The Bloodstained Shadow (1978)

JUNE 23, 2009

GENRE: GIALLO, ITALIAN
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

It’s rare I watch a Giallo that’s not from Argento or Bava, so if The Bloodstained Shadow (Italian: Solamente Nero) is not one of the better ones outside of their realm, please accept my apology for enjoying it, and then suggest some others. For all I know, it’s among the weakest, because I have so little to compare it to. It could use some tightening and a bit more gore, but otherwise it’s exactly what I want from a Giallo.

And what do I want, exactly? Well, some great murder scenes, obviously. Like I said, there’s not a lot of blood (the murderer mainly just strangles folks, though there is a nice bit where he/she tosses an old woman into a fire), but they are all well-staged and coherent, which is more than you can say about some others I’ve seen. By grounding the film in something that actually resembles reality, it allows the story and characters to shine through, with some impressive visuals to boot.

It also has its fair share of wonderfully strange moments, like when a woman tries to cheer up her retarded son by dismembering a doll that he hates (this part actually disturbed me a little, as she really fucking annihilates the damn thing). I also love all of the extras in the movie, as they are all colorfully blunt and seemingly carrying out their actual lives. There’s a pair of drunks outside of a restaurant rambling about whether or not one has time for another round, a few cops questioning the sex life of the film’s hero, and a guy who is really impatient about getting his food in another restaurant scene. It’s also the rare film to have a line of dialogue like this: “That man has tried to molest my little boy again. This is the fourth time!”

She says this to a priest, who then goes off to confront the would-be pedo. The idea of a priest giving someone shit for being a child molester is somewhat like me complaining about someone being too harsh on Lionsgate. Also, the plot point is rather unnecessary in the long run (the guy is one of the first to die, and his red herring man-servant is never seen again), but it’s still, if nothing else, unique.

I also liked how the mystery was structured. Some might consider the end a bit of a cheat, but I didn’t see it that way, and thanks to an exposition-heavy explanation from the hero as to how he figured out who the killer was (complete with flashback footage - it’s like an early version of the Saw montage), everything makes sense and fits together. There’s a brief moment early on that seems to be trying to make the hero a viable suspect (he appears wet when there was no reason for him to have been outside), but other than that, it’s unusually sound in that department. Plus I didn’t figure out the killer’s identity until pretty late into it, so that’s also good.

I am curious - does Venice only have that one street, or is that the only one that they allow film crews to work on? It’s the same one you see in Don’t Look Now, Last Crusade, and probably a dozen others. When our heroine (Suspiria’s Stefania Casini) begins walking around the area, I kept expecting that freaky little rain-coated woman to run out and stab a surprised Donald Sutherland.

The DVD’s only extra besides the trailer is an interview with director Antonio Bido, who comes across as far more sane and coherent than many of his peers. He explains why Goblin is not credited with the score, talks about working with the actors, and apologizes for not sticking with the Giallo genre, and mentions having a new script in that vein, which, 7 years later, has sadly not been filmed. Maybe if Argento’s aptly titled Giallo is a hit, it can help pave the way for a resurgence in the genre. It’ll help keep me in business, at any rate.

I was saddened to discover that this film is relatively unheralded. The trailer is not on Youtube (a scene is though), the IMDb page is below average in terms of having info (the message board is completely empty too), and there is no Wikipedia page for it. There's a lengthy page for the Saw theme song ("Hello Zepp"), but not for this movie? Come on now.

What say you?

And now, Horror Movie A Day and Happy Hour Comics would like to present the newest in an ongoing series of HMAD-inspired comic strips. I hope you enjoy!! (Click to enlarge)

PLEASE, GO ON...

Terror At London Bridge (1985)

JUNE 7, 2009

GENRE: SERIAL KILLER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REVIVAL SCREENING)

Filmmakers/actors often take shots at their own films when they play at the New Beverly (be it a joke at the expense of their own performance, the box office, or in some cases, the work of others on the film), but Clu Gulager is a notable exception. Whenever he speaks about one of his films before it screens, he will praise the other actors, the director, and refer to the film as “wonderful” or something similar. But even he didn’t have much to say about Terror At London Bridge (aka Bridge Across Time); he praised his co-stars, but merely referred to the film itself as “interesting...” or something like that.

Well, it’s certainly an interesting concept for a movie. Jack the Ripper is somehow brought 100 years forward in time and begins stalking women on the harsh, cold streets of... Lake Havasu, Arizona. Well, OK, I’ll give them points for originality. Jack is often brought back in NY or LA or whatever, and that gets old. I’ll take a small lakeside town over the umpteenth metropolis.

Unfortunately, the details about it are all wrong, and worse, fairly stupid. If it’s the real Jack, why does he copy his own murders, right down to the date? Wouldn’t he be like “oh, now I can do something different!”. Nope, he even waits around for weeks doing nothing (besides hit on Adrienne Barbeau) until the next “original murder” date comes along. So Jack the Ripper has OCD, then. Also, he comes back to life via a magic rock. It seems London Bridge has been dismantled and rebuilt in Lake Havasu (I actually thought this was the most ridiculous part of the movie until I found out that its true), but they were missing one rock. When the rock is returned and put in place, Jack is reborn. Luckily for him, it happened at the same time of the year as his original murder spree (August/September). If the rock had been found/replaced in like, March, he’d have to get a parttime job or something just to keep busy until he could start killing.

This also means that the movie is painfully low on a body count. There are only three murders, with lead cop David Hasselhoff trying to prevent the fourth. But since the movie is 96 minutes long (TV movie standard length), instead of stalking/killing, we just get endless scenes of the Hoff romancing a boat shop owner, Hoff arguing with his chief (Clu) and some town official in the Murray “You can’t close the beaches” Hamilton role, or a lab tech rambling about how weird the evidence is (“This blood seems to be a hundred years old!”). And Jack himself is equally dull; he only has a few lines and is almost never seen outside of the kill scenes. Plus his face is hidden at first, as if the movie was going to be a whodunit. There is some novelty to seeing him in his 19th century garb (hat, cape, etc) as he walks around a sunny beach area, but not nearly enough to make the movie entertaining as a whole.

Oh, and Hoff has a “tragic past” - he shot an “armed” suspect that turned out to be a kid with a can opener (note - in lieu of a trailer, which I couldn't find, I put this scene at the bottom of the review). Strangely, this movie predates Die Hard, so perhaps Steven E. de Souza caught this dullfest on TV, heard the shooting story, and thought “I bet I can use this in a GOOD movie, one people might actually like!” And viola, Al Powell has something besides a Twinkie addiction to make him so memorable. That, OR, it’s just a generic story that doesn’t hurt an otherwise solid movie but can make a lousy one look all the more uninteresting.

