Well it was Christmas yesterday and nothing says Christmas like… reminiscing about Halloween?

*sticks head in*

Hi everybody. Remember when I was doing a Halloween marathon and then it just petered out with no explanation? Sorry about that. My original pipe-dream was to watch 31 movies in 31 days. Although it soon became clear that it was impossible (I can easily watch a movie a day, I just can’t muster up the creative energy to then write about it) I was determined to watch as many as I could. For all you know I only got as far as 14. I wanted to set the record straight on this. I watched but did not review the following films:

(name withheld)
The Monster Squad
The Ruins
Ginger Snaps
Once Bitten

The Ruins was a solid horror film that I would recommend. The Monster Squad is fondly remembered by many but frankly I found it weird and fairly stupid. Once Bitten is fondly remembered by no one, although it stars a young Jim Carrey and boasts a soundtrack mostly made up of a single catchy song, the lyrics to which are mainly the name of the film over and over. “Once bitten…. oooh oooh once bitten.” It might have been totally something different actually, but this is how I prefer to remember it. Ginger Snaps (and I’m sad I didn’t give this one the full review treatment) is borderline fantastic, and one of the few films in my horror marathon that I would recommend to people as a FILM rather than as a horror movie. Great stuff.

So what went wrong? Why did I watch all these movies if I wasn’t going to comment on them? Well I was, I really was. But I was determined not to skip anything, to review everything in the order in which I watched it. So what was it that happened after The Gate and before The Monster Squad that crushed my gentle spirit and sapped my will to write? A little gem called Snoop Dogg’s Hood of Horror.

No seriously, that is a real movie.

And even months later I would rather cut off my own hands than type anything about it. I’d call it ‘cinematic excrement’ if I could bring myself to use the word cinematic within a million miles of this celluloid abortion. Avoid it like the plague, people. It’s NOT the ‘good’ kind of bad you might assume it to be. It’s the bad kind of bad. It’s double bad with a side order of extra bad.

So if you were one of the two people in the world who was enjoying my film related ramblings and was sorry they stopped, you know which Doggy Dogg to blame.

Snoopy Doggy Dogg, in case it needed clarifying. That guy. Boo hiss!

I don’t think I actually watched a horror movie in my life until I was in university. I was a sheltered lad. Therefore the concept of “horror for kids” seems antithetical to me: kids can’t watch horror movies - you make no sense thing-that-I-just-said. But apparently some children out there watched scarier things than Gremlins when they were growing up and one of those movies was possibly…

The Gate

There’s really only a single moment in it that counts as proper gore, but it’s a doozy. The young boy’s hand pushes through the collapsing face of his father and goo pours out. EW! Aside from that, and possibly bearing in mind that preteens might well be the target audience, much of the scariness revolves around fears of childhood: the death of a pet, the loss of parents, the shadows on the wall that seem to move of their own accord at nighttime. I can see how this whole thing would be quite unsettling for the kiddies.

When a large tree is struck by lightning and must be dug up and removed from the backyard, the kids find a geode in the roots. They decide to dig for more and the ground collapses revealing a deep hole. From which stuff will later emerge! The story is pretty basic more or less, but the kids actually speak and behave like kids (so it’s more realistically written than average) and the child actors can actually act (which is rare enough even for adults in the horror genre) and also actually resemble kids which is an unexpected plus - you know how the 15 year old girl is sometimes 25? Here the kids are convincingly the right ages. And the stop motion little goblins (presumably also the right ages) are excellent - I assume it’s stop-motion because I can’t think how else it could have been done, but it’s some of the smoother more convincing work I’ve seen. Good job stop-mo dudes!

If I have to knock this one for anything, it seems like it might be ripping off Poltergeist at times: kids in peril, haunted house, strobe lights and smoke/wind machines on overdrive. The story is original-ish but it was probably trying to be reminiscent of that other family-horror film that did so well at the box office a couple of years earlier. But that’s a small complaint really.

Also notable for some of its child actors becoming more well known later (though not to me, I don’t know any of these guys). But the main boy is a young (now movie actor) Stephen Dorff, and the two sisters who are the best friend of the lead girl have gone on to tv careers, one as Kirsten in the OC, and one in the comedies Still Standing, and lately Eastbound and Down. So maybe that floats your boat. Maybe not, eh?

Nothing groundbreaking and not really all that scary for a man of my age and handsomeness, but still I give this one a thumbs-up. If only because you keep waiting for the totally gutted house to magically repair itself just before the parents return - and it doesn’t! Oh my god, this never happens. What are the kids going to tell their folks? The house is a complete write-off. And they’re probably still paying for it, aye. Sadly the credits roll before we can find out and the parents will have to deal with this trauma off screen. The movie is a win if only for busting this one annoying cliche.

Man was I ever disapponted with this one. The directorial debut of the man who was also responsible for Frankenhooker (ridiculous) and Brain Damage (flawed but intriguing) is not his best work. I don’t know what the circumstances surrounding the making of this were but clearly it was done on a micro-budget. So if it was a labor of love for all concerned we’ll call it a triumph of artistic endeavor in the face of an overwhelming lack of money / acting talent. That’s maybe the best way to think of it. But another way to think of it would be: dumb.

