Decapitated Zombie Vampire Bloodbath: 2019

Wednesday, December 18, 2019

The Burning (Tony Maylam, 1981)

For a cheap slasher flick, The Burning surprisingly launched a number of successful careers. Jason Alexander, Holly Hunter, Fisher Stevens, and Brian Backer (best known for playing Mark "Rat" Ratner in the following year's Fast Times at Ridgemont High) appear in their first movie roles, with Ned Eisenberg making his third film appearance. Editor Jack Sholder, whose work on this film was his sole editing credit, went on to direct Alone in the Dark, A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, and The Hidden. Co-screenwriter Brad Grey later became one of the most powerful agents and producers in stand-up and sketch comedy, film, and television, and his credits include Happy Gilmore, Mr. Show, The Larry Sanders Show, The Sopranos, The Departed, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

The music and special effects departments, meanwhile, snagged a couple of talented veterans. Director Tony Maylam had mostly directed concert films and sports documentaries prior to The Burning. One of those documentaries, about the Winter Olympics, featured a score from Rick Wakeman, the keyboard player from Yes. Maylam talked Wakeman into writing the music for The Burning, too. (This is a bit like if Peter Gabriel had done the score for Sleepaway Camp III or Robert Fripp had tackled Nail Gun Massacre.) Tom Savini, still in the early part of his career but with an already impressive CV, handled the blood, guts, and makeup.

Unfortunately, The Burning also kick-started the film careers of Bob and Harvey Weinstein and changed their company Miramax from being a regional distributor of concert films to an international film production and distribution company. The Weinsteins at the time were successful concert promoters in Buffalo with a strong desire to break into the big leagues of the film business. They figured a horror movie would be cheap and profitable, and they had industry connections from their recent years as film distributors. They convinced Maylam, a British director whose films they had recently distributed, to direct a slasher film inspired by the Cropsey urban legend that they would produce and co-write.

The Burning wasn't a hit in the U.S. initially but did well overseas, especially in Japan, and VHS sales were good. This gave the Weinsteins a base to slowly grow Miramax into one of the most successful independent production and distribution companies of the '90s and 2000s. They won a truckload of Oscars and achieved massive mainstream success. Meanwhile, Harvey Weinstein (allegedly, I'll say here to avoid any litigiousness) used his veneer of respectability, industry clout, wealth, and power to facilitate, and avoid consequences for, harassment, rape, abuse, intimidation, manipulation, bullying, and assault. A production assistant on The Burning came forward two years ago with her own story of sexual harassment, so Weinstein was abusing his power from the very beginning. His criminal trial begins soon, and I hope he gets what he deserves.

The Weinstein pall hangs over The Burning, and one wonders what would have happened if the film had tanked to such an extent that Miramax never got off the ground. I don't think it would have stopped the ambitious brothers from eventually achieving their goals (they were already wealthy concert promoters), but maybe it would have delayed their plans enough to have spared some women the abuse they endured. There's a gross thread running through the movie that depicts sex as something men have to bully, negotiate, intimidate, and/or use salesmanship to convince women into having, which really seems like a Harvey Weinstein worldview as we learn more details of his private life.

This review is at risk of turning into a soapbox rant, and there were plenty of cast and crew working on the film who didn't abuse people, so let's get into the actual movie. The Burning was one of four slasher films about teenage campers in the New York and New Jersey area hitting theaters in 1980 and '81 (the other three were Madman and the first two Friday the 13th movies). The respective filmmakers of Madman and The Burning claim these films were in the planning stages at the same time as Friday the 13th and were not attempts to cash in on that film's success. It's a mystery that may never be solved. (BTW, Madman is one of the most bananas slasher films ever. A truly deranged movie.)

The Burning begins with a classic horror setup: the prank gone awry. A group of four teenage boys take a (fake? real? WTF?) skull, cover it with dirt and worms, and put a lighted candle near it in the shack of Camp Blackfoot maintenance man and creepy weirdo Cropsy while he sleeps. He wakes up, sees the skull, freaks the fuck out, and accidentally sets his shack and himself ablaze. He miraculously survives his horribly disfiguring burns but is hopping mad about the whole deal and vows to kill teenage campers in rural New York for the rest of his days. He gets some murdering practice under his belt in New York City immediately after leaving the hospital and then skedaddles to the woods of another camp, Camp Stonewater.

Camp Stonewater has it all. Teenage campers, twentysomething counselors, a thirtysomething teenage bad boy camper named Glazer (Larry Joshua), and a fortysomething teenage camper, the very Constanza-esque Dave (Jason Alexander), who says things like, "We got a regular Esther Williams here," when a friend dives in the lake and who is fond of Three Stooges routines and keeping his shirt on while swimming. I believe without proof that the director told Alexander to improvise all his dialogue. Fisher Stevens, whose character's name is Woodstock, was 17 at the time of filming and looks about 13. A 22-year-old Holly Hunter is frequently in the background, but she gets a few lines in the second half.

