Creepy Six Films

Second set of interviews over at the Giallo site

2011-12-02T08:49:00.000-08:00

Nadeem Ali's interviews with the cast of the just-finished-shooting "Reversed" are now posted over at GIALLO.CA

Check it out!

And in other, somewhat unrelated Creepy news, The Renfield Syndrome Kindle book has just been published in Spain and Italy! You can head over to the Renfield Facebook Page for other updates and goodies.

More news and updates soon!

-Vince.

New cast interviews over at Brivido Giallo

2011-11-26T06:14:00.000-08:00

Nadeem Ali from the UK's Videotape Swap Shop interviews the cast of the recently-wrapped feature film Reversed, over at the Brivido Giallo site. Check it out!

(Part one of two).

New posts/diaries over at Giallo.ca

2011-11-01T03:49:00.000-07:00

Hello, cats, hope everyone had a spook-tacular Halloween! We're right in the midst of our latest production through Brivido Giallo in Europe, and if you'd like to check out some of the press diaries from our friend Nadeem Ali of UK's Videotape Swap Shop, then hit up Giallo.ca to check it out.

Till next time!
-V.

Reversed

2011-09-20T05:09:00.000-07:00

We've nearly completed casting for Brividio Giallo's first film production, Reversed. Principal photography will commence this October 23rd in the UK. Thank you to all those who are participating.

-V.

Casting "Reversed" for Brivido Giallo

2011-09-05T08:50:00.000-07:00

If any actors/actresses in London UK are interested, we've started casting... Check out the page for details:
http://giallo.ca/

Cheerleaders back intact.

2011-08-08T03:48:00.000-07:00

The problem with social media sites like YouTube and Facebook is that when anyone, for any reason, finds something offensive they have some Facebook-given immediate right to have the content removed simply by flagging it - whether it is justified or not, which I'm thinking usually not as it is a freedom of speech issue, isn't it? After someone had our video "Catholic Cheerleaders for Satan Reel 3" banned from YouTube under what I thought was suspect circumstances (please see previous posting on that) I took it upon myself to appeal the YouTube decision.

Appealing a banned video in something any YouTube account holder can do, but they don't tell you that in the initial "we've banned your video" courtesy Email they send you directly. It's not even in your YouTube account inbox. No, you have to dig around until finally you stumble upon a path that will allow you to send in an appeal - and when you do find that link, you appeal had better be thirty words or less. Shit, I've had tweets longer than a YouTube appeal.

After stating my case (that there really was no graphic nudity or explicit sex in the video, the very reason it was flagged and banned - again, see last post) one week later, this is the I received back from YouTube:

Dear creepysixfilms:

Thank you for submitting your video appeal to YouTube. After further review, we've determined that while your video does not violate our Community Guidelines, it may not be appropriate for a general audience. We have therefore age-restricted your video. This does not negatively impact your account standing.

To learn more about age-restricted videos, please visit our Help Center

Sincerely,

— The YouTube Team

Pretty damned generic if you ask me, but proof that they don't actually look at the content before it's banned or taken off of the site. If someone flags it, then why not review it at that point? Why not send the insulted/offended party and email, something like,

Dear sir or madam,
We have reviewed your flagging of certain content posted on YouTube/Facebook and have decided that although it may offend you, there was really nothing illegal or in any violation of free speech to be found. We have added a content warning which should be satisfactory to anyone who may, in the future, also be offended so they might not view the content in question without prior warning, as you unfortunately had.

Thank you and good day.

I suppose the only thing that really irks me about this is one person takes it into their own hands to decide what others should or should not be viewing, based on their own principals or religious beliefs. That's not how it works, man. We all get to hear each other and make decisions for ourselves. Again, for ourselves. We're all adults here, aren't we? And if we're not, then what is your kid doing on YouTube unsupervised? I've seen more risque stuff on that site than our silly 70's grindhouse homage.

-V.

The trouble with Cheerleaders

2011-07-26T02:23:00.000-07:00

Well, well, well, it only took six months this time, but someone has flagged (and hence, YouTube has taken down) "Catholic Cheerleaders for Satan REEL 3". Great, now the whole thing won't make sense!

Well, all sarcasm aside, I think it's a little bit fundamentalist that anyone can flag and have a work of fiction taken down. You'd think it was because some poor cheerleader got their vagina ripped out. But no. It was due to "excessive nudity and graphic sex". Huh? There was no nudity. Okay, sure, there was some implied sex in a tent prior to the vagina-ripping, but that's about it... IMPLIED. Perhaps, implied all too well. And if I may reiterate, it was not the vagina ripping that was the problem!

Not to get too paranoid, I have a thought it was because there was oral sex performed on a female. This, for some reason, screams taboo for a lot of people, and it's not just indie stuff, either, it's big-budget Canadian and Hollywood films where the right-wing-ish MPAA do not seem to like to see women pleasured in this manner. I have a feeling if the actors in the cheerleader tent were having good old-fashioned missionary-style one-pump-two kind of sex we'd all be hunky-dory.

As a slightly off-topic rambling case in point, I just watched Frank Henennlotter's "Brain Damage" last night, and as I'd purchaced this one here in the UK I was worried it was the cut version. It wasn't. And really, why should it have been? It was cut by the Americans in the first place. There's a scene where a girl from a nightclub gets the drug-parasite (named Aylmer) thrust in her mouth, and it looks like she's giving a blowjob. It's a joke - a dirty joke, but a joke nonetheless. And that's exactly what someone at the MPAA thought, so he passed the scene and gave Henennlotter's film an "R" rating in America. He was then fired for that decision. Was the actress actually sucking on the actor's wang? No. So what's the problem? If you go to see a movie called Brain Damage that shows, in its promotional material, a graphic picture of someone pulling their own brain out their own ear, really, what kind of film are you expecting?

Likewise, a film titled "Catholic Cheerleaders for Satan". Seriously, if one found this sort of thing offensive (and one would've been on REEL 3 at this point) why was one watching in the first place? And why would one keep watching after the trailer and the first two episodes? It's a comedically blasphemous homage to rebellion cinema. Perhaps after the first couple of episodes some inner embarrassment got the better of them.

Not to mention we'd already censored it ourselves before posting that reel! Well, it's okay, we'll make sure the people who want to see it can see it one way or another, but really, with all this shit going on in the world, I can't wrap my head around those that need to spend their time trying to rid the YouTube channel of dumb-ass stuff like this.

Well, at least people are watching the shows. That's far better than complete indifference.

-V.

Dark Media City

2011-05-23T19:15:00.000-07:00

We were just turned onto this new social media site (yeah, like I need something else to keep up with!) but it is very cool. If you have the inclination, check it out! Here's the new Creepy Six Films page:

http://darkmediacity.com/profile/creepysixfilms

Have fun...!

Updates in general

2011-04-16T12:17:00.000-07:00

Today there is a new series launched on our online literarhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gify arm, http://creepysixtales.wordpress.com/

Tomorrow, we will be recording audio commentaries for the forthcoming HD releases of The Hard Cut AND Catholic Cheerleaders for Satan!

And at some point in time after tomorrow (but this year) we will be launching Creepy Six International, in partnership with our new sister company Brivido Giallo, please visit us at:
Giallo.ca

Thank you all for the continued support!
-V.

The Renfield Syndrome NOVELLA...

2011-03-26T12:22:00.000-07:00

The Renfield Syndrome novella now for the Kindle in the U.S! http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004SV2H6C

...And in the UK! https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B004SV2H6C

Dirt cheap! (Or in true indie fashion you can just hop over to Creepy Six Tales and read it there)
https://creepysixtales.wordpress.com/ Plus way more cool stuff. Check it out!

On The Hard Cut Double/Feature

2011-03-13T13:24:00.000-07:00

(coming later this year)

This project has always been close to me, though the film that it has ultimately become was accomplished with much serendipity.

Originally envisioned as a genre-crossing narrative told through the structures of film noir and horror, “The Hard Cut Double/Feature” has since taken on an entirely new life of its own. While it started as a detective story in its early script stage, it soon grew into two film ideas – the first movie would feature the sardonic detective Roddy Tillinghast tracking down a lost film print in a film noir populated with underground gangsters, femme fatales and immortal satanic cheerleaders. The second film, by juxtaposition, would take place over the exact same events of “The Hard Cut” but through the point of view of two of the underworld gangsters, Rocky & Alex. This second film had been titled “I Woke Up Screaming the Day I Died” and was ultimately the result of a knee-jerk artistic reaction to the current (and ongoing) state of corporate culture vs. the working class.

Throughout the lengthy post-production period, these two films would morph several times, cut after cut, each shaping their own cinematic personalities, while simultaneously it was becoming clear that these stories could never function to their full potential without each other. In the end, the innovative group of producers made the decision to permanently connect the two films together in “The Hard Cut Double/Feature”, a project that has now become a genre-bending film noir/horror/grindhouse opus that tells a cinematic tale unlike anything that I've seen come from these genres, individually, before.

-V.

New Stuff Saturdays

2011-02-26T09:27:00.000-08:00

New fiction up on Creepy Six Tales: http://creepysixtales.wordpress.com/

And if you would like to have a look back on some of our older flicks, I've finally updated the official website pages/menu to showcase (briefly) all the films individually. Swing by and check it out!
www.creepysixfilms.com

And thanks for all the support lately!

-V.

New stuff on Creepy Six Tales

2011-02-19T10:19:00.001-08:00

The Renfield Syndrome now on Amazon Kindle in the US, UK and Germany! Follow links...
http://creepysixtales.wordpress.com/serials/
...And check out H.P. Lovecraft's Re-Animator while you're there. Free!

-V.

Creepy Six Tales!

2011-02-12T13:01:00.001-08:00

Too lazy to watch the free movie on YouTube? Well, now you can read the four-part serial for "The Renfield Syndrome"! Check out Creepy Six Films' new website for on-line fiction, Creepy Six Tales...

And enjoy!

-V.

Catholic Cheerleaders Playlist

2011-02-02T06:56:00.000-08:00

Check out the full Catholic Cheerleaders for Satan Playlist here!

Catholic Cheerleaders for Satan supporters... Thank You!

2011-01-09T09:58:00.000-08:00

Check out what people are saying so far...!

Dread Central- http://www.dreadcentral.com/news/41733/catholic-cheerleaders-satan-rear-their-heads-online
Horror Movies- http://www.horror-movies.ca/horror_19712.html
Horror Society - http://www.horrorsociety.com/2011/01/03/catholic-cheerleaders-for-satan/
Tube Filter- http://news.tubefilter.tv/2010/12/28/catholic-cheerleaders-for-satan-promises-70s-camp-horror/
(Tubefilter) via IMDB- http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1467976/news#ni6482719
Buried.com- http://www.buried.com/horrorpress/catholic-cheerleaders-for-satan-launches-january-2nd/
Horrornews.net- http://horrornews.net/tag/catholic-cheerleaders-for-satan/
Bloody disgusting news- http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/news/22837/
Splatter container- http://www.splattercontainer.com/news/view.php?id=1402

Catholic Cheerleaders for Satan: Reel 3 (Creepy Six FIlms)

2011-01-09T09:57:00.000-08:00

Going public January 2nd.

2010-12-29T06:51:00.000-08:00

Check out our Facebook page!

Soon, very soon....

2010-12-09T17:19:00.001-08:00

"Catholic Cheerleaders for Satan" will be officially released in 2011, only a few mere weeks away... However, you can stay tuned for a sneak preview near the end of 2010... for those who might be interested.

-V.

2011

2010-11-28T21:27:00.000-08:00

So, there's this detective named Roddy Tillinghast. He gets hired to find an old 70's drive-in flick called "Catholic Cheerleaders for Satan". He gets beat up a lot and we made a movie about him and his jaw-cracking gun-slinging friends, and this movie is called "The Hard Cut Double/Feature". It's coming out next year, in 2011.

But wait... we also found the real deal -- the "Catholic Cheerleaders for Satan" movie from 1978. Timewarp! Only the print was effed, we couldn't really show anyone, so instead of letting people think we're a bunch of liars, we went and remade this movie, like shot-for-shot, pretty much. Then we took the print and dragged it across the cement and some broken glass and shit... So it kinda looks like the old effed up print we dug up now.

Anyhoo, we're going to send this thing out to the world, one reel at a time. Soon. Very soon. And then, maybe later, you can see what happens to the poor detective who tried to track this sister-loving drive-in flick down...

Very soon.

-V.

Testing...

2010-11-28T10:33:00.001-08:00

Trying to sync all the social media... and failing miserably. So far...

The Renfield Syndrome is up...

2010-10-28T06:59:00.000-07:00

Episode 1 is up! Watch for new episodes about the unraveling mystery of Amanda Keaton's disappearance in Creepy Six Films' media satire every Thursday/Sunday on the Creepy Six Films YouTube channel or check out:

www.creepysixfilms.com

Enjoy!

-Vince.

Halloween is early this year

2010-10-26T07:25:00.001-07:00

Get ready, the first episode of Creepy Six Films' new web series The Renfield Syndrome will be airing through YouTube (or creepysixfilms.com) this Thursday, October 28th! The shows will be in HD, and we'll be posting 2 per week.

Eleven episodes plus a couple of extras, too. Hope you enjoy!

-Vince.

The Hard Cut (Double Feature)

2010-09-19T17:22:00.000-07:00

A little expansion on The Hard Cut, a new film from Creepy Six Films that should be ready to hit the film festival circuit by the end of '10...

From the original Synopsis: "Private dick Roddy Tillinghast nonchalantly passes off a random missing-persons case to his ex-partner Ritchie Valentine... And instead, Roddy gets suckered by The Looker -with her endless legs- into tracking down a lost film print...

On the surface, the film print looks like another worn-out drive-in horror flick, but deep inside the reels of 35mm, there's hard evidence of a cold case murder and ritualistic sacrifice. It's not hard to figure that Roddy isn't the only one who wants to get his hands on this coveted film print, but when Ritchie Valentine’s slashed corpse is discovered under the bed of a seedy hotel room, a bizarre chain of events is kicked off like a line of toppling dominoes, with Roddy diving headlong into deadly trouble every time he makes a move."

Okay, I'm going to stop right there, although the synopsis actually continues for another paragraph or so. What I'd like to do is explain a little about the concept of the movie, in particular the concept of the film within the film (The Hard Cut). And that film within is called Catholic Cheerleaders for Satan. This was a little exploitation/horror opus, in the vein of 70's drive-in fare like Satan's Cheerleaders. The movie-in-move "Catholic Cheerleaders for Satan" was produced by the character named Jonas A. Pressman, exploitation filmmaker a la Harry Novak or Herschell Gordon Lewis. Pressman made Catholic Cheerleaders for Satan and then spliced in footage from an actual Satanic sacrifice, only to have that scene excised from the distribution prints for reasons of censorship. However, in the movie "The Hard Cut", that original workprint still exists, and that scene, spliced right into the middle (very Jungle Holocaust of him, no?) is what a mob of underworld thugs are all in a tizzy over. This spliced scene, is in its truest essense, evidence of murder and the corruption of the Satanic religion. And they want this evidence back.

As we have produced "The Hard Cut" and it's companion piece (or part two of the double-feature) "I Woke Up Screaming the Day I Died", we thought it might be prudent to track down the original film, "Catholic Cheerleaders for Satan". The existence of this film is somewhat dubious, though we intend to put or energies forth regardlessly, and some may say heedlessly (but no less enthusiastically, I can assure you with the greatest of ease), to find this film. We will be utilizing the following two months to hopefully accomplish this task, and to bring Catholic Cheerleaders for Satan to light by the time we're ready to send The Hard Cut Double-Feature out into the cinematic world.

We will, as always, truthfully and faithfully, keep you posted.

Race with the devil.

-V.

It's been a while...

2010-07-24T14:16:00.000-07:00

...Too long, in fact, when it comes to the measurement of time that seems applicable strictly to the space between blogger post. I can assure anyone interested in Creepy Six Films the Midnight Movie Company that we have all (as in us producers) been extremely busy this spring, leading into summer, on finishing the projects we started two years ago now. These projects include "The Hard Cut" & "I Woke Up Screaming the Day I Died" feature film-noir Double Bill, and a new web series entitled "The Renfield Syndrome", which will be launching this Halloween. Everything will be finished for release by the end of this year, at which time our contract with Brain Damage Films and our 113-minute horror/sci-fi gorology "Hell Hath No Fury" will also be over (did anyone in Canada or the US actually find this DVD in their local retailers over the last five years...? Yeah, likely not. If you did, leave a post here and let me know). So "Hell Hath No Fury", official selection of the 2006 Fantasia Film Fest in Montreal and one of C6 Films' favorite productions, will be getting a proper re-release with all the trimmings in 2011, available on the website proper or Amazon.com; whichever you prefer. To give another idea of how busy we are (not just soaking up the Vancouver sun on patios littered with beer brought by gorgeous waitresses), I'm actually writing/posting this blog on the fly, and while that may be exactly the whole point of a blog, I can assure you I never do this. No sir/ma'am, my blog are written out in Word first, then spell-checked, edited for content/spelling errors (and I do this myself, which I'm certain is painfully evident in pretty much any post you click on here) and then copy and pasted into the "New Post" section of this little Blogger account we have. Not too shabby for a day's work per week, though that weekly task of literary mayhem, as brief as it may be, has clearly been neglected as of the last six weeks. So, is this post signifying a return to proper blogging form? Likely not. We're way to busy! But I will, whenever possible, be leaving little notes here like pages slipped from a well-worn dairy as to when the heck's going on, mostly for cast, crew and family as I'm sure they're as anxious as (or more so than) anyone else to know when the hell these movies we started way back in Oh-Eight are coming out.

Soon, very soon... (insert evil laugh here, tinged with the slight edge of insanity).

-V

(image form The Hard Cut set, 2008)

The book that saved my life (well, creatively speaking)

2010-06-15T20:41:00.000-07:00

As most everyone who has had the time to take a quick visit to the Creepy Six Films site proper already knows, there are three films we've had in the can and are on their way through the pipeline – in fact, have been traveling through that seriously extended pipeline for the last 18 months, since we officially wrapped production on the last feature film (which was November 2008). The first two features have been simultaneously going through post-production for most of those 18 months (there was actually a 2-month break mid-2009 while we were out of the country). Getting back into the country, I found I was refreshed, revived, and full of new ideas going into the next picture edits of both “The Hard Cut” and its quasi-sequel, “I Woke Up Screaming the Day I Died”. That was back in July of '09. However, all brilliant ideas aside, I soon discovered that I was not exactly creatively up to the daunting challenge of re-cutting films and scenes and shots that were just somehow not working together in the mesh I'd already constructed. Everything seemed like it should work -- but in it's truest form, the cinematic artform will by nature reveal problems with storytelling that must be, well, edited. That is one of the best and most frustrating challenges of being creative in this arena. Rewarding too, once the puzzle can be deciphered, and amazing as one goes through the journey of trying to solve all the problems, from the gargantuan to the most minute detail that will always matter somehow in the end. And one change will invariably affect something else completely, so you have to go back and change that, which in turn affects something else... It can be overwhelming at times, to say the least.

As winter passed and March rolled around, I was nearing the end of the fifth cut/edit/version of “The Hard Cut”, and that's where I got stuck.

Enter the book... “The Conversations with Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film” really did save my ass (if not really my life, per se), though the book is not at all a how-to on film editing. Sure, Walter Murch discusses many aspect of film editing, but mostly by relaying stories of the numerous problems he'd encountered while cutting The Conversation, Apocalypse Now and The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and the solutions which usually came up at the most unexpected times, or simply through serendipitous situations. It is actually quite inspiring, and Murch mixes these conversations with many words of wisdom regarding cinema, literature, mathematics, the human condition, sound designing and The Godfather. This in not just a book for editors, thought, this is a phenomenal essay on the art of film and could be enjoyed by the likes of rabid film fanatics. The man is a real intellect; a thinker, a cinematic and mathematical philosopher; somewhat quirky, and an amazingly talented editor. I found out, after the fact, that the “The Conversations” is actually a series of books, apparently there's one with Marlon Brando (and a handful of others I'd never heard about). These I have not read but now that I've finally finished the seventh cut of the first film and the massive overhaul of the second film, I might actually have a couple of weeks to look into these other Conversations. Though somehow, I have my doubts that the subjects of the conversations or the timing of the reading of the books would ever strike within me such a chord as the Walter Murch Conversations.

Check it out.

-V.

There's actually a severe shortage of vampires in Italy.

2010-06-04T18:29:00.000-07:00

I love Italian cinema, and there's a real soft spot in my heart for the Giallo genre. Those who know, know, so I won't bother rehashing as to the origin of this genre, but I'll go ahead and mention that it's basically the Italian thriller, which would widely include what in North America we'd even go so far as to consider horror. American horror films, and specifically the slasher sub-genre, are mostly seen as thrillers in a lot of Europe – France, Spain, Italy. Where you'd see movies like Silence of the Lambs, Friday the 13th, Black Christmas, Halloween, and even the first couple of Saw films, categorized into the horror genre or “section” of video retail outlets, you'll find them in the thriller sections overseas. Or in the case of Italy, the giallo section. Actually, I'm just being descriptive to illustrate my point. If you did find yourself shopping in Italy or France, likely these films would just all be mixed in with each other, there's not a lot of genre categorizing in the retail outlets. Anyway, here I'm rambling about thrillers, slashers and Gialli when what I wanted to talk about was the severe lack of vampires in Italian horror cinema. Mostly, the vampire films in Italy come from outside sources (usually American), as in George Romero's “Martin” (titled “Wampyr” in Italy, re-scored by famed Italian band Goblin and, as rumor would have it, re-cut by Dario Argento – the Italian Hitchcock – himself). While there have been a couple of Italian vampire productions, none have really been of note. There was a film produced called Vampire of Venice, which was actually supposed to be a legitimate and official sequel to Werner Herzog's Nosferatu remake, but star Klaus Kinski caused so much upset on-set (surprise, surprise) that the production went into a spiral of problems and the finished film ultimate couldn't overcome the damage done during production. It ended up with a somewhat restrained commercial release. I actually had never heard of the film myself until I started looking into Italian vampire flicks. Lamberto Bava, son of celebrated giallo filmmaker Mario Bava, made a vampire movie called Dinner with a Vampire, about a group of actors lured to a Vampire's lair under the pretext of a big audition. (Was Lamberto trying to say something here?). Going back to the genre categorizing of European horror films, interestingly, this outright vampire tale was produced for a short-lived series of televised giallo films in Italy. So evidently, in Italy, even a vampire movie is a giallo.

On a side-note, Lamberto Bava, while being most noted for directing the two Italian “Demons” films (and these are considered outright horror flicks), he also happened to direct one of my all-time favorite, non-Dario-Argento gialli: “A Blade in the Dark”. This was originally intended for Italian television in the early eighties, but after he finished the film it was deemed too violent and was then distributed theatrically.

Lamberto's father, Mario Bava, actually shot three vampire gialli and one vampire sci-fi flick (Planet of the Vampires). Of all my digging around, I could only come up with six Italian vampire flicks, and this man directed four of them. Awesome. “Black Sunday”, starring Barbara Steele, could be considered one of Bava's masterpieces, but it's rarely described as a vampire film. Gothic, horror, giallo, it is all these things, too. More overtly bent to the vampire sub-genre, there's a fantastic segment in Bava's giallo anthology “Black Sabbath”, and this fun tale is one of my favorite vampire stories produced for the cinema (although the whole three-story film is really good). But the earliest one I uncovered was a film simply titled “I, Vampiri” (also directed by Mario Bava). I actually have no idea what this movie is about, I can only assume that the title says it all. Incidentally, according to Wikipedia, “I, Vampiri” was the first sound era Italian film. Interesting...

-V.

Best Character Ever?

