I Love this Poster

I first saw this poster in a train station in the South of France just before it premiered at the Cannes film Festival. I was certainly not lucky enough to have caught it at the prestigious festival, but I did catch in this weekend in London. In short, I dug it - a lot. In a little longer, Drag Me To Hell looked to me like an Evil Dead Sam Raimi movie directed by a Spiderman Sam Raimi. It was slick, polished, professional, and also fun, gory (or at least gorier than I'd though it would be post-Spiderman), and for all intents and purposes it did come off like a Sam Raimi flick, though I won't spoil anything by saying why or picking out any choice moments. The premise, as seen in the trailers, is pretty much what you get. Having been energized after seeing this kick-ass horror flick (not to mention deafened, this was without a doubt the loudest movie I'd ever seen in the theatre) I checked out on of the blu-ray sights to see what other film fans were saying -- and initially, I was surprised to see the mixed reaction to both the film and the anticipation (or lack thereof) of going to see it. As I mulled over all the points from the internet brigade, I felt that they were all valid -- of course, Drag Me to Hell is not another Evil Dead. But should it have been? Or rather, could it have been? Probably not, too much time has gone by, Raimi has practiced making films an entirely different way for a long time now. The other debate: The Dreaded Studio Involvement/Tampering. The reason this point came up was the apparent PG-13 rating and whether or not this is a ploy to release a "director's cut" blu-ray this September. Or was the PG-13-rated Drag Me To Hell the intended Raimi cut in the first place? I can't say, I didn't even know it was rated PG-13. In the UK, the theatrical release got a "15" rating. Barring any hardcore or explicit sex, which Drag Me To Hell did not have, generally restricted-style films won't get higher than a 15 in England, according to my own personal research - and I have been spending more than enough time in the HMV stores around Piccadilly and Oxford. Also, films are often cut differently for International theatrical releases, Raimi's own Quick and the Dead got a full sex scene in the UK's version of the flick, both theatrically and on DVD. So where does this bring us in the debate? Apparently, nowhere. That must mean I'm rambling. To me, what it comes to is Raimi now is different for Raimi then, but he still made a killer horror flick, I have no idea what kind of cut I actually saw of the film, and Allison Lohman is a pleasure to watch, no matter what kind for grue she's covered in.

-V.

The 2-Minute Aspect Ratio Lesson

I use AVID for post-production work, and one of my pet peeves is that with so many cameras (all the current ones, really) all shooting in a true anamorphic 16x9 aspect ratio, why is it my Avid's aspect ratio masking templates are all designed to be used on the non-anamorphic 4x3 ratio project/browser setting?

Peter Speers likes to call me an Aspect Ratio Nazi. But to me, it's important. It's your FRAMING, for god's sake!

Well, if you've already shot your film in true anamorphic 16x9 but have framed your shot compositions with a different aspect ratio in mind, here are the effects I use to get the proper ratios while working in the anamorphc 16x9 project settings in Avid:

For a Panavision-style 2.35:1 widescreen ratio select the 16:9 Mask located in the effects bin under "Film" and apply the effect over your footage in the timeline. Using the effects editor, unlock the "fixed aspect ratio" under Scaling and shift the Hgt slider left to 70.

For a seventies or eighties-style PROPER 1.85:1 widescreen ratio (don't be lazy and leave it at 16x9 - that is not cinematic, that is home-theatre) I use the effect simply titled Mask, also located in the effects bin under "Film". Using the effects editor, unlock the "fixed aspect ratio" under Scaling and shift the Hgt slider left to 94.

I find these to be pretty darned accurate, hopefully any perusing editors might find it helpful.

-Vince.

