Malevolence 3: Killer (2018)

AUGUST 14, 2023

GENRE: SLASHER
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

According to Amazon, I purchased my Blu-ray of Malevolence 3: Killer in October of 2018, which means it’s been sitting there for five years waiting for me to finally get the energy to watch it. Why would I need "energy", you ask? Because despite being a big fan of the first two films (the second one was simply called Bereavement when released, though it’s been since retitled Malevolence 2: Bereavement), I knew this one was compromised due to the tragic death of one of its main actors with only about half the film being shot. Being an independent production that was already strapped for cash, writer/director/bunch of other things Stevan Mena couldn’t afford to just reshoot with a different actor, so after sitting on his completed footage for about two years, he figured out a way to salvage some of the man’s performance and his story with some new actors, adding new scenes, changing the ending, etc. So basically, a Frankenstein’d movie, most of which never turn out all that good.

And guess what: it’s not very good. It’s not a disaster, but it’s not a very good trilogy closer either, and I’d be curious if the original version would have even been all that much better. For starters, Mena shot the movie on digital this time, so it was already losing the old-school charm of the others, which were shot on film (Super 16 in Malevolence’s case), which along with the period settings truly made it feel like some lost slasher of the golden era for these things. Neither film was particularly inventive when it came to the story, but it was the “back to basics” approach (more so in the first one; Bereavement was closer to survival horror than traditional slasher) that made it stand out in the post-Scream, “everything has to be ironic” era. It was just a straightforward slasher, with some green but not intentionally “bad acting” performances, that made it work as well as it did. But here, by shooting digitally (and doing almost nothing to sell the supposed 1999 setting, as Killer narratively takes place only a day after the original) it instead feels like another generic slasher from the 2010s, with little to distinguish itself from so many others.

But more troublesome is how little it connects to the first two. For those uninitiated, Malevolence was the middle part of the story, with Bereavement, despite coming out later, actually the first part. I assumed there was some solid reason for doing it this way that would become clear with this new film, but we learn almost nothing about killer Martin Bristol here, and there’s no real reason for him to go after the people he kills in this one. You know that scene in Halloween II where Michael kills that one neighbor girl after he robs the Elrods of their kitchen knife, and how it seems like an unnecessary detour considering he’s supposedly going after Laurie? (Hardcore fans know the scene was added later to get another kill in, but that’s irrelevant.) Well that’s kind of how this whole movie feels, except it's just the padding with none of the connected payoff. We pick up immediately after the events of Malevolence, which ended on Martin going after the two survivors (the blonde woman and her daughter). Whether it was the aging or actor availability or what, we don’t get a proper resolution to this cliffhanger – their bodies are just found later, and Martin sets his sights on a trio of college girls who rent a house together somewhere in the suburbs.

(He also kills the woman who lives next door to them, which results in the Final Girl having to look out for the woman’s daughter – a plot point that also surfaced in The Third Saturday in October Part V, another throwback slasher. Did I miss this plot happening in one of the OGs?)

Why these particular people, you may ask? Your guess is as good as mine! It was established in the first one that he wasn’t exactly cruising the town for victims, offering more of a Jason style “they were in his territory” kind of a motive (for lack of a better word), but here he’s just slicing up folks around town at random, which gives the film a properly high body count and even a few '80s style unusual kills (lawnmower blade!), but it doesn’t quite gel with the MO he displayed earlier, so even though it’s the same actor it feels like a different character entirely. His whole “inability to feel pain” thing doesn’t even really come up; he is shot near the end and naturally escapes, but that’s common among all masked slashers, so it’s not exactly notable. Malevolence offered the twist that the killer was not the guy who kidnapped the kid in the first scene, but the (now older) kid himself, and then Bereavement showed how he got to be that way, but now it’s just standard stalk 'n slash fare, with zero payoff for the confusing timeline stuff. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to just say it’s X number of years later and the FBI Agent Perkins (Kevin McKelvey, I believe the lone returning cast member besides Jay Cohen as the killer) still obsessed with finding him, as opposed to halfheartedly saying it’s the next day when there’s no real in-plot reason for it? And then they could say these girls were living on the ground that used to be his factory/home, since razed, which would at least give him some sort of motive for setting his sights on them.

Of course, it’s possible that this is where the death of the actor put a wrench into things, as he was playing one of the FBI guys along with Perkins. Mena’s solution was to give Perkins a couple other agents to assist him, so basically every time we see him he’s with one of the three, to give the impression that there’s a whole team working on this and whenever Perkins is with one, the other two are following up on a different lead. But that leads me to believe that while perhaps the “buddy movie” element (as Mena refers to it) was lost, it didn’t have too much effect on the plot as a whole, as he hired two new actors to handle the deceased performer’s role in the scenes he didn’t film, assigning them his original dialogue. And I can’t imagine for a second that whatever changes he was forced to make to the script had him somehow omitting the reason Martin was going after these random girls who don’t appear to live anywhere near him, and that’s a big part of why the movie doesn’t measure up to the others. Long story short, I don’t doubt the film took a hit from the actor’s loss, but it seems there was something “less than” about the whole project from the get-go.

Mena provides a commentary, as always, but while he starts off about the actor’s death and how he almost considered abandoning the movie entirely, after that initial explanation he rarely speaks about that element, instead focusing on the usual low budget pitfalls, working as his own DP this time (in addition to composing and editing as he had done for the other two), etc. Most surprising and delightful: he points out that the teenaged girl from Malevolence actually came back to play her corpse, even though you only see her legs because she had aged too much (again, it’s supposed to be the next day) so they couldn’t show her older face. The dedication! I wish he spent a little more time explaining what the scenes he couldn’t use (and says he’ll never release out of respect for the actor) would have entailed, however; he makes it clear that not everything was able to be given to the other two actors he hired, but doesn’t get into specifics. It’s very possible that the reason the stuff with the girls is so random is because it was only meant to give the film some kills in between longer FBI scenes, only for it to become the focus, but if so he doesn’t say as much. He also notes that they didn’t have a dedicated documentary team, which explains why the “making of” on the disc is just a collection of random, narration-free behind the scenes shots and outtakes. Oh and he says his sound team didn’t even realize it wasn’t film until he told them, which I guess means it’s a good thing that they’re sound guys and not visual guys, because yikes – it’s not even a good digital look!

Of more use is a ten minute piece on how he composed the music, which is interesting as he’s not trained in such matters but the score, while obviously owing a lot to Carpenter along with everything else on screen (his lifts from Halloween, a sort of tradition for this series, are more overt than ever), is one of the film’s/series’ best assets. The disc also opens on a reel of trailers for all of Mena’s films, including this one, which is amusing as I had managed to go five years without seeing a frame of it only to have some of it shown/somewhat spoiled right before I finally sat down, as I assumed it was a different movie at first because why would there be a trailer for it beforehand? But it seems he’s gotten the rights back to all of his films (the other two in this series and Brutal Massacre), which were released by Anchor Bay (RIP), so good for him. Considering the uphill battles he’s fought on this series (and how Brutal Massacre is essentially autobiographical) it’d be annoying if they got swallowed up in some merger and making money for execs who probably didn’t even know what they were.

Oh well. Again, I don’t think the film was ever going to measure up to the first two, but I was disappointed to see it fell short of those already lowered expectations. Like I said, it’s not unwatchable or anything, but it’s just so perfunctory – if it wasn’t part of an established franchise I don’t think anyone would have ever paid it any mind. There’s no real hook to any of it (he doesn’t even wear his creepy sack mask, or any mask at all), it’s not particularly well made, there’s no atmosphere… the generic subtitle turned out to be kind of a warning. I feel bad for Mena as I know he is capable of delivering when he’s got the resources to do so, and let's not forget that even the Fast & Furious team, with its blank check budget and CGI miracles, couldn’t completely fix their movie after their own actor was lost halfway through. But maybe he should have gone with his gut and just abandoned it, so we could just imagine a more fitting finale than what we ended up getting.