2010-05-17T18:18:00.000-07:00

I remember first seeing Pulp Fiction in its hugely successful theatrical run buck in ’94. Pulp Fiction was my Titanic – it was the film I saw three times during its theatrical release. It was a fresh take on the gangster genre, and for me, Tarantino’s masterpiece (despite the director himself believing it to be Inglourous Basterds. No, when compared to Pulp Fiction, I’m afraid Basterds looks more like a rehash). When audiences saw Pulp Fiction for the first time, those who loved it were struck by that all-too-rare Thunderbolt! moment. The moment when you know you’re witnessing something unlike anything else you’ve ever seen before. I don’t think Basterds quite did the trick. Back in ’94, there were two things that were buzzing around Pulp Fiction – the writing, and Sam Jackson’s character/performance (for which they actually created a “best supporting actor” category at the Cannes Film Festival that year – I guess when they did that, he sort of knew he was going to win that one). What might have been overlooked by the critics creating such a buzz, but certainly not overlooked by the fans that enjoyed and love Pulp Fiction, was the Vincent Vega character, as performed by John Travolta.

Okay, I lied. There were three things buzzing – the third being John Travolta’s unforeseen comeback. Possibly the Hugest Comeback Ever. Before pulp Fiction, Travolta was about to go direct-to-video after a handful of “Look Who’s Talking” sequels. Ack. Anyway, the whole affect of Travolta’s character (Vincent Vega) ultimately became overshadowed by that whole comeback thing. And then Travolta was pumping out Hollywood movies with vengeance. Still is, in fact. Even though he’s done more “meh” films than good ones his career seems impervious now. Long gone is the buzz for Pulp Fiction, though it’s got a huge cult following now, yet I wonder how many Tarantino fans have watched this flick recently? I know after its initial video release (I remember picking up the “widescreen” VHS tape for $12.99 the day it came out for retail sales) I watched it another fourteen times. I rewound the last story (The Bonnie Situation) so many times that I left a permanent glitch on the video tape at the start of that segment. The tape has been long retired, and I watched the DVD of that film perhaps once, maybe one-and-a-half times in the last 12 years.

Well, I’m back into it now. Waiting impatiently for a Hi-Def release to happen on this side of the ocean, as my DVD looks like poo now with the advancements of entertainment technology. Still, I’ve thrown it in on my computer, and have thoroughly enjoyed it all over again. What struck me this morning, though, was the idea that Vincent Vega might just be the best film character ever created.

To understand what’s so amazing about the Vincent Vega character, we have to look at Pulp Fiction as a type of film contrary to what its own genre would dictate – As a Hero’s Journey. Only it’s told in three parts. And through three different characters. As my friend and DOP Sasha put it, “That’s what’s so brilliant about it (Pulp Fiction)”. The call to action and action as a hero is played through Vincent Vega (John Travolta), the facing of the beast by Butch (Bruce Willis) and the reflection and self-realization of the actions, after making through all the circles of hell, Jules (Sam Jackson). However, it’s the deep characterizations of Vincent Vega that are completely reflective of the overall hero theme of Pulp Fiction, which are not, as a whole, part of any of the other characters – or not on such a profound level, at any rate.

John Travolta’s portrayal of this character is nothing short of amazing. His performance as Vincent Vega (which is really Tarantino’s character, when it comes down to it) is done as by someone who’s some sort of cosmic supernatural juggler: he creates Tarantino’s Vega character for the screen with absolute magnetism by showing us such humour, love for the world, quiet authority, aloofness, cold-blooded harshness, comical humiliation and a true, and totally flawed, hero of the day. As Vincent Vega so humbly put it during his date with Mia Wallace: “I have my moments”.

That might well be one of the biggest cinematic understatements – ever.

-V.

No sleep till... well, till we're finished doing what we're doing.

2010-05-10T21:07:00.000-07:00

There is something incredibly intriguing, to me, about a story centered around a lead character who is so plainly exhausted his world winds up crumbling before his very eyes and while he is completely aware of it, even watching happen right before his eyes, he is utterly incapable, in the state he's in, to do anything to stop it. Most of the films I've seen of this kind are dark comedies. Or dark, dark, dark comedies. Scorsese himself has directed two of these films, films where the leading actor has so perfectly performed the idea of sheer exhaustion that as an audience member you not only empathize with the character, but the whole idea of lack of sleep and growing frustration actually become palpable.

The most recent of these cinematic stories I've seen was Werner Herzog's film “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans”, which stars Nicolas Cage. Ironically, I stayed up late watching this film and then couldn't get to sleep. I could surmise that my weekend filled with an overindulgence of sugar, meat, cheese, coffee and beer might've had something to do with that, too, it wasn't just the fact I'd stayed up a little past my bedtime on a Sunday night. Anyway, I've spoken to a couple of friends regarding what I'd initially thought was a remake of Abel Ferrara's original “Bad Lieutenant” (starring Harvey Keitel), but as rumor appears to have it, the title came from the idea of the producer trying to cash in on the title alone, it really has no connection whatsoever to the Ferrara/Keitel flick from '92. Cage does a pretty good job portraying a police lieutenant who appears to be going on for days without sleep, disintegrating humorously in front of our very eyes as he tries to track down a material witness to a drug-related mass murder. Where Cage's excesses and lack of sleep drives him is so very, very entertaining to see.

Other, lighter versions of this utter-exhaustion scenario are explored in John Landis' 80's comedy-thriller “Into the Night”, where he brilliantly casts Jeff Goldblum as the hapless insomniac who finds himself knee-deep in Persian assassins and International cover-ups when he tries to help Michelle Pfeiffer as she's attacked in a parking garage at LAX. Also a product of the 80's, Griffin Dunne does a fantastic job as the guy who just want to get home to bed after a series of unfortunate events dogs him all night long in Scorsese's “After Hours”. Ultimately (and hilariously), Dunne would be robbed of the success of his seemingly simple quest. A few years later Scorsese would explore the effects of insomnia once again in his film “Bringing out the Dead”, about an ambulance driver at the end of his tether, played by Nicolas Cage. Cage is pretty damned good at finding the ridiculousness in such insomnia-ridden character scenarios.

Edward Norton tried his had at this as well in David Fincher's wild “Fight Club”, based on Chuck Palaniuk's even wilder novel. Fight Club shows one of the more magnified and cinematically grandiose effects of insomnia. Fight Club's Project Mayhem might just be an exaggerated allegory for the trouble all of us night-lifers have gotten into in our lives (at one time or another, right?) back when sleep didn't seem as important as it does after your twenties are left behind in the dust, and the dust has long settled and your twenties are still standing back there on the road, way back in the distance, all dusty and anemic, looking around, and asking through all the daze and confusion: What The Hell Happened? And I think it should be pretty obvious right now that my own lack of sleep is what's hacking mindlessly at the keyboard. It's beyond my control. My mind has given up, I'm just going along with the ride now...

But if you want to talk epitomic insomnia-films, I would recommend you have a look at “The Machinist”, starring Christian Bale. This is the film he famously starved himself for, and it never fails to creep me the hell out.

And the horror genre is obviously no stranger to the stress of insomnia. Wes Craven and New Line Cinema created an immortal pop-culture sensation with the idea in “A Nightmare on Elm Street”, a franchise in which “Part 3: The Dream Warriors” is in my opinion the best film in showcasing the idea of total exhaustion. I can still picture a teenaged Patricia Arquette shoving spoonfuls of dry instant coffee into her mouth. Ugh. The Nightmare on Elm Street concept is particularly scary, simply because we all know that staying awake forever is plainly impossible. How the hell are you going to be able to win that one? The short answer is: You're Not.

And despite the good fight to the contrary (i.e. characters trying to Keep It Together through their sleep-deprived rants and raves), movies like the new Bad Lieutenant, Bringing Out the Dead, The Machinist, all show what can happen not when the fight is won (because it can't be), but when the lead character finally realizes that the fight was impossible to win in the first place. That's what's so intriguing about the scenario – because we, the audience, knows how it will have to end. The hero can't win, they can only succumb to the inevitable, and then they'll just have to see what happens. That's the Unknown Factor, the part that's what's really engaging. The climax to these films end not with cathartic releases, but with sweet, sweet relief. With sleep. Or if you're Griffin Dunne form After Hours, with ironic, cruel comedy.

Pepe: Art sure is ugly.
Neil: Shows how much you know about art. The uglier the art, the more it's worth.
Pepe: This must be worth a fortune, man. – After Hours

Speaking of the new Bad Lieutenant (or “The Bad Lieutenant”, as the title slate on the Canadian release puts it), there’s a slew of off-the-wall performances by the likes of Val Kilmer and Vondie Curtis-Hall as Cage’s cop cohorts and an awesome, awesome turn by Brad Dourif as Cage’s bookie. I have to say, I totally dig Brad Dourif. I’m going to do a blog all about him in the near future, the guy rocks! I know he was up for an Academy Award for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but my intro to this maniacal actor was his turn as a pest exterminator in Stephen Kin’s rat-terror flick “Graveyard Shift”. Okay, way off topic, I got it. Anyway, what I was intending to get around to saying was that Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant flick was one of those rare never-pressed-the-pause-button flicks. You know the ones – when you’re kicking back on your couch with your beer/popcorn/almond M&Ms and your hand never even drifts close to where the remote control is resting on the arm at the other end of the couch. You don’t even think about getting up to pee, because, hell, that can wait, you’re watching an awesome movie right now! Yeah, this was one of those flick that made my extremely short list of no-pausers.

Also joining another short-short list; the list of good Nicolas Cage movies:

1. The Bad Lieutenant
2. Wild at Heart
3. Red Rock West
4. Lord of War
5. Matchstick Men
6. Bringing Out the Dead
7. Face/Off

And of course there’s the list of not-so-good, or as I like to call it, the “guilty pleasures” of the Nick Cage cannon:

1. Next
2. Knowing
3. The Rock
4. Snake Eyes
5. Ghost Rider
6. Con Air
7. Face/Off

Then there’s the “completely crappy”, not even worth mentioning, so I won’t. There’re also the ones I’m totally indifferent to, like Moonstruck, Leaving Las Vegas, Valley Girl, Trapped in Paradise, Wicker Man (which I’m indifferent to because I refuse to watch it), and then there are the Nick Cage movies that aren’t really Nick Cage movies at all: Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Raising Arizona (that’s a Coen Brothers movie, you ask anyone) and Peggy Sue Got Married. You’ve gotta give it to the guy, he’s done a lot of freakin’ films, and he’s worked with a lot of talented directors. Wonder why he couldn’t end up affording all his islands and mansions and shit. Wouldn’t it be like, hey, I’m Nick Cage, I’m broke so I’ll just go do another handful of movies for Michael bay or Martin Scorsese or Brett Ratner or Walt Disney or some dude who wants to do another crappy horror movie remake? Of course he would, he's Nicolas Cage, man! I suspect he just got tired of his personal island. And the mansions. I mean, hell, who wouldn’t get tired of things like that? Well, I’m sure I don’t know. What I do know is that my wife cringes every time I bring a Nicolas Cage movie into the house, and a lot of my friends aren’t big fans, either. Personally, I love all the Cage-isms.

And trust me; The Bad Lieutenant is a great place to see some new ones.

“Never leave a man behind!” – John Goodman, Raising Arizona

-V.

Dead Skin Masks (and: “Wipe that face off your head, bitch.”)

2010-05-03T18:26:00.000-07:00

Ah, the old dead skin mask, that old horror staple introduced back in ’74 by Tobe Hooper and his docu-horror masterpiece “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” (Back when Chainsaw was two words). It was likely unforeseen that the creation of the character Leatherface would give rise to one of the most iconic horror villains in the genre. The name for the character was birthed out of obviousness, in the ’74 version of Massacre he would wear a mask of stitched-together pieces of human skin.

And then came the ‘80s. And the skin-mask got an upgrade.

The skin mask no longer consisted of a stitched-together jigsaw of flesh; rather, it became the result of one whole horrific facelift, always from one of the films’ numerous victims. The best example of this, hands-down, was Tom Savini’s work in Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2. Frightening and gory and even funny, Savini and Hooper took the idea of the face-mask to even more horrifying heights by having the villain force our heroine to wear the scalp and face of her own dead friend (the charming country-boy owner of a local Texas rock radio station). However, even as this is the most memorable and epitomic of the one-piece dead skin masks, and the one that would serve as the inspiration (or source of rip-offs) in other scenes of this ilk to films like House of 1,000 Corpses, The Devil’s Rejects, and even Texas Chainsaw’s own 2003 remake, the squirmish instance in Hooper’s 1986 Chainsaw sequel was not the first time we’ve seen this…

Almost unbelievably, this full-face-mask gag was done two years earlier in Wes Craven’s now-classic A Nightmare on Elm Street. The gag was cut quick (on screen for only a second or two) and was pretty much used as a incidental gag, where Freddy Kruger sticks his face through a small window and he’s wearing the face of his first teenaged victim (played by Amanda Wyss, a minor cult/horror actress in the ‘80s – she also appeared in the Deran Sarafian’s 1989 vampire flick To Die For). He rips the Amanda-mask off after barely a beat and then the film cuts to the brilliant running-up-the-stairs-while-being-chased-in-a-dream shot which pretty much steals the show in that series of nightmarish events.

“Wipe that face off your head, bitch!” – Parker Posey’s brilliant line in Linklater’s Dazed and Confused.

And when it comes to wiping faces off of heads, once again we can see this in one of the first nightmare sequences from Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street. Although this time it was nether the first nor the quintessential of the face-off-of-head horror gags. I guess John Woo also had the best of both worlds in his film, aptly named, Face/Off. But undeniably the most memorable face-off had to have been Tobe Hooper’s doing once again, this time in the Spielberg-produced horrorshow Poltergeist. And while removing skin from bodies is also something of a horror genre staple, from gory exploitation-style horror to the more “serious” ones like Silence of the Lambs, it’s somewhat been reinvented recently in the film Martyrs, one of the more surprising of the newer horror releases. It’s a shame we’re inundated with such abysmal horror offerings over the last decade that some real gems end up getting lost in the shuffle. I guess that’s the thrill of the hunt – and the find – for hardcore genre fans.

And yes, I just wrote a blog about pulling people's faces off.

“Dog will hunt! Dog – will – hunt…” – Choptop, from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part Deux.

-V.

Top-Eleven Vampire Flicks

2010-04-27T18:15:00.000-07:00

I just finished writing another post for the ol’ Jess Franco Blog, though this week’s posting is not actually about a Jess Franco film, it’s about a little flick from ’74 (-ish) titled “Vampyres”.

Which got me thinking.

Hence, the list.

Enjoy.

1. Martin. George Romero’s independent classic.
2. From Dusk Till Dawn. The rockinest Mexican hoedowningest stripperest Tom Saviniest hilarious action vampire horror flick in town. See it before you die (and possibly come back to life)
3. The Hunger. Tony Scott’s epic of vampiric beauty.
4. Vampyres. A Euoroshock erotic horror gothic extravaganza.
5. Lifeforce. Tobe Hooper’s naked space vampires flick, based on the book by Colin Wilson. With Patrick Stewart!
6. Daughters of Darkness. 70’s Belgian arthouse horror. And more lesbian sexiness. Dig it.
7. Black Sabbath. This Italian Mario Bava movie is actually an anthology, but there’s a great vampire story in the middle.
8. The Vampire Happening. Cheesy, corny, and probably a few other food additives. I love it. A vampire farce, and far more successful as such than “The Fearless Vampire Killers”, in my (likely unpopular) opinion.
9. Vamp. A bunch of humans go to a stripclub where all the sexy strippers are vampires. See also “From Dusk Till Dawn” (minus the Mexican), and think 80’s!
10. Vampyr. One of the originals, by Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer (and loosely based on “Carmilla”). Very gothic.
11. Let the Right One In. One of the best “new” horror films I’ve seen in a loooong time.

Of course, there are many other modern vampy classics, like John Landis’ “Innocent Blood” or films that are vampire films without being vampire films – like Cronenberg’s “Rabid” or a lot of the Jean Rollin or Jess Franco Euro cult contributions, not to mention I also have a soft spot in my heart for Coppola’s version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but this is a top-eleven list, not a top-sixteen or top-twenty-three list, and I think Dracula movies could be their very own list – perhaps in the future, when I’m either running low on ideas to blog about, or if another burst of vampirism-inspiration hits me. Maybe a Dracula-vs.-Carmilla kind of thing. We’ll see. And I know someone’s going to get irked that “Near Dark” is nowhere to be seen here, or that “Vamp” has a spot above “Let the Right One In”, but hey, this is my list, you want a different order, make your own damn list! (You can leave it in the comment box) Till next time…

-V.

Shenanigans in April (or: What the hell have we been doing, exactly, for the last four weeks?!?)

2010-04-22T18:45:00.000-07:00

So what the hell have we been doing? To quote Jungle Julia: That’s a damn good question! And a question not without answers, though some of those answers fall into the category of Strategic Avoidance. Only yesterday I got into a discussion at work with our new accountant about the different between avoiding and being evasive. As I feel being evasive has malicious connotations, I’m far more comfortable with the fact I’ve been avoiding something; moreover, a specific something that looks more and more (to my utter dread) like an ultimately unavoidable eventuality (i.e. Inevitability): Signing up on Facebook. Believe me, this isn’t going to go down without a fight, I’ll be dragged into Facebook kicking and screaming. Don’t I have enough to do these days? I’ve got blogs, websites, and a YouTube channel to procrastinate over. Sheesh. Anyhoo, until that inevitability turns into a reality, I’ll keep on avoiding even the mere idea of it all and try to keep track of what’s been going on this month. The real reality, as in, everything else we have to deal with.

Though it hasn’t formally been posted on Creepy Six Films’ official site (there’s that procrastination again!), we are indeed working on a side-project called “The Renfield Tapes” and “The Renfield Syndrome”, which we’re now planning as a two-part web series. Most of The Renfield Project (as I’m lovingly calling it) was shot in the spring of 2008 as a test for a new HD camera we were going to be using to shoot our two “big” feature films (“The Hard Cut” and “I Woke Up Screaming the Day I Died”). The footage worked out terrifically (I’m sure ‘terrifically’ was definitely a word back in the seventies – in any case, my spellcheck hasn’t set off the red-line alert as it just has for, ironically, the word ‘spellcheck’) and to make a short story pretty fucking long, the script acted out was a lot better than I’d remembered from the time I’d originally written it, only the poor directing and drunken camerawork really got in the way of the whole thing. So, this month, the re-shoots commenced over the long Good Friday weekend and it was much, much better. I didn’t actually realize how much of the movie, which had previously been completely wrapped, we’d needed to re-shoot until I condensed all the pages of dialog down for the actors. Nearly 60%! Wow. Guess that’s what happens when you try to combine film directing as beer drinking (two of my favorite pastimes) into a simultaneous (i.e. Glorious) event. So this time, we saved the beer till after we’d wrapped. (Much better plan).

On top of all this, Peter (sound recordist/designer) and I have been trying to work out the workflow for the next four months for the “big” films in order to have them finished in some kind of timely manner (if you can call two years timely). What the hell, it’s not like we’re Warner Brothers or something.

“I don’t want it good, I want it Tuesday!” – Jack Warner.

So with the workflow sorted out (in theory) now we go back to the unconventional realization of this goal… Meanwhile, I’m currently reading “Conversations with Walter Murch (famous/awesome film editor) and the Art of Film Editing”. Within these pages he outlines the fives steps of filmmaking that any nimrod who’s already shot six films should know: Step 1 – The Script, Step 2 – Pre-Production, Step 3 – Shooting, Step 4 – Picture Editing, Step 5 – Sound editing & design. Well, you can just go ahead and call us cinematic pioneers because we’ve already tossed those useless conformities out the window and jumbled steps 4 & 5 together. That’s right; we’re simultaneously doing our picture and sound on not one, but two films. “Big” films. Which then begs the obvious question, What the Hell were We Thinking? I think it’s pretty clear that we weren’t. And meanwhile on the meanwhile, I’m still going off on my own literal tangents and producing screenplays (in strictly the paper sense, not “producing” them as in turning them into even more films). Although I realized a few days ago I should be focusing my ubiquitous talent for verbal diarrhea towards something more constructive and less culturally damaging, like updating the blog! Okay, so this is a new leaf being turned. Right now. Swear to baby Jesus. I will be more focused on updated the blogs! (Somehow this is sounding more and more like a New Years’ resolution. Here I go resoluting again). Ack, that red underline-thingy just showed up again (guess what word that was for). Okay, it’s back to the books for me, I’ve gotta figure out how to finish editing these films before we creep into the next decade (Help me, Walter Murch!) and I’ve seriously gotta brush up on my vocabulary.

“So, this guy comes up to me and says, ‘I am the human encyclopedia. For only a handful of change, I will give you the definition of any word in the English language!’ to which I replied, ‘Well, you already fucked that one up buddy, because you just described a dictionary, not an encyclopedia!’” – Some funny stand-up comedian wearing a banana-print jacket who I saw last night at a club.

I went to a club last night, and now I’m hungover at work blabbing on a blog.

At least the girls at the coffee shop around the corner were nice to me this morning. As it turned out, two of them were hungover too. Only it’s a lot harder for them, I would imagine, you can’t really pretend to be working when you’ve got a lineup of caffeine-deprived nine-to-fivers expecting to get their Soy Milk Lattes fucking immediately. No, in that case, you’d really have to put forth the effort, hangover or not. And still, they had time to leave me a nice little note on the cardboard sleeve of my Americano-to-go… And here I go being a bad influence. No, you shouldn’t blog and work at the same time. Did you see that movie Julie & Julia? That chick got busted taking sick days from work just to blab on her blog – and where the fuck did that get her? See? There’re lessons to be learned from here, kids. Fuck around at your dayjob and someone might make a movie out of you blogosphere ramblings. I can only imagine that nobody would want that. I felt really sorry for her in that scene where her boss confronted her.

“Hungover no more, Vince!” – Girl at the Coffee Shop, as written on my coffee cup.

We’ll see, coffee shop girl, we’ll see…

If anything, the workplace is conducive to an atmosphere of pressure and immediacy when you’re writing things on “company time”. Ah, how I love those corporate clichés. I have one of those bosses like Denham on “The IT Crowd” (if you don’t know this BBC show, you seriously need to check it out!), it’s all “Team, team, team!” Alright, that’s as far as I’ll go with that, I’m not in the mood to delve further into that drivel. At any rate, next time, I’ll make sure to have the blogs all nice and done before I even get to work, and as to not interfere with our new post-production workflow schedule-thingy we’re trying out now, I’m pretty sure I can juggle all that. As long as no more stand-up comedy shows (with beers) get in the way. What a fucking distraction that is.

“Stupid beer!” – My sis.

-V.

Consumer Rehab: Month Six Ramblings.

2010-03-22T14:02:00.000-07:00

It has been a bumpy six months, willpower-wise, a couple of stumbles off of the anti-consumer wagon on a ride that’s been pretty fucking rocky, to say the least. To reiterate from last post, the challenge is this: One year, starting September 22 2009, of making no purchases of any tangible items. The goal is not really to be saving money; the goal was to quit bringing items, new or used, into the house. So far now, having arguably completed six months (or one half) of the intended mission, I have brought into the house one KISS concert t-shirt, three umbrellas (of which I still only ultimately have one) and a handful of Blu-ray movies, all of which, oddly enough, feature the Prince of Darkness as one of the central characters. And to illustrate exactly how the Consumer Rehab mission works: KISS concert, totally legal; a KISS t-shirt from the concert: illegal. Getting KISS to play the concert at my house: debatable. There'd probably be some shit left there afterwards, so I'm thinking it would be a negative on that one.

