JPX's Best Of Horrorthon 2007

Favorite (new film)

Flight of the Living Dead (2007)


I assumed that this would suck. I mean, following the slam-dunk remake of Dawn of the Dead and Romero’s somewhat disappointing Land of the Dead, I wondered if we really needed another zombie movie at this time. The answer turned out to be a resounding, “Hell, yes!” Flight of the Living Dead maximizes its small budget by essentially centering all the action in the confined space of a commercial airplane. Once all hell breaks loose, which happens early in the film, the action never lets up. Highly recommended for all zombie aficionados.

Hidden Gem Award (and unexpectedly good flick)

The Haunting (1963)


Dripping in atmosphere, the house featured in The Haunting could be its own character. With its towering walls, a seemingly endless array of rooms, sharp blacks and whites, and overall stellar cinematography, The Haunting is a real treat and my favorite new discovery. When JSP and I began Horrorthon in 2000 our main purpose, beyond trying to fill the void, was to sift through the garbage of the horror genre in order to discover those rare gems. The Haunting is exemplifies this worthy pursuit and stands as one of the best “haunted house” films I’ve ever seen.

Runner up,

Night Tide (1963)


Most Disturbing

SAW IV (2007)


Come on, how could it not be SAW IV? The opening autopsy alone makes this the one to beat for “most disturbing”. Even this seasoned horror veteran found himself a bit queasy when Jigsaw’s brain was plucked from his skull (after much drilling, of course). Although not the strongest installment, SAW IV more than meets the SAW standard providing plenty of gross thrills, horrible traps, and a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it finale that points out all the “clues” you missed along the way. The SAW films are not for the faint of heart but they deliver what they promise with some terrific, intricate plotting.

Runner up,

Unrest


Unrest contains one of the most disturbing scenes of this year’s Horrorthon. At one point in a woman strips down to her underwear and plunges into a tank of formaldehyde containing gross anatomy class, corpses. Thinking about this a month later still gives me the heebie jeebies.

Scream Queen

Linda Lawson as “Mora” from Night Tide (1963)


While she technically doesn’t scream all that much, Linda Lawson plays the mysterious Mora with just the right balance of a sexy yet possibly delusional siren. You find yourself attracted to her but all your instincts tell you to run like hell away.

Runner up,

Carrie Fleming as Jenifer in the Masters of Horror episode “Jenifer” (2005)


Sure she has the face of a yeti, but she has the body of a porn star, so would you or wouldn’t you? Every male has their own secret answer to this, but they know that the only answer is, “Of course not, baby, she’s hideous”.

Worst

Trog (1970)

Essentially unwatchable and only notable for being Joan Crawford’s final film performance, Trog is a horrible, tedious exercise that only grows worse over its short run time. Not remotely entertaining on any level, avoid at all cost.

"What was I thinking?"

Runner up,

Piranha Piranha! (1972)


This is what I wrote in my original review, ‘Nuff said.

“In Piranha Piranha nothing happens for 75 minutes, then we’re treated to a rape, a stabbing, and very weak fisticuffs. Most of the film is padded with Peruvian music sunk to images of poor people, native animals, and a tour of a diamond market. It’s a freakin’ travelogue. Awful awful movie.”

So Bad It’s Good Award

Ring of Terror (1962)


Although this story could be told in 10 minutes, the journey to the ultra-lame climax is what makes Ring of Terror an enjoyable mess. I love old movies that portray “hip” “teens” in school doing the American Graffiti thing. Ring of Terror is best appreciated as an early 60s (cinematic) snapshot of college and dating life. The boys are all preppie and the girls wear poodle skirts. This is an innocent time that would be shattered forever a year later. The dialogue is of the “Gee whiz” variety and fraternity pranks add up to nothing more than ringing someone’s doorbell and asking for a penny. Silly, fun stuff.

Goriest

Flight of the Living Dead (2007)


Once the carnage of Flight of the Living Dead kicks in, it’s a non-stop bloodbath until its bleak finale.

Most Memorable Death

SAW IV (2007)


In this flashback we see Jigsaw’s very first trap. All this poor fella has to do is push his face through a mask of razors in order to push the lever in front of him, which would free him from his shackles. Gruesome stuff.

Runner up,

Suspiria (1977)


Thrashing in a room full of razor wire makes for a bad day (original photo link severed).