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FTP: Suffer Little Children (1983)

JANUARY 18, 2023

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

After watching Skinamarink last night, I wanted something a little more traditional for a horror movie viewing. And yet of all the movies in the pile (less than 70 now! Down from 150 or so!) I managed to single out Suffer Little Children, which comes from the same line that brought us the WTFery of Things and Sledgehammer, and might be more incompetent than the two of those put together. But I could at least tell you what it was about without needing prompts from the official synopsis to fill in some gaps, so it got one over Skinamarink in that department.

In fact if this was made with any degree of skill, I might genuinely enjoy it, as the plot kind of rules. Our setting is an orphanage where a new resident is dropped off with just a note saying they could care for her. The note identifies her as Elizabeth, but nothing else about the girl is known, nor can she speak to explain things herself. But it takes all of 12 seconds for us to be clued into her nature, as another girl there makes fun of her and is quickly knocked aside by a door that slams on her after Elizabeth gives it an evil stare. But instead of laying waste to all the kids who live there, Elizabeth recruits a few of them into her budding Satanic army, which ultimately leads to a mega bloodbath – the kids either join or get killed with all of the adults who work there. So it’s some low key Children of the Corn kinda stuff (albeit predating that film’s release by a year), but without any of the respectability that movie offered. As poorly made as it is (shot on video by film students for 7,000 bucks), it’s no surprise that it ended up attracting the attention of the Video Nasty folks, on account of all the child on child (or child on adult) violence that occurs in the name of Satan.

(They probably clutched their pearls over the finale too, where another biblical character enters the proceedings. It may be 40 years old but I wouldn’t dare spoil the surprise.)

In fact I kinda liked it even as is, and probably would enjoy it more if it wasn’t padded and weighed down by the subplot of a former resident who has become a major pop star. He stops by his old place to meet the kids before performing a charity concert set to benefit them, and strikes up a relationship with Jenny, the overworked social worker who runs the place along with another guy who clearly has a crush on her. The rivalry between the two men and the budding romance between Jenny and the faux Rick Springfield is tedious stuff at best, and has no real payoff beyond the mild novelty of a horror movie about Satanic cults where the rock star is completely innocent, even oblivious, to those shenanigans.

I also have to dock it for a confusing (even by this movie’s standards) bit immediately following a date between the two, where Jenny is suddenly upset about an event with the kids. From her scattered outbursts, it seems she took the kids to the pool and Elizabeth instigated some of the kids to distract her by pulling off her bikini (!?) while she attempted to drown the others? The vague recollection suggests the scene was meant to actually be included at some point and the dialogue here serving as more of a recap, but not seeing it - after suffering through five minutes of the runtime devoted to their date instead! – felt like a real cheat, robbing the middle of some much needed action. I assume budgetary/production limitations kept them from being able to properly film such a major scene, but why have the epilogue to it? Just cut the whole thing so we're not aware of what we're missing.

Still, the super gonzo final five minutes or so make up for it, and it’s only 75 minutes with credits anyway, so hardly a waste of your time as long as you have an appreciation for this sort of thing. I basically break down movies into three categories: under 80 minutes, 80-99 minutes, and 100+ minutes. 80-99 minute movies just have to be competently made and/or amusing more often than not to get a pass, and anything over 100 has to be genuinely good. But for these sub-80 minute movies? Give me one or two things I’ll remember a year from now and we’re good. And this one does! Even if I somehow forget what I described above, I'll always remember that this 1983 movie begins with narration explaining that it's a reenactment of events that took place in 1984, because that it just too incredible to let fall out of my memory. So the system works!

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Skinamarink (2022)

JANUARY 17, 2023

GENRE: HAUNTED HOUSE, WEIRD
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REGULAR SCREENING)

We’ve all been duped with a misleading trailer once or twice, but in the case of Skinamarink, I’m hard-pressed to think of a MORE honest promotion for a horror movie. Outside of the oft-repeated “in this house” not appearing in the film (I can’t tell if the trailer voice is meant to be, you know, TRAILER VOICE or if it’s trying to pass off the line as dialogue), the vibe of the trailer is exactly what the film is, albeit for 100 minutes instead of two. So if you watched the trailer and thought "OK, this is more of a teaser, the real movie can't be like that, right?" - you're not gonna be happy if you buy a ticket.

“But the trailer is just a bunch of random shots of ceilings and stuff?” you might be thinking, and yes, that is correct and that is also what the film offers for its entire runtime. There is some dialogue, but it’s delivered by off-screen characters and often so hard to hear that the film provides subtitles for the majority of it. There are four people in the cast (two kids and two adults) but they could have been sitting right next to me in the theater and I wouldn’t have recognized them, as we never see any of them that clearly. The film’s real star is a nightlight that appears several times (occasionally knocked around by the ghostly presence) or maybe the orange Lego brick separator that shouldn’t have existed in the film’s 1995 setting (I like to think it was another demonstration of the ghost’s powers, myself).

The plot, which is made more clear in the two line description on IMDb than from the film itself, is about a kid who sleepwalks and hurts himself a bit, waking up the other family members in the process. Over the course of the evening, their house begins to change – the windows and doors disappear, their toys start collecting themselves into a massive pile, and then the parents also disappear, leaving the two kids (4 and 6ish) alone with whatever supernatural force they’re being terrified with. It seems to all unfold over one night, but a late on-screen title suggests it's going for much longer, though without any exteriors (or characters, really) I guess it doesn't matter much.

Now, that probably sounds like a pretty straightforward haunted house movie; a sort of “Poltergeist but from the kids’ POV” effort that maybe would make good gateway horror for your own young’ns. But no: as I said, most of that plot is hard to suss out from what you see on screen, which is mostly hallways and floors and assorted toys. The camera rarely moves, the characters appear even less, and the lo-fi approach (super grainy, not always clear VHS type imagery, albeit presented in a 2.40 image) makes it hard to tell what you’re actually looking at on several occasions. Sometimes this is used for an effective scare, like a seemingly empty shot of a wall (or something similarly featureless) that slowly reveals the little girl (I think?) standing there, but most of the time it gives you that inclination to dart your eyes around the frame, looking for something that might appear in a corner or from behind whatever random object you’re looking at.

If you’ve gotten this far you can probably figure out if this is a “for you” movie or not, and alas I fall into the “not” category. I didn’t hate it or anything, and I admired the experimental nature of the effort (doubly so when you consider it was playing in multiplexes, with a trailer for Ant-Man 3 beforehand), but at 100 minutes I got pretty restless waiting for it to switch gears (spoiler: it never does). The problem is, for me, that the movie is basically – occasionally even effectively! – trying to depict the sensation of a bad nightmare you probably had as a kid, in an attempt to get under your skin and creep you out, and I am simply not easily susceptible to such things. I heard that the best way to watch the movie was all alone in your house in the middle of the night with all the lights off, and I don’t doubt it, but I’ve seen a number of films I found scary in theaters (including Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity, both of which have been namechecked in the film’s hype), so it should more or less work on the big screen.