All in all, I think the experimental mission has been mostly successful, and I’m solidly back on the wagon again. Being hardcore on the wagon has produced an interesting affect this month: I find myself at the movie theatres more often than I have been in a long, long time. And I’m not talking about paying for one flick and then sneaking into three or four more at the local multiplex, I’ve actually rediscovered the little arthouse theatres, two of which are only a few blocks from my pad. Without overdoing it (as that’s my M.O. with most things in life, go big or go home, I guess), I’ve only been to see four films so far this month, with a fifth looming in the immediate future, and at a total cost of roughly twenty-two bucks, unless you’re going to count the four Guinnesses I had at the St. Paddy’s Day screening of The Commitments last week. (Yes, you can buy a beer at the theatre, and I ain’t talkin’ about no paper cup… I’m talkin’ about a glass of beer!). In which case you could call that an even forty bucks. But even at that it averages out to 10 bucks per night-out, and that ain’t so bad in my book. I’ve had to renew my memberships at both of the theatres for the year, something I hadn’t done since I went and saw The Godfather retro-screening back in 2008. I have to say, I’m quite enjoying my dark nights of cinematic pretention with the handful of film geeks in Vancouver. Most of the screenings, even at The Commitments, there were only a handful of patrons in the audience, but last night I experienced my first full-house arthouse screening, and this was at what I though was a pretty obscure flick to boot – a documentary on Clouzot’s “L’enfer”, which was supposed to have been a massively-budgeted and equally massively-crewed experimental French film financed by Columbia Pictures in 1964 and never finished or released. Well, to my utter surprise, the theatre was packed, and so the pretention rages on, evidently. I was seated beside two kids who had literally run from the Vancouver Island ferry to get to the show in time with all of their luggage, a laptop plastered in stickers, an extra pair of red women’s cowboy boots and a rolled-up and half-squashed poster of “Dr. No”. The theatre’s seats are equipped with cup-holders, but they don’t tell you that about a third of those black cup-holders actually have no bottoms in them. You could hear the clank and jangle of Snapple bottles hitting the floor as the opening credits started to roll. Pretty tricky of them, if you ask me, I guess it’s to keep all us pretentious assholes to keep from getting too pretentious or assholy. You can only be so pretentious when you’re listening to your Snapple bottle rolling down to the front row in a race with the coffee from the guy beside you and the girl’s can of Coke from two rows back. I guess most everyone else had either been there before or had already figured out the ruse designed to get you back to the concession for more. Thank Christ this wasn’t the theatre that was selling the beer. I was actually kidding about the coffee rolling down the floor, that one likely would’ve just splatted on the floor but thankfully the lip of the sippy-lid got caught on the edge of the cutout rim at the bottom of the fake cup-holder and it held fast. If anything, it elevated my respect for those annoying plastic coffee lids. Well, what can you do, I hear the entire place is run by volunteers. In the meantime, I’m quite enjoying my newfound pretentious arthouse cinema outings of the night, and it keeps me from getting into all sorts of other trouble, like writing more screenplays or something equally as culturally annoying. And at least this way I also have something to do while Avid is rendering hi-def editing files other than watching the horizontal black line making its painfully slow progress up to 100% completeness. Maybe I should install a bottomless cup holder to my desk chair at home to keep me from getting too pretentious there, too.

-V.

4. The X-Rated Italio-Giallo Series #14 (Spine 126)

2010-01-27T19:25:00.000-08:00

“Die Nacht der Rollenden Kopfe” (or: Death Carries a Cane)

Yes, Death does indeed carry a cane, and he uses it, too! Uses it to grab his victims by the neck before he slashes them to death in this fun and silly Giallo from 1972! Produced within the same era as Argento’s “Bird with the Crystal Plumage”, this murder-mystery has more in common with earlier Italian Gialli than with Argento’s far more famous (and far more stylish) films later in the 70’s. The common Giallo trappings are definitely here in Death Carries a Cane, from the usual opening scene that provides a material witness to the catalyst murder, to the constant shots of black gloves and close-ups of the straight razor used to dispatch the unfortunate victims of the kill-crazy rampage. In almost a pre-telling of some of Argento’s intermittent themes, the murder victims are all female students of a famed dance academy. Unfortunately, despite the high entertainment value, this thriller isn’t particularly well-written – by the time we get to the ending (which is actually a little suspenseful), when the murderer is finally caught and we’re privy to the identity, one of the detectives humorously sums up how the audience might feel at the revelation: “I don’t get it”. The lead Inspector proceeds to explain and it’s all wrapped up in a neat little package – except for the fact that it really doesn’t seem all that plausible. In fact, a lot of the precursory clue-finding is flat-out ridiculous – it’s a wonder they even solved the crime at all! But to reiterate, the trade-off is in the entertainment value, and for all its ridiculousness we do have a decent amount of bare flesh and spurting blood. I’d say if you can track a copy down, it’s recommended. Definitely a lot better than some of the lesser-know Gialli I’ve sat through. (Though now that I look at this review I guess this doesn’t really sound like a glowing recommendation, does it? Seriously, it’s fun.)

-V.

Consumer Rehab: Day whatever…

2010-01-20T20:56:00.000-08:00

I just started reading George Orwell’s brilliant “1984”. I’d watched the film last year and now can clearly see that it is imperative reading, even if your only intention is to see the film. There’s too much information, too many ideas, too much beauty and anger and other emotions to cover that as good as the film is, the novel will always have far more depth, meaning and even resonance than the film alone. I was reading one of the chapters about halfway through the book in a coffee shop this morning before going to the old Dayjob. I read or write in the same coffee shop every morning before starting the Dayjob. It’s a thing I like to do, and I really like to imagine that I’m doing it in a Parisian streetside café. Of course the fair-trade coffee shop on an ugly street corner in the depths of the industrial east side of my west coast Canadian city doesn’t even come close to the cafés of Paris, I go nonetheless, to spend time spending time that’s not at the Dayjob. It’s a good start to the day. Anyway, today, this morning, there I was, as usual, seated at one of the tables with Orwell’s 1984 open before my face and my empty espresso up stacked askew on the stained saucer beyond the book, when I looked over to the growing lineup at the cashier counter. The lineup always grows around eight-thirty in the mornings, people grabbing their-last chance coffee before running into their own nine-in-the-morning Dayjobs. I imagined Winston, the hero from 1984, in line at his office cafeteria with his dented tray waiting for his serving of milky soup and gin rations. I could see Winston standing in line at the coffee shop waiting for his warm blueberry muffin and Americano instead. I could see him clearly in my mind, paying for the foodstuff that was surely better than the slop they were serving in 1984. (That’s the Orwellian 1984, to clarify). But was there really a difference? While we’re all here, now, paying for our muffins and gourmet free-trade coffee, Winston got his foodstuff for free. Still had to stand in line, but it was free, because he was part of society. Part of the Work Force. And us? We’re part of the work force, too. We go to work, get paid, and then we’re “free” to use our paid monies on anything we want. Doesn’t even have to be muffins or Americanos. Can be anything – cable TV, CDs, iTunes, iPods, cameras, board games, a new couch, whatever the fuck we want. Now that’s freedom. Only we have to spend our money on that freedom. The more we spend on our Stuff, the more we have to work to get ourselves out of consumer debt. We work, get paid, and spend money, so we’re free. Or so we’re told we’re free. I don’t know, but that doesn’t sound like Freedom to me. Orwell, “1984”: Freedom is Slavery. I suppose it is, if you have to go to work more and more just to keep up with the debt that your freedom’s gotten you into. There’s so much advertising now, freedom can be considered synonymous with consumerism in the eyes of the capitalist society. That’s what capitalism is, essentially, the freedom of consumerism. The freedom to buy or sell anything. It’s all business, and business requires workers, and workers need to get paid and workers need to spend money or society will collapse as we know it. That might be squeezing everything into a too-tight nutshell, but my own idea intrigues me. Or at least in the dawning winter light of Orwell’s literature and bitter espressos, it seemed intriguing. Maybe not, but I thought I’d share it with the rest of the Party members… for free.

-V.

Fuck the Bozos!

2010-01-18T20:01:00.000-08:00

Just finished watching last year's hi-def video release of Terry Gilliam's sci-fi semi-classic “12 Monkeys”, and I've gotta say, I liked it just as much as “La Jette” (and here's to hoping an angry mob of cinephiles doesn't follow me home in the dark and beat me to death with vintage film projectors), and I liked it a lot better than the first time I'd seen it, way back in '96, I think it was, at one of the downtown cinemas that no longer exists. That's not to say I didn't like it the first time I saw it – not at all – I just think I missed some of the finer nuances of the film. Like when Bruce Willis and Madeleine Stowe have that film-philosophical scene inside the movie theatre during a Hitchcock retrospective, where Bruce Willis muses verbally on how films are different to you when you watch them at different times in your life. The films you watched before haven't changed, but they do take on other meanings when you're a different person. I suppose this would be one example of an incestuous allusion, as 12 Monkeys was actually now doing the same thing for (or to) me as I sat watching it fourteen years later. I remember also why Brad Pitt stood out for me – because he stole every scene he was in. Well, maybe Mr. Pitt's performance in this particular film wouldn't classify at all as nuance in even the loosest interpretation of the word (or in regards that scene in the theatre either, for that matter, but the sound of the word “nuance” just seemed so right – alright, I'll quit saying it now), but there were some words to live by spoken by that social paranoiac, the epitome being when he stormed out of the 12 Monkeys headquarters calling out, “Fuck the Bozos!” Right freakin' on! That's what I'm talking about! I promptly decided to philosophically snare that little gem of a saying for myself so that I might immediately start applying such virtue to everyday life. Seriously, who the fuck has time for bozos anyway? I'm sure virtue was the right word to use there, I double-checked that in a thesaurus and the first synonym was “moral excellence”. Yes, I'm quite positive that was the word I wanted. To the bus driver who's wearing headphones while driving and missing every second stop. To the co-worker who wants everyone else to make his job easier but is too self-absorbed and ignorant to help anyone else out. The business owners who will blow thousands of dollars on frivolous things but claim there's no money for raises, or additional staff to help with the workload. The people who fuck the day away on the internet and then complain that there's too much work to be done on such a small staff. The people who won't move over when they're taking up the whole sidewalk, the people with umbrellas who still walk under awnings in the rain, the taxi cabs who think the traffic signs must apply to everyone but themselves, the drivers who speed out of unmarked alleys in the dark and look shocked when they almost run over a pedestrian, oh yes indeed, Fuck the Bozos! With the world full of them, can we seriously afford to be giving undue attention to all of them? Christ, that would take an entire lifetime. There are other bozos around who seem to enjoy bitching about everything, so let's let those bozos take on (or continue on with) that duty. I'm comfortable with that. Bozos “A” will call out bozos “B”, and then we can sit back stress-free with socially paranoid grins on our faces watching the monkey show and checking out some old films again, now that we're completely different people with new sets of views on the important things in life. Yes, this is me wallowing in the brilliance of 12 Monkeys; dig it. (Insert sigh of satisfaction here).

-V.

3. The 666 Special Edition X-Rated Kult DVD (Spine 4)

2010-01-17T17:45:00.000-08:00

Massacre at Central High

A few months ago, friend of mine was talking about how most revenge films are right-wing, purely by nature. I do personally believe this to be true. Another friend of mine, much more recently, was crashing on my couch one night when he threw in the Neil Jordan film “The Brave One”. I do like The Brave One, but I'd forgotten how it was actually attempting to portray Jodie Foster's revenge scenario in a more left-wing manner – or at least, some of the morality behind the revenge. There are, I'm sure, other revenge flicks out there that wind up portraying the old “eye for an eye” without leaning completely to the right, by addressing other, possibly more emotional, issues with the action of vengeance. When I first put in the X-Rated Kult DVD triple-six special edition of "Massacre at Central High", I found this (almost immediately) to be a pretty good film, and I thought it was going to be an excessive in left-wing revenge filmmaking circa the early seventies in America. And I stress, thought it was going to be...

Massacre at Central High opens up with an establishing shot of the school and main setting, while a few of the students straggle along before getting to their first class. Once inside the school, we see actor Robert Carradine (pre-"Revenge of the Nerds") scrawling a red swastika on one of the lockers just before we meet leading character David in that same hallway. David is a new transfer student, who has a friend Mark, and it's Mark who's already “set him up” with the cool kids. Turns out, the cool kids are nothing but a mean group of bullies, and are described by one of the students as “the Gestapo squad” (though I might be paraphrasing the “squad” part of that quote). Anyway, the point is clear enough; and David isn't really grooving the the Gestapo Squad's social tact, so he breaks free from the group, which puts stress on Mark, his friend who's still socially tied to the group. After a confrontation between David and the rest of the Gestapos during an attempted gang-rape of two of the female students, in which the Gestapos get the proverbial shit beaten out of them (David is something of a high school warrior), they ill-advisedly try to get David back on their side, to join forces with the power, instead of creating opposition with it (him). Things don't turn out the way they want, and the Gestapos end up crushing David beneath a car he's fixing, permanently crippling him. Here, then, we are introduced to the fatal revenge plot of the film. However, much to my surprise, the bullies are dispatched quickly and the plot takes a dramatic turn towards the likes of George Orwell's Animal Farm, using the student body in place of animals as they try to re-establish some kind of political hierarchy now that the previous totalitarian leadership has been abolished, permanently.

Massacre at Central High, I have to say, threw me for a loop – and in such a good way. I'd read a few reviews on the internet holding this little-seen American cult film in high regard, and I can see why. I'm sure this movie was marketed as drive-in fodder, when there's so much more it has to offer. Even the exploitable elements – the action, the murders, the nudity from nearly all of the leading players, both female and male -- all fit so well inside the political story and high school lives of the characters that they actually cease to be true elements of exploitation, rather lending to the quality of the whole film and all the characters and their relationships therein. I can say I haven't seen a movie about high school kids I've enjoyed so thoroughly since the film noir “Brick” a couple of years back. To really amplify the kind of people this story is about, there are no adult characters in the movie (save for a few non-speaking extras at the end of the film), no teachers, cops, parents. A principal is spoken of, once, but never scene or heard from on-screen. Like the Animals of Orwell's Farm...

Massacre at Central High comes highly recommended, if you can track down a DVD copy (even a crappy one) online. This X-Rated Kult DVD was presented in an Academy aspect ratio, but it looked open-matte to me, so I zoomed it into 16x9 and the framing looked pretty good. Thankfully, the English version on this title came watermark-free.

-V.

1. The "Evilspeak" 2-DVD-set-box X-Rated Kult DVD (Spine 118)

2010-01-12T21:26:00.000-08:00

About the X-Rated Kult DVD (mini-series)...

X-Rated Kult DVD is a now-defunct European cult movie distributor, their claim to fame is really having released well over a hundred titles on special-edition PAL DVDs and casing them in large plastic clamshell cases (reminiscent of the old Warner VHS clamshells), often with multiple versions of the artwork printed for each title. Releasing titles from Jess Franco, Jean Rollin, Luigi Cozzi and a slew of other horor/exploitation filmmakers, both European and American, over the few years they were in business X-Rated Kult DVD built up quite the impressive library, utilizing just as impressive splashy cover artwork. Other than Criterion, I can't think of another DVD company that used such an original and consistent concept for branding their releases. In fact, I'd say the the Kult DVD were far more original and consistent in their packaging than Criterion. As the company has ceased releasing their PAL special editions a couple of years ago, I felt lucky to have found a handful of them at a horror movie retailer in Milan called Bloodbuster (they were featured in one of Rue Morgue magazine's 'Travelogues of Terror' a while back), and you can still order some of the titles: bloodbuster.com

Only recently, I've started cracking open those awesome clamshells. (When possible, I've included the X-Rated Kult DVD artwork, but some of the jpeg quality is not great, sorry about that).

“Ein Computer programmiert vom Teufel personlich!”

I already knew when I had this two-disc, three-film-version of the Clint Howard splatter film in my hands that Anchor Bay had already released an uncensored version in North America. As per my opening paragraphs, it was definitely the packaging that got me with this one. Plus three versions of the film..! The uncensored 100-minute version of this eighties American horror film was also presented in anamorphic widescreen, so I figured the print would be pretty good. When I finally opening this baby up, I found that the two discs were mislabeled – Disc 1 said it was disc 2, and vise-versa. So having accidentally put the original 87-minute R-rated version in the DVD player, I was suddenly horrified to find that it was only presented in a German language dub with optional Dutch subtitles! Oh, crap. I had to switch the discs anyway, so I threw in the uncensored version, and thankfully, there was an English option without any subtitles – however, if you choose to watch the film without the Dutch subtitles, the subtitles are replaced with a handy (thankfully little) note at the bottom of the screen informing us North American viewers that this film is only intended for sale in Europe. I though this was a little unfair of them, I'd bought the goddamned thing in Europe! Then again, how did they know I was going to do that, right? Well, back to the print, and all in all it was in pretty decent shape, but I couldn't help think that the Anchor Bay version might've blown this out of the water. I can't say though, not only had I never watched the Anchor Bay version, I'd never even seen this film before! As the film goes, it was actually pretty cool, if extremely heavy-handed in its seemingly endless set-up... but what a payoff.

Clint Howard, younger brother of famous film director and American Graffiti/Happy Days star Ron, plays an orphaned teen attending a military school. He's bullied by the sports coach, he's bullied (endlessly) by his teammates and roommates, he's bullied by the priest, he's bullied by the Sargent and the Colonel and the Colonel's secretary (who steals his Satanist book). I guess you can see where this is headed. Clint, here named Coppersmith (or “Copperdick”, as his roommates taunt him), had been using the Satanic book (before it was stolen from him) and the academy's library computer to secretly translate the text of Satanic vengeance as scribed by some long-ago murdered Satanic Cult leader named Estaban (don't worry, there's a hilarious prologue explaining this whole backstory character). The computer graphics are as advanced as those in Superman III, but that's not much of a shocker as both films were from the same era (I just wanted to offer a more mainstream example of the computer technology). As the story should go, the computer becomes possessed, Coppersmith becomes obsessed, and everything comes to a bloody head in the last fifteen minutes of the movie, with a real show-stopping finale. That at least made it worth sitting through the first eighty minutes of pure set-up. This one really took its time, and I have to say I was a little surprised at that, even other films of this ilk never took that long to start paying off... but as I said, Evilspeak did pay off in spades. Of course, I'm talking about the uncensored version here, I don't know if the original and twelve-minute-shorter US cut was anything so gorily spectacular.

Well, as I'm a sucker for packaging, I have a few more X-Rated Kult DVD to go through yet, I'll be reviewing four more for this blog and one for the Jess Franco Fan blog (unabashed self-promotion: see sidebar blogger links) as part of the X-Rated Kult DVD mini-series of posts. If you're interested in checking out these films, I do believe a lot of them have been re-issued by either American distributors or by UK distributors in region-free versions in one form or another.

-V.

And yes, this is an actual still from the film. Enjoy.

...And a Happy, totally belated, New Year!

2010-01-08T14:25:00.000-08:00

Well, for those of you who would like to know, 2010 is going to be pretty busy around the Creepy Six Films camp. First up, the trailers for “The Hard Cut” and its sister production should be back up on the site this month (sooner rather than later), we're replacing the old teasers with new Hi-Definition compressions. We're going to be finishing off the two feature films and finally getting them out of post-production later this year. And last but not least, if you've noticed a teaser poster in the 'coming soon' section of the website proper, well, there's going to be more fun there by the end of the year. Of course, that's all projected and time has certainly got a way of getting away from me at the most annoyingly inopportune times – like when you're trying to get three films ready for release in the same year. Where do the days go? Flying past my head in a freakishly rapid blur, that's where. But, it's a new year, fresh start and all that, right? So nose to the grindstone and I'm sure we'll have everything ready when it's supposed to be.

In the meantime, keep checking back!

-V.

A Christmas List #3

2009-12-22T06:25:00.000-08:00

Below is a list of cool things I discovered just this year (though not necessarily from 2009)... Would I steer you wrong? No way in hell! Enjoy!

Favorite theatrical release this year:
Moon.

Movies:
The Animatrix (sci-fi)
Cypher (sci-fi)
The Jacket (sci-fi)
Last Year at Marienbad (Criterion/Blu-ray)
Martyrs (horror)
Massacre at Central High (this one was hard to track down!)
Timecrimes (sci-fi)

Books:
Stephen King's Dark Tower series
“Comix” by Dez Skinn
Dean Koontz' “The Bad Place”
Joe Lansdale's “Leather Maiden”
Micheal Slade's “Ghoul”

Music:
Megadeth's “The System Has Failed”
Alice Cooper's late seventies/early eighties catalogue – including, but not limited to
“Lace and Whiskey”
“Special Forces”
“Zipper Catches Skin”
“From the Inside”

Food:
Smoked meat poutine

Graphic Novels:
Ed Brubaker's “Criminal” editions

TV:
Lost (Season 5)
Mad Men
Weeds

For getting more creative:
Moleskine lined-paper notebooks

-V.

A Christmas List #2

2009-12-20T11:41:00.000-08:00

Our friend JD’s top-ten movies of all time list (with extras)

"These are the ones that never fail to move me emotionally and intellectually. There's almost nothing under 10 years old because it usually takes a decade for a film's impact on me to really sink in."

1. Koyaanisqatsi
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey
3. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
4. The Double Life of Veronique
5. Play Time
6. The Conversation
7. The King of Comedy
8. The Trial (1963)
9. Repulsion
10. Mulholland Dr.
11. Bad Timing
12. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1972)
13. Knightriders
14. Crimes and Misdemeanors
15. Shoot the Piano Player

-JD

And stay tuned for A Christmas List #3 -- coming before Christmas!
-V.

A Christmas List #1

2009-12-20T11:34:00.000-08:00

THRILLER: A Cruel List.

I'm one of those self-proclaimed cinephiles who's of the opinion that “Thriller” is a category unto itself – and while the genre will indisputably cross-genres with the likes of mystery, noir, even horror, I think there's something, sometimes, that makes a specific movie nothing but pure thriller – straight up. Like the works of Alfred Hitchcock, Brian DePalma or Alan J. Pakula, there are just those films that no other word would be justified to describe it. Alright, here’s my list of Top-25 Thrillers! (To agree or disagree...)

1.The French Connection
2.Deathtrap
3.Psycho
4.Blow Out
5.Basic Instinct
6.Body Heat
7.La Femme Nikita
8.D.O.A.
9.Brick
10.Lucky Number Slevin
11.Rear Window
12.Body Double
13.Don't Look Now
14.Blue Velvet
15.Dark City
16.Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
17.Payback (Straight Up: The Director’s Cut)
18.The Bank Job
19.The Gauntlet
20.The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974)
21.Marathon Man
22.Dressed to Kill
23.The Usual Suspects
24.Angel Heart
25.Sisters (1973)

-V

This article turned into a trilogy (but this is it, I swear…)

2009-12-05T17:46:00.000-08:00

In addition to the Sci-Fi list part III:

This type of thing is completely within character for me – I address a specific cinematic genre, and then I go and get completely addicted to it for the next three weeks. Yes, I’m still talking about science-fiction. I’ve gone through an additional six films since creating the all-time top 30 Sci-Fi list a couple of weeks ago (which I now realize is dubiously missing The Arrival – I dug the hell out of that flick, but I guess it just didn’t stick to the gray matter enough for a listmania recall). Most of the six video-store rentals were not even worth mentioning, so unlike the articles last week, I won’t. One worth mentioning was the Adrian Brody thriller “The Jacket”, put out by Warner Independent Pictures a few years ago. I thought this was going to be something like Jacob’s Ladder (or more accurately Incident at Owl Creek), and while it’s entirely possible that The Jacket was inspired by that film, The Jacket is an experience unto itself. This is what I’d call Haunting Science Fiction. Brody plays a Gulf War vet who survives a near-fatal gunshot wound to the head, only to return to the United States where he’s convicted for killing a state trooper on an icy highway. Guilty or not, the judge and jury believe Brody to be mentally disturbed, and he’s shipped off to the local loony bin where the head doctor (no pun intended) sees fit to restrain Brody in a piss-stained sleeve-strapper and shove him into a morgue drawer overnight (and drugged to the hilt) where Brody might have an opportunity to contemplate his past. Only problem is that Brody seems to have developed the ability to contemplate his future, too.