Basket Case

An intriguing/hilarious synopsis is probably the best thing it has going for it: Duane comes to New York to see the world and find love; also to carry around his deformed murderous psychic mutant brother Belial in a basket so that together they can murder the doctors who performed their forced separation years earlier when they were young pair of siamese twins.

The acting is mostly bad (understandable) but the writing is really off too. The plot kind of holds together more or less, but good writing is the one easy way to make a cheap movie better and this doesn’t happen at all. Characters are boring, lines are flat and sometimes the dialogue doesn’t even seem to match the action on screen: “If I ever get my hands on you again I’ll kill you,” says one character to another even as he is holding him at that very moment. Hey bro, your hands are on him right now. Why don’t you know that?

The guy that plays Duane is the best actor in the thing but that’s not saying much. Still he acquits himself. The female love interest on the other hand can’t convincingly say her lines and she’s not even especially attractive. I suspect that the casting choice came down to which lady was prepared to get naked and then act out being strangled to death while raped by a puppet for the least amount of money.

Oh yeah the puppet. I’m sure it was the best they could do but frankly it’s ridiculous. It’s intended to look gruesome but it’s so fake it just ends up looking funny. Mostly it’s animated as an actual puppet and from time to time in stop-motion but neither is remotely convincing. It’s a hard enough stretch to believe that a wounded fragment-of-a-person (he’s only a head and shoulders) who fits inside a small basket could have significantly more strength than a grown man (there’s just no good reason for this, after all) but even if we meet the idea halfway the execution is so woeful that there’s not a chance you can buy it for even a second. The thing looks like it’s about to fall apart and yet with a single swipe of its clawed hand it can rip a person in two? I don’t think so. It’s a shame they decided to show so much of it, because the various times in the movie that Duane simply carries the basket around while people repeatedly ask what’s in it is strangely effective and creepy at times. The idea of a man who carries gruesome death around in a wicker basket with a smile on his face works; it’s just that nothing else does.

Especially not working, is the overly long, overly dumb flashback we get to the boys’ childhood and their eventual separation. The idea behind it is not bad actually, in that once we see what happened to him we understand why Belial is out for revenge; he’s not just a mindless killer and on some level you sympathise with him in his prior mistreatment. Though this seems like a poor excuse for being a no-good little cock blocker when Duane is about to get some action with the girl who can’t act. Going on to kill her for no reason seals the deal. You are a jerk, puppet - it’s no excuse that you have childhood trauma.

So I don’t want to talk too much about this one. If you have a thing for watching deformed puppets grind their bloody stumps against the groins of alleged actresses who can’t even act “dead” properly then this is the movie for you. And probably the only one because I bet that scenario doesn’t happen a lot. Skip this one and rewatch Brain Damage instead. But if you DO check this out make sure to stay for the unintentionally funny closing credits. When Duane and his brother fall out a hotel window to their deaths, the credits roll as the camera looks down onto the street and holds on the twisted corpses and the crowd standing around them. But the credits start rolling before you expect it - as though the guy that cues the credits was anxious to get out of there (understandable). Then rather than fading to black the credits roll over the bodies and the crowd, which just continues to circle around and around them because they can’t stop moving because they need to keep moving until the credits finish. It’s unintentionally the best part of the film. Something about it is just so silly that it becomes a highlight. At least it went out at its peak?

Nomads

Pierce Brosnan is a bearded French Anthropologist. Er, for the purposes of this film. He is rushed to hospital, mistaken for crazy a bum. He convulses a bit and whispers something in a lady Doctor’s ear and then dies. Really? We’re like two minutes in. Why would your biggest name die and- oh! He’s back. He pulled a Bill Pullman on us. Remember when old Bill took a dive off a balcony and did himself in at the beginning of the Grudge, only to come back later in a dream or flashback or something that happened while I was haf asleep at that point? Well Pierce is pulling the same trick. He’s whispered something into the ear of Lesley-Anne Down and now she’s acting all crazy and seems to be reliving his last few days in her mind as if it were through his own eyes. Also there’s a punk gang who might be ghosts. Hooked yet?

I found this one on a random list of recommendations for horror films. Having seen it I’m not even sure it qualifies as a horror. But it was not a bad movie and it was scarier than some I’ve looked at so far so we’ll let it slide. I’ve got to say the idea behind this one was cleverer than the usual and really had me intrigued to see where it would go. Via flashback or waking dream or something we learn that french Pierce and his french wife have settled in America after many years of field-anthropolamagising and studying the ways of like… Eskimos and shit. Le wife is sick of living in tents and having her husband disappear for days and coaxes him into taking a job at a University, so that life will be more stable. But on their first night in their new home someone spray-paints obscenities on the front of the house and leaves a disturbing gift in the garage. Upset, le wife asks rhetorically “What kind of people would do such a thing!” Sorry, I mean… “vould do such a sing!” Big mistake lady. Remember your husband, the Anthropologist? His anthropologina starts tingling at the thought of finding out EXACTLY what kind of people would do such a thing. He steals away in the night with his camera, finds the mysterious black van that contains our presumed vandals and follows them around for 30 hours, all the while taking pictures and trying to work out what makes them tick. This may not sounds thrilling on paper but maybe you have to be there for this one. So many films involve the hero stumbling into something by idiocy or exploring a mystery with the most contrived of excuses. I loved that this was the guy who had absolutely the perfect reason to be snooping after these people. Not to protect himself, not to expose them, not for money… Just because this is what he does. His passion in life is understanding alien cultures and he’s thrilled by the prospect of finding one in California where he thought his Anthopothingy days were over.