In fact, one of the things I was most taken by during my experience was how quiet the crowd was, and it was nearly sold out. A couple people walked out, unsurprisingly (I had to laugh when two girls finally gave up with maybe ten minutes left, something I saw happen at Inland Empire, which was a film I had already mentally compared it to), but no one expressed their frustration until the lights came up at the end, or checked their phones or whatever (at least from where I could see, about dead center of the auditorium). If anything, everyone seemed to be trying really hard to maintain the same sort of quiet intensity the film offered – at one point someone attempted to recline their seat, and the squeaking sound from the leather parts rubbing together had them stop almost instantly. The only other time I’ve seen that sort of commitment from an audience around here was during the first Quiet Place, and considering this was an AMC, with people laughing and cheering for the Nicole Kidman ad, I must say I was practically stunned at how well behaved everyone was and how they all seemed to be aware that they shouldn’t be disrupting the other patrons. More like this, please!

At any rate, I hope those who enjoy this sort of thing (though I can’t really think of anything else to compare it to) get a chance to see it in the most ideal circumstances possible. And again, I’m glad to see a multiplex take a chance on something like this at a time when even family-friendly Disney stuff is tanking because people are so accustomed to staying at home unless it’s a predetermined blockbuster like Marvel or Avatar. But I slept just fine when I got home (except for when my idiot cat woke me up because it managed to stick its head through the handle hole of a plastic bag, then proceeded to run around the house knocking into everything trying to get it off), sans nightmares or fears that my windows would disappear. Making it an experiment that failed, at least for me. But an interesting experience all the same, and if it's not playing near you, it will be on Shudder soon, as they are the co-distributors (which saddens me as it makes it much less likely that there will be a Blu-ray with commentary, as I'd be interested in listening to one if provided - UPDATE: my pessimism was unwarranted; it IS indeed coming to disc with commentary! I'll buy it on principle.). And yes, SOON, so please don't impatiently steal it.

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Skinned Deep (2004)

AUGUST 17, 2021

GENRE: BREAKDOWN, SURVIVAL
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

Gun to my head I would have guessed that Skinned Deep was an early '90s movie more or less produced for the VHS market, something that would have gotten coverage in Fangoria during those pre-Scream years where big screen horror was so intermittent that the mag had to noticeably step up its coverage of smaller films (the '80s rarely afforded them the opportunity). But nope, it was actually released in 2004 (by Fangoria, natch) and started shooting in 2000, long after the heyday of both the film's subject matter (Texas Chainsaw-esque demented backwoods killers) and the home video market it was chasing. DVD had taken over by then, as had the video chains over the mom and pop types, leaving these sort of things in the dust as Blockbuster would rather stock another copy of The Ring than devote shelf space to more than one copy of something like this.

No, this was clearly just a labor of love from writer/director Gabe Bartalos, making his debut as a director after years of makeup and FX work. His resume dates back to the mid '80s, and I swear I've seen him on at least a dozen DVD/Blu bonus features over the years thanks to his work on Frank Henenlotter films and Charles Band productions. Needless to say I was curious what kind of film he'd make on his own, and I was happy to discover it wasn't just a bland slasher that gave him an excuse to show off his FX skills every ten minutes, but instead offered a singular vision of a filmmaker who cared about every frame in the film, regardless of whether or not it had anything that would excite gorehounds.

The basic story is nothing new; a family of four is traveling, their car gets a flat, and the nearest place for help is run by murderous weirdos. But there's something "off" about the proceedings that should tell even the most jaded viewer (including me, at first) that this isn't going to be a run of the mill affair. The actors (heroes and villains alike) are all very bizarre and exaggerated, as if they stepped out of a David Lynch music video, and when the killing starts, Bartalos saves the most gruesome death for the young boy of the family, i.e. something most wouldn't dare to do at all. After everyone else in the family is dispatched, the focus falls squarely on the teen daughter, who catches the fancy of Brian aka Brain, so named because... well, he has a giant brain on his head.

Yes, this enters into sci-fi territory, as our villains have seemingly been created by, er, The Creator, a mysterious puppet master we meet later. Brain/Brian is seemingly sympathetic and longs to run naked through Times Square (a vision we see for real; Bartalos obviously didn't have permits and just shot the sequence guerilla style - the actor was subsequently arrested, but they got the shot!). His "brothers" are the more murdery ones, one is called Plates after the sharpened dinnerware he uses as weapons, and the other is the Surgeon General, the machine-mouthed guy on the cover. A few actors played him based on availability and what not (it was a long production, as noted) but Plates is played by Warwick Davis (Bartalos did his makeup for all of the Leprechauns), painted to look like an albino and dropping off kilter line readings into most of his scenes.

Heroine Tina runs afoul of them and other baddies over the course of the film's (slightly overlong) 97 minutes, but they take out others on occasion, like a group of elderly bikers who seek revenge after one of their number is killed trying to help the girl. Bartalos is seemingly well aware that this sort of movie can feel "samey" to the astute horror fans who will undoubtedly make up the majority of his audience (there is zero attempt at making this thing mainstream friendly, I assure you), so he keeps things forever lively by keeping Tina on the run, allowing the production designer enough of a showcase for an entire demo reel. When Tina ends up in a room that is covered ceiling to floor in newspaper, you truly get the sense of how much work went into the movie to keep it engaging. He could have thrown the girl in a typical bland basement room with a few pipes in the background, but instead you get this strange, claustrophobic visual that had to have taken dozens of man hours to put together.

It's that attention to detail that makes the film stand out where it could have been another 90 minute chase flick. Again, yeah, it could have been tightened in spots, and you need to forgive some wonky ADR and the like, but there is almost never a moment in the film where you can't pause it and say "Look at how much work they put into creating this scene", between the complicated makeup (Brain's took four hours to apply, and he's in it quite a bit), crazy set designs, and yes, the gore, which is mostly practical but Bartalos also knew better than to institute a ban on CGI. Any good FX artist knows that utilizing the best of both worlds is the way to get the most ideal results, and so some sneaks in here and there, and only a fool would complain about it.

Severin's blu has two featurettes, one a vintage piece from (I assume) the first DVD release back then, and a new retrospective where Bartalos and a few others answer fan questions. There's also a commentary track with pretty much the same people as the later retrospective, which is kind of annoyingly out of sync with the movie so there are times where Bartalos is saying "OK this shot coming up right..... HERE was (tech talk)" but from context we can tell he is referring to something we saw 15 seconds earlier. But otherwise it's chockfull of production info and anecdotes, with occasional ball-busting and self deprecation, i.e. an ideal track for both fans of the film and also for detractors who assume things like this can just be slapped together in a weekend. Even if you're not down with all of the movie's choices, no one can deny that it is the result of a hard working filmmaker that wanted to put his own spin on classic horror movie material, one who made sure to put every dollar of his (not large!) budget on the screen instead of blowing half of it on a pointless cameo by someone who didn't happen to have a horror convention on his schedule that weekend.

It's sad though, because I kept having the "They don't make em like this anymore" thought for a movie that was only a couple years old when I started doing Horror Movie A Day. I mean yeah it's depressing to think I'm that much older, but in general the idea of anyone doing this sort of thing (on film no less, though there are a handful of well-matched digital shots) is practically unthinkable nowadays. Indie horror exists of course, but the things that find distribution are mostly A24 lite affairs, with gonzo stuff like this being "underground" fare that probably costs less than I spend on electricity every year. It's rare I come across anything that the filmmaker spent years of their life tinkering with to get just the way they liked it, shooting when they could instead of shitting it out over a week and trying to salvage something from what they shot (on their iPhone). Oh, and doing it before he could ask people on the internet to pay for it, reducing their own interest in making sure it got done right. I'm sure those sort of productions still exist, but they don't come across my desk as much as I'd like. Hopefully that'll change.