But The Jacket wasn’t even the highlight of my latest Sci-Fi excursion. The winner of this round has got to go to Vincenzo Natali’s “Cypher”, a fantastic film on corporate espionage, set in an unspecified future. The story, starring Lucy Liu and Jeremy Northam, moves along at a perfect pace (and that doesn’t mean breakneck) with a constantly morphing plot that won’t quit on ideas, imagination or energy. The film never comes to overtly upgrade any James Bond or film noir territory, though the style and influence of each of those forms is noticeably present within the writer and director’s own storytelling, and it works perfectly in Cypher's futuristic setting. Of course, other movies from the late 90's to the early years of the millennium have tried this exact genre-crossing before, such as The Thirteenth Floor or Gattica, but never to such an epitomizing effect. Cypher is a highly engaging, totally fun, almost perfect Science Fiction film (in my book, anyway), and the Top 30 Sci-Fi list will be duly reconstructed for future listings.

-V.

The Ninja and the Comedian

2009-12-02T20:01:00.000-08:00

I went and saw Ninja Assassin with my two brothers last night, and I think the title pretty much sums the whole affair up nicely. I didn't quite get that nostalgic urgency to find the nearest back yard and start beating the shit out of each other with tree branches, karate chops and high-kicks, but close enough, it did the trick. Even the dialog at the beginning of the film was appropriately terrible, with emphatic music to match. Yes, this was just what the doctor ordered for any thirtysomething boy whose childhood summers were spent renting clamshell VHS copies of Enter the Ninja, Revenge of the Ninja, Nine Deaths of the Ninja, American Ninja (I-IV) and who could forget, Ninja III: The Domination. I still have a copy of that one (though to which exact Ninja series this was a sequel sort of escapes me now) ...Not to mention the subsequent epic backyard Ninja battles that ensued pretty much as soon as the tape was over, and before it had even a chance to complete the auto-rewind; there we were smashing broomsticks into each other and spin-throwing roof shingles stolen from the next door neighbor's renovation project to use as throwing stars. And those bastards stung! Ah, memories. Well, if I had any complaints about Ninja Assassin, it would be the gratuitous use of CG. That, and the fucking heckler who was sitting behind us.

I realized form the get-go that the heckler behind us was only trying to turn the campy film into more of a 42nd Street type of experience, he was enthusiastic, yelling at the screen and all... Unfortunately, though, the experience falls flaccid when one's repertoire consists of screaming “Shut up!” at the main characters on the movie screen, or “about time!” or “Yeah! Yeah!” Or my personal favorite, yelling to the Ninja, “Just shoot him! Shoot him!” to which even the heckler's friend had to lean over and explain, “Uh, this is a sword fight.” Now, when crackerjack insults or witty observations or verbal retorts go right, they can be pretty damned funny – and let's face it, Ninja Assassin wasn't exactly the type of movie that required a full assault of intellectual attention – then this sort of audience-participation atmosphere can be pretty fun. Hey, I can dig it, and I've been to screenings where this sort of thing went really right. But when you have a forty-something acting like a drunk nineteen-year-old and his best material is “Hey, just like Superman!”, well, perhaps its time to realize that maybe all those people who just shelled out twelve bucks a pop might not have wanted to spend their money hearing YOU. And it might be best to get back to the drawing board and see if you can't come up with some material that might at least be humorous after a little practice, if wit and good timing are the types of things that completely escape you. Misfortune reared its ugly head for a second time that night, clearly in my direction, after I turned to the heckler and suggested he might be better off doing just that – working on some better material – before proceeding with his battle of wits vs. the movie screen. I suppose I hurt his feelings, but I did not expect his response would be to get louder, and abysmally stupider. At least around this time the movie itself went up a few decibels for the non-stop Ninja action finale, and the verbal assault was adequately drowned out.

So to all you aspiring comedians, if you're going to subject a theater full of people to your wit and humor, make sure you understand what both of those are first. If you need a dictionary, then just keep your mouth stuffed with popcorn and save the rest of us your tedium.

Much appreciated.

-V.

Victoria Comic Con 2009

2009-11-25T06:57:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to our Victoria Comic Convention door prize winner,
Syd Froman!

Thanks very much for your participation and enthusiasm!

(pictured below): "Tromette" Elena Esovolova, who helped
James Tyce & Rob Carpenter with the draw.

In addition to the Sci-Fi List ...(The Sequel)

2009-11-20T14:19:00.000-08:00

Alright, after the last three sci-fi flicks earlier this weekend, I’m onto a new double-feature, and my hope of experience some better science fiction have come to fruition!

First Feature: “The Animatrix”. While I quite enjoyed the first Matrix film so many years back, I was not won over by the two sequels that followed. I can’t rightly recall if it was because of this I'd initially avoided The Animatrix, but after seeing this film I was actually sorry I’d waited so long. The Animatrix boasts some real science-fiction ideas and short stories in its nine-segment structure, and stylistically, the stories range from the sexy to the cool to the amazing. As a complete collective, these animated shorts not only show the potential of good science fiction writing, they showcase the true potential of the whole idea of the Matrix. As far as I’m concerned, this was the only sequel The Matrix needed. Highly impressive. Worth adding to the list? Yes!

Second Feature: “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (Or otherwise known as “1984” or “George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four”). I am a fan or Orwell’s work, but I had not read this novel. Is it really any surprise then, that this film was completely not what I’d expected? What I did expect was a dystopian science fiction film with a main consideration to the advent of “Big Brother”. What I was not expecting was such a purposefully bleak rendition of a totalitarian nation in the name of pure, ultimate power for a handful of bureaucrats, designed at the decimation of the human spirit and mind. This story was beautifully told through Michael Radford’s film, with images and scenes that haunted me well after the movie was over. Still, as strange as it is for me to write this, I don’t believe this was one of the best science fiction films I’ve ever seen; one of the better ones, absolutely. But I have a seeded suspicion that my outlook on this film could grow over time, as it did with the likes of Blade Runner. The Future will tell.

-V.

In addition to the Sci-Fi List... (Part 1)

2009-11-17T20:59:00.000-08:00

I became so intrigued with my own Sci-Fi list I decided that I really had some catching-up to do in this genre… Cinematically speaking. I was practically the last one I knew of (in my generation, anyway) that had seen Blade Runner, while everyone else I knew was hailing it as one of their favorites. Truth be told, I didn’t even particularly like it all that much the first time I saw it. But it did haunt me for a while… I guess it’s digression time, so I’ll stop right there. Alright, back to catching up. I rented a handful of Sci-Fi blu-rays and DVDs from the local Rogers Video and watched three in one night. Unfortunately for me, none of the three were really worth writing about (I know, so why am I bothering? ‘Cause I’m a loudmouth who can’t keep my trap shut, obviously). Okay, so here are the first three sci-fi films that left little impression on me…

1. “Outland”. Yes, the One With Sean Connery. Truthfully, he’s the best thing about this movie. Well, actually, the story and art direction are pretty good too, essentially this is a police procedural movie that starts out as a murder/conspiracy mystery and ends up as an action picture. That it is set in the future (and on Jupiter) is the only thing science-fiction about this film – which to me makes it not science fiction at all. All the ideas put forth are completely action/cop movie with the exception of the use of broad public surveillance – still a new idea back in 1981, but this idea, even as science-fiction, is so poorly thought out, we have scenes where the bad guy is hiring a hit over a public video broadcast and then the two hitmen show up and stop directly in front of two surveillance cameras to put their guns together. Seemingly anyone can follow the movements of anyone else on the video monitors and just pop up to meet (and/or help and/or ambush) them in any given place. On second thought, I think it was the awareness of surveillance (or lack thereof) that was particularly not well conceived.

2. “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (2009) …Yes, the One With Keanu Reeves. In this film, Reeves is also good. The timely updating was quite good also. It certainly felt like an honest science-fiction film. The script seemed to do – or at least want to do – everything right …or in the right order. Or in the right way… I don’t know, but something definitely went wrong. Like when you get that hollow feeling in the middle of your belly but you’re not exactly sure why, something’s happening but you can’t quite figure out what exactly is going awry. Not a horrible movie, but definitely not memorable sci-fi, either.

3. “2010” The Sequel to the Stanley Kubrick Movie. This was the best of the three, and the most science-fiction of the sci-fi movies of my weekend (so far). The movie looked really great, but presented an awkward disposition for me right off the bat – I couldn’t help but compare it to Kubrick’s film, despite the intense effort I was putting into doing exactly the opposite. Maybe I was thinking about it too much. I liked the set-up (picking this story up as a real sequel) and I liked the execution of most of the ideas, but the movie went on too long and the explanation for the menacing spreading dark spot on the side of Jupiter in the third act just didn’t do it for me. Not a total waste of time, but obviously this isn’t exactly a rousing recommendation, either.

Well, in retrospect, none of these movies were a waste of time, I’m glad I watched them all. Only now I feel I can put them behind me without any solid plans to reconsider them in the near future. I’ve got two more sci-fi flicks to go this weekend, so till next time…

-V.

Top 30 Sci-Fi list… for now!

2009-11-12T12:10:00.000-08:00

Okay, so it’s been a lazy couple of days, and this isn’t quite a full-fledged article… But hey, (as I'm sure I've said numerous times before) who doesn’t love a good list, am I right?

1. A Clockwork Orange
2. Blade Runner
3. Robocop
4. Back to the Future
5. Videodrome
6. The Road Warrior
7. 12 Monkeys
8. Alien
9. Planet Terror
10. Mad Max
11. 2001
12. Moon
13. The Thing
14. V for Vendetta
15. The Fly
16. The Terminator
17. Galaxy Quest
18. Planet of the Vampires
19. Starship Troopers
20. It! The Terror from Beyond Space
21. THX 1138
22. Solaris (2002)
23. Equilibrium
24. I, Robot
25. Serenity
26. Next
27. X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
28. Space Truckers
29. The Man who Fell to Earth
30. Alien: Resurrection

-V.

I like... Musicals?!

2009-11-10T14:59:00.000-08:00

Holy crap. On October 31st (a scary night, indeed) I was struck by the truth of one of the most unlikely, ludicrous facts that I'd never stopped to think about. Perhaps I'd never stopped to think about it for a reason... but now I'm forced to admit it.

It was Halloween night, and what happened to be playing on cable television, but “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”? Cliché, perhaps. But that doesn't make it any less entertaining. I knew I liked this musical, I've appreciated it for some time now. But what I didn't realize what exactly how may musicals I did like, and in fact have as a part of my movie library...

I also know that as of late I've also been getting very much into Alice Cooper, but watchng a rock star putting on a theatrical performance isn't exactly the same as witnessing an actual musical production. Thinking on this, I decided to make a list (Hell, who doesn't love a good list?) of the musicals that not only I like, but that actually have a copy of in that library of mine.

1.Brian DePalma's Faustian “Phantom of the Paradise”. Don't ask, just see it.
2.Troma's “Poultrygeist” (This was the musical Troma was made to make! Thank you, Lloyd Kaufman).
3.“The Rocky Horror Picture Show”... another 70's classic.
4.“Repo: The Genetic Opera”. (Actually, this is a Rock Opera as opposed to a musical. There is only one word spoken in the entire film, the rest is sung. Amazing). Created and directed by the guy who brought you Saw II, Saw III and Saw IV.
5.“Cry Baby” ...from John Waters. Need I say more?
6.“The Blues Brothers”. This would have had higher marks, but I don't think the story relies on being told through the music. But make no mistake, the energized musical blues numbers are phenomenal, directed by the man responsible for Michael Jackson's “Thriller”).
7.“Sweeney Todd”. Tim Burton's somewhat commercially-successful adaptation of the stage musical, “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”.

I also have a soft spot in my heart for the Frank Oz-directed “Little Shop of Horrors”, but that's a tough classification for me. On one hand, it is a very entertaining musical filled with great songs... but then, it's not really on original musical. I love the original Roger Corman film even more, and the fact that this musical did not have its genesis as a musical seems strange to me to include it in the above list. But if you must, you can call this one Number 8.

-V.

60 of the Coolest Flicks around: UPDATED & UNCUT! Almost Brand New!

2009-11-03T19:36:00.000-08:00

Over five & a half years ago I made a list of my top 60 then-favourite slices of cinematic mayhem. At the time, though I knew a top-whatever list would be inherently a “work-in-progress”, I did harbour delusions of it being at least somewhat definitive. Nearly six years and an industry home-video format changeover later, I realize now that my personal tastes have changed a lot. I've compiled her my “new” Top 60 all-time favourite movies list, and out of both curiosity and nostalgia, I've also posted my original list for comparison...

The New Top 60 (October, 2009):

60. D.O.A. (1949)
59. Ed Wood
58. Dressed to Kill
57. Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry
56. Blow Out
55. The Shawshank Redemption
54. Natural Born Killers
53. Dirty Harry
52. The Warriors
51. Blood Simple
50. Silence of the Lambs
49. La Femme Nikita
48. Dog Day Afternoon
47. Body Heat
46. Robocop
45. Basic Instinct
44. House of 1,000 Corpses
43. Don't Torture a Ducking
42. Le Couperet (The Axe)
41. The Exorcist
40. The Conversation
39. Pickup on South Street
38. Contempt
37. Bad Timing
36. Man Bites Dog
35. High and Low
34. The Usual Suspects
33. Repulsion
32. Apocalypse Now
31. Superman
30. Audition
29. Vampyros Lesbos
28. Zombi 2 (or: Zombie)
27. An American Werewolf in London
26. Videodrome
25. Eyes Wide Shut
24. Deathtrap
23. Psycho
22. Poultrygeist
21. Dust Devil (uncut version)
20. Goodfellas
19. Deep Red (Profonso Rosso)
18. Jackie Brown
17. Mean Streets
16. Re-Animator
15. Suspiria
14. Day of the Dead (Romero's)
13. The Stendhal Syndrome
12. Sin City
11. Big Trouble in Little China
10. Dawn of the Dead (again, Romero's)
9. Full Metal Jacket
8. Blade Runner
7. Martin (1978)
6. They Live
5. Tenebrae

4. Iron Man (Shinya Tsukamoto)

3. Grindhouse
2. The French Connection
1. A Clockwork Orange

Ironically, the new #1 was my all-time favourite movie for years on end, so long ago, until it fell victim to over-watching (the coupe de gras was actually seeing in in a repertory theatre – which has since been torn down...). It had since disappeared from my top-ten spot for almost fifteen years. I suppose enough time has gone by it's found its way back there. Anyhoo, the original list from years back is down below...

60 of the Coolest Flicks around (original list, 5 & 1/2 years back)

2009-11-03T19:30:00.000-08:00

#60. Fingers
#59. The Getaway
#58. City of Lost Souls
#57. Foxy Brown
#56. The Devil Came from Akasava
#55. Branded to Kill
#54. Five Easy Pieces
#53. The Beyond
#52. 5 Dolls for an August Moon
#51. Mannanja (A Man Called Blade)
#50. The Blues Brothers
#49. The Evil Dead
#48. Ichi the Killer
#47. The Warriors
#46. Rock & Roll High School
#45. The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3
#44. Magnum Force
#43. Blade
#42. Die Hard
#41. Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry
#40. Don’t Torture a Ducking
#39. Read My Lips
#38. Spasmo
#37. Q (The Winged Serpent)
#36. Rear Window
#35. Dirty Harry
#34. Chinatown
#33. Bound
#32. They Live
#31. Once Upon a Time in Mexico
#30. Violent City (The Family)
#29. The Howling
#28. Pulp Fiction
#27. Robocop
#26. Dog Soldiers
#25. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia
#24. GoodFellas
#23. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
#22. Walking Tall (1973)
#21. Jackie Brown
#20. Suspiria
#19. Femme Fatale (2002)
#18. Bullitt
#17. Day of the Dead
#16. Escape from New York
#15. Return of the Living Dead
#14. Killer Condom
#13. Tenebre
#12. Little Shop of Horrors (1969)
#11. Irreversible
#10. Blow Out
#9. The Hills Have Eyes
#8. Beyond the Darkness (Buried Alive/Buio Omega)
#7. Big Trouble in Little China
#6. Brain Damage
#5. Kill Bill (Vol. 1 & 2)
#4. Re-Animator
#3. Dawn of the Dead
#2. From Dusk Till Dawn
#1. Frankenhooker

(Summer 2004)

-V.

Classic Horrors, Day 10: I'm a dirty rotten cheater.

2009-11-01T17:57:00.001-08:00

Okay, so it's the last day of this Halloween horror blog series, which was supposed to be about classic horror films in Hi-def. Well, for this final post, what we have here is a Halloween horror treat on hi-def, though whether it's a bona fide classic or not, well... mainstream opinion might say flat-out no way. I do, though, have a classic to look back on... but it sure as heck ain't hi-def. Well, not yet, anyway, I guess we can see what the future will hold.

Rob Zombie's “House of 1,000 Corpses”... No, as much as I enjoy this flick, I can't rightly call it a classic. It is, however, a great example of the genre. And despite its many classic influences, Zombie managed to create a pretty original psycho-slasher Halloween film for his freshman effort. Funny, I just realized that out of Zombie's four feature films to date, three of them take place on Halloween, the exception being The Devils Rejects (his masterpiece, as far as I'm concerned). “Corpses” takes place over October 30th and 31st in the mid-seventies, where a group of college-type kids are driving across the country trying to write a book on wacky roadside attractions. They come to Captain Spaulding's Fired Chicken and Gasoline station, which also happens to be a museum of questionably genuine Freaks of Nature and houses a thoroughly original Murder Ride... and we're left to presume the kids drive up to this place mere hours after a robbery-turned-double-homicide has just occurred. This is only the lead-up to far more diabolical shenanigans, which all occur after they've left the murder ride with their chicken and gasoline -- when, in an homage to Brian DePalma's Blow Out, the tire is shot out on their vehicle en route to bringing a crazy-cutie hillbilly rocker chick (Sheri Moon) back to her hidden-in-the-woods house, where the front driveway is decorated with rows of crucified scarecrows and dummies, and the porch decorated with severed doll parts. Obviously, things are only going to get worse for the wayward authors and their two girlfriends. And oh, boy, do they every get worse, and they get worse with style. “House of 1,000 Corpse” will always be a Halloween staple for me, though whether it ever achieves the cult status of its inspiration(s), only time will tell. But it sure looks pretty in HD!

Now, onto the Standard Definition content – a true classic, and one of the last things I watched before Halloween passed us for yet another year - the 1970's supernatural mystery series “Kolchak: The Night Stalker”. Carl Kolchak is a newspaper reporter who always winds up stumbling into the super-weird cases, much to the chagrin of his editor-in-chief Tony Vincenzo (that Vincenzo is actually an Italian first name, not a last name, seems to matter not at all). Based on two popular made-for-television movies written by iconic horror author Richard Matheson (I Am Legend, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Duel, Hell House), Kolchak soon after came into a whole series of his own, though the series proved to be not as popular as the original television movies. I don't know for sure, but maybe it was partially because the series only extended the themes in a “further adventures” sort of way instead of expanding on any of the lives of the amiable leading characters. Personally, I loved the basic approach. The episodes in the series are intelligently written in the face of the sheer cheesiness, and the thought that went into making each of Kolchak's supernatural investigations completely nonidentical from one another almost showcased a certain brilliance in and of itself. But I think ultimately that the key here was the retention of the humour in nearly all of the situations, whether it was Kolchak finding himself in the most unlikely and life-threatening of predicaments, or if it was Tony Vincenzo (I just like saying that name) berating him for neglecting the “normal” story assignments he was supposed to be following (a most common shtick – when really, it wasn't Kolchak's fault that supernatural trouble had a way of finding him around any and every corner of Chicago)!

Kolchak was played to deadpan perfection by the energetic Darrin McGavin, who's claim to fame had to have been playing the father in Bob Clark's “A Christmas Story”. But then, Bob Clark's Canadian Christmas movies could be a whole other blog... And that's for later.

Happy Halloween!

-V.

Classic Horrors, Day 9: Deliverance time.

2009-10-28T18:01:00.000-07:00

Stephen King listed this film as one of his tip-top scary films of all time in his non-fiction book on creative horror, “Danse Macabre”. And if Stephen King says it's horror, well... But I think what Stephen King meant was that Deliverance evoked fear and intensity, not that it was a horror film, per se. And evoke fear and intensity it does, and it does it well. Almost too well. This is actually one of those films that I can't watch too often. I wouldn't go so far as to call the film grueling, it's actually slightly too entertaining to be that dark, but make no mistake, it is dark. Deliverance is a film about four city slickers driving into the country for a little canoe trip. They piss off some inbred locals, and well, I there have been enough survivalist horror films for you to guess what happens next. Not that you'd much have to guess at any rate, Deliverance, while starting off the survivalist horror trend of filmmaking (which became hugely popular in Canada in the late-seventies to mid-eighties), has become something of a culturally iconic film, not even due to the fact it stars a very young Burt Reynolds. It's the story of suspense and survival that really clinches it. That, and the unforgettable “Dueling banjos”, of course.

There is also the film's subtext of industrialization and the expansion of suburbia that play to the more unsettling horrors of Deliverance. When our four protagonists are victimized and hunted by the locals, they are forced to run and, battling against the elements of the habitat, and thereby paralleling the situation of the inbred antagonists against the expansion and annexation by acceptable, or “civilized”, American society.

This is one of those rare films that show the horror of America in a timely situation, yet it's become a classic because of timeless themes and taut storytelling. Scary indeed.

-V.

Classic Horrors, Day 8: It's Jason time.

2009-10-26T18:59:00.000-07:00

I love “Friday the 13th”. I've always loved it. I grew up starting with the original classic, and I got into the following Jason sequels later, the way the films were meant to be experienced. It's not due to any great foresight, I can tell you that – yes, I'm just really that old. At least I wasn't old enough to start this decades-long trek (obsession?) out in the theatre. No, sir, it was though handy VHS I got my first jolting experience with the much-beloved slasher genre. It would be almost twenty years before I'd finally catch Jason – in “Jason X” – in the local cinema. Anyhoo...

Last week, during an ass-kicking pumpkin carving session, we threw on the new “Trick 'r Treat” flick from Warner, produced and shot by the usual suspects from Bryan Singer's Bad Hat Harry Productions. And on a re-watch (yep, I dug it that much), I heard a joke from the folks partaking in the Audio Commentary, verbally burning the Friday the 13th remake. I couldn't condemn nor defend the remake myself, I never did see it, and after the abysmal experience of trying to sit through The Hills Have Eyes remake (sorry, fans), I can't say a watching of the Friday remake would be happening in any foreseeable future. And here I sit, not even feeling any itty bitty twang of missing out. Man, do I ever have a habit of digression. Once again, anyhoo... It reminded me of another classic released on hi-def this last year (well, I guess the remakes are good for something, after all).

Friday the 13th has been given the sub-genre label of slasher flick in North America, while overseas it's played merely as a thriller. Much like (and much in common with) the Italian Gialli, Friday the 13th is clearly constructed as a conventional thriller, taking the plot from Agatha Christie's “Ten Little Indians”, where each character it pegged off one by one, until there is only one left...