The Last Double-Feature of Random Horror Mayhem (Day Six – Thirstday)

“A man would have to be some kind of fool to think we’re all alone in this universe.” -Jack Burton

The Last Double-Feature: “Drive Thru” & “Undead or Alive”. After the disappointing fizzle that originally ended my Ten Sessions of Random Horror Mayhem, I thought I might resurrect the horror for a final session in the hopes of ending on a better note. I was somewhat successful. I was perusing the local Rogers Video, specifically their two-for-one crap bin, and I came across a copy of each of tonight’s double-feature. I took them up to the counter, where the clerk immediately recommended Drive-Thru, saying it was the absolute best bad-horror film he’d seen since “Rave to the Grave”. I hated Rave to the Grave. Crap… Drive Thru is an interesting animal of a film, though after seeing it I wouldn’t exactly put it in the horror section. Just because there’s a homicidal fast-food clown doesn’t mean it’s a horror movie. Last I checked, a horror film should at least entertain the idea of being horrifying or scary. This one’s got a Ronal McDonald from hell running around with a rubber Viking hatchet from Toys R’ Us. The acting’s pretty good, aside from the fact that the lovely heroine (Leighton Meester) seems far too blasé when faced with planchettes that fly off of Ouija boards all by themselves and best friends who get there heads shoved into microwaves, barely muttering an oh, crap when faced with the inexplicable. To say the least, Drive Thru is not exactly firmly rooted in any kind of reality, so I guess even this character flaw goes with the flow. More amusing than funny, and definitely without any sort of chills or scares, it plays out more like a demented episodic television show; though the thrills are pretty mundane for the most part – yet it’s all still nicely executed by its duo-directors (Brendan Cowles and Shane Kuhn), who are also apparently responsible for starting the Slamdance films festival in Utah – so I guess these guys are no strangers to film. What I don’t get is these new filmmakers’ fears of showing a little skin (and I’m not just talking about these two directors). Nudity, while admittedly pleasing to the eye most of the time, is also a quintessential subconscious tool in horror, whether it’s on the screen or on the printed page. Naked = skin = vulnerability = chills = suspense. Nudity has its place, and so does playing it safe, and if you’re going to deliver a slasher flick, then you’d better remember which one’s appropriate, and why, when, and where. Detective Crackers steals the show, no small feat when you’re up against a flame-headed burger mascot from Hell. (I’ll give this one 2 out of 4). Undead or Alive fared a little better, this one a zombie comedy western starring Chris Kattan that often worked on all three counts. Some actual laugh-out-loud moments with cheesy and excellently executed zombie effects set with a western backdrop has Kattan fleeing a mucked-up relationship with the local whore as he rides alongside an ex-soldier turned reluctant criminal. Soon the pair hooks up with a gorgeous ass-kicking Indian girl from New York who winds up saving their hides more than once as a zombie sheriff leads a lynch mob after our heroes’ blood …and guts …and brains. At certain points the doldrums make an appearance and hang around for a while, but things never completely loose their footing and it’s chock full of quotable dialogue. The worst thing I can say about this movie is that it was a pleasant surprise, especially if you go into it without expectations. (3 out of 4).

Ten Sessions of Random Horror Mayhem (Day Five – Duesday)

“Have you paid your dues, Jack…? Yes sir, the cheque is in the mail.” -Jack Burton

Day Five, Session Ten: The Last House in the Woods. While this may sound like a seventies rip-off of the Craven cult classic Last House on the Left, this is actually a 2007 Italian giallo-style rip-off of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. And not the original, either – this is a riff of the remake. Hmm… Actually, this spaghetti horror starts off promisingly, as we see a young mother about to get rescued from a desolate roadside car wreck, when instead she gets attacked by the masked stranger while her young child watches from the darkness of the surrounding trees. After this, we meet a young couple who’ve just broken up, they drive into the woods for a quickie when their world quickly turns upside-down – as they’re attacked, the girl nearly raped, by three loud-mouthed partying thugs. A man and wife rescue them from the thugs, only to take them into their home (the presumed Last House in the Woods) and the young couple discovers that this is actually a family of cannibals, with the same type of convenient set-up as the family from the aforementioned Texas Chainsaw Massacre (new demented family members pop up out of the blue, every time the heroine thinks she’s found someone who actually might save her). Only half an hour in, things move from intriguing to standard to pretty dull, even the heroine’s mid-film escape and chase can’t drum up much excitement. Things get progressively stale, until finally taking a turnaround near the final act when the three thugs show up again at the house. Barely getting a second wind with its rejuvenated plotting, the film unfortunately falls victim to an overlong and absolutely unnecessary exposition end scene where the mother of the demented family verbally rehashes the entire family history and its plot elements, a scene that the film would’ve been so much better off without. While writer/director Gabriele Albanesi has some obvious panache for style and plotting, the film really has no sense of the mechanics of mystery or suspense, ultimately sinking the whole thing, despite the interesting stalk-n-slash third act. And thus, my Ten Sessions of Random Horror Mayhem ends with a fizzle. I might just have to make up for this later. (1 ½ out of 4)