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FTP: Observance (2015)

FEBRUARY 14, 2019

GENRE: PSYCHOLOGICAL
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

Digging through emails, it looks like poor Observance has been sitting in the dreaded pile since the summer of 2016, and I assure you it's not even close to the oldest title in there. But at least I have a good excuse for letting it pass me by - that's when I moved into my current home, and to this day I feel bad because the very first thing I watched in that home was the first episode of 11/22/63, which I specifically asked for to review (unlike this) and never finished it because it took all month to actually finish moving in. If memory serves I didn't even have the surround sound hooked up yet and just watched that one episode through (shudder) the TV speakers. Wonder how it ended?

Anyway, if you're the type of person who needs to understand what's going on in their horror movies, I'd steer clear of this one - it's got that "I'm gonna channel my inner David Lynch" feel to it and leaves the viewer with way more questions than answers. However, if you just want to feel uncomfortable/unnerved it's actually a pretty good entry in the Repulsion/Tenant sub-genre of "someone in an apartment goes nuts" movies. Actually, it reminded me even more of Occupant, a similarly uneven but mostly admirable indie version of this kind of movie, but I doubt namechecking that one will ring as many bells. I was stunned to learn that it only cost $11k; it looks just as good as any other indie (you know, the kinds with 6 or even 7 figure budgets) and has a pair of solid actors in the lead roles (plus bit parts for John Jarratt and Benedict Hardie, who played the main henchman guy in last summer's Upgrade). As "calling card" kind of movies go, I must say if I was a studio exec I'd be trying to land director Joseph Sims-Dennett as he clearly knows how to maximize his budget.

But I'd hope he'd work with a writing partner, or let someone else handle that part entirely. Even in the realm of "you're not supposed to understand everything" types the script seemed to be just sort of tossing things for the hell of it as opposed to not spelling everything out. The plot concerns a desperate man who agrees to a surveillance job of a woman who is about to marry into some well-to-do family, only for him to start hallucinating and suffering from body horror type ailments as the job drags on much longer than expected, but I was never quite able to discern the connection between these two things. Occasionally it starts to be seemingly building toward the idea that maybe HE is the one that's actually being observed, but it never pans out. And I'm at a total loss with the ending; it's certainly a surprise and rather grim, but also far too abrupt.

Still, when it works it works rather effectively, especially the body horror stuff. Our guy gets some kind of huge (bed?) sore on his back at one point, and its ooze/blood has stuck to his shirt, forcing him to pull it off over his head as quick as he can - it's like a "rip the band-aid off" kind of thing, but times a hundred. And he pukes up some mysterious black ooze - the same stuff that appears to be filling up more and more of a jar every time he sees it? Couldn't tell you what that was all about, but I do know it gave me the proper unsettling feeling. This was a festival movie, and it probably worked even better in that setting, as you'd be more "trapped" (like its character) than you are at home, free to pause and what not - I highly encourage an uninterrupted viewing for it to provide the most effect on you, if you plan to check it out.

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FTP: Boardinghouse (1982)

FEBRUARY 1, 2019

GENRE: SLASHER, SUPERNATURAL
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

As a fan (well, "fan") of Sledgehammer and some other early shot on video oddities, I was excited when I won Boardinghouse at trivia a while back, because while it sounded like something I would enjoy I was also leery of blind buying the damn thing (especially on DVD, gross!). Now I could see it for free and not mind if it turned out to be really bad! But man, I wasn't prepared for just HOW bad it was; it actually took me several attempts just to finish it, and that was the 96 minute version - there's another that runs an hour longer, something I have to assume is akin to waterboarding or flying on Spirit Airlines. I know there's some appeal in seeing something this amateurish and weird, but whatever that je ne sais quoi is that makes the likes of Things and (to go out of horror) The Room into a compelling experience, it's definitely absent here.

I can give them some leeway on the removal of nearly an hour of footage - I can't imagine even something like The Godfather would be much use if more than a third of the film was lopped out. But thanks to MovieCensorship, a site that runs down the differences between two cuts of a movie, I know that a great deal of the footage is just padding or scenes running longer thanks to more cutaways and the like. Entries like "The shorter version cuts away a few seconds before she gets to the door" are common, so unless you believe that watching someone walk all of the way to a door is essential to the film's coherency or merit, I think you'll agree that this movie wasn't "ruined" by getting hacked up. Obviously some of that footage is meatier than the example, but after reading through the entry (which is very long since so many of the cuts are of a few seconds here and there) I am certain that the film couldn't be saved thanks to how it was made in the first place.

And no, I'm not referring to the shot on video aesthetic - it actually looks fine for that sort of thing, and in fact I've seen movies made twenty years later that looked much worse. No, the problem is that the director cast himself in the lead role of a guy who is a sex magnet for every woman in the film, which is icky and implausible in equal measures. And since it's a lot cheaper to film a guy being hit on by a lady or two than to have a big chase/kill scene, we spend most of the movie watching the women fawn all over this guy, and not nearly enough time on the killer doing his thing. So that leads to the other problem - it's one of the most meandering "slashers" I've ever seen; the setup is fine (the owner of the titular boarding house nabs a group of comely ladies who all move in around the same time but then start getting picked off one by one) but the killer takes too much damn time to do that. Instead we get scenes of the hero going to work, meeting clients, one of the girls working on an album, a pie fight, a pool party (including a bizarre catfight), and horrifying sex scenes.

I know all that makes it sound like a lot of fun but I assure you, the lack of any momentum makes these moments just as dull as everything else. I think the thing that makes The Room "work" is that it's actually kind of a threadbare story about a guy whose fiance is cheating on him with his buddy, but keeps tossing in all these non sequiturs to keep it lively. But most of the things this movie offers are exactly what you'd expect from a slasher - they're just too spread out and done too poorly for it to ever be any fun. In fact, the only amusement I ever got out of the damn thing (besides the electronic score, which occasionally sounds like an Asylum mockbuster of Halloween II's) was when they clearly edited something out, as a scene would just randomly fade out before any discernible point to it had been made; presumably they had to keep part of it for continuity or to avoid cutting an actor (read: friend of producer) out entirely. I can't help but wonder if they kept going and got the thing down to like 75 minutes if it would actually work?

P.S. The menu is horribly designed too. This whole affair was a waste of a trivia prize!

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Blood Beat (1983)

MARCH 29, 2018

GENRE: POSSESSION, WEIRD
SOURCE: STREAMING (AMAZON PRIME)

A couple months ago, a friend of mine who had just installed a home theater with 4K and 7.1 and all that jazz had a few of us over to marvel at it, but this friend isn't exactly a blockbuster kinda guy, i.e. the movies you'd want to demo a high-end home theater with. I brought a couple of my 4K discs, but what we ended up watching was Blood Beat, a full frame, probably mono film that had been recently released on standard Blu-ray. I mean it probably never looked or sounded better in its nearly 35 year old life, but I can't say I was blown away by the home theater's capabilities (though he did relent and let the rest of us watch a few minutes of Fast and Furious 8, and then I could confirm that I really need to have a proper home theater someday), making it a peculiar choice to show the system off. So I just focused on the movie itself (a novel idea, eh?), but alas I was tired before it even started so I passed out halfway through and when I woke up I had no idea what was going on, vowing to watch the rest later that week.

Well two or three months later, "later that week" is finally here! Obviously I just rewatched the movie from the beginning, because my vague recollections were of no use - "Hunters, a samurai, and I think a painting" was not enough to write a review or even find where I left off. But if you've seen Blood Beat you know that I could watch this movie a thousand times and still not make much sense out of it, so I guess it didn't really matter in the end. For those uninitiated, the film focuses on Gary, a standard Wisconsin man (read: a hunter) who is dating a woman that would rather sit inside and paint all day. Her grown children are coming to visit for Christmas, and when they arrive she immediately gets weird vibes from her son's girlfriend Sarah, and the feeling is mutual. This puts her in a rather antisocial mood, so the others all instantly go hunting, at which point the horror stuff starts happening.