The inherent problem with any Jack the Ripper movie is that they never caught (or even identified) him in real life, which means that the film either will have no real climax, will make shit up like in From Hell, or, as in this case, will use time travel and other nonsense to distract you away from that problematic issue. And with a good script, it can work. But seriously though, a magic fucking rock?

What say you?

And now, Horror Movie A Day and Happy Hour Comics would like to present the newest in an ongoing series of HMAD-inspired comic strips. I hope you enjoy!! (Click to enlarge)

PLEASE, GO ON...

Return Of The Boogeyman (1994)

MAY 23, 2009

GENRE: CRAP, SUPERNATURAL (?)
SOURCE: DVD (ONLINE RENTAL)

Since before I even saw the original Boogey Man, I had heard about the sequel that used a lot of footage from the original and generally sucked to boot. But since I kind of dug the first one, I wanted to see it anyway. Unfortunately, Return Of The Boogeyman is actually the THIRD film in the series; there is actually a straight up Boogeyman 2. Apparently, the thing I watched (Return) recycles footage from both 1 AND 2, which might explain why I hadn't the slightest goddamn clue what I was watching throughout most of the runtime.

Now, not having seen 2, I don't know which is footage from it and which is the new stuff. Someone on the IMDb - surely a place where no one ever exaggerates or simply makes shit up - claims that Return only has about seven minutes of new footage. If that's true, I assume its the bookends of the film, which involve the pantyhose wearing man running around on the beach while the extras pay him little mind, and then the ending where our "heroine" (so named because she is in the movie more than the other characters) gets into her car and sees the guy in her rearview mirror.

If THAT is true, and if I also take out the footage from the first movie that I can definitely place, then I guess Boogeyman 2 is about a band or group of filmmakers that live in or want to investigate the place where the murders from the first film occurred. Or something. There's also a beach house, and a psychiatrist....

Seriously, this movie is fucking appalling. Recycling footage or not, there is no excuse for it to be so goddamn incoherent, not to mention wildly inconsistent in terms of film stock. Some scenes are blue filtered, others look fine, sometimes they give the footage from the 1st movie a "flashback" look, sometimes not... even the shit in my Decrepit Crypt pack shows more professionalism.

The weirdest thing about the footage is that they apparently didn't get the rights to the audio? Because it's all but completely muted, while the girl who is telling the story (if its supposed to be the same girl that's in the scenes we are re-seeing, her name is different) just narrates exactly what we see. Also, it makes the movie look just as bad as this one. Nice work.

There is only one moment in the entire film where I was entertained. It's at the very end (the one nice thing I can say about this movie, it's short), when all the footage has been used up. Our "heroine" has seemingly rid herself of her fears by talking about things that she wasn't around to see, and then says "Now I must try on my stockings." Apparently, that was the fear she was trying to overcome; the killer in her nightmares wore pantyhose on his head, and it has kept her from being able to dress appropriately. Amazing.

And of course, now I have no choice but to see Boogeyman 2 just to ease my mind as to how all of this fucking crap fits together. Fuck you, Ulli Lommel (and listed director Deland Nuse; I guess Lommel only "directed" the footage from the other movies this time around).

What say you?

And now, Horror Movie A Day and Happy Hour Comics would like to present the newest in an ongoing series of HMAD-inspired comic strips. I hope you enjoy!! (Click to enlarge)

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Voices (2007)

APRIL 28, 2009

GENRE: ASIAN, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: DVD (STORE RENTAL)

Having had enough of my increasingly frequent falling asleep during movies (I even dozed during Repo the other night for the first time ever, despite the lights and extra sound from the “Shadowcasters” adding to the insanity), I have decided to try something: the instant I feel myself getting heavier eyelids, I pause the film and get up, check my email, splash some water in my face, play a turn on Scrabble (on Facebook, where games can last weeks), whatever. Then I sit back down and resume viewing, presumably wide awake. So as a result, the 85 minute Voices (Korean: Du Saram-yida) took me over two hours to watch, but I saw every minute of it without having to go back and re-watch sections of the film. Hurrah!

(Of course, irony strikes - I ended up watching the entire thing over again anyway, because I couldn’t make sense of the ending, but more on that later.)

Anyway, Voices helps to solidify my feeling that this year’s After Dark Fest was the best yet. I didn’t outright love anything, but it’s more important that I didn’t hate or even dislike anything either (though I have yet to see Butterfly Effect 3, mainly because I haven’t seen 2). Everything was OK to good, which is fine by me. So where does Voices fit in? Well, for the first 45-50 minutes, I would say it was the best of the lot. However, director Ki-hwan Oh cannot sustain the first two acts’ pace or appeal, and the 3rd act, while far from bad, is a bit disappointing, and leaves a couple of things unresolved.

But the first 45 or so... oh man. Not only do we get a heaping of violence (the body count here is much higher than average for a Korean horror film), but it’s bloody as hell to boot. I’m talking full blown geysers of the red stuff, a la Nightmare on Elm St (mixed with the “full body red” look, think The Descent). Also, vicious stabbings, a fall from high that leaves an ever-growing pool of crimson... this may be the BLOODIEST Asian horror film of its kind that I’ve ever seen. Plus, the attacks pack a visceral punch; there's a scene where a would-be killer repeatedly smashes a car trying to get to our heroine, and I admit to jumping at the sound/strength of a window being smashed.

I also liked that it was a unique take on the curse/weird things happening type of Eastern horror film that we've seen so many times. It’s similar to Ju-On/The Grudge in a few ways, namely a curse that is seemingly born from intense anger and how it seems to focus on a few school girls (like Ju-On 2). But to its credit, that’s more or less where the similarities end. There are no ghostly children making noises, nor do any ghosts with long hair covering their faces make any appearance. Hell, I don’t even think water factors in to any of the scare scenes, which may be a first.

The problem is that after a rollercoaster first act and most of the second, it not only slows down (as expected), but it does so to answer questions, and doesn’t bother to answer them all. For example, all of the stories we hear about previous victims of the curse seem to involve family: mothers killing sons, brothers killing sisters, etc. But our heroine is attacked by pretty much everyone BUT her family. Her mother eventually takes a stab at it (pun possibly intended, I can’t remember what she used to attack her), but before then, a fellow classmate, a teacher, and her little nerdy buddy all try (and fail) to kill her. Her sister and father never even raise their voice. Obviously this setup has its perks - you’re never sure when she’s safe or when the person she’s with is going to suddenly lunge at her - but it leaves a fairly large plot hole.

