Scenes from Horror Hound, Day 2: A Comedy of Terrors

I'm winding up my impressions of Horror Hound Weekend today with a look at Tucker & Dale vs Evil (2010, directed by Eli Craig), a film that is mysteriously without North American distribution a year after making its debut at Sundance in 2010. This is a riff on the rural massacre movie, in which unwitting college students (or other photogenic young people) wander into the woods to be eviscerated by rural degenerates. This archetype is pretty old, dating back to the Sawney Bean legend, but it was given full life in the Southern Gothic literature or Flannery O'Connor and James Dickey, who give regionalism a hint of derangement and resentment.

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Scenes from Horror Hound, Day 2: Wishing Past the Graveyard

The big screening on day two of HHW was Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, which I'll talk about in a separate posting. Immediately prior to that screening was a preview of a movie called A Wish for the Dead (2011, directed by Nathan Thomas Milliner), which, like Lethal Obsession, is a microbudget film from Indiana. We saw a ten minute clip and based on that clip, I'm on board for the full movie. It's obvious almost from the first frame that the filmmakers know what they're doing, and they do it well. The film's web site describes the plot like so:

"After weeks of sitting in the hospital by his dying wife’s side. John is desperate for answers. So when a mysterious man appears promising her salvation with a simple wish he jumps at the chance. Little does he know the terrible price attached to this simple gift. "

It's a terrific premise and I'll be interested to see how it plays out, but the clip they showed at Horror Hound doesn't give any indications of this scenario. It stands up pretty well as a short film, in which a girl, bullied online, kills herself in her bathtub only to wake up in the morgue. And she's not alone. This has the gutwrenching zombie action down pat, and even with its lo fi DV production values, the camera is in the right place for every shot, every cut is well considered and effective, and the make-up effects are mostly convincing. There's some dicey acting--there always is in films from this sector--but dialogue is mercifully minimal here. What you get in this ten minute clip is a better and more horrifying zombie movie than many full length zombie movies (I'm looking at you, Italy). I hope the rest of the movie is at the same level. Even if it isn't, the preview clip was worth watching all by itself.

Scenes from Horror Hound, Day 1: Enthusiasm Does Not Equal Aptitude

I apologize for the helter skelter nature of these posts, but the weekend was kind of a jumble for me. This will, unfortunately, be the pattern of my reporting.

The first day of the show, I sat in on a screening of a microbudget indie called Lethal Obsession (2010, directed by Jason Hignite and Chris Jay), a slasher film in which the victims are all women who work as cam girls. The murders all happen on-camera. The killer is a masked figure of indeterminate gender. The prime suspects are the customers who are logged on to the feed during the murders and the woman who owns the site. The structure of the film gives the filmmakers an excuse, a la old school exploiters like Stripped to Kill, to give the audience a peepshow experience, but rather than climaxing with, well, a climax, we get a murder scene. This prompted me to turn to one of my friends during the movie and say, "This is like porn without the money shot." Indeed, that's exactly what it feels like. The level of performance is like a porn movie, the structure of scenes is like a porn movie, and the production values are like a porn movie. It doesn't get off to a good start, either, because it suffers almost immediately from that bane of all microbudget movies: bad sound. The sound quality tends to obscure whatever virtues the film might have.

But then again, maybe not.

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Scenes From Horror Hound, Day 3: Lo Fi

One of the odd things about the Horror Hound Weekend was the absence of a video room. I'm used to sci fi conventions, so maybe the horror people have different expectations, but every other fan-oriented convention I've been to has had a video room with appropriate entertainments running, grindhouse-like, in an endless stream. The closest Horror Hound came to this was two sessions of film clips. The first, celebrating the centennial of Vincent Price's birth, consisted of trailers for Vincent Price movies. The second consisted of Hammer Horror movies, truncated into ten minute versions. These were all projected with a Super 8 movie projector. This was interesting, because my family had a Super 8 camera and projector when I was growing up and I have a lot of fondness for the kinds of films collectors could buy on a budget. As an adult, I had a 16mm film projector of my own and a small collection of films, including a version of The Wolf Man abridged to about 45 minutes. I bought it at auction from a school district, as I recall. In any event, this is an area of film with which I've had some contact, and watching these two programs made me kind of nostalgic for it.

What struck me hardest about the Super 8mm Hammer films was the fact that you could condense most of them to ten minutes without omitting much of the salient plot points. The guy who was running this show wasn't told the theme beforehand, and didn't have enough Hammer films to fill the time slot, but he DID have a selection of other films to intersperse. Watching a condensed, 10 minute version of The Bride of Frankenstein was instructive, because even though the full film is only an hour and ten minutes long, it resists being condensed in a way that the Hammer films don't. The stuff that was omitted from The Bride was totally essential. The abridgement creates an unavoidable sense of loss. That isn't the case with, say, The Plague of The Zombies or The Vampire Lovers, which were both on the program. Hammer was pretty rigid in their running times, and there are more than a few of their movies that are seriously harmed by being forced into their 90 minute running times (I'm looking at you, Curse of the Werewolf!), but this is the first time that I've entertained the idea that their mandated running times also had the opposite effect. Interesting...

I'm also surprised at how much texture the lower resolution of Super 8 film adds to these movies. Again, it hurt The Bride of Frankenstein, but with the Hammer films, it tended to add a grottiness that suited them, while disguising their essential cheapness. Not that I'm suggesting that anyone dirty up their prints of any movie before releasing them, but it's an interesting effect.

None of this stuff mitigates the fact that Frankenstein Conquers the World is crap any way you cut it, but at 10 minutes long, it becomes some kind of weird dream fugue.

Scenes from Horror Hound, Day 2

I met Barbara Steele today! Barbara Fucking STEELE! SQUEEEEEEEEE!

Ahem.

I had her sign my laserdisc of Fellini's 8-1/2. She had never seen one before. I think she was pleased.

Scenes from Horror Hound, Day 1

So I was standing at DVD booth in the dealer's room, chatting with my friend, Anna, about the various movies on display there, when my eye was drawn to Mario Bava's The Whip and the Body. The conversation went something like this:

Me: Have you seen The Whip and the Body?

Anna: No.

Me: You totally need to see that. It has Christopher Lee in it, and it's kinky as hell, and the transfer is gorgeous.

Anna: Yeah?

Me: Yeah. Is this the VCI edition?

Nice man manning the booth: Yes.

Me (to Anna): This was one of the first discs from VCI that wasn't crap.

Nice man manning the booth: Hi. I'm Chris Rowe. PR director for VCI Entertainment.

Me (probably turning red): This is the VCI booth, isn't it?

Nice man manning the booth: Yep.

Me: (Facepalm).

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Seriously, though, the VCI disc is lovely and the movie is a key film from a major director. I said some admiring things about the disc and we picked up their edition of Dark Night of the Scarecrow. THAT disc is gorgeous, too. Full marks for pulling out all the stops. Highly recommended for fans of the movie.