This template is put to gory use is countless American slasher films. In the Italian Gialli the characters that are murdered one by one are each done so for individual reasons – most commonly, they are coming to know too much about the killer or his motives, or they have simply gotten in his (or her) way. In the slasher flick, the victims are set up like bowling pins, with the sole intention of knocking them down in the most creative way imaginable. There is often no real reason for the kill-crazy rampage, and this is probably where the slasher film ultimately crosses the line from thriller to horror film. The group of camp counselors (or mall shoppers or bowling sorority sisters or whatever have you) will wind up stuck in an unwinnable situation where they are given no choice but to wait and see who will be picked off next. Granted, if the characters are even marginally well-written, this can generate a good amount of suspense and tension (points for the thriller aspect), but because we know that there is really no complexities to the films' homicidal motives other than crazed anger, mindless vengeance, or some gory survival situation, the sheer concept of the entire affair naturally pulls the film into Horror territory, and away the film goes gleefully. Because of the horror-oriented motive behind the killings, this then inevitably created iconic status for so many slasher villains, as the focus of the evil fell completely on the villain himself, with seemingly no reason (or at least no good one) for the endless string of killings (especially as sequels began to pile up, turning the films into franchises). Usually the reason for said homicidal rampages would be explained in a twist ending, and the slashers with the more outrageous twists would be the ones most remembered and destined for cult-film status. But there were always the “creative kills” to showcase each film and its inevitable sequel, each one trying to outdo the last. At least, that how it was back in the 80's. And the slasher sub-genre is certainly a product of the 80's, if anything is. Most will say it was John Carpenter's Halloween that launched the popularity of the slasher flick, but what about the oft-forgotten (or at least criminally underrated) Black Christmas? While both of these film had something to do with the kicking off of the slasher craze, I do believe it was Friday the 13th that was responsible for the actual popularization of the sub-genre.

But the “Ten Little Indians” plot led to another slasher-genre-character phenomena – that of the Final Girl, upon which many an article and literary and cinematic essays have been exploring. It would seem simply logical that within a plot that sees each victim killed one by one, there would inevitably be a “final” victim, and the mathematics of chance would tell us that the percentage of that final victim being a girl is... well, it should be fifty, but as we all know from experience, the chances of the final victim being a girl is more like 110 %. Regardless, essays on the Final Girl delve into such deep social and feminist connotations one wonders if the filmmakers had any of this in mind, and if the social subtext was really meant to be this rich, in the first place. Well, that's a bit of a lie – I don't wonder that at all. When that last girl is running through the woods and she happens upon the machete that will undoubtedly put and end to the killer by decapitation, I have my doubts regarding any social context that may have been in the film, purposely or otherwise.

-V.

Classic Horrors, Day 7: Ash to Ash

2009-10-24T10:17:00.000-07:00

Sam Raimi's Evil Dead films, I dare say, are probably some of the most loved horror films in modern cinema. And because of this, there's really not much to say on the subject, though I will say this – the hi-def releases of both Evil Dead II (Anchor Bay Entertainment – I still can't bring myself to call it Starz) and Army of Darkness (Universal, since they've had the rights back from Anchor bay for some time now) do both of these classic horror/comedies justice. Both films sport some film grain, but the overall scope, clarity and richness in color really stands out. The half-destroyed-y-shotgun-blast face of Bad Ash (Army of Darkness) shows more gory depth than I've even seen before. That being said, there's still a soft spot in my heart for Anchor Bay's original 4,000-copy limited double-DVD edition of Army of Darkness, and while that particular film transfer drew some online controversy by those who dared to compare it with other overseas releases, I will always have space on my shelf for that DVD set.

The blu-ray for Evil Dead 2 brings to life all of the cocked-eyebrow, sneering and smirking expressions of Bruce Campbell, who plays leading character Ash in all three Evil Dead films, whether all of his gleaming bloody facial wounds are in continuity or not. While the horror mythology of the Evil Dead films are based around the writings of H.P. Lovecraft and his fictional Necronomicon – or “Book of the Dead” – the molesting woods of Evil Dead I and II, and the ginormous attacking tree in the climax of Evil Dead II obviously reminded me of the kid-eating tree from Poltergeist. Hell, I could've had a Night of the Trees horror marathon, and included William Friedkin's The Guardian! (Whatever happened to that movie?) Also aping the interdimentional vortex from Poltergeist, we have our hero Ash sucked back through time along with his Oldsmobile Delta Royale, a clever gag by Raimi who must've been either clairvoyant enough, or going through a just-in-case scenario, to render the vehicle displaced in time and henceforth able to be shot within a medieval sequel.

The opening of Army of Darkness picks up right where Evil Dead II leaves off – sort of. In a screwball twist, the end of Evil Dead II left us with the impression that Ash was being hailed as a God and the slayer of the “deadites”. The beginning of Army of Darkness has Ash being whipped as he's dragged off in chains and about to be fed into a pit of spiked walls and mutated creatures. This off-the-wall subversion of the original idea only fits in perfectly with the rest of Army of Darkness, where shotguns arrive in Ash's hands from out of nowhere, witches are brewing stews in cauldrons right in front of everyone yet nobody notices she's there until she starts screeching like a banshee, shotguns don't usually need reloading, but when they do, the shells (like the gun itself) come out of this air, horses are abandoned deep in the haunted woods only to be found again when it's necessary for Ash's escape, and throwing a princess off of the roof of the castle is okay, because evidently when she's in deadite form, only the deadite part dies and the human part will survive. Ah, those crazy and evil dead. Ash, too, is far more loudmouthed and goofy than in the first two films; in those films Ash is our begrudging and somewhat humorous hero. In Army of Darkness, Ash must come around to save the world from the deadites, but basically what he's saving the world from is his own idiocy. If he hadn't been such a prodigious macho screw-up in the first place, he wouldn't have had to save anyone from anything – a theme reinforced in the brilliant S-Mart epilogue to the story.

While a lot of Army of Darkness rehashes Evil Dead II (and likewise Evil Dead II does to Evil Dead I) – the pit of monstrosities and spiked walls in Army of Darkness is really just an elaborate take on the dangerous basement from the Evil Dead cabin, and the windmill scene is just more cabin-in-the-woods shenanigans, medieval-style – it was not at all hard to watch these films back-to-back (with only a pause between them to load the next disc). In fact, I found I loved them as much as ever. I can only hope that in the future Anchor Bay will find a source print good enough to transfer the original Evil Dead to blu-ray (or if they have one already, they get off their buts and get on it). In the meantime, fans of hi-def will have Raimi's The Quick and the Dead (there's the Dead again) and his most recent offering, Drag Me To Hell, which was scripted by Sam and Ivan Raimi, the writing team who brought you Army of Darkness. 'Nuff said, right?

-V.

Classic Horrors, Day 6: Tobe Hooper night

2009-10-21T18:20:00.000-07:00

Two of Tobe Hooper's classic horror films have been released in high definition – and with good reason, in my opinion. Both the seventies' “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and the eighties' “Poltergeist” are not just Hooper's most commercially successful films, but they both represented major genre breakthroughs in their respective decades. The latter more so due to its commercial success and its bringing new life into the classic ghost story while launching the horror film into a mainstream light, while the former was both thematically and cinematically groundbreaking in its own brutal realism and tension. As well, these are the two films that represent Hooper at his creative best – even while I absolutely love Hooper's Cannon “trilogy”, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part 2, Lifeforce, and the updating of Invaders from Mars, as well as both of his Masters of Horror episodes (Dance of the Dead and The Damned Thing); and I also think there's a lot of guilty pleasure to be had in his Harry Alan Towers-produced “Night Terrors”, another take on the writings of the Marquis de Sade, and even his shot-for-cable “The Apartment Complex”.

However, while as recently as only a year ago I'd be quick to shout that Texas Chainsaw 2 was my favorite Hooper film, I now think, after years of watching and re-watching Hooper's cannon, that his films are the most satisfying when they creatively twist gothic horror into modern settings. In this respect, I believe The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Poltergeist are the most successful in pulling this style off, with Texas Chainsaw 2 a close runner-up. And not nearly as successful, but striving for the same thing, was Hoopers' remake of The Toolbox Murders. The Toolbox Murders would be the tenement-gothic horror, but the far better films are the low-budget country horror (Texas Chain Saw Massacre), radio station gothic (Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2) and of course, suburban eighties television-generation gothic horror (Poltergeist). The Texas Chain Saw Massacre has been talked about to death over the decades (though deservedly so), but unfortunately most of the Poltergeist talk was the terrible hearsay that Speilberg had actually directed the film and had Hooper along as the supposed puppet. What should've launched Hooper's career into the stratosphere ended up torpedoing it. But is there any truth to the hearsay? Having meet Hooper at a lecture on cult films back in 2002 (jeez, has it been that long already?), the soft-spoken horror icon begrudgingly told a different version of events: Spielberg, the film's key producer, had come by the set and offered to shoot a second-unit scene in the front of the exterior location (on the suburban cul-de-sac) while Hooper was shooting scenes with the key actors on another part of the location simultaneously. While Spielberg was directing the beer-guy on the bike, a reporter from one of the trade magazines showed up on set, and that was the end of that story – and nearly the end of Hooper's commercial career (of course he would never fully recover professionally from that incident, either). I tend to believe Hooper's story, and not just because he's a helluva nice guy, either. Looking at the opening of the film, one familiar with both directors' work can see the guy-on-a-bike-carrying-a-flat-of-beer over the sweeping feel-good Jerry Goldsmith score is easily Spielberg's handwork. However, the scenes following that seem to be the work of the claustrophobia-inducing horror director Tobe Hooper (whose talents, I surmise, is exactly what got him this gig in the first place). As the camera sweeps up the stairs, following the family dog as an interesting introduction the suburban family, brings a sense of deja vu – the sweeping camera as Kirk and his girlfriend Teri wander innocently up to the house of Leatherface in '74. And coming back into the suburban living room, the camera sweeps back down, this time following Carol-Anne as she heads for the fuzzy television. Thematically, I feel Poltergeist borrows from Graham Masterton's seventies horror hovel “The Manitou”, purposefully mixing the supernatural with modern technology (though in The Manitou, the technology is in the form of a computer, in Poltergeist, it's the television and the myriad of video, film and audio-recording technology the ghost hunters bring into the house at the start of act two). But Poltergeist has a lot more to say about the social implications of its technology. The first time we see Craig T Nelson's (The Husband/Father) face is in a framed photograph on the table beside the bed, where his wife (JoBeth Williams) is sleeping alone. Where is the father/husband? Passed out in the living room, in front of the television, long after the last station has gone off the air. But even before this series of long set-up shots, we have the opening credits, playing over the American National Anthem. I wonder, would International audiences understand the implications of the Anthem, as it's normal to hear this in America (and Canada) when a network station would go off the air? Do other countries overseas play out the last of their networks' televised airtime with their own National Anthems? But it's a truthful implication, played out in sound only over a black screen until we slowly see the fade up into the blue-white pictures flashing from a television screen. This opening realism also echoes the blood-red and sun-spotted opening credits of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The long set-up shots of Poltergeist reminiscent (though a little more commercial) of the long backing shot of the manipulated and mutilated corpse at the start of Texas Chain Saw, as we hear the police-radio narration “...and in some cases, only parts of the corpse have been removed.” (Forever embedded in my head thanks to the sampling on the White Zombie song “One Big Crunch”). And do I even need to mention the similarly-themed graveyard and decomposing corpses as the horrific backdrop to both films? (Evidently I feel I did).

The differences are almost as uncanny as the similarities, though. Take a look at Chain Saw where almost every one of the good characters dies, the lone survivor ranting frantically and raving insanely on a Texas back-road. In Poltergeist, not only do none of the characters actually die, but the one famously gory scene we do get, where a man rips his own face right off of his skull, turns out to be a complete cheat. The scene, while momentarily effective, is in place solely to freak the audience out as there's no logical way that event could take place as portrayed through the character's eyes. I mean, logically speaking, what exactly could have been going through that character's mind in those moments where half his face was in the bathroom sink? There are jump cuts in Poltergeist obviously used to put the viewer on edge, while all the cut-away on Texas Chain Saw were far more cleverly edited throughout that film. (According to the imdb Spielberg himself had an uncredited hand in Poltergeist's editing). And going back to the inferences of Poltergeist's subtext of Modern America (and Americana), there is an early scene in the film that holds a heavy implication of the storytellers' cynicism that is a surprising antitheses to most of Spielberg's other stories... In “Jaws” and “Duel”, man overcomes the beast. In “Close Encounter of the Third Kind” and “E.T.”, the aliens are not only real, but they bring about positive changes in the leading characters. Even in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” the religious hocus pocus turns out to be a true and real force. In Poltergeist, while the events contained within the cinematic world are real to the characters experiencing them in that world, the aforementioned cynicism is revealed a scene at the beginning of the second act where the father, Craig Nelson, is sitting before the paranormal psychology department and giving some background on his family: the oldest daughter is 16, his wife and mother of that child is 32. But we're almost not given enough time to realize that his wife must've given birth to their first daughter when she was 16. It's this kind of pre-marital situation that could be (if one were so inclined) stereotypically classified as white trash behavior, as could the declaration and belief of ghosts and ghouls actually existing – WASPs who aren't educated enough to use birth control while having sex in their teens might also be the same people who pick up the supermarket tabloids that claim to have uncovered the existence of the elusive bat-boy, and might also be the same people whose basic extracurricular activities occur in front of the television screen – although that might be a slippery slope to go down. But I'm pretty sure it was no mistake that the perfect suburban family also happened to have a television in almost every room of the house: living room, kitchen, bedroom, and the more characters who joined the story as the plot moved on, the more televisions and monitoring equipment ended up in the house. This could also be a statement that America's answer to technological problems is more technology, and if this is in fact one of the film's subtexts (and not just me reading into things), then Poltergeist presents this in a cleverly absurd light.

Getting back to the actual plot (and back to the face-ripping guy), of course I realize that having one of the main characters in Poltergeist simply sacred off was really the only way that story could go in order to forward it's plot. Had he (or anyone for that matter) actually died, I suppose then the cops would've become involved, then lawyers, then the university grant committee for the science of paranormal psychology, and the plot would've just run off the rails. I have to say, with no deaths (other than the pre-deceased, of course) Poltergeist is an extremely effective horror film and it's clear to see why it's had such a long-lasting influence on the genre...

...Much like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I say, for a “commercially unsuccessful” horror director, Tobe Hooper's been pretty damned successful and influential in contemporary American horror cinema.

-V.

Classic Horrors, Day 5 ...more King.

2009-10-17T15:34:00.000-07:00

Stephen King rules! ...Okay, maybe I said that on day 3. But seriously, that was Children of the Corn, for god's sake. (Sorry, god). But seriously. This time, Stephen King REALLY rules. As planned, my unsuspecting sister came by for a peek into King's world with another haunted hotel tale (not The Shining, but a Stephen King Haunted Hotel double-bill wouldn't have been a bad idea, either). Tonight we present... “1408”.

John Cusack plays a semi-depressed, definitely cynical ex-good-writer who's now stuck in his own world of spiritually-dysfunctional dreck as he travels Americana coast-to-coast in search for the next great Haunted Hotel. It's the reality-TV of literature in a sense (if it indeed makes any kind of sense), basically speaking, the writer is stuck in a comfortable rut. That is, until he's obsequiously invited to stay in room 1408 at the Dolphin Hotel in New York.

Interestingly, this horror film in enhanced by a rather aggressive set-up by Samuel Jackson, who plays the hotel's owner. Admittedly, a lot of times, especially in horror fiction, a set-up forewarning of doom and gloom (if not outright bloody apocalypse) is a bit of a tension killer. In 1408 it has the opposite, and obviously intended effect – to scare the crap out of you when the events in room 1408 really get rolling. The only downside to this wonderfully constructed and executed adaptation is that the first half is slightly more successful than the latter half, still, it's a great ride on King's seemingly inexhaustible horror train.

The second half of the double bill: Rob Reiner's “Misery”. Just out this fall on Blu-ray, the new HD version more than does justice to Barry Sonnenfeld's claustrophobic winter cinematography. James Caan plays a writer who's stuck in a rut (sound familiar?) writing the ongoing historical romance series called (aptly) “Misery”. He's nearly killed in a car accident in the middle of a blizzard, then saved by his “number one fan” who also happens to have some experience nursing... which is at first good for our crippled hero, then later turns out to be so very bad for him. This is one of those ironically terrifying stories where if only one little thing had happened differently, or at least at a different time, the whole series of horrific event that followed might've been completely avoided. If only our hero writer hadn't chosen that novel to kill off the Misery character. If only the novel had been published a couple of months later. If only he hadn't let Annie Wilkes, his number-one fan, read his recent, unpublished work. If only he'd used an IBM instead of a typewriter to write the damned thing in the first place. If, if, if... Misery has a lot of those. And yet, almost in spite of itself, it creates an enclosed world of palpable tension and suspense while keeping the leading man reigned to the confines of not only one room, but to his bed, for nearly the entirety of the story. When we, the audience, are allowed to go outside for a breath of fresh air, the events that we're witness to are either frustrating (making even the outdoors seem claustrophobic) or intentionally humorous, which almost makes us dread having to go back into Annie Wilkes' house. Of course, we have to go back. We have to see what's going to happen to the famous writer she's got imprisoned in his room, stuck in his bed with both of his legs broken... We have to see... We have to.

Of course, anyone familiar with Stephen King's work will know that writing about writers is the norm. What's often overlooked, though, is King's careful attention to the motives behind the hero's writing, something usually dysfunctional, and this is the something that must be overcome by King's fictional artist. It is in this spirit that Misery the movie is fundamentally different than Misery the book. In the film, we have the horrific experiences of the hero/writer (courtesy of antagonist Annie Wilkes) that leads him to a place where, by the end of the story (film), he can finally fully achieve the full potential of his personal work, and overcome his original, destroyed work's inferred shortcomings. “I don't really know what (the book's) about,” James Caan quips to Annie Wilkes during an earlier scene in the movie. In King's far more artistically pessimistic novel, the triumph over the even-more-gruesome events causes the hero/writer, who has had to sacrifice a deeply personal work, to get his comeuppance by purely financial means, and we come to the flabbergasting realization that the best revenge would come from his ultimate selling-out and betrayal of his original artistic vision and needs. Much darker, I'd say, than Misery the film, which not only turns its back on King's artistic pessimism and challenging sub-plot of the Misery novel, but thematically does so on most of King's other work as well. Rarely does King's hero-writer get to overcome the plot's horrors to achieve personal artistic success. The hero does get to achieve some kind of spiritual success, but almost never does the artistic intention remain intact, or achievable at all, by the end of King's stories. The antagonist of The Dark Half even goes so far as to physically force, through violence and extortion, novelist Thad Beaumont into creating his next blood & thunder money-making bestseller instead of merely allowing him to proceed with a more artistically rewarding, and probably financially unsuccessful, novel. At the end of The Dark Half it doesn't appear that Thad will ever finish his arthouse book, and further reading of King's other novels will reveal an even darker finish to Beaumont's story. I find these themes especially interesting as King himself is arguably the most successful novelist of all time. While King's made a living scaring the hell out of thousands of people, perhaps this is a peek into what scares the boogeyman. Yet I still have to ask the question: Do King's heroes wind up coming out of their experiences with their integrity intact? Whether they sellout (Paul Sheldon) or not, I'd have to say that yes, they do. Or at least they seem to.

-V

Classic Horrors, Day 4: Repulsion

2009-10-13T20:18:00.000-07:00

Well, this was an interesting session indeed, I shall start with a minor digression as my intended Stephen King double-feature was temporarily postponed because my sister asked to join me on that journey. She'd just finished the Dark Tower series and is currently on a Stephen King kick. Can't blame her, really. So instead, I wen into another double-feature of sorts, but this one only half-classic. The first film was of the new breed, not the trendy new breed, mind you, there was no Prom Night or Sorority Row remake here, rather I took on Jennifer Lynch's twist on the classic Roshomon, “Surveillance”. Judging by the abysmal trailer, I did not have high hopes for this film, but I suppose my masochistic side was the one who talked me into this (that pesky devil). Turns out, the younger Lynch nailed the new twist on the old tale. I was watching it with something of a giddy anxiety, as she (the co-writer/director) gives us enough clues to figure the main thrust out very quickly, but it's the layer of un-truths that are flung at us, often two at a time, as three separate stories (or six if you count all the lying going on) unravel simultaneously. Beautifully, it all makes sense, and looks pretty stylish to boot in the back-roads world of America Lynch has created for her story. Point one for the new films. Point two would go to a movie I'd watched about a month back, “The Signal”, a story of horror and madness told by three different storytellers who subversively don't try to cleverly cross-track each others' chapter. Instead, it's told as a linear piece, and it's inventiveness lies in the entire scheme of the film, where an electronic signal has turned anyone who was tuned into a television/radio/cell phone/computer into a lunatic who still gravely and emphatically believes in their own sanity. It's actually a brilliant play of character vs. character. Alright, two points given, now onto the intended intention of this whole affair... The Classic Horror. This evening, we will be taking a look at Roman Polanski's “Repulsion”.

Repulsion is a film I firs saw years and years back. Though I did not have a memory for many of the events that took place in this film, I did remember thinking it was very slow. Well, hell, I was young. Anyway, having another look at this smart take on horror and psychosis was actually a bit of a frightening journey. It's definitely a horror film for adults, and you can see, and appreciate on some level, Polanski pushing the boundaries of censorship back in the mid-sixties. A then-unknown Catherine Deneuve (or relatively unknown) stars as Carol, a young woman living with her sister in swinging London. When her sister takes off with her boyfriend on a twelve-day Italian vacation, that's when things immediately go all to hell for poor, sexually-repressed Carol. The sexual repression and paranoia bring her psychosis to a head and things only go from bad to worse. What's great about Repulsion is that we're shown Carol's mental instability in the first shots of the movie. They're not extreme at first, but they're certainly there. One of the fundamentals of horror, either in literary fiction or in cinema, is that in horror the Terrible Thing that could happen to a character has already happened (madness, death, violence, dismemberment), or The Thing happens in the first stages of the story, and the characters within the Horror Tale are then left to dwell in, and deal with, the wake of the Terrible Thing. Of course, like any good story, the horror (or feeling of horror) is still mountable, but a film that only delivers the Threat of the Terrible Thing and then has the characters trying to outrun it, fight it, overcome it, well, that's not exactly horror. That's terror. Undeniably suspenseful (when done right), but also undeniably not horror, and the two should not be confused as often as they are. Polanski's film is a good example of horror, and still effective on a dark fall night – especially alone.

-V

Cinematic Horrors, Day 3: Children of the Corn.

2009-10-10T10:21:00.000-07:00

Okay, so this adaptation of Stephen King's short story shouldn't rightly be considered a horror classic... but this is unarguably one of those films that has lasted in the face of time passed. A cult classic, then? That might still be stretching it. But I defy you to find a horror fan who if accidentally coming upon this movie while flipping through television channels at three in the morning wouldn't stop... and watch... and stick with it to the end. That's exactly what happened to me so many years ago (over fifteen, to be sure). I've since rented the film and watched it properly at least a couple of times, and to me, it was cheesy horror fun.