Another issue is the twist ending, which also leaves some things unanswered (but at least puts the “family vs family” aspect back in place, sort of). I won’t spoil it (partially because I’m not entirely sure what happened), but it seems like the type of twist that could use a Saw-style montage that re-explains everything we saw before, something Ki-hwan Oh doesn’t offer (hence why I watched it again on my own, but it didn’t help beyond minor character details). The movie is based on a graphic novel, which I assume makes more sense. And if not, it probably has some tentacle rape or something. At any rate, it’s not the worst twist ever, but it definitely could have used a bit more audience hand-holding in its presentation. And I say this, for once, on the authority of someone who saw the entire thing!

There’s a scene that made me laugh out loud though. This guy is doing his Asian horror movie duty by living in an isolated house and giving our heroine a lot of exposition, which includes the story of when he killed his wife by throwing her in front of a goddamn bus. He then says “After serving time in prison...”, but he doesn’t appear to be much older, maybe 5 years. Is wife-icide not really a big deal in Korea? Potheads get more than that in America.

The DVD had no extras at all, so I finally selected the “Miss Horrorfest Webisodes” to see what the girls looked like and why they found these things so important that they had to stick them on every disc. One girl was pretty cute, but Suicide Girls rejects are not my type, so I had little interest in them or the god-awful editing on display (I’ve seen better work in high school public access films). Also, all together the episodes ran just under an hour, which means that’s an hour’s worth of video content eating up the bit budget for the DVD; space that should have been used for making ofs, audio commentaries, or even deleted scenes - things that were all but completely absent from this year’s batch. Pretty much bullshit, if you ask me. Not as bad as Paramount forcing those fucking worthless “Lost Tales from Camp Blood” things on the new Friday the 13th discs instead of cut footage or retrospectives that are worth a damn, but still pretty lousy.

So in a strictly visual sense, this is a winner. It’s gory, it’s visually exciting (I didn’t even mention the occasional monster that shows up), and unlike most Asian horror films, it’s on the short side of things. It’s also shot in the 2.35:1 aspect, a rarity for these things. However, it’s also needlessly confusing and seemingly incomplete (maybe it WAS supposed to be longer - again, having actual filmmaker input on the DVD instead of a bunch of attention whores work out their daddy issues via cheesy After Effects projects would be helpful). Your call.

One final note - the original title was Someone Behind You, which makes a lot more sense than Voices. No one hears any “voices” in the film (well, not ones of interest to horror movie fans), so why they changed it from something that DID make sense to something that didn’t is beyond me. Again - did someone Weinstein the shit out of this movie?

What say you?

And now, Horror Movie A Day and Happy Hour Comics would like to present the newest in an ongoing series of HMAD-inspired comic strips. I hope you enjoy!! (Click to enlarge)

PLEASE, GO ON...

Bats (1999)

APRIL 4, 2009

GENRE: PREDATOR
SOURCE: DVD (ONLINE RENTAL)

Roughly every monster or “Predator” type horror movie (basically any movie where a number of natural creatures attack humans) ends with a shot of an undiscovered egg or whatever, setting up a sequel. In many cases, this sequel never actually comes (which is usually a good thing - that Godzilla II that was threatened is never going to happen), but in the case of Bats, it actually DID get a sequel almost a decade later (Bats: Human Harvest), for whoever the fuck was asking for one. And given my “job” here at HMAD, I would have rented it by now, had I seen the original. But alas, I apparently had better things to do in October of 1999 than go see a killer bat movie*.

Given that it was a theatrical release, you expect it to be better than Sci-Fi original fare, and for the most part it is (thanks to a script by John Logan - who would be nominated for an Oscar the following year for Gladiator). The effects are decent (though there seems to be about four different bat species in this roost), and there’s a lot more action and production value in any given scene than your Ice Spiders or Anaconda 3s have in their entirety. The actors are also more engaging than usual. Ironically, the folks here (Lou Diamond Phillips, Leon, Dina Meyer) would probably jump at the chance to take the lead role in a Sci-Fi movie nowadays, but back then they were still fairly relevant. And you can never go wrong with Bob Gunton.

There are two big problems that keep it from being an overall success though. One is the strange pace - the movie is seemingly on overdrive for the first 45 minutes (there are more bat attack scenes in the first 20 minutes of Bats than there are in the entirety of Nightwing), but the pace cannot be sustained, resulting in a rather dull 2nd half. At first I was pretty impressed by how fast moving it was (hell, the requisite “YOU were the one that created these!” scene takes place mere moments after the guy is introduced!), and was wondering how they could top it for a finale. But they don’t. The finale is actually a lot like Nightwing’s - our heroes go into a cave to set up some gizmo and then hightail it out of there before the entrance is sealed. And only Lou and Dina enter, so you know the bats aren’t going to get one final kill in, resulting in a finale in which they might as well just have presented with onscreen text for all of the excitement it creates.

The other problem is Louis Morneau’s directing. As the director of Hitcher II and Joy Ride: Dead Ahead, I wasn’t expecting much, but he actually makes those duds look good in comparison with his work here (which may explain why he never again helmed a theatrical release, despite the film’s modest success). For whatever reason, he films half of the movie using di-opter lenses, even for scenes where the characters are relatively close together anyway. He also has a strange affinity for smearing and/or skewing the image. It’s ok for “Bat POV” shots, but he uses it EVERYWHERE, even in scenes where the bats aren’t even present. It certainly doesn’t look good, and it eventually becomes a distraction, particularly in wide shots in which our heroes resemble Mike Teevee once he’s been stretched back out.

He also seemingly went out of his way to find the least compatible stock footage for some army jets heading toward the town to blow it all to hell. You’re all into the movie and all of a sudden you’re seeing dailies from Iron Eagle.

One thing I will praise is the sound mix. It’s awesome! The bats can be heard swarming in from all around you, and the directional effects are above average as well. I would consider it a perfect soundtrack if they had only thought to mute Meyer when she delivers a line about how she can “hear the bats’ sonar”. How do you “hear” an abstract concept? Yeah, and I can smell hunger.

The DVD has a menu created by a Photoshop template, an EPK behind the scenes that nearly put me into a coma (except when Gunton creepily compliments Meyer’s good looks), and a commentary by Morneau and Phillips in which they go on and on about how hot/tiring it was in the heat and what not. Riveting.

As these things go, it’s slightly above average. It won’t make you forget Tremors or The Birds, but I’ll take it over Frogs, that’s for damn sure. And bonus points for putting Carlos Jacott in a non-villain role for once.

What say you?

*Yet I went to see Random fucking Hearts.

And now, Horror Movie A Day and Happy Hour Comics would like to present the newest in an ongoing series of HMAD-inspired comic strips. I hope you enjoy!! (Click to enlarge)

PLEASE, GO ON...

Frogs (1972)

MARCH 31, 2009

GENRE: PREDATOR
SOURCE: DVD (ONLINE RENTAL)

If you watch a horror movie called Frogs, and the frogs don’t actually provide any of the horror, does it make a sound? Or, I guess, a visual imprint? Wait, I guess movies have sound too, so... wait...