Camping hijinks ensue amid the picturesque forests and lakes of western New York. Then people start getting killed. You've seen a slasher movie. You know the formula. Since Tom Savini is handling the effects, we get a lot of excellent kills. Shower scenes and skinny dipping scenes occur. Glazer is hit in the butt with a slingshot and vows revenge. Porn mags and rubbers are smuggled in by Dave. Canoe trips are taken. Girls' softball games are watched by horny adult teens. Virginity is lost. A raft is built. Lessons are probably not learned. Fingers are cut off. Guts are slashed.

There are some beautiful, ominous shots of a canoe floating in the lake, a light mist rising from the water, and the setting is gorgeous, but most of the images are fairly perfunctory. It's fun seeing so many actors at the start of their careers, the kills are satisfying, it's all pretty entertaining except for the creepy sexism, and late '70s and early '80s slasher films are like a comfort blanket for me (I should probably seek help). I enjoyed the movie, but it's nothing particularly special (though you certainly won't see another slasher film with a Rick fucking Wakeman electro-prog score). The Weinstein connection makes me a little heavy-hearted, but the entire fucking world makes me a little heavy-hearted. It's dark times, and we're never going back to the innocent days of adult teens getting hacked to pieces by madmen at poorly supervised summer camps in the Carter and Reagan years. I'm getting wistful now. Happy holidays, weirdos.

Saturday, December 7, 2019

White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1932)

White Zombie is a creepy, unusual, complex, and visually striking Poverty Row horror film, and it's not even as racist as I was expecting it to be. I realize that's a bit like saying, "hey, there's only a little flesh-eating bacteria in this coffee," but, unlike The Mask of Fu Manchu, which made me extremely heavy-hearted upon a recent re-watch with its deliberate dehumanization of and disgust at every nonwhite character, White Zombie's few moments of racism come from ignorance and prevailing cultural attitudes and are presented alongside critiques of racism and sexism and the idea of possessing another person, whether it be through the exploitation of labor or a romantic relationship. It's a strange stew of regressive and progressive points of view, aided by a fantastic Bela Lugosi performance and much ominous weirdness. And, yeah, it's also a straight-up entertaining horror movie.

Set in Haiti, the film begins with a young engaged couple, Madeline Short Parker (Madge Bellamy) and Neil Parker (John Harron), taking a coach to the home of friendly acquaintance and plantation owner Charles Beaumont (Robert Frazer). The couple will be married in a ceremony at Beaumont's plantation at his invite (way ahead of the white bougie trend of recent years). Of course Beaumont has an ulterior motive. He's in love with Madeline and attempts to get her to run away with him to Port-au-Prince. She, for whatever reason, is in love with her bland dweeb fiance Neil and refuses Charles. I would have refused both of them, but YMMV.

On the way to the plantation, the couple are momentarily slowed by a funeral in the middle of the road. The coachman explains that the locals bury their dead under well-traveled roads to prevent grave robbing. This is almost immediately followed by a creepy weirdo appearing out of the dark, coming up to the coach and grinning, saying nothing. He proceeds to stealthily steal Madeline's scarf before a procession of dazed weirdos appears behind him. The coachman tells the couple that the weirdos are not people but zombies, and they 23 skidoo. That creepy dude is Murder Legendre (Lugosi) a white voodoo master and factory owner who turns people into zombies to work as his slaves.

Of course, shitty plantation owner Charles strikes a deal with shitty factory owner/voodoo master Legendre to turn Madeline into a zombie so she can belong to Charles forever. The elaborate plan works, but Legendre is not a man to be trusted, and, anyway, Charles stupidly realizes way too late that having a soulless zombie version of the woman of your dreams is much worse than having the real woman exist in the world as her old self even if she doesn't love you back. Meanwhile, boring old Neil teams up with a missionary, Dr. Bruner (Joseph Cawthorn), to try to save Madeline and end Legendre's reign of terror.

Halperin creates a consistently unsettling vibe, with almost no scenes taking place in daylight, and despite the limited budget, his sets look vast and elaborate and are inflected with German expressionist touches. The film has a dreamlike atmosphere with its own rhythm that doesn't feel much like other, more conventional movies, and the sound design is particularly odd, with a screaming vulture appearing often and another scene underscored by the turning of a groaning wooden factory wheel.

Halperin is a bit of a mystery man. A theater director turned filmmaker, Halperin worked exclusively as a Poverty Row B-movie director from 1924 to 1942. He specialized in horror films and melodramas, though he later regretted his horror films, expressing a distaste for the genre and the negative feelings he felt he put into the world. This bums me out, because on the evidence of White Zombie, he was really good at horror. I can't find any biographical information about what the hell he did between 1942, the year of his final film (Girls' Town), and 1983, the year he died. That's almost 40 years of no film work. A Chicago native, Halperin died in Bentonville, Arkansas, the birthplace of Walmart. That's all the info I could scrounge up.