Best Looking Monster

Pumpkinhead 4: Blood Feud (2007)


Wow, when I reviewed my movie list from Horrorthon 2007 I realized that I didn’t really watch any “monster” movies this year so Pumpkinhead wins by default. Next year I will focus more on the “monsters”.

Scariest

Reincarnation (2005)


Although J-Horror is long in the tooth at this point, I still jump when I watch these things.

Leviathan

(1989) *1/2

Having watched Deep Star Six, the other underwater movie that was rushed to release because James Cameron's The Abyss was coming out later that same year, I figured I would be remiss if I skipped this aqua-turkey. I knew I was in for trouble as soon as I saw the dvd menu screen with this crappy dancing CG diving suit on it. Ugh.


You want this to be a stupidly decent (or decently stupid) movie: you've got an underwater mining rig staffed by eclectic kooks who are played by some decent actors: Ernie Hudson, Daniel Stern, Hector Elizondo, Richard Crenna -- and they're led by good ol' Peter Weller, doing a sort of Buckaroo Banzai without the charisma. They happen upon a sunken Russian ship and they grab some stuff to investigate, including the ship's log and various personal effects. As Buckaroo and Richard Crenna read about a mysterious plague that took the Russian crew, two of the Americans take swigs from a nicked flask of vodka.

Unfortunately the flask contains remnants of some Russian experiment to create some kind of fish/human hybrid, an experiment that went so wrong the ship was sunk. What starts as a sickness eventually becomes a transformation into some kind of fish monster, I think. It's amazingly hard to tell. Deep Star Six may have had a weak monster puppet that they couldn't show too much of, but at least they showed enough so that you could see what it looked like. Leviathan's critter is so cheap and bad they rely completely on blurry half-shots and rapid jumps and you really never get an idea of what this thing is (that screenshot below was really hard to catch).

The rules change around: sometimes the biomass creates a larval stage (top), sometimes infected people just suddenly sprout little mouths in their palms. In this way Leviathan rips off both Alien and John Carpenter's The Thing in the lamest way possible. Remember Scuzzlebutt from South Park? The bigfoot-like creature that Cartman tries to scarily describe: "and one of it's legs is...Patrick Duffy!" Well, Leviathan isn't joking when they say that. "And on the side of it's head is...Richard Crenna's head!"


This movie is 1) exceedlingly stingy with the monster and 2) pretty damn boring, either of which are dealbreakers for this kind of flick. In classic ripoff mode, it plods along the path of its betters and doesn't give the world anything new or worthwhile. My favorite example of this happened right after the appearance of that toothsome larva thingie. It wraps itself around the arm of a crewmate, eating into him in a flaccid Alien face-hugger imitation, and Ernie Hudson runs to get help. He seals the door and tells Hector Elizondo to watch it while he fetches Crenna and Buckaroo. When they come back, the metal door has been busted through from inside, and Hector is just returning from down the hall with a weapon in his hands. "I thought I told you to watch the door!" says Ernie. "I'm not watching that thing without some protection!" says Hector. "Hey! That thing is my friend!"

Okay...nobody ever mentions that it's weird that the door has been destroyed by superhuman strength, or that the crewmate went from bloody, panicked victim to powerful monster in about two minutes. Surely this deserves some discussion, no? Or did I just not get my copy of What To Expect when You're Being Stalked by an Underwater Fish Monster?

The Hitcher II: I've Been Waiting

(2003) **

Oh, well. This one really had nowhere to do but down, since the first one was such a perfectly complete story. Poor C. Thomas Howell is revising his Jim Halsey role from The Hitcher, except he's all growed up and he's a police man now. The story opens with a round of Dirty Harry justice that seems completely justified (kid saved, kidnapper dead), but Jim gets fired for it anyway. When he delivers the bad news to his girlfriend Kari Wuhrer, she delivers the worst bit of Horrorthon advice I've ever heard: "Honey, you can't just go around shootin' people 'cause they're wacko, you know?"



To his credit, C. Tom does a decent job portraying somebody still torn apart by past trauma. Taking the advice of retired Captain Esteridge (the one reasonable police officer in the first movie, and Jim's "reason I became a cop"), he decides revisiting the site of his old nightmare and confronting his fears might be a good idea. It isn't.

Because very shortly after Jim's return, Kari forces his hand and they pick up hitchhiker Jake Busey in the middle of a sandstorm. After some dialogue in which Jake sports some mild spookiness but annoyingly never turns into Rutger Hauer from 1986, Jim flips out and kicks him out of the car at gunpoint.