Look, it’s fucking dumb to name a movie Frogs when the frogs don’t kill anyone. All I'm saying.

I don’t blame our amphibian ancestors though. Frogs are pretty creepy (I am afraid of pretty much any water-dwelling creature though, including if not especially fish), but they don’t really have any sort of attack power I can discern. Do they even have teeth? They got those giant tongues, but unless the frog itself is giant (which these frogs are not, they’re merely “slightly bigger than normal”), I can’t see the tongue causing much damage to someone.

So does the film have a complete lack of kills? Quite the opposite - the movie actually has a higher body count than I expected. As I pointed out in the Home, Sweet Home review, you don’t have horror movies centered on family gatherings all that often, because that means you are wiping out someone’s entire family instead of their friends and neighbors. And each person meets their demise at the hands of lizards, snakes, spiders (those aren’t even amphibious!), alligators, turtles, birds (again - fit the theme!), and crabs. Apparently there was a butterfly kill at one point (!!!) but it was deleted and replaced with snakes, giving them TWO kills in the movie. The frogs sort of get in the final kill, but they simply ribbit until the old guy has a heart attack, so that doesn’t count. Maybe that’s why the movie was named after them? The producers felt bad for not letting them in on any of the carnage?

In fact, the frogs are so unthreatening that a little kid actually casually walks by a few on the porch during the “escape” that serves as the “that was it?” climax of the movie. No theatrics like waving a torch in their direction or anything, he and the others just sort of mosey on by while the damn things sit there doing nothing, much as they did for the 80 minutes before.

And without an actual villain, the movie has no climax either. Like Twister, the movie ends when whatever scene is occurring around the 90 minute mark has reached its logical conclusion and everyone calls it a day. The big finale goes down like this: the hero (a young Sam Elliott!) clubs a snake, hands a kid a shotgun, and then they all get into a car with a good Samaritan who is in no way puzzled as to why a shirtless man with a shotgun and a trio of obviously upset women and children doesn’t care to explain what happened or where his car is. Awesome.

Another hilarious thing about the movie is that everyone calls the old guy “Grandpa”. Either there’s some weird incestuous shit going on, or the family has skipped a generation. He’s also a wonderfully horrible old man; he hardly cares when his grandchildren are killed, and also shoots a snake hanging over the dinner table before ordering everyone to sit down and eat, without bothering to have his black sla-, er, servant clean up the snake guts first. He’s also a selfish ol’ bastard - the family has gotten together for a week to celebrate four birthdays, but he repeatedly refers to “his” birthday being ruined or whatever. Spread the joy, asshole.

And this is supposed to be scary, but I just found it kind of heartbreaking:

Let him in! He obviously won’t fucking do anything.

What say you?

And now, Horror Movie A Day and Happy Hour Comics would like to present the newest in an ongoing series of HMAD-inspired comic strips. I hope you enjoy!! (Click to enlarge)

PLEASE, GO ON...

Screamers: The Hunting (2009)

MARCH 26, 2009

GENRE: TECHNOLOGY
SOURCE: DVD (STORE RENTAL)

I wonder if the producers behind the myriad DTV sequels that have cropped up over the past year or so want to murder Joe Lynch and the rest of the Wrong Turn 2 crew. By delivering such a top notch sequel, it elevated the idea of what a non-theatrical sequel could be capable of delivering, and in turn made their lazy efforts (let’s throw in an example here: Vacancy 2) seem even worse than they would had WT2 never come along. So it’s a nice surprise to report that Screamers: The Hunting, a sequel only one man in the world was asking for (that would be Don the DVD fanatic), is actually pretty decent. It wouldn’t win a cage match with WT2, but it’s certainly an example of how to deliver an entertaining entry in a fledgling franchise.

For starters, it improves on the original. Not by much, but it does so in the areas that count: gore and effects. The screamers look better, and they interact with the backgrounds in a far more believable way. They also fuck folks up - I was actually surprised by how gory some of the kills were. It’s hardly a splatter film, but compared to the nearly bloodless kills in the original, it’s fucking Dead Alive. Plus, the human/screamer hybrids are truly hybrids this time around; their jaws open to reveal machinery and blades inside (it kind of looks like a robotic version of those things in Blade II). The body count is higher too, for what it’s worth.

It’s also improved in the pace department. It’s more or less a remake of the original, with folks going to check on a distress call and yadda yadda, but they move along. In the original, the first 45 minutes gave us... a mostly offscreen plane crash and a mostly offscreen opening attack. Here we get true carnage, a firefight, a couple of gory kills, etc.

Unfortunately, it also retains the original’s bizarre penchant of keeping important cast members to the 3rd act of the film. At least they aren’t lying about Lance Henriksen’s role - he is listed in the “and” role, not 2nd billed like Jennifer “I don’t appear in the movie for nearly an hour” Rubin was in Screamers 1. But still, it’s not until the 70 minute mark that Lance finally appears, and he dies less than 10 minutes later. I actually began to wonder if the guy making the credits just assumed Lance was in the movie (“Space? Robots? DTV? Yeah, Lance has gotta be in here...”) and put his name in there just in case, as he doesn’t appear on the cover either.

Speaking of Lance, one must think of Aliens. For years, any low budget sci-fi/horror movie used Cameron’s film as a template when characterizing its main players. You always get the fish out of water teaming up with a bunch of hardasses. But it seems Screamers was actually using Battlestar Galactica as its template. We have the strong female, sure, but she’s not an outsider or whatever like Ripley was. They are a team, and they flirt with each other and more or less act like normal humans with normal issues. They even refer to the Screamers as "Toasters" at one point - sort of a giveaway. Even the requisite “evil” human isn’t a slimy fuck like Burke, he simply sees an opportunity to make some money, but isn’t doing so at the risk of his teammates’ lives. Keeping him in a morally gray area is far more interesting, much like BSG’s Baltar (at least, in the earlier seasons - I’m only on season 3 but he seems pretty much a full on villain at this point). It’s a change I hope to see more of; there’s only so many Hudson wannabes I can take in one lifetime.

At least one fellow reviewer has bemoaned the idea of rats being in the movie (and actually causing the screamers to “wake up”), but they were in the original too, so shut the fuck up. Rats are everywhere, and that’s all there is to it. Speaking of the original, it does have some ties; Peter Weller’s character is often mentioned (one of the characters is his daughter). Oddly, the opening credits once again say “based on the short story by Philip K. Dick”, but mention none of the original’s screenwriters.

Hey, why is it whenever someone in a movie mentions “raw materials”, I immediately want to go back to Star Wars Galaxies? Anyone else play that broken-ass game? I used to love crafting shit out of my hard-grinded materials. Folks would report of a great vein of Goobledygookdium on the planet Goofynameia and I’d go off with my survey tools in order to make a gun that would fetch me 200 credits... man, good times. I understand Fallout 3 has some crafting involved, I should get on that shit.