Maybe Halperin didn't appreciate White Zombie, but Lugosi appeared to be having a blast. He is so great in this movie, and the camera loves every smirk, stare, grin, and death glare Lugosi delivers, rewarding him with several close-ups and memorable entrances. Lugosi, along with the look of the film, is the best reason to see it.

Saturday, November 23, 2019

Brutal Sorcery (Ling Pang, 1983)

Ling Pang's Brutal Sorcery is a nutty black magic Hong Kong possession-fest told in flashbacks within flashbacks about an extremely unlucky taxi driver who gets possessed by two spirits thanks to his own bad luck but falls headfirst into another possession a couple days after getting free of the first one thanks to his own stupidity. It's a fun and ridiculous film that drags a little in the final third before rallying in an epic showdown finale between two black magicians, one working for good (and much selfish glory), one working for evil.
Alan Chang is driving around Hong Kong one night in his cab looking for fares when he sees a woman walking alone. When he asks if she needs a ride, she turns around and shows him her scary ghost face. Terrified by seeing the ghost, Alan gets his fortune read. The cards aren't good. The fortune teller says the combination of the bad card reading, the ghost spotting, and Alan being born at 9:00 p.m. on the ninth day of the ninth month in the year of the dog means he'll probably die young. He's seriously freaked out but gets a good luck charm to hang in his cab, which completely placates him because he's kind of a doofus.
He hits the streets in his cab soon afterward and talks a middle-aged couple into accepting a ride even though they're acting spooky and keep warning him off. Despite his ominous fortune, goofy Alan is oblivious and takes them to a cemetery where they tell him to wait. The woman disappears, then the man has Alan take him to a different cemetery, where the man disappears. Alan is surprisingly relaxed about all this thanks to his good luck charm, but things get bad when Alan stops at an all-night noodle stand where the employee and the other customers act like possessed weirdos. When he gets home, Alan throws up the noodles and starts acting like a total weirdo. His wife, daughter, aunt, and uncle decide he's possessed and take him to a medium, who channels his possessors. It's the couple he picked up in his taxi, who were killed by a black magic spell mid-sexual encounter. The spell was placed on the couple by their families, who didn't approve of the Hong Kong-Thailand mixed relationship. They were buried in separate cemeteries, and their spirits only get to hang together once a year, when the black magic is strong. They have both possessed Alan and agree to un-possess him if he digs up their bodies and takes the remains to the woman's sister, who lives in Thailand. She will bury them together, and their spirits can hook up eternally. Complicated shit.

Alan seems to have no trouble grave robbing and delivers the goods to Thailand. While there, though, he forgets about his wife and kid and starts boning the sister. He finally tells her, three days into the affair, that he's married and is going back to Hong Kong. She says she accepts this news as long as he comes back three months later for a visit. The sister contacts the evil black magician who put the spell on her sibling and gets a spell in motion for Alan if he blows off their future rendezvous. Dumb Alan ghosts the sister, and the recently de-possessed cab driver is once again re-possessed, this time in a much deadlier "black magic death spell." He starts acting crazy and eating live animals raw, which concerns his family. He is also unable to perform sex. Every vagina feels impenetrable thanks to the hilarious curse. He finally owns up to the affair. His wife forgives him, takes him to another uncle who is a doctor, takes him back to the medium, and finally consults with a black magician, who reluctantly agrees to help fight for dumb Alan's soul. A black magic vs. black magic superfight ensues.
Holy fuck, that's a lot of plot. It doesn't really feel like it, as almost everything that occurs is goofy and hilariously dubbed into English and mostly quickly paced. It's hard to know if the dialogue is this weird in the original Cantonese or if something has been lost in translation. For example, the family is approached by journalists in the film's opening scenes, and the doctor/uncle tells them, "This is no time for that kind of talk," before responding to the next question with the entire story of everything that happened to Alan, possession-wise, much of which the doctor wasn't even around for.
The movie is visually pretty perfunctory, and the effects are just okay, but, except for a somewhat dull stretch at the two-thirds mark, Brutal Sorcery is lively and fun and extremely weird. Once available in the U.S. on VHS but now out-of-print, it can be seen as of the date of this post on YouTube. Check it out.