And by horror stuff I'm sure you know what I mean: the ghost of a Samurai that is bathed in blue light and makes sounds that the subtitles refer to as "Mystical Boinging". I mean the movie is actually kind of a slasher in general terms - the samurai ghost thing starts offing people one by one with his sword, but it's all so damn bizarre that it never really gives that slasher vibe. For starters, we don't really see the samurai until the last 20 minutes, so until then it's more of a "presence" than a flesh and blood stalker, and either because of the film's low budget or the director's incompetence (both?) the kill scenes are hardly anything one could refer to as a highlight, which is kind of the whole deal with slashers (especially by 1983). And in one of the film's many unexplained elements, Sarah's orgasms seem to be linked to the killer, so if she's flicking the bean or riding her boyfriend, the kill scenes are intercut with her doing that, making them even harder to follow. I can't even tell if her sexual energy is giving the samurai some life, or if she's psychically turned on by his killing spree. Either way they're having fun doing their thing, I guess.

It occurred to me during the film how many of these "regional" productions are totally insane, and I have to wonder if it's intentional or just an unfortunate side effect of people making a film when they don't really know what they're doing (it's a good a time as any to note that the writer/director of this film never made another, and didn't realize the film was full-frame until he was halfway through shooting). I can tell you from experience that ideas that make perfect sense to you don't translate to the screen and can leave others confused, so I have to wonder if movies like this, or Things, or Disconnected, or any of the other random ones I've found over the years were intentionally vague or forced to be that way because of how they were made. I mean there's gotta be some train of thought that puts the ghost of a samurai in the middle of the Wisconsin woods, right? Unless they were just using the ol' idea balls in the manatee tank (Google it), I have to assume there was a scene explaining it that got cut due to damaged film, or maybe they ran out of time/money and never got to shoot it in the first place.

Anyway, the movie has JUST enough of that sort of inept insanity to make it worth a look. The Samurai talks in a weird computer voice, there's an out of nowhere argument about juice between two equally out of nowhere characters, and the "Samurai vision" and other random effects are almost impressive when you consider when/how the movie was made. But those moments are often separated by long stretches of people just repeating their banal dialogue, long pauses, walking around, etc. so it's fairly dull more often than not. There's a hunting expedition that goes on forever, and I think we spend more time watching two of the characters play Monopoly than we spend watching the samurai in all his/her glory. Plus the disconnect renders a lot of it less fun than it should be - sure, it's awesome when the kitchen goes haywire and we get cans of Tab flying around, but since it's so unrelated to everything else (and barely mentioned after) it doesn't generate that kind of kitchen sink insanity that Evil Dead or Hausu ramps up throughout their respective runtimes. It also ends on some of its most confusing notes (a major demise is suggested while we look at a static shot of a door for ten seconds) and the surviving characters calmly walk out of the house while putting on their coats as if they were going to run an errand instead of escaping a nightmare scenario that left some of their loved ones dead.

I suspect it'd be more fun with a midnight crowd, perhaps during one of those all night festivals where your sleep deprived brain has you thinking you're hallucinating some of this stuff anyway, and the baffled reactions of your fellow moviegoers can generate enough energy to smooth over its rough patches. If you've never seen this sort of thing before, I guess it's a good place to start before you get into the really insane likes of Don't Go In The Woods or MST3k fodder like Manos. But as I've had more than just a taste of these things, I dunno, this one didn't have that je ne sais quoi that'd have me excitedly recommending it to like-minded fans unless it was on the big screen. It was just OK, and that's not the reaction I'd expect from a movie with a synopsis that included the phrase "possessed by the spirit of a Japanese samurai warrior". I actually preferred it when it was just focusing on its poorly acted characters yelling at each other - if it focused entirely on that juice couple, this would be a much more excited review. Oh well.

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For A Few Zombies More (2015)

MAY 12, 2017

GENRE: ZOMBIE
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

Considering how much I dislike watching sequels when I haven't seen the originals, AND how I try to balance out my sub-genres, I find it amusing that this and the previous HMAD review are for sequels to zombie movies I never saw. But unlike Dead Rising, I didn't even realize For A Few Zombies More was a sequel until a character had a rather blase reaction to the appearance of aliens, and got suspicious that I had missed something, i.e. an entire movie. That film, 2004's Hide and Creep, is one of the ones I had on my DVD queue back in the "every day" days of the site, but never got around to seeing it - now I pay the price! Oddly enough, the Blu-ray case doesn't even mention the first film, so perhaps they're purposely trying to play down the connection anyway.

Luckily, besides that quick bit, I never felt at a loss here, and a quick read of the first film's wiki page shows that apart from a few characters there wasn't much of a tie between the two films, as most of this focuses on a character that doesn't seem to have been in that one. Her name is Natalie, and she's on a rescue mission that ropes in the returning characters (including Chuck, played by co-director/co-writer Chuck Hartsell), but if I'm understanding correctly that film had an anthology type structure (like Pulp Fiction or Trick r Treat) as opposed to this one's straightforward narrative. Long story short, if you too haven't seen the first film and have an opportunity to watch this one, don't let your "ignorance" sway you - I'm super picky about these things and I barely even noticed, let alone let it bother me.

Besides I was too impressed with how many zombies they had and the amount of shootout action the film offered. The budget for the first one was only 20k, and while this one was not reported on its IMDb I doubt it was much higher since funding for these sorts of movies has gotten harder, not easier, in the past 10-12 years. So while that means some of the locations ring a little fake and not every actor will be going on to bigger and better things, you get a lot more of what you came for than you're usually liable to find in such things. There's a bit around the halfway point or so where zombies swarm a car, and I was legitimately impressed with how many they had - a wide shot shows several dozen coming from both directions as they close in on the car, keeping it from driving off to safety. Not every scene is that populated, of course, but even Dead Rising I don't think ever offered 50ish of the damn things onscreen at once.

As for the shootouts, they get a bit repetitive (there's even a joke about their frequency that made me chuckle), but since the zombie action was probably harder to pull off and more expensive, I found it to be a pretty nice consolation prize. So even though there's not a lot of undead action, there's still plenty of GENERAL action, as opposed to people just talking or driving around backroads hoping that other cars don't pass them by in this supposed post-apocalyptic wasteland (or dystopia, if you will). Imagine if Day of the Dead had the same amount of zombie action, but instead of Joe Pilato yelling at everyone the characters all just kept shooting at each other - that's kind of what the pacing is like here. That said, I would have been thrilled if maybe ONE shootout had been chucked in favor of another zombie scene, even a simple one like one or two zombies trying to get into a room where our heroes were trapped with no other exit or something - it felt like there were long stretches without any real zombie appearances at all, which minimizes their threat.

Then again, more zombie action would mean less dialogue, and that's there the film shines. Again, not all of the acting is great, but a number of the characters are dryly sarcastic and kind of world-weary about their predicament, which I found amusing - even when they took a shot at Armageddon out of nowhere (*shakes fist*). Hero Chuck is a film buff, and he apparently just wanted to sit around and watch movies until the whole thing blew over, which is pretty much what I'd want to do if the real world got overrun by the undead. But thankfully he doesn't drop too many obvious references, and a number of them are even inspired - mentioning Starship Troopers at one point turns out to be a setup for a later punchline about that film's Dina Meyer (whom young BC was quite smitten with back in the day). And I like that Dawn of the Dead is a movie that exists in this world, without it becoming a big thing - the character has more to say about Star Wars (it's in the same pile) as he's currently faced with a "look out for yourself, or help your friends" decision as Han Solo was in the first film. Plus, when they're talking we're less likely to be pummeled by the faux Carpenter score - we really need to give this brand of homage a rest for a while I think. Same goes for the signature Carpenter font, though here they actually go with the Halloween credit font specifically, instead of the Albertus "Carpenter" one, so I have to give them a pass on that out of loyalty to my favorite movie.