Fast forward to this very summer, and imagine my surprise to find this film discussed at some length in the Taschen book “Horror Cinema”. In this book, the author suggests Stephen King's influence of H. P. Lovecraft in this tale of children gone insane within the archetype of ecclesiastical power. When the blu-ray was released, I grabbing it the first day. The movie was only a little more than I'd had memory of – basically, a cheesy adaptation of a short story that might've been better off if it had stayed short (Clive Barker was always one to champion the effectiveness of short-form fiction in the horror genre). It also seemed fall into (if in fact it didn't help spearhead) the slightly annoying style of 80's horror film, which is the structure of the one-hour set-up and half-hour pay-off. In kids' terms, you gotta wait an hour for anything fun to happen. Lucky for us, the one-hour buildup at least has some likeable, if not all that interesting, characters. As far as this one goes as a Stephen King adaptation, I'll have to agree with the Taschen author, this one feels a lot more H. P. Lovecraft, which is not a bad thing. My main complaint: I really wanted to see the big bad demon from beneath the rows at the end of the film, and for anyone who would challenge that we the audience did get to see the monster, I'll challenge back and say some colored-over fire is no monster. In spite of its weaknesses and overabundant mediocrity, a lot of Children of the Corn does work as a basic horror film. Yes, I enjoyed it, no, I probably won't need to watch it again for some time. At least Anchor Bay has offered a few goodies on the blu-ray, including five featurettes presented in hi-def, with reflections from the producers, directors, creative crew and a handful of actors (even Linda Hamilton in one of the extended interviews). I have to admit, after watching the two hours of bonus material and the affinity these creative people had for the project, I found Children of the Corn even more endearing. Yeah, I'm a bit of a sucker.

Stephen King rules!

Classic Horrors, Day 2: The Omen...

2009-10-06T19:40:00.000-07:00

The Omen is certainly a classic of the horror genre, one of those films the first time you see it it somehow gets under your skin. A simple tale of a child (Damien) born of the devil and taken in by a political ambassador and his wife, who've just lost their firstborn. Obviously a supernatural tale, the ease with which the story is told and the tension builds to frightening sequences as somewhat unnerving. However, this psychological terrorism is deluded after the first viewing, and this is where The Omen differs from others of its ilk, especially those from a similar time period; specifically, The Exorcist and Rosemary's Baby. I've found that the first of those two does not lose its potency over time, and the second one actually becomes more interesting as new details and nuances are notices upon repeat viewing. As I've said, The Omen is a simple story, and it's ability to scare and entertain are nearly flawless, the first time around. I couldn't help but wonder, on my third viewing now, if the catharsis of The Omen would've benefited from a twist in the build-up of the leading character, where the audience might not think him possibly insane at the moment we're witness to the prospect of murdering his own child. This is the turn used in Rosemary's Baby, of course, and so I suppose that wouldn't really by such a hot idea as it'd already been exploited several years previous, and arguably in a better film. But this train of though got me to a spot where I was considering the plot-moving elements of The Omen – which is the photographic premonition of victims' deaths. A prominent tabloid photography becomes entangled in the mystery of The Omen because after personally snapping two of the victims' death-premonition photos, he accidentally snaps his own when he catches himself in the mirror. On top of the premonitions, we have several religious characters delivering omens and warnings of impending death and apocalyptic doom to our lead characters. Therein lies the twist, and I can't believe I didn't notice it before. Photographer snaps photo of himself that visually predicts his death, motivating him into action, he becomes involved in the mystery and the quest to stop the Devil-child, and because of his involvement he winds up dead. The photographer would not have become involved, however, if the photo of himself hadn't held the visual prediction of his own demise – and he would not have died if he hand' become involved – so the entire incident plays back on itself and there was really no other outcome for this character other than the predetermined one. By destiny? God? By the devil himself? This question is unanswered, but as out lead character does get some answers, so he too becomes more embroiled in the apocalyptic plot, and hence, the predictions of his own demise can only ultimately come true. The characters are trapped in what is happening and there is now way out, and that is one of the fundamental characteristics of the honest horror film. This is horror.

Now, that being said, I still hold true to my declaration that The Omen does have far less replay value that The Exorcist or Rosemary's Baby (and if I might be so bold as to also suggest a reading of Ira Levin's fantastic book Rosemary's Baby), and I don't think I'm alone in this line of thinking. So it's conspiracy theory time. I do believe that the Hollywood studios have released The Omen out on blu-ray first to satiate the thirst for classic supernatural horror in us rabid fans, purposely holding back the two better titles (you know which ones those are by now). This way the rabid fans (me) will more likely pick up The Omen an add it to our personal library. Let's face it, if I had a choice of all three, when exactly would I have purchased The Omen? Possibly not at all. And truthfully, that would've been a shame. Here's to you, Damien. Thanks for the frights.

-V.

Classic Halloween Horrors, Day 1

2009-10-01T06:25:00.000-07:00

With the release of several catalogue titles in high definition, the relatively new Blu-ray format has given cinephiles another chance at re-discovering old favorites without having to hope and wait to see midnight screenings at cool downtown cinemas. Of course, that’s always the preferred way of viewing cult classics, but what’s a movie freak to do in the meantime?

Halloween is just around the corner and for me that means one thing: Horror Season! For the last few years, fall marks that particular time of the year that is any horror buff’s dream. It’s Stephen King time, horror movie popcorn time, it’s skull and witchcraft time and the time for Faustian deal-making, if one were so inclined. And for the last few Halloween seasons, I’ve done more than my part to involve myself in marathon horror-film watching, marathons that usually go into the following spring. And being an avid fan of horror, I’ve acquired my taste for it the way most have, starting with the classics. The Shining, An American Werewolf in London, many from the cannon of John Carpenter and George Romero and Wes Craven. …But then where do we go? The Italian Giallo, Paul Naschy’s lurid Spanish thrillers, the sexploitation quasi-horror films of Spain’s Jess Franco, Takeshi Miike and the ongoing series of J-horror (that was so seven years ago) and now K-horror… and now the American remakes of both of those (would that be A-horror?); and finally, as if participating in the sad epitaph on the American horror films’ tombstone, here we are sitting through, although we tell our friends we never would/will/have, the likes of many Hollywood cash-grabbing remakes of our beloved classics. I can’t believe I myself stooped to, under pressure, viewing the remake of Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes. I had to turn it off after ten minutes, and I felt a little sick to my stomach, truth be told.

But I still remember Halloween 1985, I was ten years old, we’d just gotten home from a wild night of trick-or-treating, and my brother and I lounged out in the downstairs rec room with our Safeway bags full of candy and were treated to, when we flipped on the television, a horror double-feature of Halloween II followed by The Howling. That was one of my favorite Halloween memories from childhood.

Now, with the rediscoveries on the horizon of hi-definition, I can delve back into the classics, a more innocent time when I didn’t even know what the hell the word Giallo meant, or who Jess Franco was or what exploitation was. To me, these are the classics, the films that got me so excited about horror, about movies, about writing in the first place…

DAY 1…
The first feature on the list is the Landis/Spielberg/Dante/Miller anthology Twilight Zone: The Movie. This is an interesting animal. The first ten minutes, an introductory scene featuring a young Dan Aykroyd and Albert Brook driving along a dark road in the middle of seemingly nowhere is more of a Tales from the Crypt-style ride into the series of four proceeding shorts. Landis’ is a smack in the face racial prejudicial tale of ultimate comeuppance. Not very subtle, but highly entertaining – though even now, twenty-some-odd years later, one cannot get past the fact that this is the film the killed actor Vic Morrow and two innocent (and illegally hired) child actors. The Landis/Morrow piece plays out like a complete story – and that’s because it is. This was exactly the script Landis had written before a Warner Brothers executive pushed him to add something characteristically redeeming to the short. What Landis added was a scene that had Vic Morrow saving two kids from a lake of volatile explosions and helicopter fire. All those elements mixed on film, and the rest is history. As Landis’ film was the first to be shot, Spielberg immediately reacted and wanted to get out of the project. Warner Brothers, fearing that not completing the film would look like an admission of guilt on their part, held the other three directors to the contract and forced them to finish their shorts. While Joe Dante’s is a hyperactively fanatical take on the original Twilight Zone horror story about a boy who can get whatever he wants (also used in one of The Simpson’s Treehouse of Horrors episodes) and George (Road Warrior) Miller’s version of Terror at 35,000 Feet is a pulse-pounding thrill ride, Spielberg opted out of his take on the original “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street”, a sci-fi horror that sees what happens when a suburban neighborhood is overcome by fear, paranoia and violence at the hands of an alien visitor, and instead directed one of the softest, most genteel episodes ever, and thusly bringing the level of the entire Twilight Zone film down a notch or two. Spielberg’s story, while mildly entertaining and humorous, is ultimately the only one I feel worthy of the skip button. Obviously, not including the tragic loss of lives in this statement, the greatest dent to the potential of the film had to be Spielberg’s change of attitude towards the making of the film (specifically his segment). While Spielberg would sever all ties to Landis after the Twilight Zone incident, he’d still work with Joe Dante, and together they would make Gremlins shortly thereafter.

On Criterion’s DVD of Cronenberg’s Videodrome, there is a roundtable discussion with Cronenberg, Landis and Mick Garris that takes place between Landis’ An American Werewolf in London and the shooting of The Twilight Zone, where a young and highly enthusiastic Landis speaks about his upcoming “secret project”. Eerie watching this interview, knowing what would transpire, what Landis had no idea about, that he would lead the tragic shift in many lives and his own career, which would never fully recover from the horrific incident.

An American Werewolf in London. Just a few words now on John Landis’ first horror film and one of the best werewolf movies ever produced. Landis’ script makes for one of the best written films (horror or otherwise) that I’ve seen. The dialogue in each scene and the construction of the scenes work in a nearly perfect harmony within a horror story, that even for a supernatural tale, is pretty off-the-wall. This one gave me nightmares when I was eight years old, and a couple of decades later the whole affair really still stands strong. This is also one of those classics that got me hooked on horror in the first place. Tightly edited and full of humorous charm, to boot. Few horror films come close to this kind of satisfaction. American Werewolf is one of those films I've never fallen out of love with. Sure, there have been times we've had to take a break, like with most things in life – you can't just live on beer and pizza either, though if I had my way... It was great having the opportunity to see this old friend of mine again, that mischievous lycanthrope wandering the London underground and underbelly... the new blu-ray from Universal is phenomenal (though I don't know that you'll find any more special features here than you did on the previous special edition DVD release a few years back). And going back to that Videodrome roundtable discussion, it was there that Landis had revealed he'd actually cut one of the more gruesome murder scenes after the initial theatrical screening... unfortunately, that is nowhere to be found on this hi-def re-release. Still, American Werewolf will forever have in important place on my shelf, and in my bloody heart.

-V

Fallible Security = Zombies.

2009-07-30T10:54:00.000-07:00

Now that I’ve taken a second look at the horror/action sequel 28 Weeks Later, I’m positively of two minds about the film. First viewing, first mind: I actually didn’t like the film. Surely there were some intense and suspenseful moments, but overall it was the lack of military security in the film that broke the suspension of disbelief for me. But before I digress too far, (SPOILERS AHEAD) I suppose I should illustrate the visual frustration I had with the film upon the first viewing: The American military has sectioned off a “safe” district in the city of London, England and set up a mass residency for survivors of an apocalyptic plague. Through this military-secured district, two kids manage to escape on foot and bike, and one civil engineer gains unbelievably easy access to a quarantined patient and manages to re-spread the virus to the entire population of survivors in a matter of moments. What the eff?

Second viewing, second mind: The clue to all of the apparent plot holes can be found in one of the earlier key details, and that’s the presence of American military. Not the British? Why? Now I’m starting to understand that this movie might actually be some kind of allegory for the American terrorist and counter-terrorist attacks. (MORE SPOILERS) Take for example that the first moment the virus gets out of control; immediate orders to terminate EVERYBODY are given across military radio communications, much to the shock of at least one of the sniper soldiers whose job it is to maintain the perimeter. Obviously this is for everyone's own good, just obliterate everything and you'll obliterate the weapon of mass destruction -- the weapon in question just happens to be viral. These suspect plot points actually do relate back to what I previously perceived as plot holes – namely, the lax military security. Now then I think the laxness of the security might be a sarcastic jab at America’s own homeland war politics and anti-terrorism security – hence, why the soldiers aren’t British (another plot-mystery solved).

While I can take all this into consideration and now appreciate 28 Weeks Later on another sardonic, somewhat timely, and allegorical level, some small part of my consciousness still nags at me that the plot points still might just be what I'd thought in the first place -- plot holes straight from the scripting stage. Ideas that seemed plausible on the page that didn’t quite translate to the screen, rooted in a story where the entire backdrop of the film is based around security – or the idea of security. But if the film is indeed intended to only comment on the IDEA of security… specifically American-global security… well, as I’ve said, I’m of two minds when it comes to 28 Weeks Later.

A far more pointed example of the Idea Of Security is George Romero’s Land of the Dead, a film a couple of years older than 28 Weeks Later, but still with the timely concepts of misplaced safely and misguided security in effect. As a good friend of mine likes to say about George Romero’s later films, “Your subtext is showing,” it at least is more definitive of the allegorical ideas than 28 Weeks Later, in which the latter film’s ideas can easily be misconstrued as plot mistakes. Still, while I do believe Land of the Dead started off with a much better script than 28 Weeks Later, it’s this latter film again that manages to generate more suspense and more intensity to the action than Land – and I don’t believe it’s simply because Romero’s film leans more towards comic book styling. So, why then? How, in the face of the initially-perceived plot holes, could that film then generate that kind of intensity from me? Could it be the camerawork and editing alone? Maybe the performances? Maybe there was just something visceral at its heart the whole time? The need to discover the answer is what led to the second, and far more enjoyable, viewing of 28 Weeks Later. But Romero’s Land will always have a place in my heart as one of my favorites. And if anything’s for certain, it’s that lax security equals massive zombie raids.

-V.

I Love this Poster

2009-06-01T12:06:00.000-07:00

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

2009-02-19T20:29:00.000-08:00

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)

2008-10-20T20:31:00.000-07:00

“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)

2008-10-18T14:38:00.000-07:00

“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)

2008-10-17T18:52:00.000-07:00

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).

2008-10-16T18:58:00.000-07:00

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).

2008-10-15T21:40:00.000-07:00

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)

Ten Sessions of Random Horror Mayhem (Day One - Fryday)

2008-10-14T20:09:00.000-07:00

Day One, Session One: Village of the Damned… And that would be John Carpenter’s 1995 version. I love John Carpenter, and he has certainly done some more than decent adaptations in his day, including Stephen King’s Christine and the classic “Thing” remake. So what happened to The Midwich Cuckoos? As much as I love John Carpenter, I have had the misfortune to have begun appreciation of his work when he was working through a couple of slumps, and luck being what it is, I managed to catch three of his less-than-stellar efforts theatrically – Escape form L.A., Vampires (the best of the three by far) and the Village of the Damned remake, while missing the classic In the Mouth of Madness completely during the one week it was in the theaters, until it was released on home video. Ah, home videos, a chance for entertainment redemption in case you missed a potential cult classic the first go around. Anyway, thanks to DVD, I had the opportunity to give Carpenter’s Village another chance. So, as I asked, what went wrong with this one? At face value, nothing… The beautiful and eerie widescreen photography, probably some of the best photography in Carpenter’s career, creepy kids, decent special effect, moments of sheer suspense and creepiness, good small-town characters and backdrops and a sense of impending doom that would do Stephen King proud, and one of the best one-liners in any horror-children movie, ever, as delivered by a thinner Kirsty Alley: “The children have started to integrate into society… there have been some casualties”. I ask again, what happened here to make all these ingredients, handled by a seasoned director, into a concoction that comes out so darned bland? No clue, otherwise I’d be a freakin’ master of horror. While it’s not a real failure by any standards, it’s not amazing, either, and considering this is from a story that both John Carpenter and Wes Craven had been keen on remaking for years prior to the production, and the insight in John Carpenter’s production notes on the DVD, only makes the vibe of disappointment even more unfathomable. However, I don’t mean this to sound like a total write-off, it’s Carpenter, after all, and it certainly does have its moments – and I can’t really make and honest “remake” comparison anyway because (shame on me) I still have not seen the original filmed version of Village of the Damned – perhaps that’ll be for the next sessions of random horror. (2 ½ out of 4).

Day One, Session Two: Tetsuo II - Body Hammer. There’s a Japanese Manga DVD used book-store that opened a little while ago, just a few blocks from where I live. And the DVDs are all Japanese DVDs. For a fan of Shinya Tsukamoto like me, to see a selection of his films in special-edition Japanese DVDs was like a dream come true. So merely a few hours earlier today, I ran up to the counter with my copies of Tetsuo II, Bullet Ballet and Haze – Original Long Version, only to have the Japanese shopkeeper translate the back of the boxes for me and inform me that there were no English subtitles. I hastily pointed out the subtitle symbol on the back of the Tetsuo II box, and the lovely lady behind the counter just smiled and showed me what the Japanese character for “English” looked like. I left the store with no Shinya Tsukamoto DVDs. But, I did dig out an old, burned AVI file I had from ages ago, a full-frame rip with English subs, and put that on. It was time. I’ve been a big fan of Shinya’s films for a few years now, his first feature Tetsuo: The Iron Man being one of those rare, rare moments in a cinefile’s life when we watch one of those movies that changes our lives. A film that makes you think a little differently, that makes you look at films, and the possibility of film, in a whole other light. One of those films. Was it too much to expect something similar from the movie’s sequel? Unfortunately, yes. The firmer plot structure of Tetsuo II seemed to work against the whole idea of the films’ industrial, chaotic themes. If you’ve never seen the first, brilliantly artsy Tetsuo, then you’ll enjoy this sequel/remake a whole lot more. IF you have, there is still a lot to enjoy, but don’t expect anything mind-blowing …well, not off-screen, anyway. (2 ½ out of 4).

Have we seriously run out of ideas here?

2008-09-10T19:34:00.001-07:00

I just finished watching Neil Marshall’s Doomsday, something I was pretty excited about as I really dug his previous Dog Soldiers and Descent. Starring an unlikely hero, Rhonda Mitra (the rape victim in Hollow Man), Doomsday starts off as a painfully obvious homage to John Carpenter’s Escape from New York (set in the year 2035… NOW), and despite some truly inspired moments -as quick as they may be- the whole predictable set-up starts to drag; while we see that the pending Escape from Glasgow plotline hinges on the premise that a team of specialists needs to be dropped inside the walled-off quarantined half of Scotland in order to retrieve the cure to the reaper virus, which is rearing it head once again in future London. There are survivors on the other side of the wall, living in the quarantined and completely cut-off section of the world; and the logic is where there are survivors there must be a cure… If you see where this is going, then don’t get too hyped for the end of the flick, when they drop the final bomb (or is that ball…?) you might be left with your jaw hanging open at the dumbfounding obviousness of it all.

So what jazzed up an otherwise-called remake of Escape from New York? How about costume design and road chases right out of Mad Max and The Road Warrior – only not quite as good or exciting (five minutes of the bad-ass chick trying to grab for her ankle-holstered gun while getting strangled in a speeding car?) Or how about a second twist ending, straight out of Army of Darkness? I guess that was alright, since Army of Darkness was already starting to mix with Escape from New York forty minutes previous, only without the hilarious banter. What the hell was going on with this flick?

At the end of the day, this was not a terrible movie. But I still can’t tell if I liked the damned thing or not. Nicely shot, distractingly edited, it had its moments… all sort of moments. I just don’t know. One thing, it does stick in your mind, in a somewhat nagging way. Maybe, sometime in the future, I’ll give this one another try. For now I’m going to throw on a John Carpenter flick, and maybe even Mad Max if I’m not too tired.

-V.

Mother’s Day Summer

2008-08-15T22:54:00.000-07:00

I was doing my monthly Rue Morgue review (a little late this month, as time would have it, we’ve been pretty damned busy)… and writer John Bowen’s column located in the rear of the magazine immediately caught my eye – It Came From Bowen’s Basement treats us readers to a little introspective on what is, in my opinion, one of the greatest underappreciated horror offerings around. And this one from none other than Troma studios…

Mother’s Day, directed by Lloyd Kaufman’s own brother Charles (not to be confused with the “Adaptation” Charles Kaufman), not only boasts one of the more interesting character plot set-ups for any horror/slasher flick, even former ET critic Leonard Maltin himself stated that it boasts one of the most original horror-movie endings – which I’m inclined to agree with, though don’t expect something more than low-brow originality.

The plot concerns three ex-college roommates who decide to go on a camping trip for their annual all-girls get together. The movie segues between the demented backwoods family and the girls, as they take turns flashing back to their collage days, each flashback revealing something about one of the characters. These character traits come to play a part in the plot of the film as a complete picture, making their inevitable attack all the more memorable and effective, despite some campy moments.

While John Bowen’s column was a fun one-pager, I was wishing he’d hit on the connective tissue between this movie and one of my favorite horror novelist, but that didn’t happen (and yet I don’t expect Bowen to have read all the horror novels out there, either), so I thought what the hell, I’ll bring it up…

Horror movie fan and phenomenal horror novelist Richard Laymon (RIP 2001) was never shy about paying homage in his literal works to some of his favorites, including Friday the 13th, Badlands, The Hills Have Eyes, The Stuff, Dressed to Kill, most of which he mentioned specifically by title in a couple of his books. But Mother’s Day in particular appears to have inspired most of one of his best novels, Blood Games. Of course, in true Laymon form, the author takes the basic plot points and brings it to all kinds of crazy levels in his inspired horror-adventure-splatter novel; BG has been available in a previously-unpublished uncensored version through Leisure Horror (paperbacks), and I would highly recommend this novel to any horror fan -- and if you can’t track it down for some reason, just grab the closest Laymon book and you’ll in all likelihood have a ball with it.

-V.

Shhhh...

2008-06-09T12:44:00.000-07:00

Things have been pretty damned busy on the film production front, but I saved a few moments to write up this quick blog-on-the-fly. I also happened to have a few moments to steel away for the sake of “research”, of course meaning the watching of a couple of movies and reading a little horror-inspired lit. One of the big surprises occurred last night when on a whim I threw a copy of Dead Silence into the DVD player that had been sitting on the bookshelf collecting dust for the last two and a half months. I was expecting nothing, and as the norm when one does this, I received a nice reward. A stylish, old-school horror story in the vein of EC Comics – directed with a dash of Argento’s gialli. This was the Unrated version, and when I stumbled upon this website just this morning: http://www.movie-censorship.com/ (and I highly recommend checking this site out if you fancy your cinema “unrated”), I was flabbergasted at the amount of footage cut or changed for the theatrical r-rated version last year. Anyway, check it all out if you’ve been toying with the notion of seeing this killer ventriloquist’s dummy tale of terror. …And speaking of Argento, I also had the opportunity to see the UK DVD release of “The Third Mother” (or Mother of Tears), Argento’s finale to his supernatural Mothers trilogy that started with Suspiria back in the seventies. This is definitely his most gore-soaked exploration of the dark pits of hell, with demonic rituals and gut-yanking violence and naked nun-demons. I can’t figure why this chapter has thus far received such a bad rap from his fans, I thought it was gruesome, exciting, cheesy and scary all at once (pretty much like Argento’s earlier works), and it was nice to see Asia in the lead role again. I’ve heard the Weinsteins are going to be releasing this one later this year on DVD, possibly through Dimension. And harkening back even further (about 200 words, give or take), those stylishly fun and gruesome EC Comics had a cinematic rediscovery over the last week as well. I got re-hooked on the Tales from the Crypt series (thanks to the season six box set) and rewatched “Demon Knight” (a great little flick, but I still can’t figure the ‘seven stars, seven people’ logic of the thing – there was never any point there were only seven people in the motel, unless you count the exact moment when Billy Zane slammed his fist through the sheriff’s face – whence I supposed he was technically dead, and therefore leaving seven people only if you discount Zane and Sadler). Anyway, that’s way beside the point. Along with Mother of Tears I received the same day (though curiously in a different package) the UK 2-disc edition of Creepshow, that loving tribute to EC Comics by Romero and King, and the edition which was produced by Universal Studios expressly for the UK DVD. This was the best Creepshow I’d ever seen, with a feature-length documentary on disc 2 featuring Romero, Savini, Ed Harris and Adrienne Barbeau. It also included all the deleted scenes Warner Brothers had convinced Romero to cut in order to obtain a 2-hour running time for the theatrical release back in 1982. Crazy fun. And as a bizarre side-note, there is a Tales from the Crypt story form season six starring Hank Azaria as a corpse-robbing morgue security guard that consistently makes overt references to Dr. Orloff. I had no idea the Tales writers were Franco-savvy.

