avalanche.

5. The Proposition – John Hillcoat’s  wild Australian western, written by Nick Cave, takes place in a bloodsoaked 1880’s outback.  Police Captain Morris Stanley (Ray Winstone) offers captured bushranger outlaw Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce again) and his simple minded younger brother Mikey freedom in exchange for Charlie hunting down his murderous older brother Arthur (Danny Huston), a notorious killer feared even by the Aborigines, who call him The Dog Man.

Sort of a western Heart of Darkness, we follow the progression of Charlie’s hunt for his near-mythic brother across a virtual hellscape, replete with black clusters of flies and savage, half-wild bounty killers (including a grizzled John Hurt) and bear cringing witness to his eventual, ultraviolent return when the particulars of the titular proposition go tragically, if not predictably awry.

The Proposition is brutal and beautiful, a dark acid western in the truest traditions of the genre.

6. The Warrior’s Way – OK this one is a huge thematic departure from the rest of this list, but I can’t help it, I really enjoyed it. It’s essentially a frenetic HK-style action movie from South Korea and New Zealand, directed by Sngmoo Lee.

Sad Flutes (named for the sound of blood whistling from a severed neck) clan master assassin Yang ( Jang Dong-gun) destroys a rival clan at the orders of his superiors, but stays his hand from doing in an infant girl. In derelict of duty he flees to the western town of Lode, populated by ex-carnies, and there raises the girl, April, in anyonymity, befriending a dwarf (Tony Cox), the town drunk (Geoffrey Rush), and a local girl (Kate Bosworth), who seeks revenge against a murderous gang leader known as The Colonel (The Proposition’s Danny Huston again) for murdering her parents and brutalizing her.

When the Colonel and his army arrive to finish the job, Yang takes up his sword to defend the town. But the very act of arming himself draws the attention of his old clan master Saddest Flute (Ti Lung), and the Sad Flutes arrive to punish their own.

The Warrior’s Way is a slick, insane weird western actioner where legions of bandanna wearing, duster-clad, Maxim toting stormtroopers essentially butt heads with the Korean equivalent of faceless sword twirling ninjas, and I get absolutely giddy watching the CGI mayhem unfold. Blood fountains and rains (literally), and for some there will probably be as much eye rolling as head rolling. It portrays an at times hilariously over the top hyper reality of painted backdrops and never-could-be characters, Geof Darrow-esque mass super-violence in the mode of chanbara flicks and manga. Very imaginative, but admittedly not for everybody.

It sticks out like a sore thumb on this list, but if you can watch a scene like the one below and get a kick out of it, you’ll enjoy it (definitely NSFW):

Any one of these is worth a view, and in my opinon, a purchase.

DT Moviehouse Review: The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe

Time once more for my blog feature, DT Moviehouse Reviews, in which I make my way alphabetically through my 200+ DVD/Blu-Ray collection (you can see the list right here)and decide if each one was worth the money. Today, I review the Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe.

Directed by Andrew Adamson

Screenplay by Andrew Adamson, Ann Peacock, Christopher Markus, and Stephen McFeely

Tagline: The beloved masterpiece comes to life.

What It’s About:

In the midst of the German bombardment of London during World War 2, four children are sent to the country to live with their eccentric uncle. During a game of hide and seek they pass through an enchanted wardrobe into the magic land of Narnia where they become embroiled in a war between its good creatures, led by the lion Aslan (voiced by Liam Neeson) and the White Witch Jadis (Tilda Swinton) and her dark army.

Why I Bought It:

I was not introduced to fantasy by C.S. Lewis, but probably by Rankin and Bass’ Hobbit cartoon and Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of The Rings, which in turn led me to the original Tolkien novels, Robert E. Howard’s Conan, and most importantly, Dungeons and Dragons, the roleplaying game that supercharged my imagination early on. I spent untold hours in the basement of a friend’s house rolling dice and eating junk food while the older players passed the Captain Morgan and we took on hordes of monsters and each other in bleary-eyed sessions morning and night. I couldn’t get enough of fantasy.

I had read the entire Narnia series by the time this movie came out, so it was a given I was going to see it, but I remembered Lewis as being a bit bland, and so I didn’t expect to like this as much as I did. I saw it with my best friend, a guy who I’d once watched turn his human thief into a fire breathing, flying minotaur trapped for all eternity inside a diamond (a magic Deck of Many Things, a few lucky Wish pulls and a complete inability to quit while he was ahead had culminated in this) and when the final battle sequence began with its dizzying array of Monster Manual denizens, we’d both turned to each other, looking past our wives in nerd-gasmic, bug-eyed appreciation, both of us I think, in that moment, really WANTING to be in Narnia.

Following a cast of child actors can be pretty hit or miss. You can be blessed with Harry Potter or The Goonies, or damned to the ninth circle of Mary-Kate and Ashley Skywalker. The kids assembled to portray the Pevensie kids are winsome and earnest, and don’t come across as the type with a celebrity and money obsessed parent breathing down their necks, shoving them into the closet with St. Sebastian when they don’t hit their marks (or whatever showbiz parents do).