Saturday, November 9, 2019

The Brood (David Cronenberg, 1979)

Though The Brood's critical reputation has improved to such an extent that it was recently canonized by the Criterion Collection, contemporary reviews were mostly unkind. Mainstream criticism in the '70s, '80s, and '90s tended to summarily dismiss the horror genre in blanket, knee-jerk fashion (with the rare exception, such as Halloween or The Exorcist) as juvenile, crassly commercial, exploitative, not artistic, and/or immoral, whether it be a generic slasher ripoff or a thoughtful, creative film like Cronenberg's. Just look at the difference in the way Roger Ebert, for example, reviewed The Brood and the more measured and positive way he wrote about Cronenberg's later films. (He even called fans of The Brood "reprehensible" in his review. Settle down, buddy.) Meanwhile, several academic and intellectual critics classified The Brood as a reactionary, anti-feminist film. Hardly surprising coming from the writer of this blog, I know, but I don't agree with any of this.

Cronenberg humorously described The Brood as his attempt to make an honest version of Kramer vs. Kramer, and he's also referred to it as the only time he deliberately set out to make a classic horror film. Inspired by the ugly, contentious divorce from his first wife, Margaret Hindson, in 1977 and the bitter custody battle for their child that followed, The Brood is a sad, angry film about divorce and parenting from a mostly male point of view, but it's hardly an anti-woman, anti-mother revenge screed, as many critics painted it in 1979. (Cronenberg's second marriage, to cinematographer/editor/producer Carolyn Cronenberg, was much happier, lasting from 1979 until her death from cancer in 2017. They had two children and worked together on several projects.)

The Brood is about damaged people with complex feelings and, despite its chilly exterior and controlled composition, is an intensely emotional film full of rage, loss, and empathy. Cronenberg's working through a lot of heavy stuff here, but understanding and sympathy exist alongside anger, revenge, and duplicity, and the film is honest about how people process intense emotions. Divorce is intense. My parents split up when I was 25, and even though no custody battles were involved and I was an adult, it fucked me up for a decade, and I still occasionally feel the aftershocks in my forties. I'd like to point out amidst this heavy discussion that it's also a pretty great horror film about murderous mutant children manifested from rage.

The splintered Toronto couple at the center of The Brood are Frank (Art Hindle) and Nola (Samantha Eggar). (Cronenberg said part of his reason for picking the two actors was because they had similar mannerisms to him and his ex-wife.) Frank has custody of their daughter Candice (Cindy Hinds) during the week. Candice spends weekends at the rural compound of controversial psychotherapist Dr. Hal Raglan (Oliver Reed), where Nola is institutionalized. Raglan has created an intense form of therapy called "psychoplasmics" in which patients turn their internal trauma into physical manifestations in role-playing sessions with Raglan. These manifestations mostly take the form of skin lesions resembling psoriasis or seborrheic dermatitis, but things are a bit more complex with Nola, who is dealing with so much anger, sadness, childhood trauma, divorce trauma, stress, and lifelong mental illness that she psychoplasmically gives birth to mutant children who are docile when she is relaxed but turn into tiny yet efficient killers when she's angry. While most of Raglan's patients are in a facility in the city, Nola and her psychoplasmic brood are isolated in the country.

Frank thinks Dr. Raglan is full of shit, but he becomes more alarmed when he sees bite marks and bruises on Candice's back. He believes Nola abused Candice and angrily confronts Dr. Raglan. Frank says he'll stop the weekend visitations, which Raglan says will seriously derail Nola's recovery. Frank does it anyway, and the mutant children begin their killing spree. As Frank tries to keep his and his daughter's life together and Nola tries to get well, more characters are introduced, including Nola's divorced, alcoholic parents, one of Candice's school teachers, an extremely Canadian police detective (he wants to help and is not suspicious), and the great Robert Silverman as a former patient of Raglan's who is now suing him, claiming, with weird growths on his neck as proof, that psychoplasmics gave him a rare cancer. (Silverman has great weirdo roles in several Cronenberg films. In addition to The Brood, he appears in Rabid, Scanners, Naked Lunch, and eXistenZ, as well as Cronenberg's episode of Friday the 13th: The Series.)

The Brood is more proof that Cronenberg is one of the finest visual stylists of the last half-century of film, and each frame is carefully composed, full of visual and emotional detail, and interesting to look at, dammit, unlike most of the trash on television and in the multiplexes. His images are never flashy or show-offy, but never pedestrian, either. The cast is mostly pretty great, with Oliver Reed and Samantha Eggar really going for it. (BTW, Reed was arrested during production after a drinking companion dared him to walk naked in the frigid Toronto weather from one bar to another and Reed accepted the challenge.) Cindy Hinds, in her first role, has some occasionally awkward line readings, but her facial expressions and screen presence are perfect for the film.

Cronenberg creates an atmosphere and tone in The Brood that just works. He makes the gray, dreary Canadian late fall/early winter visually fascinating and an appropriate physical representation of his characters' internal states. The mutant children (played by kids from a local gymnastics school) are creepy and unsettling. Howard Shore's score is tense and frightening without calling too much attention to itself. This is a great horror movie. My reprehensible ass loved it even more than when I first saw it.