Who’s the dummy, now?

-V.

All is quiet on the Western front... for now.

2008-04-09T13:24:00.000-07:00

Well, I’ve said it on our official site, and I don’t mind saying it again… looks like things are back on track. I wipe the sweat from my brow and lean back in my office chair and contemplate the serenity, which I’m sure will be short-lived. A quick breakdown of what’s been happening (aside from more headaches via the Creepy Six Films web service, who double-billed us our annual payment, and then when we simply requested a return of one of the payments, someone else in the billing department caught wind of the word “refund” and gladly Emailed to inform us that our account had been promptly eliminated and we could expect our refund immediately)... Yes, aside from this hiccup, I’m happy to report that our last restoration (for “Human Nature the Uncut Version”) is complete and the last of the on-line catalogue has been posted and everything is now up for sale. We’re really heading into development and pre-production territory now with our new noir-thriller shooting later this year, called “The Hard Cut”, which we’re producing with the help of our San Franciscan friends Keptone Films. This is slated to start shooting this September on HD.

On the fun-for-fun’s sake side of things, a few goodies I’ve been enamored with lately: Chuck Palahniuk’s novel “Haunted”, the amazing 6-disc ultimate edition GRINDHOUSE DVD from Japan (specifically, Amazon.co.jp), and a new blog I’ve just discovered: Last Girl (http://finalgirl.blogspot.com/).

And if you’re into something ingeniously asinine, go here immediately: http://www.realultimatepower.net/

My weekend starts tomorrow night so now that I actually have all my work-work put behind me for the rest of the week, I’m gonna kick back with a couple of beers and get back into some indie horror, “Mulberry Street”, “Right at Your Door”, and maybe a little “Nightmare Man”. I’ll let you know how that all turns out.

Best,
Vince.

Issues from Cyberspace

2008-03-17T11:57:00.000-07:00

Issues, indeed. In the last four weeks, we’ve experienced a three-day interruption of service on our official website

(www.creepysixfilms.com) as the service was “changing platforms” – only nobody bothered to notify us of the change until after it was completed. Okay, but since then, it’s been issue after issue, mostly with the page-loading speed and with the sudden inability to update the site at all (apparently, our plug-ins were corrupted on the server’s end). So we took down the site for a few hours while they re-installed everything – only to have it come out worse than before. Crap.

What all this means, at the end of the day, is a delay with two of the DVDs we were scheduled to release (or re-release), Sex & Death: Vol. 2 and Human Nature: The Uncut Version (this one is loaded with extras). Anyone who caught our ad in the new City Slab magazine will see that we’d intended these last 2 titles to be out by the end of this month. As it is, we’re looking at about a week’s delay. Not too terrible, considering – though I’m still hoping to get these available my March 29th, that’ll depend on if we can update the site or not. I’m stuck with keeping everyone posted via this blog for the time being. (Thanks, Blogger – I mean that.)

So, what’s a fella to do in the meantime, what with his hands proverbially tied due to Cyber-Technical issues? Good week to re-discover the Coen Brothers, I suppose, because that’s exactly what I did. Starting with Blood Simple, which I do now believe to be the brothers’ most brilliantly plotted film, to the Chandler-esque The Big Lebowski, which I do now believe to be my favorite of their catalogue. Of course, I also made time for Barton Fink, Fargo, The Man who Wasn’t There, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, none of which I’d seen in several years. Can’t say there’s really any going wrong with any of those titles, which I’d consider to be the tip-top of their repertoire, along with the recent No Country for Old Men. Give those old DVDs a new spin, like me; you might end up surprised at what you missed out on the first time. And if you’re a fellow fan, I also found this while browsing around cyberspace: http://www.youknow-forkids.com/

Check it out!

-V.

That Wascally Wabbit!

2008-01-17T12:10:00.000-08:00

So, it’s been a looooong while since the last blogging attempt, due to the ever quickening spiral of day-to-day shenanigans that eat up one’s life and thus keeping one distracted from their electronically published self-appointed responsibilities.

There was a little down time since New Years’ Day, to be sure, and I had more than a few ideas for cinematic and literary ramblings and recommendations, including the ‘dusty apocalypse’ as seen in one late-nite double-feature I relaxed into with some cheap wine – The Road Warrior followed by some low-budget potboiler called Phoenix Babes of the Wasteland (or at least it was some sort of interchangeable VHS-heyday exploitation title like that), this one starring the always captivating Kathleen Kinmont in a torn-up wasteland bikini and a dune buggy.

At another point in time, I also managed a P.T. Anderson retrospective with Magnolia and Boogie Nights, a kinetic marathon, to be sure… But after six-and-a-half hours of that, who has time to hit the desk and produce a blog about it, and really, what could be said that hasn’t already been said before?

But if there was anything that really caught my attention lately, it was two movies that were inadvertently witnessed back-to-back (one late night and the following afternoon), and both, to my utter amazement, were twisted takes on that Wascally Wabbit from the old WB cartoons…

The first, if you can dig it, is the dazzling Clive Owen vehicle Shoot ‘Em Up, which also stars the pulse-quickening Monica Bellucci and the hyper (but lovable) Paul Giamatti as three strangers who wind up intertwined in the middle of a death-contract on an infant child. Sound serious? It’s anything but. Bullets barely stop flying long enough to allow the actors to get out a few on-line zingers (and some of those are absolutely hilarious) and the whole thing’s so entirely over-the-top that I still can’t bring myself to actually recommend this movie to friends for fear of exposing my deeper levels of insanity.

The next one I saw was a digitized copy of a VHS print of an animated 1974 Ralph Bakshi blaxploitation satire called Coonskin (also known as Bustin’ Out, Harlem Nights –NOT the Eddie Murphy one- and Street Fight) This movie blew me away, it was obviously a heavy influence on many films of its ilk (even right up to today), with a dark spin on the old rabbit as a small-time street hustler who works his way up the ranks of the Harlem underworld using bullets and brains, completely unaware of everything he’s destroying around him (and the shit it already is). The political connotations are thick but the animation actually softens the heavy-handedness by turning it all into something darkly humorous. Director Bakshi also employed several black animators during a time when there were no black animators working for the Disney company.

You can find Coonskin online though torrent sites and download it, it’s the only way you’ll be able to see it now unless you found a VHS copy of it when all the video stores were switching over to DVD and releasing all their old stock into the $2.99 bins… It’s my belief that this is indeed what electronic swapping is good for. Personally, I can’t understand why folks would want to download compressed and pixilated-quality versions of movies they could just rent (and possibly retain a decent copy of) for five bucks. But to me I think that being able to check out a copy of a lost film like this (or any other movies that have disappeared through studio red tape and/or absolute disinterest) is an opportunity for adventurous movie-seekers and cult fans. This is what file-sharing is all about. Sure, the file has piss-poor black compression, pixilation and it’s cropped 4x3 – but I loved it anyway.

For more info on this one, check out Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coonskin_(film)

V

Splitsville

2007-10-11T16:46:00.000-07:00

So yeah, The Weinstein Company split the Rodriguez /Tarantino Grindhouse flick in two, completely negating the core ideal of the two-fer double feature. So, what does that mean to the few fans that actually went out and supported this flick in its initial theatrical release? Well, first and foremost, is means that we don’t get to see any of the cool “coming attractions”, from the likes of Eli Roth, Rob Zombie and Edgar Wright. It means that not only are we going to have to shell out double to see the double-feature, separated and elongated – but hence, it also means you get to see 1) extra footage re-inserted into the flicks “Death Proof” and “Planet Terror”, and 2) how well these films hold up on their own.

I have little friendly bet with Sasha, our cinematographer, who was adamant the car-crashing slasher Death Proof would outsell Rodriguez’s apocalyptically dark zomedy, whereas I felt right from the get-go (as in back when the films were simply called “Grindhouse”, lest we forget), that Planet Terror was better written, a lot more clever, and a hell of a lot more in the spirit of true grindhouse cinema. True, Tarantino shot the living hell out of his feature, and the payoff was… well, it was one hell of a payoff, I’ll say that.

Anyway, I completely digress -- now that Planet Terror is being released, we have a chance to compare the two flicks separately. Death Proof, first out of the gate, is irrefutable proof that more is not better. The added footage (over half an hour!) does nothing but pad Quentin’s film with redundant dialog that has no bearing on the story whatsoever, other than to stupefyingly render the previously-stunning smash-em-up payoff utterly flaccid. By the time we finally get to the climax of Death Proof, do we even care? As in, do we care about Stuntman Mike’s finale more than we care about the fact that we’ve just been bored out of our tree? That they completely blew Stuntman Mike’s (Kurt Russell’s) originally cool intro (stuffing nachos into his mouth at the end of a bar wearing that classic silver jacket) in favor of padding in a 10-second shot twenty minutes earlier? That the usually masterful Tarantino though it would be a good idea to pad a 2-act plot into a 110-minute feature? That the added footage was left untouched, and looks like bad HD rather than looking like bad film (i.e. the way it was supposed to look), makes it look like he didn’t really care at all. I will say this – the lap dance in place of the “missing reel” gag was a welcome addition.

On the flipside, Rodriguez handled his half of the cut with a little more finesse, adding in only a few seconds of dialog or a shot here and there, thereby not really extending his original running time all that much. The few shots that were added actually serve to enhance his film. His hilarious fake “Machete” trailer still kicks things off, and his film is still graced with the original “Grindhouse” on-screen title. But what’s really funny, is that Rodriguez’s film plays better on its own. Maybe it’s because as part of the three-and-a-half-hour Grindhouse experience, we knew there was more in store, and I know that I felt a little surprised by the length of Plant Terror (expecting it would only be about an hour or so). Whatever the case, Planet Terror at least benefits from the split, which makes it more accessible in its single life -- playing out like a John Carpenter flick, only funny. And unlike Death Proof, Rodriguez’s film still fully embraces the idea of Grindhouse from start to finish, with all the film damage, skipped frames and jagged cuts -- plus it’s got cheek to spare.

So who will win out? I’d be curious to check the stats at the end of the year. Personally, I still think soul will win out over marquee – or at least, I’d like to think it will. Guess we’ll see… And of course, this is just my opinion.

-V.

New Magic from Old(School) Horror

2007-09-18T12:57:00.000-07:00

Creeping up on October, the most horroriest time of the year, September has brought froth some magical offerings for us horror fans. First off, John Skipp’s stellar The Long Last Call, fresh on the shelves at your local Chapters thanks to Leisure Books, is a darkly comic off-the-wall hellfire page-turner loaded with sex, blood, greed, lust, human degradation, demonic elation and slime. A Dark Stranger walks into a strip joint with a neon-glowing Sweet Thangs hovering over the entrance and right into the lives of four strippers, a tough-as-nails bartender, the coked-out owner and his den-mother sister and a twitchy and extremely edgy schizophrenic who’s just lost the love of his life. When he starts tossing mucus-coated hundred-dollar bills like they’re used tissue, things really start to get nasty. All in the name of good clean horrifying fun, this is John Skipp’s first mass-market release since the demise of the infamous Skipp & Spector writing team and their last-published novel Animals from 1993. A team that practically invented the “splatterpunk” movement for literary horror, this duo’s breakup was a sad time for their fans, and inadvertently marked the end of the late-eighties/early-nineties splatterpunk, (also ushered out by the declining mass-market publications of David Schow’s work when he sashayed into horror screenwriting and the shrugged-off release of Jack Ketchum’s last officially-recognized splatterfest Offispring [1992]) -- though many writers (Edward Lee, Jack Ketchum, Brian Keene) have since gone way beyond anything the spalatterpunk sub-genre offered back then (14 years ago!!) in terms of agonizing intensity, sheer grue and crimson splatter. The break-up of Skipp and Spector was purportedly a bitter one (http://www.craigspector.com/), and seems to have left both authors reeling in the professional aftermath – with Craig Spector getting the jump on Skipp by publishing his first solo novel in 2000, and a second one already out since 2005. But while Spector’s novels are hard to find, Leisure Books, who have in the last few years brought so many new talents and undiscovered (or underrated) novels to light through mass-market publications, has seen fit to bring us Skipp’s latest offering, and while it might not be as dense and complex as his previous co-authored horror-lit ventures, and a little heavier on the humorous side, it’s damn near perfect for the new millennium of no-holds-barred horror and the fastest page-burner I’ve read in a long while. In short, a total joy to ravenously consume in one single night. http://www.johnskipp.com/

And speaking of books, the famous horror bookshop Dark Delicacies in Burbank, California is the setting for the new Stuart Gordon interviews that appear on the new MGM special edition of From Beyond (its about freakin’ time!), and while good ol’ Stuart reminisces about the cast, producers and original material used to make the film, he also allows us a complete (and separate) 8-minute segment on the restoration of the long-thought-lost ‘Directors Cut’ of this seminal cult favorite. There are way more special features included on the disc as well (check out the audio commentary for everything you ever wanted to know about the pineal gland and then some), but the newly-produced segments with director Gordon and composer Richard Band, along with the astoundingly restored film transfer of the long-awaited (and worth the wait) original director’s cut, make for a midnight viewing that may possibly leave even the most toughened horror fan a little bit giddy. Lovecraft Forever!

...And speaking of it’s-about-freakin’-time, as one last note, I’ll leave you with something I discovered this week while surfing around the Internet on a workday afternoon – the Spector-half of Skipp & Spector finally got his screenplay for Animals produced (based on their novel). Yes, it’s actually true, and in fact it’s already in the can – with Grindhouse‘s Naveen Andrews co-starring along with the cool-looking Eva Emurri (as Jane). Apparently, this sucker is scheduled to be released in the summer of ’08. See you at the show! http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/news/9258

-V.

A little past the expiry date...

2007-09-15T15:56:00.000-07:00

These articles (or reviews, if you prefer) of Rue Morgue magazine’s last couple of issues were originally written over the summer for a Vancouver & Toronto-based movie industry/press Internet site that I write for regularly. While the focus of the site in question seems to be shifting more towards the press and less towards the reviews and contests (the fun stuff), the last two reviews have not been officially published to my knowledge. I’m posting them here for several reasons, the foremost being that while the eventual objective of Industry websites is simply out of my immediate control, as someone who’s been commissioned to do a specific job I still feel a certain level of responsibility to uphold support for the Canadian Horror industry (or community, if you prefer), and also to Rue Morgue itself. (I gotta admit, I love ‘em). But I also figured hey, since I already wrote ‘em, might as well let people read ‘em. I know the issues are stale (at best), but what the hell, you can always back-order a past issue from Rue Morgue if you’re turned onto something you see here. If nothing else, hopefully you get a little entertainment value out of the horrorific ramblings.

-Vince.

Rue Morgue Issue #70 (August 2007)

This issue: 8/10

Halloween came early this year – as this month’s issue features an in-depth look at Rob Zombie’s remaking of a horror masterpiece, which is to be released the last day of August.

Right off the bat, I want to cite the curve ball Rue Morgue threw following the lead article and review with the heavy metal icon, which was the article (and interview) on some different Halloween films… Now, any reader of Rue Morgue will know that following up a lead film article with subsequent articles on more films related to the feature is not only nothing new – it’s hard-wired SOP for the RM crew. With this in mind, the aforementioned curve ball gets launched when I was expecting a two or three-page follow-up essay discussing the numerous (and oft ill-advised) Halloween sequels, but instead being treated to a full spread discussing Halloween FAN-films! These are films produced by indie filmmakers without any permission given in support of the use of various intellectual properties, that just about anyone with an Internet hook-up and a basic knowledge of file-saving can watch – for free! These somewhat-sequels are made by die hard fans for their peers, and a lot of these 40-minute DIY flicks are actually more entertaining than some of the official studio-produced sequels. (Check out the Michael vs. Jason short!)

The diverse articles following the Halloween extravaganza are as solid and entertaining as you’d expect from Rue Morgue, but this issue runs out of steam at the half-way mark, right when we’re heading into the mainstay columns reserved for the usual slew of theatrical and DVD reviews. The reviews in both the Cinemacabre and the Re-Issues columns are about as flat and monotonous as the influx of dreck the writers are reviewing. (The only real saving grace being the Schizoid Cinephile column on actress Erika Blanc and “The Devil’s Nightmare” [though I think they forgot to mention Redemption’s official DVD release of this film], and The Gor-Met’s interview with 80’s zombie-gore DIY auteur Todd Sheets). While the other dreck in question is most certainly reviewed (technically speaking), the problem is that there’s not a whole lot of interesting exposition by the obviously disinterested writers for the depressing assortment of uninteresting films. With the films they picked to plug this month, they could have summed up completely comprehensible reviews with one or two quick-witted lines, instead of devoting three-quarters of a column and a couple of hours’ worth of mental energy to unnecessary word quotas.

Other than that, I had a great time with this month’s issue, and overall it well deserves high marks for the concrete feature articles, atypical subject choices, the (always) engrossing graphics and the kick-ass interviews.

Rue Morgue Issue #69 (July 2007)

This issue: 10/10

Although I’m cringing about starting off a review this way, I do feel the need to apologize right off the bat for the tardiness of this latest critique, as I was lucky enough to have been on vacation for the last couple of weeks and hadn’t even realized this month’s issue had been delivered a mere two days after my departure from the abysmally schizophrenic weather of Vancouver.

Well, this month’s Rue Morgue was a nice surprise, capping off the last weekend of the vacation -- this issue was right on the money, through-and-through. I think back on the basics of anything to do with creative media, which is the sense of telling a story. The one question each artist (or whatever you may want to call yourselves) must as before embarking on any kind of media output, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction, movies or books or newspapers or magazines or blogs, is ‘Is this story worth telling?’ Seeing that the cover art and the subsequent leading articles was devoted to a little 1987 youthful monster-comedy titled The Monster Squad, I immediately thought ‘Yes, this one is worth it’. But did they pull it off?

Of course they did, and way better than that feeble attempt at a paragraph-jumping cliff-hanger. Because the guys and gals at Rue Morgue, while seeming cocky some of the time, are still sure-handed professionals. Chris Alexander brings a sackful of entertaining and educated (and educating) text to shape his excellently stylized lead article (Titled “Kids vs. Monsters”) before leading us into an unexpected and welcome one-on-one with writer/director Fred Dekker. This article follows on the tail of Jovanka Vuckovic’s provocative “Notes from the Underground” and the vivid two-page preview of this year’s Fantasia Film Festival. And what follows is a surprising reunion of The Monster Squad’s cast of monsters, which includes interviews of each of the cast members who went under the make-up of special effects authority Stan Winston (as conducted by Jovanka Vuckovic).

And as if this weren’t all enough as it was, Paul Corupe delves into the world of EC comics for my own personal guilty pleasure, Tales from the Crypt, just in time for the comic line’s reissue and right before Vuckovic jumps back on board for a splattering look at the trailblazing metal band Slayer. After this there’s plenty more to absorb through the reviews of theatrical and recent DVD releases and re-issues, including a fantastic one-page on Attack of the 50-foot Woman and a slew of splashy comic reviews in “Blood in Four Colours” (by Gary Butler).

This issue is a kicked-back, lightened-up amusement park ride for Rue Morgue, and I personally loved it. The perfect thing (aside form a six-pack) to satiate the horror fan on a hot July day… and right before this fan had to get back to work!

--Vince D’Amato.

For the Love of Levin

2007-07-09T23:12:00.000-07:00

I don’t even remember if I blogged about this one back in the short days of January 2007, but I kept thinking about the subject all day, as I’m now reading another novel by Ira Levin, and getting excited about this writer all over again. Not unusually for me, it all started with Wikipedia back in the cold wet winter days at the beginning of the year. I was surfing around this encyclopedic crack-site and looking up all sorts of things sci-fi – I guess I was in a mood, or something – and I found many great things. Like I found out a lot about four-time Academy Award-winning film editor and sound designer Walter Murch (I’ve since purchased two of his books, which are phenomenal for any filmmaker). I found out that Lucas’ trademarked THX sound system is not a THX 1138 in-joke, like the license plate in American Graffiti or the security door code in Star Wars, it actually stands for the Tom Holman eXperiment (Holman being the actual inventor of the sound reproduction system). Continuing on with my article worming into THX the film, I began reading about the new DVD version, the special features, and also Lucas’ influences on the movie itself back in the seventies. It’s no secret by now that Lucas has used many of his influences and twisted them into his own successful cinematic works, and THX 1138 was no exception –Lucas’ first foray into sci-fi was a dystopian thriller based loosely and most notably on Ira Levin’s novel “This Perfect Day”. Becoming increasingly interested in this book, I searched online for it, where in Canada you can pick up a used copy of the now out-of-print pocketbook for a mere $68.35. Yikes.

The weekend following my Wikipedia surfing, we were invited to Vancouver Island, where our friend Maurice Devereaux had his film End of the Line playing in the Victoria Film Festival. As guests of the director, we were lucky enough to have the opportunity to stay in the world-famous Empress Hotel for next to nothing, the very hotel English Royalty bed at whilst visiting British Columbia’s capital city. Well, they could use a few new beds, I’ll tell you that -- hard as a rock with sheets as thin as single-ply toilet paper. On the plus side, the massive property did give you the feeling you were wandering through the halls of The Shining’s Overlook Hotel. Creepy, creepy, creepy. Anyway, I outstandingly digress…

I figured with only one-sixteenth the population of Vancouver, I might have a little luck scouring the used bookstores in Victoria. All three of these bookstores also happen to be on the same street and contained along one side of a two-block stretch, which made the hunt a little easier. And wouldn’t you know it, the third bookstore I went into had a copy of the 1971 paperback edition in fantastic shape for $3.50. I snapped it up, much to the jealous stupefaction of our friend Maurice, who repeatedly proclaimed “That kind of thing never happens to me!” This made me feel even better about my find, and briefly made me forget about the three-day rainstorm we were currently only halfway through. Well, that’s winter in B.C.

I’m also happy to point out that Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day ended up, after all that, becoming one of my favorite books of all time. Yes, all time. Interesting too, that this is one of his only novels that has not been made into a film (unless you count THX 1138, but that film barely comes close to describing this utterly amazing novel). Levin is also the creator of Rosemary’s Baby, Sliver, The Stepford Wives, and A Kiss Before Dying. And Like most good movie-watchers, I’d seen nearly all these films at one time or another. So admittedly, being familiar with the work (especially Rosemary’s Baby) I was thus far consciously evasive of Levin’s books, thinking I wouldn’t enjoy them so much having already known the plots and themes – something I’m coming to regret now. This was another reason I was initially attracted to This Perfect Day – I’d never seen it before!

Well, last week I found an old 70’s paperback copy of Rosemary’s Baby, also in really good condition, at a thrift store for one cool buck. I picked it up and cracked it just this morning, talking myself out of my initial skirting of this familiar material, and all I can say is wow. Ira Levin is a master storyteller. No, I haven’t finished the book yet, but in the first 30 pages he’s already set up the mystery, the characters (including the gothic New York apartment) and evil’s back-story with exciting description and narrative, and with what appears to be such stunning ease it could make an aspiring writer want to smash his forehead on the wall of the nearest building. The dialog is brilliant and yet to the point, you could get lost in it, almost becoming completely unaware of turning pages.

As an author, Ira Levin has not so much crossed or bent genres as I get the feeling that he pointedly set out to create a literary piece of work in each one. Sci-fi, thrillers, horror, comedy, and yet everything seems to come with a slightly sarcastic bent towards society and politics. I will definitely be tracking down more of his books in the near future, as this author is quickly becoming one of my absolute favorite writers. Funny I’m thinking about this now, as his movie Deathtrap for years has been one of the best thrillers I’d seen, I’ve touted it several times to friends. For me, it’s the epitome of wit.