I also really loved a rather inessential bit where our heroine stumbles across a band who is recording a double album. She's incredulous that they're bothering considering the zombie issue, but the band explains that when all the zombies are gone and normal civilization occurs, folks will want new music and there won't be any - just the old stuff they had before everything went to hell. I always wondered, particularly in the Romero films, when exactly these kind of things stopped happening - like in Night of the Living Dead, it's just started and kind of a localized problem, so I'm sure people in Hollywood kept on making movies for a while. But when did they finally decide enough was enough? Ditto for pretty much everything - were the folks who make microwaves still going to work, or did they figure it was pointless and stay home? I would love to see a zombie movie where everything had a specific frame of reference for when the world "stopped" in a general sense; it fascinates me for some reason. Indeed, a lot of the references here were from 1997-1998 (there's even one about The Postman!), so I wonder if that was intentional or just coincidence. Probably have my answer if I saw the first film.

The Blu-ray I was sent came with a novelization, which made me very happy and I instantly put it with all my others, which I really need to organize someday. It's a fitting "gimmick" for the film's 90s worship (the hero is an ex-video clerk, in fact), as it seems every movie that came out in that decade had a novelization (if you want proof I'll let you borrow my copy of Stepmom). I'd like to read it, but I feel I should put more energy into finally watching the first film, because these are the kinds of indie horror films I want to see more often. I may not love them, but I can see that they actually care about what they're doing and have a "let's put on a show" attitude that I am unable to detect in the average found footage flick (hell, they even hand-painted the poster instead of doing some shitty Photoshop thing - see below!). As I find less and less time to watch and review something just for the sake of doing so, I don't want to waste more of my life on cynical "Let's join the party" junk. I want to feel like the people behind it were less concerned with finding distribution in the current market than they were with simply making something they could be proud of down the road.

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The Editor (2014)

SEPTEMBER 7, 2015

GENRE: COMEDIC, GIALLO
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (OWN COLLECTION)

A few years ago I had an idea for a giallo send-up, but never really developed it because I realized I hadn't seen as many films in the sub-genre as I wish I could say I had, and thus I felt under-qualified to joke about them, even lovingly. The team at Astron-6 either didn't have that hang-up (or, more likely, had just seen more of them), because The Editor is more or less in line with what I would have done, which is to make up a new giallo story (as opposed to directly parodying a particular film) but present it in a comical way that pays tribute while also taking the piss out of some of the sub-genre's traditions. The black gloves, the misogynist heroes, the nonsensical asides that don't add up... it's all here, and for the most part it works a lot better than I expected it to.

In fact, the only major issue is that the performances are all over the place, with some of the actors playing it straight (and thus making it funnier), while others are stopping just shy of actually winking at the camera. When the biggest offender is one of the writer/directors (Matthew Kennedy) it's hard to really say he's "doing it wrong", because it's kind of his call - but I much preferred Adam Brooks' (also writer/director) more subdued performance, as it felt more like something I would really see in one of these movies (ditto Udo Kier, who has a brief role as a doctor that could easily have been transplanted from a genuine entry). I can only assume they figured the joke would be TOO subtle unless some of the actors were letting you know that they were in on the joke (ditto for the dubbing; only a couple characters are dubbed, enough to enjoy the reference without it overpowering the movie), and they might be right.

Because it's actually a pretty good story! They smartly combine an older, standard murder mystery with a more modern (well, modern for the giallo heyday, meaning the 80s) reflexive concept, as our primary characters are the cast/crew of a genre film, a production that is getting quite chaotic as people keep dying. The producer vows to keep shooting at all costs, so maybe the killer is one of the actors, murdering co-stars to beef up his/her role? Or is it the title character, who is said to have spent time in an institution after cutting off some of his own fingers (and nearly killing a colleague) in a bizarre accident? I wouldn't say it's IMPOSSIBLE to figure it out, but it's actually fairly satisfying as a mystery, with the weirdo supernatural elements (such as the editor transporting into his Steenbeck) adding some of that Fulci flair (The Beyond is just as much an influence as Deep Red or whatever). At times, it's actually more successful than Berberian Sound Studio, which was the straight version of a similar story - not a bad feat for a "parody".

And that's the thing, it's more in line with Naked Gun or the recent They Came Together in that it's not doing any direct parodies of any particular film (i.e. the Hot Shots style) - it's just a funny version of the general idea of one. Sure, you might spot a direct reference to Murder Rock or even Dressed to Kill (!), but these are just quick plot points of little consequence - the overall concept and major scenes are wholly original, just "at home" within the sub-genre. It's a tough thing to pull off (and even harder to market - They Came Together was basically sent direct to video for this reason), and I think you genuinely have to love the movies to do it. Like a good roast, you can't just be mocking the roastee out of nowhere - it has to come from a place of real affection. Like, I could do something like this for slashers fairly well (well, if I had any skill as a screenwriter I mean), but if I did a haunted house version it'd just be me mercilessly mocking its tropes and saying "fuck you" to the basic idea of them. I think that's why the Epic Movie guys are so bad at what they do - they're just mocking whatever's popular, instead of taking on a type of movie they care about. You don't have to think the movies are infallible (because they're not), but you DO have to love them anyway, or else you'll end up with cynical crap.

Since the Astron-6 team was behind Manborg (albeit with the core members taking different roles), I was afraid that they'd use visual FX for the blood, since they seem to like that "intentionally fake" aesthetic and also because I know they don't work with very high budgets (a lot of indie producers I have talked to claim that they have to go digital with their blood because they don't have time/resources to do it on set, forced to get it done cheap/free in post production). But no! They spray gallons of the good stuff, and even have two kinds - a more realistic looking dark red, and a more pinkish one for the in-movie scenes, matching the "melted crayon" look of those older films. The digital photography betrays them, but otherwise they have done a pretty good job of matching the look of the films that influenced it - it's got the vivid colors, the zooms, the bold font for the credits (I particularly appreciated that touch), and the music - even some by Claudio Simonetti himself (sourced, I assume - I'm not enough of a connoisseur to know for sure).

As with Manborg (I still haven't seen Father's Day! I should fix that) the disc comes jam-packed with bonus features, including a nearly hour long documentary about its production. As you can expect, it wasn't the smoothest shoot, with the crew almost entirely running out of money with only 20% of its scenes shot, picture cars not working (you get to see Kennedy attempt to finish breaking off the muffler that was already hanging on the ground), and occasional other snafus, the sort of thing you'll never see on a studio Blu-ray. The commentary by Kennedy, Brooks, and co-writer/star Conor Sweeney is also pretty fun; they point out some of the references and other production snafus not covered in the making of, and heap praises on all of their crew (I also enjoyed the note that they actually had the money to pay someone to do one particular effect and thus demanded perfection). There are also a few deleted scenes of minor merit; I think they cut the best joke about the cop slapping the female characters around (it's something of a running gag), but the others were good calls to delete. The other bonus features are a bit too jokey for my tastes (like the poster artist having a sci-fi machine create the art for him), as the "no one is getting paid" gag wears a bit thin, but they're quirky and thus in line with the DIY feel of Astron's productions.