Ten Sessions of Random Horror Mayhem (Day Four – Stormy Monday)

Day Four, Session Nine: The Velvet Vampire (1972) …I knew I had something bizarre kicking around on my shelved that I hadn’t seen yet! In this day of having instant worldwide information at our fingertips, the hunt for obscure genre or cult or exploitation titles becomes increasingly easier. The chances of accidentally happening on a strange or rare title increases immensely. Conversely, the feeling of satisfaction of actually finding a hidden treasure, or something special, or the gem of the old drive-ins decreases, the thrill of the hunt gone. For me, The Velvet Vampire was not I title discovered through the miracle of the internet. Rather, I found out about this movie many years back in a pretty odd way. I’d rented The Vampire Happening (totally not The Velvet Vampire) from an out-of-the-way Blockbuster where I’d lived nearly twelve years ago, a Blockbuster that still had a few pretty odd titles on their old-stock VHS shelves. I dug the movie, and ended up buying it a few years later on DVD. I also have a habit of keeping scraps a paper around, one writes a phone number on it then files it, I’m sure this is nothing we haven’t all done. About three years later, I find my receipt from that blockbuster rental – on the receipt reads a VHS rental of “The Velvet Vampire”. Now I know I’ve never seen that movie. From this miscatalogued rental tape, I track down an actual copy of this movie at a whole other video store on the other side of town. Do I rent it? No, I don’t. So still never having seen this movie, my interest is reignited when I get into Roger Corman’s films, and discover that the director of the well-received Student Nurses is none other than the director of The Velvet Vampire – Stephanie Rothman. Of course by now a couple of more years have passed and the video store that had a copy of The Velvet Vampire has switched over to DVDs and has sold off most of its old VHS stock. Flash forward a few more years… and wouldn’t you know it, just a few months ago, it was the internet that came to the rescue, when on a lark I typed the title into Amazon.com and got a hit. Someone actually put this sucker out on DVD! I ordered it, and when it arrived in my mailbox I was slightly worried to discover the cheap-looking packaging, from some company called Cheesy Flicks. Tonight, I finally tore the shrinkwrap off the box and placed the DVD in the tray with more than a little trepidation… A full-frame picture, a little muddy… but actually, not bad, as far as prints go. Some dark spots, but most of the movie takes place in the desert sunlight, so overall, not to shabby. The movie’s pretty brisk, an exploitation vampire flick loosely based on the vampire Carmilla (there’s even a tombstone in a makeshift desert graveyard marked “Le Fanu”), sexually dream-like, pretty enjoyable, not scary, pretty cheesy, a lot of fun for a bizarre little hippy-ish movie. Okay, so far so good. Now the weird part – for a film shot in the early seventies, a film I now know with absolute certainly that I have never seen, despite what my Blockbuster receipt said all those years ago, I was floored at all the similarities between this story, this whole movie, and our own first attempt at horror-exploitation – Carmilla (now titled Carmilla the Lesbian Vampire by our friends at Unearthed Films). Right down to the yellow vehicle and dreamlike sex sequences and vehicles breaking down on desolate roads. Our original script was even set in the desert, but being as we’re located on the west coast of B.C. that never really materialized in the finished movie. So weird… Anyway, as Rothman should’ve learned being a protégé of Roger Corman, when the monster’s dead, the movie’s over. The Velvet Vampire goes on about two minutes too long, into a scene that was just begging to be cut out of the film and forgotten about, but other than that, it was a pretty entertaining night. I probably won’t be watching this again anytime soon, but I have to say I might wind up taking a peek at Cheesy Flick’s website to see what else they have in store for a dark and windy night. (2 out of 4)

Ten Sessions of Random Horror Mayhem (Day Three – Happy Thanksgiving).