My notes have “Let’s go” written down. I dunno why, maybe I liked how they said it or something. Or maybe I was having flashbacks to The Cars. Whatever.

I also want to officially call it - every actress with the last name Holden is incredibly beautiful. Alexandra, Laurie, and now Gina Holden, the star of this movie (which, I am still technically reviewing, despite the length tangents I have taken). She reminds me a bit of Gabrielle Anwar, which is the polar opposite of a problem. She’s also the type of action heroine I like - she’s smart and tough, but she doesn’t have that annoying “grrrrl” attitude that makes me feel like I’m watching some sort of feminist propaganda (see: Tank Girl). Put this lovely woman in more movies, preferably ones people besides obsessive compulsive horror movie nerds will see.

The DVD’s only extra is a featurette that was also surprisingly above-average. It covers the usual ground (casting, story, visual effects), but it does so by literally taking you through the movie (do not watch it before watching the film, as it gives away the end), and keeps random clip usage to a minimum. Its worth noting that Lance appears in it more than he does in the film itself. One thing I was looking for, however, was information on what the movie was shot on; it looked a lot like digital at times, but they never discuss it. The end credits are no help, I only learned that this movie’s existence is due to Canadian Tax Brackets - about a dozen different of them are “thanked”.

So is it worth a watch? I would say so. I had fun watching it, unlike the dull original, and it was competently made across the board. Compared to Sony’s other recent DTV sequels, it’s theatrical-worthy. And I’d like to point out that director Sheldon Wilson also directed the surprisingly decent Kaw, so at this point I have to assume he’s not one of the hundreds of faceless hacks out there in DTV land, and is someone who actually gives a shit. Kudos, sir.

What say you?

And now, Horror Movie A Day and Happy Hour Comics would like to present the newest in an ongoing series of HMAD-inspired comic strips. I hope you enjoy!! (Click to enlarge)

PLEASE, GO ON...

Cameron's Closet (1988)

MARCH 22, 2009

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: CABLE (FEARNET)

You know how on The Simpsons the first five minutes are just sort of setting up the real plot in a really random way? Cameron’s Closet is kind of like that. It starts off with a kid that has telekinetic powers and is seemingly starting to rebel against the scientist types who are studying him (it actually feels like the movie starts halfway through its own narrative), but after a while it’s really about some monster and a cop with psychiatric problems. The telekinesis eventually seems forgotten entirely.

Of course, that wouldn’t be too much of a problem had the monster/cop section of the movie been interesting, or even coherent. I eventually hadn’t the slightest clue as to what the fuck was going on, only that there was a monster in the kid’s closet and this little artifact thing was the key to stopping it. A cop that got turned into a zombie factors in somehow. It’s bad enough when your killer kid movie (he more or less kills his dad in the first few minutes, making a machete turn and chop the guy’s head off in one of my all time favorite movie decap deaths) isn’t really a killer kid movie at all, it’s even worse when the one they give you instead is dull and largely kill free.

Speaking of the kills - how fucked up is this kid’s mom going to be? Except for the cop’s partner, the only deaths in the movie are of the most important men in her life: her ex (father of her child), her boyfriend, and her brother. I assume her dad is already dead or else he probably would have gotten offed too. Plus, the entire movie is about some mythical monster trying to kill her son, and does so by... killing other people? Including one that pretty much wanted to kill him anyway (the boyfriend guy) for scratching up his car with a rubber ball? For most of the movie, it seems that the monster is on the kid’s side, if anything.

Speaking of the brother - the monster makes itself look like his sister in order to seduce him before killing him (again, the monster seems to be making things more difficult for himself than they should be). However, the brother is into it, gleefully macking on what he thinks is his sister. And yet, even with light incest, I still don’t recommend the movie.

I dunno why, but this annoyed the shit out of me too: Cameron has his name spelled out in sheets of paper (one letter per page) on the wall of his room in a zigzag shape. But they aren’t spaced evenly, which drove me insane. So of course, director Armand Mastroianni (He Knows Your Alone - sadly this movie did NOT feature the first appearance of a future legendary actor) finds a way to show the damn thing like twenty times over the course of the movie. As if I needed another excuse to punch the movie in the face.

The worst thing about it, however, is that the monster was designed by Carlo Rambaldi (Alien and ET), which is ordinarily a good thing. However, he seemingly worked for ten, fifteen minutes tops on this one - it never moves or does anything cool. I don’t even think the entire body was ever shown in a shot.

Couple crew members worth noting though - the DP was Russell Carpenter, who went on to shoot Titanic ten years later. And Lawrence Bender, better known as the producer of Pulp Fiction, worked as a key grip. Other than Mel Harris (thirtysomething*) I didn’t recognize any of the actors, though IMDb says Bill Lustig is in there somewhere eating an ice cream, a scene I no longer recall.

I watched this on Fearnet, and it was of no better (or worse) quality than the DVD: full frame, poorly transferred from a subpar print (or just a VHS), you know the drill. I’m not saying it deserves such a half-assed release, but it’s good to know that bad movies get short-changed just like the good ones (i.e. The Abyss - still not given an anamorphic DVD release anywhere in the world).

What say you?

*"I need clearance to land on runway thirty... thirtysomething!"
"Thirtysomething has been canceled!"

And now, Horror Movie A Day and Happy Hour Comics would like to present the 8th in an ongoing series of HMAD-inspired comic strips. I hope you enjoy!! (Click to enlarge)

PLEASE, GO ON...

Vinyan (2008)

MARCH 19, 2009

GENRE: HORROR?, SURVIVAL
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

One of the first HMAD entries was for Fabrice Du Welz’ film Calvaire, which I really dug due to its WAYYYY off-kilter approach to the standard “guy seeks shelter after his car breaks down and runs awful of crazy townfolk” story. So I was eager to check out Vinyan, which was also directed by Du Welz. Unfortunately, it was co-written by Donkey Punch’s Olly Blackburn, which I should have taken as a warning sign that the film would be a bore.

But even taking that into consideration, this movie is far too goddamn uneventful to resonate. And that’s a shame, because at its heart is a pretty interesting and sad story; that of a mother and father’s tragic obsession with finding their son, who was taken a few years earlier. After they think they see him on a charity video (you know, “these children are hungry, and the cameraman couldn’t be bothered to give them some sandwiches, so give us your money”), they meet with the usual shady types and arrange for travel deep in the Burma jungle (unfortunately for them, Rambo had just left with a different group), and then, naturally, run afoul of people they would rather not have dealt with.