He discovers that they are a pack of… wait for it… Nomads! They have no homes, they don’t stop for sleep, they just drive from place to place all around the clock causing trouble. The punks in questions (and I mean punk in the 80s sense, all black clothes and metal studs) are all the scarier for being kept at arms length. We see them only through Pierce’s telescopic lens. From a distance they cause mayhem, but we don’t really get a close-up look at them, we don’t hear them speak. The threat they pose is very modern (for the time; and as opposed to evil from the dawn of time or something) but it’s also quite creepy; perhaps all the more so for the idea that these guys could be wandering around at the end of your street - monsters in plain sight.

Pierce realises he has bitten off more than he can chew when he realises he has just witnessed this group committing a murder. In a moment of stupidity he shouts for them to stop, revealing himself to them. And from then on he is in their sights. Let the hunt begin.

I don’t want to go too far into spoilers (although the opening of the film gives away the biggest one - he dies!) but the whole thing is weirder than I’ve gone into and there is a supernatural threat here; similar and yet quite different from the run of the mill kind in these films. The film keeps jumping back and forth between a present day Doctor Lesley-Anne, as she lurches around trying to take in what she’s seeing in her head and do something worthwhile with it, and le Pierce from days earlier as he unwittingly explores what will turn out to be his undoing, which stops either story from getting dull. We already know it’s too late for him, but will the memories he’s somehow passed on be enough to save his wife from the same fate?

Like I said, not a great amount of violence or gore here, but plenty of atmosphere and a distinct weirdness about the whole thing. Oh and a nun flashing her tits. Which you can’t say about too many movies that Blockbuster rents out.

Bon.

I must have eaten something that disagreed with me because I had the weirdest dream. I dreamed that I was watching an english language Italian horror comedy starring Rupert Everett as an employee / resident of the local graveyard, who looks for love as he kills the reanimated corpses of the recently departed. And it was funny but also sad, plus just crazy weird and made no sense. And then I remembered that my dreams aren’t that creative.

Cemetary Man

This is a zombie movie that isn’t all that much about the zombies. It’s established right away that Everett lives in the graveyard and is ostensibly employed to shoot anyone that wakes up and starts wandering around. This isn’t the zombie apocalypse. Everett doesn’t know whether the situation is unique to his local cemetary or whether this happens all over. And he’s not terribly bothered to learn the answer. He just kills them. With the help of his assitant / grave digger / fat retard who lives with him and grunts and eats alot. I should mention at this point that when I think zombie comedy I think Return of the Living Dead and / or Shaun of the Dead. This movie is nothing like either of those. It is a genuinely quirky arthouse film about a man dealing with issues of love and death that just happens to contain some zombie slayings. Just to get that out of the way. Ok?

I’m not sure I can describe the plot - most of all because I don’t understand a large chunk of it - the lead seems to be having some sort of mental breakdown and the narrative gets increasingly disjointed until it completely derails in the final act. It never quite reaches Lynchian randomness but it comes pretty damn close and the ending is frustrating as a result. Right up front I should tell you that if you’re looking for a simple story, well told, this isn’t it. But it’s still pretty interesting. Oh and it has the flying, singing zombie head of a teenage girl who lives inside a television and wants to marry the man that threw up on her when she was still alive. So there’s that.

Everett kills zombies and supervises the tending of the grounds. He meets and falls in love with a beautiful widow who dies by zombie bite not long later. Having watched her die he is then forced to kill her again as she is resurrected. And then a second time. Even after she’s gone for good she shows up again, in the form of a completely different character played by the same actress, who also falls in love with Everett and makes him contemplate getting castrated to prove his affection. Also she later enjoys being raped by her boss. A third version of this woman shows up later still. Plus some other stuff happens. Oh and the guy goes crazy and maybe kills some people. And there’s an angel of death and a troupe of undead scouts and some weird little flaming lights that dance around the place at night for no adequately explained reason.

I won’t pretend I had much of a clue what was going on in this one. I daresay it made sense to the people that created it and perhaps with repeated viewings more of the sense of the thing would reveal itself to me. However, quite aside from the inexplicable plot I found I still really enjoyed the individual parts of it. This is a unique movie to say the least, and it may not be everyone’s cup of tea but I’m glad the genre is flexible enough to include something so different. Check it out if you have the patience and want something different in your zombie movie.