Cronenberg's had a long, prolific career, but he hasn't made a movie since 2014's Maps to the Stars, and has recently expressed some skepticism that he'll ever make another one. Someone, please give Cronenberg money and a platform to do whatever he wants. (After some initial interest, Netflix recently passed on a miniseries Cronenberg wrote. Considering the volume of original programming treacle they pump out each week, this rejection seems like a prosecutable crime to me. They gave Rob fucking Schneider a show and no human has ever made it past the 10-minute mark of episode one. It's like a snuff film, but the victim is comedy.) In conclusion, David Cronenberg is great, and the present moment is stupid as hell.

Saturday, October 26, 2019

Unheimliche Geschichten (Richard Oswald, 1932)

Happy soon-to-be Halloween. Our Halloween week movie this year is an obscure German horror film from Richard Oswald, director of the extremely odd mandrake root supernatural drama Alraune (previously reviewed on this site). Unheimliche Geschichten, also released under the titles The Living Dead, Eerie Tales, A Mysterious Affair, Unholy Tales, Tales of the Uncanny, and, strangely, Five Sinister Stories (I thought Germans were good at math), is a creepy, funny, and very weird adaptation of two Edgar Allan Poe stories ("The Black Cat" and "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether") and the Robert Louis Stevenson story "The Suicide Club." Instead of presenting these short stories separately, the script by director Oswald, Heinz Goldberg, and Jeno Szatmari turns them into episodic events in a single narrative happening to two main characters, the mad scientist Morder (Paul Wegener, co-director and star of The Golem) and the journalist/newspaper editor determined to bring him down while writing the front page version, Frank Briggs (Harald Paulsen).

Intended by director Oswald as an affectionate parody of German Expressionism, Unheimliche Geschichten is not a silly horror-comedy, instead preferring its humor dark and twisted. At less than 90 minutes, the pacing is brisk, yet the stories don't feel rushed (though I wouldn't have minded a bit more of "The Black Cat"). Oswald is a visually imaginative filmmaker, and his sets sometimes look like doll's-house miniatures, but his visceral approach to character and action keeps the frame from being overly fussy. This is a wild, good-looking movie.

The film begins with Briggs and his fiancee, an actress, driving hurriedly to the theater so she can make her curtain call. He hears a woman screaming from a nearby home and tells his fiancee to go on without him. There might be a front-page story here (a running gag throughout the movie is Briggs getting himself into dangerous situations to get a story, which as editor he always puts on the front page, even snatching a story away from another journalist on his staff). What Briggs overheard was the events in the Poe tale "The Black Cat." Mad scientist Morder murders his wife in a rage after her black cat knocks over one of his experiments.

Long story short, Morder escapes the clutches of the police and Briggs, who gives chase on his own. Morder and our intrepid journalist end up fighting it out in a bizarro wax museum with motorized exhibits before they both end up in an insane asylum, where the events of the other Poe story take place. Morder escapes again. The final third takes place five years later, where a hot tip from a reader leads Briggs to a mysterious house with no doors where our fugitive Morder is running the suicide club from the Stevenson story. A dark and twisted final showdown begins. As you can see, a whole lot of stuff happens in this movie in a compressed period of time. Oswald keeps it exciting, spooky, funny, and weird. (By the way, Paulsen as Briggs has one of the loudest, fullest yells of any actor I've ever heard, and his many yelling moments in this film get funnier and funnier.)

As enjoyable as the film is, its stories of hidden evil coincided with the rise of the Nazis in Germany, and the lives of the filmmakers and actors were about to change drastically. Director Oswald, a Jewish man, fled Germany for the United States in 1938, moving back after the war after failing to land much Hollywood work. Paul Wegener, though most famous for Jewish horror film The Golem, was not Jewish and became a favorite actor of the Nazi regime. He remained in Germany and acted in many Nazi propaganda films and stage productions, though he secretly funneled much of his salary to the resistance and helped hide Jewish friends. After the war, he put much effort into charities that helped poor Berliners but died from heart problems in 1948. Actress Maria Koppenhofer (who memorably plays a singing insane asylum patient) stayed in Germany and was also a popular actress with the Nazis. Koppenhofer's ex-husband was Jewish, and she spent much of her earnings throughout the war hiding her daughter in the countryside.

Harald Paulsen, a dancer-turned-actor and co-lead of this film as journalist Briggs, had a considerably more dishonorable trajectory. Lotte Lenya was quoted as saying that Paulsen "was vain, even for an actor." More devoted to his successful stage and screen career than any conscience he may have had, Paulsen acted in some of the most virulently anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda films throughout the '30s and '40s and shamefully continued to star in popular German films well into the '50s.