Unfortunately, such scenes only make up maybe 10-15% of the entire 95 minute movie. The rest is like Terrence Malick’s version of a jungle/survival movie. If you like looking at trees and people gazing in awe at lush landscapes and such, you’ll love this movie, and maybe I would too - had I not been told it was a horror movie, or if I hadn’t already seen 90 versions of the same movie. Thin Red Line is a great film, and I don’t mind that it’s “slow”, because at its heart is another WWII movie. I’ve seen plenty of those, so I enjoyed the change of pace. But you don’t see a lot of jungle-set movies (horror or otherwise) that aren’t about cannibals, and I was genuinely interested in whether or not they would find their son. Unfortunately, Du Welz and Blackburn didn’t feel the same way.

I mean, Christ, we watch FOUR full minutes of opening credits (not even a full sequence, just the production companies and title) and some sort of filtered rain image before an actual shot appears on the screen. Then it takes another 30 for our couple to get to the jungle. Once they get there... nothing happens. It’s not until the hour mark that the “Feral children” promised on the DVD synopsis appear, and another twenty before they do anything, you know, feral (those hoping for Ils/Them or Eden Lake in the jungle will be sorely disappointed). The only exciting thing that occurs in the first hour is when a guy is suddenly beaten with a stick by some locals, a scene that is never explained beyond a guy that looks like Oldboy saying “He deserves it”.

And again, this wouldn’t even be a big problem had the actual plot been anything but a glorified Macguffin - most of the scenes with the parents (Rufus Sewell and Emmanuelle Beart) concern them watching one another sleep, staring longingly into space as they wander around, or getting fleeced by the locals (Sewell apparently carries several million dollars in cash in his pockets). You start to wonder if the kid didn’t just run away to find a less boring life.

Back to that DVD synopsis - on the top, written as more of a tagline, it explains “When someone dies a horrible death, their spirit becomes confused and angry. It becomes... VINYAN.” While I don’t argue with the definition, it has fuck all to do with this movie. Only two people die in the entire thing (in the final five minutes), and their spirits apparently had something better to do, because they sure as hell don’t do anything confused and/or angry. Sure, the dialogue appears in the film, but it has nothing to do with the story beyond providing more “local culture”; the movie could have just as easily been called Rice Paddy or maybe Hooker.

(While we’re on the subject of DVD box art, the Variety quote on the cover actually comes from a mixed (at best) review, though to be fair it’s about the cinematography and not the actual plot/acting/whatever else you think would be the subject of a blurb they would put on the cover of their movie.)

The only extra besides some Sony trailers (including yet another ripoff of The Departed; how many of these goddamn movies are they going to make? This one has Mark Ruffalo and Ethan Hawke, for those like me who can’t tell them apart except for which 30ish actors appear in them) is a fifty minute featurette. Die hard fans will have to wait for the inevitable Ultimate Edition that features several more hours of Rufus Sewell wandering about (or, in all seriousness, an explanation for the scene where Sewell suddenly throws a Molotov into a hut, watches it burn for a while, and then screams “Go home, Josh!” over and over). Given the length, it’s obviously more interesting than the usual “featurette”, but insight into the story - which is what I was mainly hoping for - is unfortunately sparse. It’s also mainly in Thai and French; prepare for lots of reading!

Hopefully lots of people will read this review before seeing the film, and thus go into it knowing what they are in for. As I re-watched parts of the film again for review writing purposes (having not bothered to take notes the first time) I found myself warming to it a bit. It’s still needlessly pretentious and indulgent, but it wasn’t as painful to watch KNOWING that it was pretentious and indulgent. Had someone said “Hey, this is a strange drama about some parents’ search for their son”, I might even have dug it. I’m not sure why Sony is trying to market it to the horror crowd; even the brief horror elements in the film’s final 10 minutes are nothing fans will get excited about. It’s just a sad, very French story/travelogue about the dangers of rich folks going into the jungle, and not much more.

What say you?

PLEASE, GO ON...

The Two Faces Of Dr. Jekyll (1960)

MARCH 13, 2009

GENRE: HAMMER, HERO KILLER
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

You just can’t go wrong with the Christopher Lee/Terence Fisher combo. Even though Lee isn’t the title character in The Two Faces Of Dr. Jekyll, his role is pretty large, and a perfect fit for Lee. He’s not a villain, per se, but he’s a slimy asshole all the same. But you can feel OK liking him, because Hyde is far more despicable. Also, the movie’s just plain good, regardless of who is playing who.

It’s not faithful to the novel, but I like the approach they took here. Jekyll is sort of a schlub, and Hyde is a handsome and charming fellow. While you are deprived of a traditional “monster”, it opens up an interesting dynamic to the proceedings, particularly with regards to Lee’s character. Lee is fucking Jekyll’s wife, and mooching off him to boot. But Hyde becomes his best bro, and they go out drinking and being awesome together. This leads to a truly wonderful scene where a young Oliver Reed pops up and smarts off to Hyde and Lee’s character Paul. Hyde tells him in imitable British fashion to simply “go to hell”, and Reed, drunk as always, attacks him. Lee joins the fracas (which is sadly too brief), resulting in the only Reed v. Lee scene I can recall. What I wouldn’t give to have them in a Face/Off style movie!

Of course, this leads to a bit of a goofy plot hole - no one recognizes Hyde as Jekyll, when the only difference is Jekyll has a fake beard and unkempt hair. As I currently have a (real) beard and am about 8 months overdue for a haircut, I began to wonder that if I cleaned myself up tonight if anyone would recognize me (and if it would mean I could go out partying with Christopher Lee). I mean, I can buy the supporting characters not noticing, but Jekyll’s wife (who Hyde tries to nail)? The eyes didn’t give him away? Come on now.

And it drags a bit at times, particularly during two interminable dance numbers that always seem to find their way into 1960s horror movies. Also, with only three central characters, all of whom are jerks, the movie doesn’t really give us anyone to sympathize with. Exacerbating this is the fact that Lee and the wife are killed off with like 20 minutes to go, leaving most of the final act sort of uneventful, as the only people in danger are folks we don’t really know.

However, there is a scene where an annoyed Jekyll suddenly pushes down a little girl that looks like a female Larry Drake, so all is forgiven:

I haven’t seen a lot of the Jekyll films (there are something like fifty variations on the story), so I have to assume that this wasn’t the only one to take the “Hyde is more appealing” route. It’s an interesting way to go I think, and given the glut of traditional “Hyde as monster” ones, helps make the overall story more enjoyable to sit through again. You know how it will end up, but the different path taken to get there is much appreciated.

What say you?

And now, Horror Movie A Day and Happy Hour Comics would like to present the 6th in an ongoing series of HMAD-inspired comic strips. I hope you enjoy!! (Click to enlarge)

PLEASE, GO ON...