The Editor is for such a specific audience that I can't imagine it will be a big seller for Scream Factory right out of the gate, but I think this will continue to find fans for a long time. It's not perfect (it could be shorter for sure) and there will always be people thinking that they're mocking these movies without any love for them (something the making of should make clear isn't the case, with one of the directors arguing to shoot a scene a different way so that it feels more like The Beyond than CSI - you don't get THAT into it when you just want to make fun of something for the hell of it), but I like what they were going for, and appreciative of the parts that nailed it. The problem with a lot of these modern "love letter" movies is that they're not adding anything of value of their own, but that's not the case here. Astron-6 has created a giallo plot that I wish I could have seen done for real, and I just take solace knowing that when I laugh at it, it's intentional.

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The Battery (2012)

NOVEMBER 16, 2013

GENRE: INDEPENDENT, ZOMBIE
SOURCE: BLU-RAY (PUBLIC SCREENING)

I'm about to shower a lot of praise on The Battery, but if you're a longtime reader or just know me personally, here's the most significant: I was happy to leave a Halloween convention early in order to see the film. That's pretty big; you know I live and breathe Halloween, and I could have even hosted another panel if I stuck around (incidentally, the scheduled moderator was at the same screening), but after raves from my friend AJ (and a positive review from Evan at Badass) I knew I'd regret missing the chance to watch the film with a crowd, and so off I went, missing some Hallo-fun (and a party) to sit in a folding chair and watch a projected Blu-ray... and I loved every minute of it.

If anything I should be pissed; a while back I wrote out an idea for a stripped down zombie movie that was closer to Cast Away than to Dawn of the Dead, and if I were to ever get it made (yeah, right) the first review would probably say "Rips off The Battery". But that's fine, writer/director/star Jeremy Gardner probably did it better than I would (well, I wouldn't have starred or directed, but you know what I mean), because he has the patience to stick to character instead of going for zombie action whenever things might get "slow" in the traditional sense. With only two people in the movie for the most part (the film has opening credits that spoil that won't always be the case - I wish they had gone without opening titles so it would have been more of a surprise when someone else shows up), it's not like much action SHOULD happen - after all there's little chance either of them will be offed until the movie's almost over (if then), so it wouldn't be very suspenseful to have them trying to outrun a horde of zombies.

And yes, they're zombies. The good (read: slow) kind, and the characters know what zombies are and will use the word when appropriate. It's one of many things that makes this feel like a much more realistic film than most z-territory; they're not oblivious to what the things could be (when the film opens, headshots seem to have been figured out, if not already known off the bat), nor are they in a hyper-realized version of the world and quoting Romero (or Wright/Pegg) to (over)sell the idea that this is not a "movie" universe. Nope, it goes down exactly as it might if you or I were among the last of the living and rarely facing immediate threat from the undead. The backstory of how the zombies came to be isn't explained, but it seems that the zombie numbers aren't much greater than that of the human race - it's not until the end that we see more than 1-2 at a time.

As a result, this allows for a lot of "hanging out". The two characters, Ben (Gardner) and Mickey (Adam Cronheim) are a pair of baseball players who are just sort of roaming around Connecticut in their station wagon, stopping for supplies when necessary but otherwise never setting up a home base. We learn that they were shacked up in a house but became surrounded by zombies and trapped for days, and thus now they approach it like they are sharks: if they stop moving, they'll die. This allows the scenery to change up a lot, but also works as a throwaway explanation for why they're not in danger all that often, giving them a chance to play catch, go apple picking, or just hang out drinking beers and (in Mickey's case) listening to a Discman. There's a truly hilarious bit where Ben pretends to be a zombie creeping up on the plugged-in (and thus deaf) Mickey that serves as a perfect example as the kind of character-based humor that the film excels at, something that's often missing entirely from most modern zombie films, which are usually more concerned with new ways of killing the damn things than making sure we care about the guy holding the makeshift hammer or whatever the hell.

This low-key approach makes the 3rd act stuff work even better than it would if it came at the end of a typical NOTLD wannabe (mild spoilers ahead!). Rather than the usual "Characters find key to salvation, have to overcome insurmountable odds to secure it" or "There's a boat/chopper/jet/whatever waiting and we have until x o clock to get there!" run n gun finale, the two heroes find themselves trapped in their car, surrounded on all sides by zombies with the keys somewhere in the bushes outside. For a while, the sequence plays as the rest of the film does - they just sort of hang out, passing the time until the zombies leave or they simply die from thirst or starvation, with the undead (lightly) banging the windows 24 hours a day (they're in there for a few days). Finally, one character decides to make another attempt at finding the keys, and rather than go with him for what would probably be an exciting little action sequence, we stay on the one who remained in the car. I might be wrong but I think it's one long 7-8 minute shot as he waits for his friend to return, agonizing over every sound, desperate to find something to occupy his mind... it's an astonishingly great scene.

So how can you see this film? Well, being an indie without traditional distribution as of yet (something that baffles me; it's been on the festival circuit for about a year now), you can actually buy a digital download of it for a mere 5 bucks from the director himself. You can, and should, do that HERE. I've paid more than that to rent a film on demand, so to OWN it and watch however times you like even after a stupid 24 hour window has expired is a pretty great deal for any movie, let alone one as good as this. Big thanks to Elric and the Jumpcut Cafe for hosting the screening, and to AJ for giving it a loving intro despite being sick. I am truly impressed, and eagerly wait Gardner's next film.

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The Demon's Rook (2013)

OCTOBER 13, 2013

GENRE: SUPERNATURAL, WEIRD
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (SCREAMFEST)

I recently read an article about people who accidentally leave their babies in the car, how they're not bad people or whatever, but victims of a strange tic in the way that our brains work when working through a routine. One likened it to driving to work (it's the most easily identifiable example) - you can get in your car and get all the way to work without actively thinking about any of it, because you've done it so many times. And that's part of the problem I had with horror movies after a while and also part of why I quit doing this every day: there were too many of those "drive to work" movies, where I could watch the whole thing and retain absolutely nothing about the experience, making writing a review next to impossible. Happily, there are movies like The Demon's Rook that, while imperfect, at least know enough to make an impression.

The coolest thing about the movie is how damn WEIRD it is, and also how it seems to be that way by careful(ish) design and not just a bunch of dudes making shit up as they go along and throwing things in at random. On the surface, it's not particularly complicated or unique: a guy comes back to his hometown and must battle an evil demon that has been wiping out the town - could be any random Stephen King novel, right? But when you add in the specifics, it truly forges its own identity, and the script by Akom Tidwell and James Sizemore (who also directs, stars, and performs a half dozen other crew positions) adds flavor at every turn - a mouse running over a piano, a kid asking a demon for pancakes, a guy performing an impromptu hoe-down with his friends because he's so excited about getting married... all these things keep the movie from ever being the slightest bit boring, a HUGE achievement when you consider it runs 105 minutes (longest movie I saw at the festival) and is the first film from just about everyone involved.

But the weird thing is, it's not very funny. In fact, no matter how ostensibly goofy the narrative gets at times, everyone plays it straight, never going for laughs or (worse) campy "so bad it's good" attitude. They're all fully committed to this odd little tale, and that's what makes it work as well as it does - nothing can kill a low budget movie like this quicker than everyone thinking they're comic geniuses, or having the attitude that if they laugh at themselves on camera, the audience will too. This also allowed me to forgive some of its missteps, such as seemingly going out of their way to find a kid who looked absolutely nothing like Sizemore to play his younger self, or curiously having nearly every character be an artist of some sort (there's like 9 scenes of people drawing before being distracted by demon carnage in some form or another).

Another thing I really appreciated was the FX work (also by Sizemore, who taught himself). Not only is it all practical (I will never, ever, EVER get tired of seeing an actor get squirted with real blood - and in this day and age, it's even more admirable and awesome), but there's an impressive variety to all of the demons, including the tree-like head demon villain and the one sort-of good one, who looks a bit like the freak from The Funhouse. It's like an indie Nightbreed - every demon/monster gets its own unique design even if they're not featured very prominently.