Saturday, October 12, 2019

Brothers in Arms (George Jay Bloom III, 1988)

A solid entry in the post-Deliverance murderous hillbillies in the woods vs. city boys sub-genre, Brothers in Arms sees a charismatic religious fanatic who left society for the mountains of Wyoming and his four crazed hillbilly "sons" attempt to murder UK rockers Dire Straits. Sorry, I meant local hunting guide Dallas (Charles Grant) and his younger brother, big city banker Joey (Todd Allen), not Dire Straits. (Variations on this dad joke will continue throughout the review, for which I refuse to apologize.) By the way, we find out that Dallas and Joey grew up in Houston. His name is Dallas, and he grew up in Houston. That's like living in Lubbock and naming your kid El Paso. Also, Charles Grant, the actor who plays Dallas, was a regular on the TV show Dallas. You can't make this stuff up. I used the word Dallas so much in this opening paragraph that the word now looks strange to me. Dallas.
Brothers in Arms begins with local hunting guide (and Dallas' best friend and business partner) Cody (Shannon Norfleet) running afoul of the religious fanatic and his creepy sons in the mountains and getting crucified. Cody's disappearance is bad news both professionally and personally for Dallas, who has searched the mountains for him in vain. He invites his estranged brother Joey to Wyoming for a mountain hunting vacation to begin the healing and to bring Joey in as an investor in the business. Dallas also has an ulterior motive. He suspects foul play in Cody's disappearance and wants to go deeper into the mountains than he's ever gone to find the truth, and, if necessary, seek revenge. Dallas, an ultra-macho man in the Rambo vein, doesn't tell Joey, who is much less toxic in his masculinity, this part of the plan. To Joey, this trip is a walk of life. To Dallas, it may be a walk of death.

The brothers start to forget old wounds and bond again when Joey takes a spill down the mountain in the middle of doing his Elvis impression, cutting his knee. While he hangs back at the tent to dress his minor wound, Dallas decides to hunt them up some dinner. When Joey hears some rustling in the woods, he tackles what he thinks is his brother, but turns out to be Stevie (Dedee Pfeiffer, sister of Michelle, though she's probably sick of being referred to that way). Before he can apologize for his blunder, two creepy hillbilly sons begin terrorizing them. They kidnapped Stevie a month ago, but she escaped. The hillbillies attempt to rape both Stevie and Joey and then try to force Joey to rape Stevie (really not into this scene), but Dallas shows up in the nick of time, killing one of the creeps in self-defense. He's blocked by Joey from murdering the other creep in cold blood. That creep gets away, and human hunting season begins.
Patriarch of the mountain weirdos, Father (Jack Starrett, director of such B-movie classics as Cleopatra Jones and Race with the Devil), rounds up his surviving creepy sons (including Mitch Pileggi, regular on The X-Files and Sons of Anarchy, as Caleb) to get revenge on the brothers and get Stevie back so they can continue the family line. Turns out, having an all-male creep camp in the mountains is not a sustainable plan for creating future generations. Father, a former federal agent who left society to live out his weird fundamentalist Christian-revenge murder philosophy in the mountains, considers his cabin Eden and any stranger to these parts an enemy against God (Stevie was kidnapped in town from a parking lot for procreation purposes). In his neck of the woods, you get your religion for nothing and your murder for free.

Though this movie has a generically Hollywood and specifically 1980s all-things-to-all-people philosophical incoherence (it condemns toxic masculinity while celebrating the lone-wolf badass, it depicts the horror of rape while also dragging out its two near-rape scenes for the creepers in the audience, it's both anti- and pro-violent revenge, and it celebrates rugged self-reliance while acknowledging that people need to work together to make any progress), it's a pretty decent little horror/thriller. The actors are all solid, the pace never drags, the mountain creeps are mountain creepy, the jokes are reasonably funny, a Reaganite/proto-Trumpist blowhard gets some excellent comeuppance, and the suspense is skillfully drawn out. As a Deliverance ripoff, it's a solid B.
Brothers in Arms is George Jay Bloom III's only feature film credit as director, and it's hardly a visual marvel. The film looks like a competent '80s TV movie, but at least you won't be annoyed by someone trying to be arty who has no sensibility for it. Bloom has a small but very eccentric list of showbiz credits. Besides this film, he directed an episode of the short-lived MTV series New Monkees (and was an assistant director on another episode), a straight-to-VHS comedic short film starring Dick Van Patten called Dirty Tennis, a TV special about the Three Stooges hosted by Leslie Nielsen, and a Stranger Things VR video game. He was also the visual effects supervisor on a miniseries about Pope John Paul II.