Okay, it's a little mean, but check out the "before" pic of C Tom from the original:


Aww, so cute. Anyway, it isn't long before Kari's screaming "I'm sorry I ever doubted you, Jim!" and they're dodging the crazy from supposedly the same evil presence that Rutger portrayed. "He didn't look like that, but that's him" says Jim. Pfff. Nice try, movie.

Before too long Jim plays human shield and the action kicks over to Kari, who endures a far less original and entertaining cat-and-mouse game with psycho Busey. At one point she loses consciousness and wakes up in...the structurally unsound water tower! For real. She has to kick her way out and climb down before it falls over. Look in your books under Not Scary, class.

One of the main drags of this flick is the duddingly boring way they carry over the whole "he's framing you for his murders!" shtick. In the original it was almost an afterthought, just part of the maelstrom of death and chaos surrounding this mysterious stranger. In this one it's right up in your grill, like when Kari slips on blood and happens to wrap her fingerprints all over the protruding knife handle as she falls on the corpse. Or when New Hitcher lops off one of his own fingers so that his story will sound more credible; instead of indifferent silence, this incarnation drawls off an irritating, persecuted story for the police. And the viewer is in danger of repeated forehead-slapping injuries watching these dumb cops, with the usual dubious side-benefit: you really can't feel too bad when they get killed.

Considering how long it took me to get here and how mid-range the movies turned out to be, I am not at this time considering another actor-related mini film festival for future Horrorthons. I don't blame Kari, however; she actually does a fairly decent job in these B-class offerings. I think I spotted a possible answer to why she hasn't made it further in the industry. I think it's her nose.


Don't get me wrong, I think she's attractive and everything, and I don't want to be mean or sound like I'm championing cosmetic surgery. But stardom is elusive, and based on factors like these. While it was good to reacquaint myself with Kari Wuhrer's big brown eyes, the center of her face just lacked the kind of distinction that gets you the full star package. The first movie with her that I watched was Anaconda, and I noticed it right away. It's as plain as the...well....

Dracula: Prince of Darkness

(1966) ***

I didn't notice it at the time, but I guess Christopher Lee doesn't say anything in this movie. He communicates only in vampire snarls. According to the IMDb trivia page, this is because Lee thought so little of his lines in the script that he decided he'd rather go silent.

This largely inessential spin on the Dracula story is Hammer Studios' sequel to The Horror of Dracula. It follows brothers Charles and Alan Kent and their wives Diana and Helen. The group is stranded in the middle of the Black Forest when their coachman refuses to take them any further. They're soon rescued by another coach and brought to a nearby castle. They're tended to by a rather cranky butler named Klove who explains that his master is dead but had left instructions that all visitors are to be admitted and cared for.

He sternly defends his master's legacy, insisting the Dracula family name was "respected." Watching Klove stick up for his boss, I was reminded of other formerly innocent names that are now irrevocably associated with evil. Who now can hear the name Manson and not think of the twisted man behind the Tate/LaBianca murders? Who now can hear the name Bundy and not think of that horrifically stupid television show Married...With Children?

Anyway, Klove wastes little time before cornering and killing Alan. He dangles Alan's body upside-down over some ashes in a coffin and slits his throat. From the wet ashes, Dracula's body begins to reform. Helen goes next, Dracula's first vampire convert.

Everything that happens after that is pretty much exactly what you'd expect. There were really only two surprising pieces of information I pulled from this movie. The first is that a vampire has to actually bite you on the neck in order to turn you into a vampire. Diana gets bitten on the wrist at one point and the monks who rescue her and Charles insist it can be operated upon. She never turns, so I guess they're right. The second is that vampires are terrible swimmers.

Dawn of the Dead

(2004) *****

Truthfully, I wasn't intending to watch Dawn04 for this year's Thon, having reviewed it a year ago. I saw it as part of a horror movie party masterminded by my girlfriend. I offered it as an afterthought suggestion when we were deciding what to watch first. I really tried to sell everyone Re-Animator or Of Unknown Origin, but when I got to Dawn, I guess I just couldn't contain my enthusiasm.

I won't bother with a recap; instead, feel free to browse these rave reviews from Johnny Sweatpants, Octopunk, and Jordan, and of course Jordan's kickass Zombie Roundup. I'd also suggest taking the time to read the comments for all of these; there's all kinds of good stuff in there. This is a SPOILER heavy review, so read on at your own risk.