Day Three, Session Six: Haze – Original Long Version. It’s midnight now, so technically, it’s day three. And it’s Thanksgiving in Canada. Earlier yesterday I went back to that Japanese Manga DVD used book store and purchased the Japanese non-subtitled DVD of Shinya Tsukamoto’s “Haze”. Being familiar with his works, and knowing that he is a primarily visual filmmaker, I though there was a decent chance thatI’d be able to figure out what was going in the story without getting too lost. Thankfully, I was correct on that account. After reading some good reviews on the internet, and realizing that I wouldn’t be able to track down a subtitled copy anytime soon, I thought what the hell, and I’m glad I did. The story goes… Man wakes up in a box. A cement box. A cement box with spikes under his feet and his mouth clamped around a steel pipe, his hands up over his head and his fingers wrapped around barbed wire. And from there it really gets nerve-wracking. This film has some of the visually industrial sensibilities of Shinya’s “Tetsuo”, using the plot of “Saw” twisted with a moral tale of love, murder and human meat. Of course, after about twenty-five minutes of dialog-free visuals, it gets with heavy monologues which I didn’t understand, but I gathered some nuances from and still found the whole experience was like watching a hard-edged piece of art. I can’t wait to give this another go in the future, hopefully with subtitles next time. (4 out of 4)

Day Three, Session Seven: The Mist… in black & white. Yes, Stephen King’s “The Mist”, as brought to the screen by uber-talented writer Frank Darabont, as witnessed through the magic of colour desaturation. It’s now ten past ten in the morning, I’ve gone to sleep and I’m back at it again, before having to run off to the family’s for turkey and stuffing later this afternoon. Originally, I saw this one in the theatre and was both cheap and impatient when it was released onto DVD, so I picked it up second-hand a week after it was released for ten bucks from the Roger’s on the corner. However, that was the single-disc rental version and I only discovered recently (or was told by one of my good friends) that the two-disc included a black & white version of the movie, something Frank Darabont had intended as he’d apparently seen the vision of the film as an old b&w monster movie. Pissed at myself for cheaping out and snatching a used rental copy, I decided to go ahead and do my own b&w version back ramping down the colour on the television set… and whoa. The stark photography at the beginning of the film really looks like a creepy old monster movie. OR the set-up for one, anyway… Thunder and lightning, contrasty back-lighting… awesome. Even the brighter scenes inside the supermarket where our heroes and villains become trapped the titular mist filled with Lovcraftian super-demons looks good. The bad CGI that plagued this fim in its theatrical prints look better now – almost all of them. The creepiness factor is even more creepy. The film feels more… intense, somehow. I recommend you try this out, no matter which version of the DVD you may have. After it was over, I went back to the middle and watch some in regular colour. Seems I don’t like it like that anymore. (3 ½ out of 4)

Day Three, Session Eight: Mulberry Street. Full of turkey and pumpkin pie. Have to stay upright and let gravity do its work. I throw Mulberry Street into the player, a movie that was a hit on the horror festival circuit in 2006 and has been sitting around my apartment (in the closet) for at least a few months now, unwatched… until tonight. Nothing like zombie rats on Thanksgiving Eve. This movie was actually pretty good. Ti starts off slow, but it’s really well-written and can’t shake the feeling of old New York cult flicks like Street Trash – even though this is nothing really like Street Trash – it’s a surprisingly fresh take on an old plot, where all of Manhattan winds up turning into flesh-eating Rat Zombies that infect the survivors with one bite, one spit, one splash of spurting blood – you get the idea, it’s been done hundreds of times before. But you take an old idea, with good writing; a new angle; you end up making a little gem of a movie. Add to that the amusing cameos of a couple of legitimate New York cult celebrities and great performances from the cast, and you have something that should be a classic in time – if it can survive the depressing array of direct-to-video crap that mucks up the gateway for the truly talented and obscures the view of a potential audience. Here’s to hoping this one finds a solid following in the years to come. (3 ½ out of 4)

Ten Sessions of Random Horror Mayhem (Day Two -- Splatterday).