Young Lucy (Georgie Hensley) is a standout, plucky and yet sensitive, with a great gosh-golly-wow face. I’d just had my first daughter when I saw this and she won me over pretty quick. I can’t even hear that Alanis Morrisette song that plays during the credits without picturing her now. The scene where she is betrayed by Mr. Tumnus (James McAvoy) is a particularly good display of her talent. Her bewilderment at the fawn’s lie (which, under the director’s hand, has an almost unseemly, exploitative feel, like a prelude to molestation in some darker Todd Solondz movie) comes across well.

Likewise Edmund (Skander Keynes) is sufficiently shifty, but doesn’t play his seduction by the White Witch so that we can’t forgive him later. Peter (William Moseley) is as heroic as you want him to be, and Anna Popplewell as the much-maligned Susan….I wish she had gotten the chance to play the character to the end of her involvement in the series, because I think from this (and Prince Caspian, the sequel) she had the chops to make it interesting.

Tilda Swinton is as ever icy and ethereal as the White Queen Jadis, alluring and cruel as first crushes often are, which gets you in Edmund’s shoes pretty well. “I know she’s evil, but dang, I really want her to be good, so I’ll give it a go. Besides, Turkish Delights! So she must like me.” Jadis’ dwarf henchman Ginarrbrikk is played by Kiran Shah, who was the kid who let the monkey poison the dates in Raiders of The Lost Ark. Liam Neeson’s voice rivals James Earl Jones’ as the sound of ultimate paternal love in the form of Aslan the lion. Other recognizable voices include Michael Madsen as the Witch’s rough right-hand wolf who sounds like he’s ready to chew your ear off at any minute, and Ray Winstone as the salty, blue collar Mr. Beaver. James Cosmo has a memorable cameo as the most kick ass Santa Claus ever.

The CG animals are only a little difficult to accept, and even then, only initially. When blended with live action, its practically perfect, particularly as on display in the epic final battle sequence. For the most part the FX are great, and surprisingly bright and four color, eschewing the typical rule of using shadow to obscure the seams.  Narnia is a sumptuous land, with bright, beautiful scenery and luxuriant textures, as any storybook land should seem.

Narnia has a reputation as a Christian fantasy series. I guess there is some element of that on display in the character of Aslan, whose arc may be a bit mystifying if you don’t take his origins into account. Yet I wouldn’t say it pushes an agenda. I don’t feel proselytized to watching it. It’s just a pretty straightforward good vs. evil story.

What I really love about this movie is it feels like an 80’s throwback. In the 80’s we had fantasy movies like Dragonslayer, Ladyhawke, Legend, and Excalibur, movies that were never embarrassed of what they were. Even Jackson’s much-lauded Lord Of The Rings movies are peppered with anachronistic winks at the audience (that awful, awful Dwarf tossing joke). Narnia has a bunch of kids from our world in a fantasy realm, and they they aren’t cracking wise and giving us Poochie MST3K commentary. They’re in it, and it’s as real as can be. I like that the kids don’t take a rear echelon Pokemon role in any of the action. They’re in the thick of the fight at all times. It makes their ultimate enthronement more deserved, more satisfying, and their sudden departure back to their own lives (as if they’d never left) more poignant.

Best Dialogue/Line:

The one that gets me is right before the final battle.

Peter has been thrust into the role of commander of this vast army, and he sits atop a unicorn in shining armor with a magic sword, possibly every boy’s dream, and certainly mine. But he has this moment where he looks to his centaur second in command (played wonderfully by Patrick Kake) and asks, as a kid in a bit over his head might;

“Are you with me?”

And the centaur has this great look on his face, a sort of bewilderment at the question. Aslan, for all intents and purposes his god, has chosen this kid to lead them, so there’s not a doubt in his mind. He sort of shakes his head and furrows his brow in an ‘of course’ manner.

“To the death,” he says.

Best Scene:

Well I keep talking up that final battle, don’t I? It’s every storybook fantasy battle you’ve ever dreamed of, with the ‘bad’ critters on one side (Minotaurs, werewolves, goat-men, bumbling giants, etc) and the ‘goodies’ on the other. There’s a fantastic shot where Peter in his shining armor, gallops on a freakin’ unicorn at the vanguard of this contingent of centaur cavalry. The centaurs lower their lances and a group of racing cheetahs pull ahead of the army, while on the opposite side, a group of white tigers rush to meet them. There’s a pullback to the whole battlefield and the music (which I must mention is really cool during this sequence, very 80’s Vangelis sound) cuts out to a pre-clash heartbeat. Then these great cats just bash into each other ahead of their respective hoses, and go tumbling. It’s not a bloody battle, but the violence is there, and dramatic. Jadis petrifies enemy combatants, even turning a diving hippogriff to stone in passing so that it crashes into the ground in fragments.

Would I Buy It Again? Yes. And this reminds me to revisit the others.

Next In The Queue:

Cimarron