Saturday, September 28, 2019

Boogeyman II (Bruce Pearn, 1983)

Also known as Revenge of the Boogeyman, Boogeyman II is a sequel to 1980's The Boogey Man, and, as we can already tell by the filmmakers not caring that "boogey man" was two words in the first film, is a monument to laziness, barrel-scraping, and the "fuck it, this'll do" attitude. Boogeyman II, an occasionally hilarious act of bad faith, should be re-released in 2019, the pinnacle year of bad faith (at least until next year). For now, used VHS and YouTube are your best bets. It's a harder film to track down than the original Boogey Man. (Almost every horror blog warns us to avoid the 2003 "director's cut" DVD, which is somehow even worse than the VHS cut.)

Ulli Lommel, the co-writer and director of the first Boogey Man (and who I wrote about in detail in my review of that film a few months ago), was approached by a Hollywood studio to make a big-budget sequel to the first film, which had done very well as an independent release. Lommel had no interest in making a sequel or working within the system, so he told Hollywood to get stuffed. He then decided to make the sequel independently at his own home and turn it into a meta art film about sequels and his own reluctance to make the movie. It's a fascinating idea, but Lommel is not that great when it comes to execution (especially compared to his mentor, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose own film about the disaster of making films, Beware of a Holy Whore, wipes the floor with Boogeyman II). What we get is a film that doesn't work as either a horror movie or a self-aware meta-commentary. It's turgid postmodern slop with some reasonably (often unintentionally) funny moments.

Boogeyman II ends up playing as a cheaper retread of The Boogey Man mashed together with rejected outtakes from Altman's The Player, which is honestly kind of interesting. I doubt Robert Altman or that film's screenwriter Michael Tolkin was influenced by Lommel, but the small-time wheeler-dealers of the film industry make up the bulk of the characters in both, and several lines of dialogue (one aspiring young actor says he's working on a movie that crosses Star Wars with Smokey and the Bandit; an investor bemoans the budget of Brian De Palma's Blow Out (a then-flop before becoming a cult movie years later) and says she could have made 18 movies with the money) could have been spoken in Altman's movie a decade later. That is the extent of my comparison of Lommel to Altman. Back to the boogey man, or boogeyman.

The film begins with the star and co-writer of the first film (and Lommel's then-wife) Suzanna Love being driven through Hollywood by a mysterious man. She arrives at the Hollywood Hills home of childhood friend Shannah Hall (Bonnie Lombard) for some rest and relaxation after the terrifying events of the first film. Shannah is married to filmmaker Mickey Lombard (Lommel), a European art film director trying to make it in the American exploitation market. Lacey (Love) tells Shannah and Mickey what happened to her, and the audience gets 40 full minutes of footage from the previous film (an amazing 85 minutes in the "director's cut" DVD version). To make it worse, the flashback footage is made darker to signify that it's a flashback, so it's hard to tell what the fuck is going on. Fortunately, I'd seen The Boogey Man a handful of weeks ago, so I did indeed know what the fuck was going on. Unfortunately, it made this chunk of the film incredibly boring.

As Lacey tells her tale, padding the only 75-minute film by half its running time, the mysterious driver eavesdrops creepily. He is Shannah and Mickey's live-in help, Joseph (played by the incredibly named Sholto Von Douglas), and he loves skulking and hiding around the house to hear what people say to each other in private. The couple hired Joseph because he appeared out of nowhere and was walking up their hill (cool move). Later in the film, when Joseph can't be found, Mickey remarks that "he probably walked down the hill to another house."
For nonsensical reasons, Lacey keeps a shard of the broken possessed mirror from the first film, and she tells Mickey about it. Joseph overhears and steals it, unleashing mayhem. Meanwhile, Shannah decides Lacey's tale of the boogey man should be made into a film, directed by a reluctant Mickey, and she invites some industry weasels to a party in an attempt to get some financing and cast some parts. Lacey doesn't want a movie made about this part of her life, but Shannah moves ahead anyway. The boogey man proceeds to massacre the party guests, but on a shoestring budget. This is mostly hilarious and involves someone offscreen shaking inanimate objects onscreen, including a toothbrush, a shaving cream can, a ladder, a weed whacker, and most hilariously, a wine bottle opener (which looks like a tiny man bouncing his arms up and down). Truly terrifying.

Lines are read mechanically, as if from cue cards. The small child of Shannah and Mickey is introduced, then completely forgotten about once the mayhem begins. (Her voice is also weirdly double tracked and given echo in one pool scene, for no discernible reason.) Shaving cream is terrifyingly sprayed in a victim's face. One young actor interrupts a young actress by shushing her and saying, "Be quiet now. Let's pretend we're in a silent movie." Joseph pushes everyone to try his dessert, but only Lacey responds. (We never see this dessert!) Yes, this movie is bad.
The film's director is credited as Bruce Pearn (sometimes billed as Bruce Starr), a cameraman who has no other directing credits, but Lommel apparently directed much of it uncredited. This is not surprising. On the positive side, the kills are funny, it's short, and I did like the Tangerine Dream-esque synth score by Tim Krog.