Day Two, Session Two-point-five-0: Two Short Films by Takashi Shimizu… Okay, so originally this was supposed to be straight-up session three. I purchased Takashi Shimizu’s remake of The Grudge years ago from the two-for-one shelf at the local HMV, first because I kinda liked the film, and second because there were two of his early short films included on the DVD, something I’d never watched until today – and promptly discovered that these shorts films were shorter than short. The first movie, titled “4444444444” is about a minute and a half long, and it’s about a young man who finds a ringing cell phone in the trash. When he answers it, something surprisingly unnerving happens – end of story. The second film, aptly titled “In a Corner”, is a little longer at just over two-and-a-half minutes, and it concerns two school girls, a bunny, and zombie and a ghost. Just what the hell the bunny had anything to do with will leave you wondering longer than it took for the actual film to play out – but not much longer. So, because both films came in at under five minutes grand total, I decided I had to ultimately kibosh the consideration of this as an actual horror session. Still, I’ll go 3 out of 4.

Day Two, Session Three: The Pit. Bizarre horror/cult flick from 1981 has twelve-year-old Jamie tossing anyone who disgruntles him into a pit in his backyard (which nobody appears to notice until they’ve already fallen/been pushed into) in order that they be torn to piece and eaten by the inexplicable pack of troglodytes (or Trogs) down at the bottom. It’s all fun and games until his adorable babysitter accidentally falls into the dreaded pit while he’s showing her. Then Jamie goes and lets those pesky Trogs out! Funny thing is this film actually works in some sensibly crazy way, a little gem of old school revenge-horror, and another one for the “horrible children” pile. Apparently, this bad boy is actually Canadian. Hmm. (3 out of 4)

Day Two, Session Four: Hellgate. Okay, maybe you caught me. “Hellgate” is actually the flipside of “The Pit” on one of Anchor Bay’s Drive-In Double Feature discs. But what the hell, I picked this sucker up brand new for six bucks yesterday and I’d never seen either of these films, despite having seen the VHS covers numerous times, back in the days of ma & pa video rental stores and exuberant curiosity. Hellgate… well, holy hell, what can I say…? From the director of “Blackenstein” comes a fifties-homage to horror insanity, a movie that starts with a fifties biker gang and a violent murder of a young woman, then switches gears when an old coot fins a magic crystal in a cave that can reanimate bats and explode fish, dead turtles and people, it’s stolen by the murdered girl’s father and used to re-animate her thirty years later, even though her ghost has already been walking around all these years and is not the backdrop of a local urban legend – something to warn tourist about should they decide to travel “Hellgate Road” – which they do anyway, and they are first seduced by the ghost/re-animated zombie and then attacked by her and her mad dad with the laser-crystal. It’s all wacky enough to hold your attention to the literally explosive finale, and you might even be tempted to have a second gander at this one down the road… to Hellgate. Ah, I couldn’t resist. (3 out of 4).

Day Two, Session Five: Corpse Mania. This is one of those early Shaw Brothers Chinese horror efforts from 1981 – and, lo and behold, one of those films that nearly changed my life. I say nearly, but this flick was tip-top. A masked murderer goes about killing the ladies of a bordello and all the blame is focused on an insane necrophiliac who was busted humping a maggot-ridden girl in one of the bordello rooms. This one sort of plays out like an Asian giallo; the conversation-heavy flick sees the police and the killer constantly trying to outwit each other in the midst of the sex business and killings. This one was a real surprise and so far the best of the films yet. (4 out of 4)