In fact, my only real gripe was the ending, which was more of a downer than it needed to be, and abrupt to boot. I understand that this was one of those productions where cast members would constantly drop out and the movie was shot entirely on weekends over a long period, so perhaps something happened and they had to come up with a new ending or something, but either way it just feels tacked on and unnecessarily grim. At 105 minutes I don't think it needed to be LONGER, but if that's what they indeed wanted to go with, I wish it could have all ended at the big massacre that we know has been coming throughout the film (we keep seeing posters for a big concert - no horror movie has such an event unless something big and violent is going to happen there). That sequence ends and then we go to the next morning, with some shuffling about before the action kicks in again, briefly, before just ending like a Hammer movie. Throughout the movie I was impressed by the first-timer's better than average direction and editing, so it's a bummer that it gets kind of clunky in its final moments.

On the other hand, they did such a great job of telling their story visually that we (meaning me and the folks I watched it with) didn't even realize that the theater had fucked up and cropped out a small portion of the top and bottom of the frame - including the subtitles for the demon language. There's a 10 minute sequence at the halfway point, where hero Roscoe reveals how he was taken by the demons, taught their ways, and managed to escape - all of which told in the gibberish demon language. We could always tell what was happening, and assumed that it was a creative decision to keep the audience from understanding exactly what was being said the whole time. It wasn't until the end credits that we realized the framing was off, as there was a still frame credit for all of the executive producers and the title "executive producers" was missing. So we got to see a scope version of the movie thanks to the Laemmle Noho 7 staff not understanding how to frame things properly (this is why being a projectionist isn't something just anyone should be doing without proper training). Luckily, the film showed twice and they got it right the other time, so it was just our crowd that got this unusual version, one that just sort of added to the weirdness (thanks to one of the producers I got to see the subtitled version later - it was mostly gibberish even in English, so if you were also at that screening, it wasn't exactly a huge revelation).

In short, this is the sort of indie horror I wish I saw more often - it's not trying to fit into any particular hot sub-genre (it feels a bit zombie movie-ish at times, but it's a very small element), it's competently (and CONFIDENTLY) made, and doesn't try to make up for its shortcomings with horrible attempts at humor. It may run a little long, but ultimately I'd rather watch something like this for 9 straight hours before enduring another 80 minute Saw or Paranormal Activity wannabe.

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Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill! (2006)

MARCH 29, 2013

GENRE: INDEPENDENT, SLASHER
SOURCE: DVD (ONLINE RENTAL)

Holiday slashers are all too rare these days, and with Easter being one of the less frequently used days as a center of inspiration for such fare, I was hoping Easter Bunny, Kill! Kill! would go all out, embracing both the rarity of the subject matter and the fact that it's a sub-genre long overdue for a comeback. But alas, it's strangely low-key, and not nearly as exploitative or gonzo as I would have expected - in fact, it's shockingly... serious?

I mean, don't get me wrong - it's still a slasher with someone in an Easter Bunny mask (another disappointment - not a full costume!), and the deaths are graphic (and loaded with practical blood!) as any good slasher should be. It's also a whodunit of sorts; we're supposed to think that the mentally challenged boy who is being tormented by his mom's boyfriend (and a child molester pal of his) has snapped and is killing everyone, but the way it's set up is too easy, and thus we know it can't be the case. But there's a strong emphasis on character development and a LONG setup before our first kill (almost 45 minutes!), making this more of a drama that TURNS INTO a slasher movie than anything else.

And that's even weirder when you consider that the opening seems to be taking cues from Silent Night Deadly Night, misleading me some as it got me hoping this would be equally depraved (and action packed). The first scene is a store robbery, and Nicholas (who is 16 but acts like a 5 year old; not sure what exact disorder he has) is obviously really into Easter the way Billy was into Christmas before being scarred forever. So I figured the robber (who is the mom's boyfriend) would do something awful, he'd snap, and he'd go on a rampage making his way to his mother, who is working on Easter much to his disappointment. But they never leave the house save for a couple cutaways to the boyfriend (who has gone out for a couple of hookers), and again even though we know the guy's a scumbag it takes quite a bit of screentime before this even really resembles a horror film.

Most of that time is spent on getting us to sympathize with Nicholas, something that might have been easier with an actual handicapped actor in the role instead of a guy pretending. He's not a bad actor, but there's something slightly exploitative about his strange form of retardation, and it took a while for me to realize that this wasn't supposed to be like a Troma thing (where his issues would be played for laughs). On the bonus features we learn that they originally DID cast an actor with Down syndrome but he had to back out because of personal issues, and that would have been a lot more beneficial as we could not only easily identify his issue (and hopefully understand how he would normally act) but also know for sure that he wasn't being made fun of in any way.

Another odd thing is that the boyfriend seems to genuinely love the mom, adding a bit of dimension to his otherwise deplorable character and more weight to the ending when we find out who the killer is. It works for that specific thing, but during the movie I was wondering why anyone who clearly had compassion for a woman could also hate her son so much; it might have made more sense if he was just using her as a convenient lover and didn't want to deal with the kid too. But at least there's some surprise to how this angle plays out, as there's a subplot about a homeless man that's way too easy to figure out its significance, made to be a big reveal - if you haven't guessed it by then, you're not very good at movies.

But kudos to the creative team for trying and occasionally succeeding at making something more dramatic and serious out of a potentially bad-taste goldmine. I suspect I'd enjoy the film more on a second view, now that I know it's not a full blown holiday slasher like Silent Night or any of the various Halloween-set slashers. And on a second view I could also try to imagine what it would have been like with the original cast, who are revealed in the film's lone supplement besides the commentary, which also has to be the first of its type I've ever seen. Titled "Fuck Up", the 17 minute piece explains the headaches surrounding the production's original casting of Joe Pilato as the boyfriend. Joe apparently was going through some sort of addiction at the time (drugs or alcohol wasn't specified) and making the other cast members uncomfortable with his erratic behavior, and was forced to leave the production as they couldn't afford to wait on him to clean up with a filming schedule already set in stone. Not much is explained here about why the Down syndrome actor had to leave, but it also cost them Lynn Lowry as his mother as the actor they cast instead was black and thus the mom had to be too. So actor Timothy Muskatel (who was originally cast as the child molester) got bumped up to the boyfriend, and another actor hired as the despicable perv (who makes the guy in Hardware look harmless). Truly, out of all the hundreds of bonus features I've seen I don't think I've ever come across anything this up front and honest concerning casting; usually they might drop a hint on a commentary about "a previous actor" and you have to go digging to find out who they mean - this actually has footage of the original actor being let go!

The commentary by Muskatel and director Chad Ferrin also talks about this a bit, as well as some other production woes, the worst being when a shady distributor gave them a bad check and then released the movie on Amazon himself, screwing them out of revenue and holding up the film's proper DVD release for quite a while (the movie is copyright 2006 - the disc was produced in 2010). They also talk about the actual production and the usual shortcomings of low budget (under ten grand) filmmaking, and throw in some TMI stories and other off the cuff remarks that make it a pretty good listen. But that's it for real bonus features; the only other thing is the trailer (which DOES sell a more full blown, trashy slasher) and spots for other releases from distributor Breaking Glass. Considering the weak transfer (non-anamorphic on a 2010 disc?) and movie's pacing issues I'd have a tough time recommending a purchase, you can get through the disc in less than four hours and probably wouldn't want to revisit it much, but I'd say it's worth a look if you're a die-hard slasher fan and are curious about an attempt to blend something ridiculous ("killer Easter bunny") with something more dramatic and realistic.

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