A few things I noticed this time around that I hadn't completely appreciated last time...

--In the opening credits, there are a few shots of human cells being attacked by zombie cells. These cells appear to be of either three different types or in three stages of metamorphosis. If it's the former, it suggests that the cellular transformation is happening all over the body and not in just the brain. Peaceful and stationary before infection, the cells are rocketing across their petri dishes by the time the infection is complete.

--When Michael discovers the zombie in the sporting goods store, both the zombie and the person it's attacking appear to be wearing security guard uniforms. I wonder if the security guards might have held the balance of power longer if they'd had those two and the one who attacks Kenneth by the fountain beefing their ranks.

--Ken Foree, one of the stars of the original, plays a televangelist broadcasting a sermon the night after the zombie crisis begins. The first few times I saw this, I snickered during his monologue, thinking, "Sheesh, these clowns are still on the air?" This time around, it dawned on me that the evangelists may have been right all along -- witness Andre's abashed brooding about the "End of Times" while washing his hands next to Kenneth. Kenneth parries brilliantly by pointing out, essentially, that if this were really a biblical thing and everyone were being judged for their sins, he wouldn't be in the mall with Andre's thug ass.

--I'm so glad this movie didn't turn into a sideshow about CJ trying to get his old superiority back. Other movies have been made less fun by making that exact choice. CJ's conversion into a good guy happens without a single hiccup and I've gotta give this movie props for not getting sidetracked.

--This was really the first time I stopped to consider how it would actually feel to fall to a gradual infection. I began to consider this while watching Frank in his final moments with his daughter. He holds her, gazes straight ahead, and whispers, "Time to go, honey." Obviously he knew he was close. My question is, was the feeling just one of extreme unwellness? Could he have felt the hunger dawning on him even then? Perhaps it was time for his daughter to leave the room because she was starting to look delicious. It'd also cast a different light on Frank's last moments with Kenneth standing guard. Maybe that's a look of hunger on his face and the only reason he's not attacking is because he knows he's too weak to move. Kenneth is in position to shoot him instantly and, as Frank notes, "You want every single second." Why waste any of it on a hopeless attack?

--Jordan pointed out that the survivors, "deal with their differences of opinion rather quickly and efficiently (for a change)." And that's totally true early on in the movie, but as the movie wears on the malcontents of the group seem to get a little bit more cranky with each other. Steve's act wears thin with everyone almost immediately -- He crows, "Why don't we drop by the marina, hop in my boat and take it for a pleasure cruise, you jackasses?" and even Monica, who only 15 minutes of screen time earlier was screwing him in the electronics store, rolls her eyes, appalled. Monica's also clearly irritated by Nicole. Where would that frustration have gone had everyone been there a month later?

--It also looks like they're running low on some key supplies. Whatever "that lemon stuff" is that Steve likes to put in his booze and that Andre's been feeding to Luda is gone. And later in the movie, Steve goes to the coffee thermos and rolls his dark eyes when it sputters empty.

--Much ado has been made about Ana remembering to grab the keys to her car and to the boat. Nobody here remembered to give any credit to Steve who remembered to bring his boat keys with him when he left the house as well.

--When did CJ get appointed propane specialist? Three propane tanks get detonated by gunfire and flare, and every single time it's CJ throwing out the tank and pulling the trigger

--The muzak they hear on the elevator on the way to the armored cars is "All Out of Love."

--That head in the cooler on the fishing boat during the end credits must have been put there by someone. There had to have been two fishermen to begin with. One of them had to have been bitten beforehand. It's doubtful anyone would say, "Hey, let's go fishing," after getting bit by a zombie, so I'm guessing the two wound up on the fishing boat as part of an escape attempt -- either away from Milwaukee like our protagonists, or away from a Lake Michigan island, perhaps hoping for better luck on the mainland. Anyway, one fisherman turns before the other one's been bitten -- otherwise how would the surviving fisherman have had the strength to fight off an attack and cut the zombie's head off? The question is, where'd that guy go? Did he commit suicide? Maybe he turned into a zombie himself and then fell off the boat in his zombie rage.

--That makes me think of another thing: You know how silly your cat looks when it trips? Ordinarily it's a pretty slick creature, but the moment it loses its balance, it looks like a total loser. There are hours of footage sent into America's Funniest Home Videos about this exact thing. I wonder if zombies look as ridiculous when they lose their balance.