Saturday, September 14, 2019

The Old Dark House (James Whale, 1932)

James Whale's second foray into the macabre after the previous year's Frankenstein is another major success and one of my favorite '30s horror films. I think I liked it even more on this second viewing than I did the first time around. Whale is both an accomplished visual stylist and a great observer of people and their mannerisms and quirks, and he has a sense of humor that is both wicked and empathetic. This combination gives his best films tremendous staying power, high rewatchability, and a modern sensibility that doesn't date.

The Old Dark House, written by Benn W. Levy based on the novel by J.B. Priestley, takes a familiar setup (travelers forced to take refuge in a storm at the home of sinister people with mysterious motives) and transforms it into something unique. None of the characters are tropes; all have their own particular points of view and ways of being that aren't movie types. It's so refreshing and entertaining to see these fleshed-out characters (played by great actors) interacting with each other in front of Whale's interested camera on the beautifully designed sets of Russell A. Gausman (with much input there from Whale).

The film begins with bickering married couple Philip and Margaret Waverton (Raymond Massey and Gloria Stuart) and their pipe-smoking, wise-cracking buddy Penderel (Melvyn Douglas) driving through terrible conditions late at night, lost in a storm. The Wavertons are tense, taking their frustration out on each other (it's refreshing to see couples arguing like actual couples in a Hollywood movie without it being some premonition of murder, infidelity, divorce, or happily-ever-after reconciliation; they're just stressed out and having a normal fight), but Penderel is having his usual detached good time, smoking away and changing popular song lyrics to storm-related tunes like some kind of big-band "Weird Al."

After nearly getting wiped out by a mudslide, the trio decides to stop at an old, dark house until the storm blows over. The door is answered by a menacing, hulking figure with a scarred face who grunts and mutters gibberish. This man is a servant named Morgan (Boris Karloff), and, in addition to his servant duties and his mutterings and groans, his favorite activities include glowering angrily and drinking to excess. He's an unfriendly presence, but Horace Femm (Ernest Thesiger) welcomes them inside. He's a nervous man, terrified of the storm, but, despite being an atheist, he does the Christian thing and takes in the weary, lost travelers even though his sister Rebecca (Eva Moore), despite being devoutly religious, makes it clear these people are not wanted.

Horace, despite his nervousness, is a welcoming host, pouring a round of gin (much to Penderel's delight) and insisting the strangers join them for a dinner of potatoes, roast beef, and pickled onions (Rebecca is a pickled onion fiend). The siblings constantly argue about religion, whether or not they should have allowed the strangers to enter, and the checkered history of the Femms, several of whom have met untimely ends or become insane. Mid-dinner, more knocks sound on the door. Two more stranded strangers join the party, a wealthy businessman and widow named Sir William Porterhouse (Charles Laughton) and his paid escort, a chorus girl named Gladys (Lillian Bond). Gladys and Penderel are immediately drawn to each other, and the whole gang drink gin, eat, and tell their sometimes emotionally heated life stories, to Horace's amusement and Rebecca's irritation and contempt.

Things get creepier when Morgan gets drunk and violent and our stranded characters learn about two more Femms in the house, the 102-year-old patriarch Sir Roderic (played by a woman, Elspeth Dudgeon) and homicidally insane brother Saul (Brember Wills). Saul is locked away on the top floor, and the siblings are both terrified of him, but servant Morgan has a deep feeling of warmth for the man, the only person in the house he appears to like.

The film remains creepy, exciting, funny, and compelling for each of its 72 minutes. Though The Old Dark House doesn't get as much attention as Whale's two Frankenstein films, it is just as good. Everything works: the acting, the shot compositions, the writing, the pacing, the big storm scene at the beginning, the introduction of each character, the descent into action at the end. This is one of Whale's greatest films.

It's fascinating to look at this film through the lens of Whale's (and Laughton's) sexuality, too. Whale was gay in a time and an industry where it was necessary for comfort, career, and survival to remain in the closet, and his horror films have a great deal of empathy for their monsters and madmen and third wheels and loners and people with secrets. Homosexuality was considered an abomination and/or perversion by much of mainstream society, and it's not too much of a stretch to see Whale's horror films as his way of struggling with this. Whale loves his monsters, who can't help being who they are, even the murderous ones in this film, and the viewer can sense real pain in their ostracization from society. Laughton was also a closeted gay man (married to the star of Whale's Bride of Frankenstein, Elsa Lanchester, a closeted gay woman), and his character's widower who pays a woman for platonic companionship is handled with such warmth and compassion by Laughton and Whale. There's also real gender-bending fun in having a woman play the elderly patriarch of the Femms, and in switching some traditionally masculine and feminine traits in the siblings played by Thesiger and Moore.
Check this movie out, why don't ya? Whale rules.

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