Patrick Still Lives (1980)

MARCH 9, 2009

GENRE: ITALIAN, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: DVD (ONLINE RENTAL)

In this day and age, you would think that getting an R rated cut of a super gory Italian movie would take MORE effort, but that didn’t stop Netflix from sending me a 90 minute version of Patrick Still Lives (Italian: Patrick Vive Ancora), despite promising the uncut 96 minute version on the website and even the damn sleeve that the disc was mailed in. Why do people even stock these things? The fact that they were ever made at all is beyond me (even with the cuts, the movie is still pretty graphic and sleazy, so cutting it doesn’t even serve the basic purpose of altering a film without the director’s consent), but the second that the uncut version was released, the R cut discs should have been tossed and burned. I will do my part by scratching the goddamn thing to high heaven.

The thing that strikes me the most about this movie is the unparalleled amount of nudity it contains. I’ve seen pornos that were more chaste. There are five women in the movie and every single one of them spends a good chunk of time in the nude. One of them appears nude more often than clothed, in fact. Even a scene that shouldn’t really have any nudity - a girl walking around the spooky courtyard prior to her obvious doom, for example - has more full frontal shots than just about any other horror film I can recall, and that’s just one sequence! And at least two of the film’s deaths involve the vagina, leading me to wonder whether this film was designed as a softcore and the horror stuff got added in later. The score is certainly “bowm chicka bowm BOWM!” esque at times, at any rate.

I especially wonder about this because the horror plot doesn’t make a word of sense, even by Italian standards. A guy gets bottled in the face after his car breaks down (all of that occurs in the film’s first 20 seconds, mind you) and goes into a coma, where he develops telekinesis and under the control of his evil doctor father, gets revenge on six people, one of whom was responsible for the bottling incident. Now, I get bottles broken over my face all the time, and I’ve never gotten any telekinetic powers from it, so that aspect already bugged me, but how the hell does one track “everyone” who drove on a road one particular day?

But who cares really, as the plot is only there to pass the time in between nude/gore scenes. The body count may be kind of low, but director Mario Landi makes up for it by staging some pretty awesome death scenes. A woman is eaten by dogs, a guy gets hooked in the neck and hung, and in my personal favorite, a typically skeleton-less Italian woman is decapitated by an automatic window. The film’s most notorious kill, a poker through the vagina and out of the mouth, seems to have gotten the brunt of the editing, so I can’t comment on its awesomeness. However, there was a wonderfully gory one in Mother of Tears, so I’ve had my fill of such things anyway.

Another great thing about the movie is how much everyone hates each other. There are at least three scenes of people smacking each other around (including a pretty epic catfight). And the namecalling!!! In the first 15 minutes alone, people are called assholes, cunts, whores, cows, mannequins (?), idiots... you name it, someone is needlessly referred to as one, usually in their first appearance in the film. Even the non-mean-spirited dialogue is worth noting, particularly when a doctor claims that one character’s death “was due to a fatality”. But that’s all fine by me, especially considering how long it takes for people to start dying off.

As is typical of Italian films, this was an acknowledged ripoff/”sequel” to a movie they had nothing to do with, in this case, Richard Franklin’s Australian film Patrick (which, oddly enough, I almost bought yesterday, without even realizing Netflix was sending me this one my way). I haven’t seen that film, but I don’t think it matters any more than it would if you saw Fulci’s Zombi (aka Zombi 2) before seeing Dawn of the Dead (aka Zombi). Ah, the Italians, needlessly confusing horror fans for over thirty years.

The DVD has a couple interviews worth a look. One is with Gianni Dei, who plays the title role (well, the Patrick part of the title anyway). It’s funny because he’s never seen the movie, considers his acting career something of a triviality, and generally seems bored with the whole affair. The other one, with producer Gabriele Crisanti is far more detailed. He doesn’t hilariously berate everyone in the world like many other Italian horror filmmakers do in these sort of things, but he offers up some good information nonetheless. There is also a still gallery, which I skipped on the grounds of “I just saw the movie so I don’t need to see photos of it”.

What say you?

And now, Horror Movie A Day and Happy Hour Comics would like to present the 5th in an ongoing series of HMAD-inspired comic strips. I hope you enjoy!! (Click to enlarge)

PLEASE, GO ON...

Home Sweet Home (1981)

MARCH 4, 2009

GENRE: HOLIDAY (?), SLASHER
SOURCE: DVD (ONLINE RENTAL)

When Grindhouse came out, Eli Roth often claimed that the inspiration for his faux trailer Thanksgiving came from the fact that there had never been a Thanksgiving themed slasher movie during the slasher heyday, when every holiday was being used as a backdrop (I don’t recall an Easter one either). Well, Roth was mistaken, as the film Home Sweet Home, released at the tail end of 1981, was indeed centered on a Thanksgiving meal being ruined by a slasher.

But in Roth’s defense, the Thanksgiving angle is pretty goddamn flimsy. If not for the fact that a family is coming together and the main dish is turkey, I don’t really think the holiday has any bearing on the film at all. It’s not like everything is closed and such because of the holiday; the family lives in the middle of nowhere. Plus, the mom and dad leave (separately) to go to a store and gas station, respectively, so the holiday apparently didn’t really affect retail locations either (don’t forget, back in the day - most if not all places DID close on major holidays).

Ultimately, I suspect that is just a byproduct of the film’s rushed/improvised feel. You know how Roger Corman tossed together a Fantastic Four movie in a blind panic because his rights on the property were expiring? I have a feeling that Home Sweet Home was made as quickly as possible by some folks who wanted to do a “Thanksgiving slasher” before anyone else did. Hence the endless scenes of people saying and doing things that no one would actually sit down and write. It’s as if screenwriter Thomas Bush just wrote a script filled with vague scene concepts. “OK, in this scene you talk about the phone being out - GO!”. As a result, you get people repeating things ad nauseum, making the movie feel like a rather bland episode of 24.

Also, I swear the movie was produced by Pep Boys. No less than 20 minutes of the film resolves around cars breaking down or people talking about said cars breaking down. And it’s not even in the traditional “she’s running from the killer and the car doesn’t start” way. No, someone will ask to take a car to go to the store, and the owner will explain that the battery is on the fritz, so someone else lets them take HIS car, which has a faulty fuel gauge. Then there’s a lengthy scene where the family’s patriarch steals gas from an abandoned station wagon, then his battery gives out (again) so he tries to steal the wagon’s battery as well. And of course, the made up dialogue never lets us forget each car’s problems and what the drivers could be doing about it (“well he said the battery is dying, so maybe he went to the gas station to get a new one.”). It’s actually kind of charming in a peculiar way.