-Vince.

Sorry, it was used…

2007-06-10T16:17:00.000-07:00

I was traversing through a used book & comic store in my neighbourhood that’s been having a perpetual “moving” sale for the last few month (and apparently, it’s now been extended until December of this year) when I was lucky enough to spot, on a yet-to-be-organized pile of recent donations to the cause, a somewhat tattered copy of George R.R. Martin’s rare “Sandkings” paperback printing from 21years ago. And I gotta say, taking a read of the title story this weekend, it was phenomenal. If you were unfortunate enough to have seen the feebly plotted and executed nineteen-nineties’ “Outer Limits” pilot (as I was), then are you in for a surprise with this suspenseful, terrorizing, edgy and rich sci-fi allegory on pride, conceit and the human condition, and the sometimes unwitting evils that lie within. Only catch is after a cursory look around Amazon, it looks like you’d have to track down your own used copy, or hit the library. But it’s well worth the effort. I could honestly rave at length.

This month's pick: The Abandoned (8/10)

Directed by: Nacho Cerda
Starring: Anastasia Hille, Karel Roden
Released by: After Dark Films/Lionsgate

Anastasia Hille stars in Spanish horror filmmaker Nacho Cerda’s feature film debut as the daughter of deceased Russian parents and the inheritor of their creepy farmhouse located out in the middle of nowhere. Arriving at the farmhouse, she immediately finds Karel Roden, who claims to be (and may or may not be) her twin brother. From this point, the duo finds themselves physically trapped in the dilapidated house going through a Jacob’s Ladder style ring-around-the-rosie throughout their relentlessly aborted escape attempts. This goes on for the next forty minutes, and in most other directors’ hands, this thin storyline would’ve fallen apart in the first few moments. But in Cerda’s gifted control and visionary (and highly visualistic) style, it becomes a crescendoing effect of suspense and creeping horror without losing even the slightest bit of intrigue.

Co-written by Dust Devil cult director Richard Stanley, the influences of both this writer and the film’s director are completely palpable, often recalling Cerda’s poetically intensifying imagery of his short films Genesis and Aftermath with the enigmatic fury of Stanley’s Dust Devil.

At the end of its second act, The Abandoned culminates in a shift in style, and the final act goes from poetic, crescendoing and mysterious to completely intense and time-warping. It never quite hits the level of emotional terrorizing as say The Descent generates, but it does become impressively nerve-wracking and gripping right to the end.

There are many pivoting moments in the film where a seasoned horror viewer will believe The Abandoned is becoming predictable, but this misconception only lasts for mere seconds before Cerda takes the film into novel and sometimes challenging territory. Not quite as challenging as his short film work, mind you, but The Abandoned is certainly a fantastic start to this filmmaker’s feature film career.

-V.

The Spirit of Grindhouse

2007-04-14T17:36:00.000-07:00

In the interest of generating a little more word-of-mouth for this new flick before it disappears from the theatres all together, I'm posting up my recent Grindhouse/Rue Morgue review from Hollywood North Report...

Rue Morgue Issue 66 (April 2007) This issue: 7/10

The Tarantino/Rodriguez flashback to the glory days of horror exploitation Grindhouse is this month’s feature story… And is it me, or is this new issue a lot thinner than usual…?

Anyway, this lead feature story is a mixed bag, for sure. First of all, kudos for showing this flick some support – in the wake of the abysmal opening weekend, it looks like it’s gonna need all the support and publicity it can get, and in my opinion, it deserves as much as it gets. It’s too bad that the featured players are the flattest part of this article. Stunningly, Robert Rodriguez’s interview doesn’t read terribly exciting at all, and on the tail of all the MTV and MuchMusic promos going on with Tarantino and Rodriguez, he really isn’t adding anything new to what you may have already seen on TV. Likewise, Kurt Russell and Tom Savini have a couple of amusing on-set anecdotes to spin, but it’s hardly worth the full-page each of these Grindhouse participants gets.

On the flipside, the two-page spread that intercuts three interviews with the Grindhouse trailer-makers – Eli Roth, Edgar Wright and Rob Zombie – is WAY more fun, with Zombie showing a good sense humour. Maybe if the lead article had been presented the same way, it might not have seemed so padded and lacklustre. In addition, the Rue Morgue staffers have very cleverly interjected interviews and articles from filmmakers of the real grindhouse days, in which you’ll find the true value of this month’s issue – having Bill Lustig (Maniac, Vigilante, Maniac Cop, and the founder of Blue Underground) talk about the old grindhouse circuit and horror/exploitation godfather Herschell Gordon Lewis giving highly amusing tips on how to make your own exploitation film.

Further highlights include Paul Corupe’s “Slumming Attractions” and “Blood Feast” articles, Chris Alexander’s “Mad Musings”/Coralina Cataldi-Tassoni interview conclusion (why they split this interview up into two parts is beyond me) and the Gore-Met’s look at a trio of shot-on-video 80’s horror cheapies.

In case you haven’t heard, Bob Weinstein was so vehemently disappointed with last week’s Grindhouse returns that he’s threatened to pull the film from theatres and re-release it as two separate films in a few weeks, and has no plans to release it in its originally conceived double-feature format on DVD. For the love of Christmas, go see this thing before it’s gone – and you might want to hang onto this copy of Rue Morgue, as there may soon be no proof that the film Grindhouse ever existed in this version. You never know, you could have a collector’s item on your hands.

-Vince.
(originally posted @ hollywoodnorthreport.com)

It’s been over ten weeks since the last update?

2007-03-05T00:48:00.000-08:00

I can’t believe how fast time whips by, especially when you’re working several jobs and contracts as well as trying to keep personal business alive, both artistic and social (and dealing with at least three birthdays to boot). It’s actually insane how fast the human mind can compute and calculate and multitask while completely ignoring the continuous passing of time, until one day you look up and think, “Holy shit, where did the last ten-and-a-half weeks get to?”

Well, on the business side, we’ve been getting two things prepped. One, the Special Uncut Edition of Carmilla (previously known & loathed as “Vampires vs. Zombies”) which should see a release sometime in the next year – hopefully while we’re still in 2007, but we’ll have to wait and see. This is one that I’m really excited about, we’ve produced so many killer special features for this; we don’t even know if everything’s going to make it onto the final DVD. Hopefully so, but of course we’ll be keeping you posted with what’s on and what didn’t make the cut. One thing I can say, is that this originally intended version of Carmilla includes much, much more gore (several minutes worth) that were previously cut from the VvsZ version to get an R-rating from the MPAA. Also, a little more nudity, and some slight tightening of some of the action -- which had been left elongated only to provide a little padding to the already anorexic running time of the rated cut.

The second thing is we’re hoping to get another project off the ground by the end of the year, which requires plenty of work and attention. Nevermind the fact that we all have to make some money in the meantime, on top of still dealing with our previous three films (the third of which is being released in no more than 2 days). And that’s something I’ve found, amazingly, that a lot of first-time filmmakers never think about – that even when you’ve wrapped, when your film is in the can, when you’ve finally put the last tweaks on your final director’s cut, your film is never finished with you – despite the belief that you may be finished with it. Through further cuts, tweaks, masters, mistakes, deliveries, screeners for distributions, festival prints, release dates, contracts, expenses, payments and flubbed financial reports, your film is still ready to grind you through the ringer. Or ring you through the grinder, whichever you prefer.

Anyway, if you love it, you won’t care. It’s all part of the film’s life (your life) and at least at the end of the day you may have another brick to slap onto your wall of immortality, a little something to be left behind for a while after you’ve long ambled off this mortal coil. It’s your art, damn it.

And speaking of art, within this past ten weeks or so, I have had the pleasure of discovering and/or re-discovering a few great pieces of other’s work - including David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, and a handful of Stanley Kubrick classics. I also totally enjoyed the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (Okay, maybe I’m a little off-kilter, but Jordana Brewster’s undeniably hot) and I had the absolutely good fortune of finding an out-of-print copy of Ira Levin’s brilliant book “This Perfect Day”, the very same weekend I was at the Victoria Film Festival checking out a fellow Canadian Filmmaker’s cinematic feature – Maurice Devereaux’s End of the Line. That was rather inspiring, too. And this Sunday was an impressive double-feature at the local theatres with Almodovar’s Volver and Fincher’s utterly amazing Zodiac. Check it out! And here’s to hoping that the next post won’t be more than a coupe of weeks… Yeah, right.

-V.

2LDK: Duel to the Death!

2006-12-15T20:19:00.000-08:00

Recently, I had the fantastic fortune to view Yukihiko Tsutsumi’s 2LDK. I first came across this movie because of my curiosity with a different Japanese horror/thriller altogether – “Suicide Club”, which to this day I still have not seen. Anyway, it was in San Francisco this past summer when I was in a DVD shop searching for pretty much anything I’d be able to sneak through Canadian customs when I found a 3-disc box set that included Suicide Club, some other movie I can’t presently remember, and 2LDK. I had no idea just what 2LDK was supposed to mean, but the description on the back of the box was utterly tantalizing… two cute Japanese girls fighting to the death inside a Tokyo apartment for eighty-seven minutes. Sounded like the ultimate catfight from hell to me!

I came across this movie a second time back in October in an article on Wikipedia. (Incidentally, I’ve become sorely addicted to Wikipedia – often choosing to surf through this site before checking my Email!) It was here that I found something even more interesting about 2LDK… This film was part of a “Duel Project” between two Japanese film directors, where after a night of drinking Yukihiko Tsutsumi and Ryuhei Kitamura came up with a challenge, to see who could come up with the best feature film utilizing two principal actors battling it out in one setting. While Kitamura came up with the raging Samurai epic titled “Aragami”, which saw a fairly big theatrical release in Japan, Tsutsumi went nearly the polar opposite and created a small movie that sees two young actresses (and roommates) auditioning for the same film role and ultimately letting their own insecurities and frustrations boil to the breaking point. There’s all sorts of creative household weaponry in employment as the girls’ battle escalates over the following eighty minutes, with plenty of cringe-inducing high jinks leading up the fully anticipated arterial-spraying finale.

On top of this, 2LDK is strikingly inventive, shot with plenty of character layering as we are privy not only to the girls’ conversing and bickering, but to their inner thoughts while things quickly start heading into the realm of extreme over-the-top-ness, adding loads of comedy to the events. Seriously, I can’t recommend this movie enough. Funny, bloody, funny.

Oh, and by the way – 2LDK refers to the classifieds in Japanese newspapers, advertising an apartment for rent – 2 bedrooms, living room, dining area, kitchen.

Check it out!

-Vince.

The First & Latest in cinematic themes of Vengeance

2006-12-04T12:13:00.000-08:00

Actually, it’s more like vigilantism, though recurring themes of revenge are usually the catalyst in any vigilante story. Stories like this tend to strike a nerve, usually as a result of frustration with legal systems and bureaucracy lined with red tape and hand-tied authorities. Vigilantism goes back to the days of lynch mobs and witch hunts, and aside from the theme appearing in comic books and movies (and even The Simpsons), the actual practice of vigilantism generally doesn’t seem to be a prime solution to crime – especially when instigated in large groups. However, there is something visceral and compelling of the lone vigilante, one man (or woman) on a rampage of frustration and the battle of fear.

Probably the most famous film to first explore the vigilante was 1973’s Death Wish with Charles Bronson. In the basic set-up, Bronson’s wife is murdered and his daughter raped, which first prompts some philosophical deliberation in Bronson’s character before he decides to take the law into his own hands. What’s more interesting, is that Bronson’s character has no interest in tracking down and killing the perpetrators of his personal crime, so to that end the idea of straight-forward revenge is eliminated and we watch as Bronson becomes a vigilante in the strictest sense, while it’s left up to the audience to decide if he’s become an urban hero and a spokesperson for the fear-filled metropolitan citizens. Even more interesting is that Death Wish is somewhat of an essay on the transition between the ideals of the sixties and the harsher realities of fear and crime in the seventies – again, the film was produced in the early seventies. While the consistent barrage of crime in Death Wish may seem overboard, it could almost be looked at now as analogous to the manipulative fear-mongering brainwashing through media by authorities as a means to their own financial ends. Death Wish just may have been ahead of its time in this sense.

While the revenge/action sub-genre had a recent blip of popularity thanks to Tarantino’s Kill Bill movies, Korean filmmaker Chan-wook Park has explored this theme of violence in a trilogy of films: Oldboy, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and Lady Vengeance, the latest of which was released in North America just last October.

Lady Vengeance is the only film of Park’s trilogy that takes the revenge motive fully into the realm of vigilantism, and in a subtly darker and more thought-provoking way than I’ve seen before. As a movie, it’s simply beautiful. As a story, it’s clashingly comedic and at times, nearly repellent – but absolutely compelling throughout. I don’t want to talk about the plot too much because one of the best experiences with this movie is watching the plot as it unfolds, starting from when our anti-heroine is released from a 16-year prison sentence and into the waiting crowd of Christmas-carol-singing Santas. …Which now, I can admit was part of the scheme for this little article. Christmastime. And while I’m sure a little vengeance for Christmas is certainly not going to be everyone’s cup of eggnog, both Death Wish and Lady Vengeance are pretty gripping Wintertime tales of violence.

…If you like your holiday cheer a little twisted.

-V.

Ew... Slimy!

2006-11-13T19:18:00.000-08:00

I know, Halloween’s two weeks gone now but it’s still alive in this horror fan’s heart - So, what exactly I got up to this Halloween obviously consisted of a lot of horror culture, it was nice to see that one of the theatres in Vancouver was doing a Canadian horror retrospective, and I got a chance to see two films theatrically that I’d never seen before – the 1976 backwoods horror flick Rituals with Hal Holbrook (Creepshow, Magnum Force) and the Jamie Lee Curtis scream queen vehicle Terror Train. Funny, I was super-excited for Terror Train while expecting nothing from the Canadian answer to Deliverance (Rituals), of course, it was Rituals that turned out to be the real gem. Terror Train was okay, if you like redundant slashers that co-star David Copperfield (!). Well, the ending was pretty good, actually, but all-around it was pretty slow going. Rituals on the other hand had moments of sheer intensity. Something about the whole survivalist sub-genre really hooks me.

Anyway, completely unintentionally, a lot of what I subjected myself to this Halloween season revolved around a lot a gooey themes. I had the good fortune to be offered the Slither DVD to review for Hollywood North Report (which you can link to at the sidebar), and this was totally hilarious. I liked Nathan Fillion from the Firefly series, and in Slither he plays the sheriff of a small town that becomes invaded with oversized alien slugs in a blender-mix of 50’s sci-fi and Evil Dead 2 shenanigans. The same week I received one of my long-awaited pre-orders from Amazon, which included the new DVD reissue of Baby Blood (courtesy of Anchor Bay), completely uncut and re-gorified (though I’d never seen the “cut” version either). This one was absolutely crazy! Like Peter Jackson in his “Dead Alive” glory days doing a cinematic essay on the horrors of pregnancy. Yikes! I shouldn’t say too much for fear of giving it away, but if you like your humor dark and messy, this killer-momma-possessed-by-alien-seed movie just might be for you. I loved it.

On the literary front, I took one of my usual chances at the local Chapters and picked up a copy of Brian Keene’s new novel The Conqueror Worms. An apocalyptic story where if you can read the title, you pretty much already know what’s going to happen to the handful of characters trapped in a house at the top of a flooded mountain. Cheesy as it may sound coming off the cover, this book actually carries some hard-edged horror and it compulsively fast-paced. It not only rocks, it’s some of the best writing Keene has accomplished to date – and that’s saying a lot if you’ve read his previous horror novels – which are called The Rising and City of the Dead, for all you zombie fanatics out there.

-V

John Landis & the sublimely ridiculous.

2006-10-16T21:29:00.000-07:00

I was eight years old when my stepdad rented An American Werewolf in London for my brother and me, and I launched it into our brand new top-leading VHS player and was absolutely flabbergasted over the next hour and a half – only to awaken several hours later in the middle of the night, afraid that there was a hairy eight-foot-long Rick Baker creation perched atop the desk in the darkness of the back office/TV room waiting for me to pass by the open doorway so that it could slash my guts open on the linoleum bathroom floor. Ah, memories…

Keeping with the theme from the last post, I’ve been rediscovering some of my favorite filmmakers from the 80’s. This, I admit, is due largely to the Masters of Horror series that’s making monthly resurgences into the local DVD stores. John Landis’s unapologetically ridiculous episode Deer Woman, about a half-woman/half-deer who stomps her prey to a bloody pulp (starring the stunningly gorgeous Cinthia Moura), was one that upon my initial viewing I didn’t immediately like. Days later, however, I found that I was subconsciously returning back to this episode, annoyingly repeating all the jokes and one-liners in my head (yes, this is what I do all day at work), and so it eventually grew on me. I gave it a second chance and liked it a little more the second time around. I’ve now seen it a total of three times to date. Now, John Landis is not so much a horror director a he is a comedy filmmaker – he’s actually only directed two horror films, An American Werewolf in London and the underrated Innocent Blood. I hadn’t seen American Werewolf in London in about eleven years, so I decided to pick up the DVD and have another look, and I knew then that Landis was indeed a master film crafter, his movies luridly exuding his personal love of the cinema. His early films manage to achieve some kind of pleasing cinematic perfection within a usually (and utterly) preposterous scenario. One of my all-time favorite movies is Landis’s The Blues Brothers – it was a favorite when I saw this in the theater back when I was 5 years old, and it’s still a favorite. Only back when I was five, it was because I thought car crashes were the coolest thing this side of the planet and I had no idea what the f-word was supposed to mean. That being said, I also believe that his best work (Blues Brothers, American Werewolf) was accomplished before the tragedy that would forever become synonymous with Landis’s filmmaking career… The Twilight Zone tragedy, where character actor Vic Morrow and two young child actors were killed during the filming of a helicopter/pyrotechnics stunt. (You can actually read an extremely in-depth report on this tragedy and its subsequent affects at this site...)

http://www.crimelibrary.com/notorious_murders/not_guilty/twilight_zone/1.html

This horrible incident must have had a lasting effect on Landis, as it obviously would almost any human being. I don’t think Landis lost his passion for film in the years following, but somehow his films just weren’t quite as John Landis as they used to be.

One notable exception was his vampire comedy Innocent Blood, which starred the original French la Femme Nikita Anne Parillaud as the charming bloodsucker who ends up (in spite of herself) playing with the food and generally making a big ol’ mess of everything within the Pittsburgh organized crime syndicate. Chock full of horror film cameos from the likes of Tom Savini, Dario Argento, Sam Raimi and Linnea Quigley, this was almost as much fun as American Werewolf, and dare I say, even more outrageous. Thinking back to my initial reaction to Landis’s Deer Woman, I remember seeing Innocent Blood in its initial theatrical run back in 1992, and at the time, I never though anything particularly special about it. But it was one of those films that kept nagging at me, even years after I’d seen it, and my subconscious kept bringing images of this movie to the forefront of my mind. I think a latter appreciation of movies in general helped me like Innocent Blood a lot better a few years after the fact. It’s even more amusing now as most of the cast of Italian gangsters have popped up in the stellar HBO series The Sopranos over the last few years.

I think with the recent horror opportunities given to Landis thanks to Masters of Horror, we’ll have a chance to see even more of the outrageous and the outright ludicrous from this sure-handed talent. I’m looking forward to see what he brings us in season two.

-Vince.

Rediscovering Joe Dante

2006-09-24T16:32:00.000-07:00

Being a fan of horror cinema, film director Joe Dante sits in a slightly awkward spot in my heart. He directed one of my all-time favorite horror films, as well (in my opinion) the greatest werewolf movie ever created – 1980’s The Howling.

Aside from this standout feature, Dante has crafted several enjoyable films though they’ve usually been in the comedy genre or geared to a more family-friendly audience. …But ho! I recall The Howling being filled with a pretty skewed sense of grim humor. And this train of thought led me to the infamous scene in Dante’s Gremlins where Phoebe Cates divulges a pretty dark yuletide anecdote. With this scene stuck in my head, I decided to revisit some of Dante’s work, specifically the stuff filled with bizarrely arcane comedy, and upon re-watching films like Gremlins, The Burbs and Piranha (Dante’s first film, which he directed for Roger Corman’s company in the late 70’s) I was reminded that not only are his horror films loaded with comedy, his comedies are often perverted with a sharp sense of horror – however humorous that may be. Dante directs with a very eye-catching comic-book style that captures the comic/horror perversity with stunning ease while inviting many homages to classic and contemporary cinema, pop culture and fiction. It’s also fun to watch Dante’s heroes get wrung through the wringer, at the end of the films they’re usually so physically abused they’re almost unrecognizable. Zach Galligan’s character in Gremlins fares a little better than either The Howling’s Dee Wallace or The Burbs’ Tom Hanks, but it’s impossible to say that Galligan goes unscathed between the beginning and the conclusion of Gremlins. And as for the horror, I now think that the kitchen slaughter sequence in Gremlins is close to being one of horror’s all-time classics.

As far as the pop-culture references go, one of the most memorable to me was the reference to the 70’s occult-horror flick The Sentinel, as described by Corey Feldman in The Burbs when he’s relating the odd goings-ons of the neighbors on his suburban cul-de-sac. With Dante’s film also having visually referenced favorite horror movies like Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, The Exorcist and Race with the Devil, I decided I should check out The Sentinel for myself. And while this movie, about a young woman who moves into a creepy apartment building that may or may not be the gateway to hell, is not without its moments of horror weirdness, it’s still not nearly as great as the other aforementioned horrors from the 70’s and 80’s. But that’s the thing about Dante’s work – it often elicits a curiosity for other movies, and in a sense, comparative to Tarantino’s pop-culture-crammed work. They’re movies for movie fans.

-Vince.

"Reality is like a fruitcake; Pretty enough to look at but with all sorts of nasty things lurking just beneath the surface."

-Gil's All Fright Diner.

Eating Out...?

2006-09-02T11:45:00.000-07:00

Earlier this summer, I picked up – on a whim – a paperback copy of A. Lee Martinez’s “Gil’s All-Fright Diner”…Now serving Armageddon with a side of fries! This has got to be the most hilarious horror lit offering I’ve read in ages! Possibly ever. It opens up with a pair of redneck buddies rolling down a dirt road in their beat-up pickup truck – the Duke of Werewolves and the Earl of Vampires (or Duke & Earl for short). The camaraderie and nonstop banter between these two “heroes” actually makes laugh out loud – a lot! Pretty embarrassing when you’re y yourself in public, but what the hell, it’s a small price to pay. Anyway, these two supernatural rednecks roll up to Gil’s diner in the middle of nowhere with a fat sassy waitress named Loretta where they find that the diner is suffering from regular Zombie infestations thanks to an insecure Asian black magic priestess. And this is all just the start of it! Author Martinez warps the supernatural myths and horror-movie clichés into a load of amazingly funny deadpan comedy.

Getting so excited over this sharp novel, I decided to check out another diner-horror last night, an old VHS copy of Blood Diner from 1987. Originally, this was indented as on unofficial sequel to cult drive-in director Herschell Gordon Lewis’s Blood Feast, but even though there’s plenty of whacked-out camp, boobs, blood and brains (brains of the corpse variety, not so much the script or execution of the movie itself), there’s something that just missed the mark. Compulsively watchable only because I couldn’t bear to not see what kind of off-the-wall shenanigans the filmmakers were going to pull out of their hat next – but after all it was over, I realized I would have been better off re-watching one of the other campy diner/eating horrors I have kicking around this apartment.

If you want some really good eating-out at the movies, may I recommend Return of the Living Dead (1985), Blood Feast 2: All U Can Eat (the real sequel from 2002), or Anthony Hickox’s frustratingly hard-to-find Sundown: the Vampire in Retreat (1991).

Order’s up!

-V.