The killer is worthy of his own paragraph for sure. You might recognize him as Jake Steinfeld (better known as the Body By Jake guy), and that’s because he wears no mask or costume of any kind, a la Final Exam. But unlike Final Exam’s killer, this guy is memorable in that he laughs almost nonstop, and makes Adam Sandler faces as he kills folks. He even racks up a couple of great kills, including an electrocution by electric guitar, and during the aforementioned “battery theft” scene he actually dives out of the bushes and sort of body slams the hood, crushing the guy tinkering away underneath it.

He’s also one of the film’s two surprisingly recognizable stars. The other is a 4 or 5 year old Vinessa Shaw, playing the requisite little girl of the family. She doesn’t have much to do (her biggest scene requires her to watch a talking mime do magic tricks), but I like to think it was her performance here that convinced Stanley Kubrick to hire her for Eyes Wide Shut. Speaking of the mime - this guy is truly a piece of work. Besides the fact that he talks, he also carries the guitar around with him at all times, playing it as he annoys everyone around him at all times. At one point he busts in on what I THINK are his parents (the family genealogy is never made clear) and refers to it as “his lucky day”. I’m sorry, but if I saw my mom and dad going at it, the last word I’d use to describe it would be “lucky”. And I think he’s a real mime too - his only other credit is playing one in an episode of Wonder Woman. So either that or he suffered the absolute worst typecasting in cinematic history.

One of my notes reads “FY”. ...I? No idea what the hell that one’s about.

I got to thinking as the body count (slowly) piled up - I think the real reason that they never made any “true” Thanksgiving slashers is that it’s kind of depressing to watch a family bite it, as opposed to a group of friends. If you think about other family based horror movies, they usually introduce “the daughter’s boyfriend” or maybe an aunt to provide the kills so that the core unit (two parents, two kids) can survive, but that’s not the case here. Except for the Shaw character (whose relation to the family is, like all the others, incredibly vague), the entire family is wiped out, leaving only the son’s girlfriend alive. That’s a bummer. Luckily, without any sort of understanding of how they relate to one another, it’s not as upsetting as it could be.

So is the movie any good? Oh heavens no. It’s inept on every level (good luck trying to make out anything that is happening during half of the climax - apparently in the mad rush to get this thing in theaters they forgot to rent lights), plotless to the point where you can never tell if you’re 5 minutes or 5 hours away from its conclusion, and painfully slow despite only being 80 minutes long. But there’s just so much quirkiness to enjoy (I haven’t mentioned the peas) that I couldn’t help but be relatively charmed and delighted by the whole affair. I mean, at one point our would-be hero finds a corpse in the driveway, and rather than scream or make a mad dash back to safety, he rather casually says “What is going ON here?”, as if he had just found, I dunno, a ham sandwich under his bed. Even the main menu is a bit “off” - it’s a screenshot of the mime doing a magic trick, with “Play Movie” the only option. Chapter marks are there, but there is no accessible scene selection (which means I shouldn’t complain when studios try to pass off such things as a bonus feature).

If you’re a fan of things like Silent Night Deadly Night Part 2 or Black Xmas, you will definitely dig this movie in the same way. A film with a complete lack of political correctness mixed with an abundance of mean-spirited glee is always welcome in my home. I mean, an old lady gets splattered across a windshield during the opening credits. You KNOW that’s worth a look.

What say you?

And now, Horror Movie A Day and Happy Hour Comics would like to present the 4th in an ongoing series of HMAD-inspired comic strips. I hope you enjoy!! (Click to enlarge)

PLEASE, GO ON...

The Werewolf Of Washington (1973)

MARCH 2, 2009

GENRE: COMEDIC, WEREWOLF
SOURCE: DVD (BUDGET PACK 4!!!)

If there’s one thing I never quite expect in one of my budget packs, it’s witty writing. Not that the movies are all “so bad it’s good” affairs like Cathy’s Curse, but they are all by and large rather generic filler (hence why they are available for forty cents a piece in a flimsy DVD boxed set). So I was surprised to find that The Werewolf Of Washington contained a healthy dose of wit and satirical writing. Being that it’s 37 years old, it obviously pales in comparison to what the Onion or Colbert come up with on a daily basis, but still, it beats the shit out of another inheritance scam movie.

The funny thing about the movie is how blatantly it rips off The Wolf Man setup, right down to the silver handled cane being used against a Gypsy guy. The twist is, our Larry Talbot standin (Dean Stockwell!) is convinced that the Gypsy (actually Hungarian, but for all intents and purposes it’s the same character) is a spy, so he asks his interpreter to “find out who she’s working for!” Then when the subject of pentagrams come up, he hears it as “Pentagon”. Heh. Once he gets back to Washington (actually Long Island) it’s more original, with lots of Watergate jokes (he's not supposed to be Nixon though, at least I don't think - they don't give him a name) and jabs at the President’s general cluelessness taking center stage.

What I dug about the movie was the general quirkiness of the whole thing. There’s a bald guy with sunglasses just standing in the background of several scenes (in one he keeps taking quick photos) but unless I missed it, he never talks, nor does anyone say what his job is. Then there’s a part where the president has to keep repeating “Chopper” over and over (and finishes with “Helichopper”). And then there’s this:

I mean, come on, the movie might have a lot of faults, but you can’t see a screenshot like that and still deny its intentional entertainment value.

One of those faults is the werewolf getup. Maybe they didn’t have enough money to tear the suit, or maybe it’s supposed to be a sight gag, but Stockwell simply looks like a guy wearing a werewolf mask. His nice suit never gets torn or even disheveled, making it hard to swallow. I don’t need a full blown transformation, but at least glue some hair on his chest and rip the shirt a little. Come on guys. Incidentally, the creepiest moment involving the werewolf is actually offscreen entirely. During the end credits, the President is giving a “My fellow Americans” speech, and he suddenly trails off, starts repeating himself, and then becomes a werewolf himself. It’s pretty awesome, and sets up a sequel that, far as I know, does not exist.

There’s also a scene in which two men engage in a rather tense scene in an in-home bowling alley. I can’t help but wonder if Paul Thomas Anderson watched the film before writing There Will Be Blood. I would like to think so. No one drinks a milk shake though, that was all PTA.

Like just about all of these movies, there is apparently no decent transfer available. Even on its own DVD, it’s a full frame VHS transfer, making the Tales of Terror version more enticing since you get 49 other movies with it for a few dollars more. But given the setup and occasionally (OK, usually) crude technical merits of the film, I would put this on the top of the “THIS should be remade” list. Surely you could modernize the film in every conceivable way: do a great Bush parody while delivering a decent werewolf movie at the same time. I know a few screenwriters/filmmakers read HMAD now - let’s write this bitch and live as kings! Also I’ll play the sunglasses guy.

What say you?

And now, Horror Movie A Day and Happy Hour Comics would like to present the 3rd in an ongoing series of HMAD-inspired comic strips. I hope you enjoy!! (Click to enlarge)

PLEASE, GO ON...