--If that head was able to survive without the body, that means that the surviving fisherman took down his buddy the hard way: cutting the zombie's head off while it was still attacking.

I'd like to give a special shout-out to Jordan who provided me with a copy of the disc, complete with director's commentary -- I literally just noticed the DC was on there about 3 minutes ago, after dozens of viewings. It's a burned copy. I'm going to have to get the full version at some point, just to see all the extras. Everyone's been raving about the featurette of Andy's video journal from inside the gun store.

I wish I could see this for the first time all over again.

The Hitcher

(1986) *****

Wow. I knew this one was good, but I'd really forgotten how good. I wasn't even going to watch it until I was at the video store and spotted the sequel, which stars none other than Kari Wuhrer. After wading through six Hellraisers and three Prophecies to get to Kari, of course I was gonna watch the first Hitcher first. I'm like that.

During the era of his teen heartthrobdom, C. Thomas Howell plays nice kid Jim Halsey, hired to drive some guy's car to California. After nearly dozing off and killing himself one night in the middle of the Texas desert, he decides picking up a hitchhiker so he'll have someone to talk to is a good idea. It isn't.

Enter Rutger Hauer, who delivers a stunning performance as John Ryder, a mysterious, car-hopping angel of death. Only in Blade Runner does this actor match the ruthless, sexy menace that he pulls off here. After some increasingly unsettling conversation, he puts a knife to Jim's throat, taunting him with his cool craziness until our hero sees the passenger door is ajar and pushes Ryder out. Unfortunately, that's just the beginning.

What follows is one of the best drawn-out mind fucks ever put on screen. From that point on Ryder targets Jim, not as the victim of his homicidal urge, but as witness to it. As Jim tries to gain control of the situation it spills out into a full-blown nightmare; soon he's got the trigger-happy Texas police convinced he's the murderer. Every time the things seem to be settling down, Ryder emerges from the shadows and spins things further out of control.

The Hitcher is one of those great 80's flicks that comes with a heavy coating of style and works beautifully because of it. The cinematography takes full advantage of the lonely, evocative desert landscape and the slick, moody soundtrack is perfectly matched.


It's never clear if John Ryder is a crazy loner or some supernatural force, although I did spot a clue to his motives this time: for whatever reason, he's picked Jim Halsey to be his executioner. He says it in the first scene, when Jim, knife to his throat, tearfully begs "what do you want?" Ryder answers "I want you to stop me." There are definite sexual overtones to Ryder's fixation, which makes it all the more profound -- as he sees it, nobody even exists in this game except Jim and himself. At one point when Ryder's capture is assured, Jim says "they'll catch you." Rutger Hauer delivers a dismissive "yeah" with such contempt you could believe he's the devil himself.

I'd recommend The Hitcher to anyone reading this; you need to see it if you never have, and if you haven't recently you should give it another look. I think this may have only been the second time I've ever watched this, and it completely blew me away.

In the Mouth of Madness

(1995) ****

I had only ever vaguely heard of this movie; I knew it starred Sam Neill and involved something Stephen King-ish and "fiction comes alive"-ish, so I mentally glommed it in with The Dark Half and forgot about it. While discussing the Lovecraft movies I was watching last month, my coworker Alex asked me if I'd seen this. It's not based on a Lovecraft story exactly, but it is heavily influenced by his ideas.

We open with Sam Neill as John Trent, being thrown in an insane asylum and opting for the "dragged away screaming" method of entry. Shortly afterward he's visited by good old David Warner, a doctor hoping to gain clarity on Trent's condition and any possible connection it has with what's going on "out there." By that I mean the world at large, where by intriguing comments we're told things are rapidly deteriorating. In his cell, now decked out with crosses drawn in black crayon, Trent lights a smoke and tells his story, after knowingly observing "things are turning to shit out there, aren't they?"

What follows is a story far more interesting than one about a fictional serial killer coming to life. Trent is hired by a publishing company to find their missing blockbuster author, a horror fiction icon with the unlikely name of Sutter Cane. Worse than just plain missing, Cane's gone missing with his latest manuscript, which has the same title as the movie. This not only puts a lot of money at risk, but also means hordes of angry, rioting fans. I figured this idea was far more palpable after witnessing the fervor over the final Harry Potter book.

Before Trent even consents to take the job, he's threatened by an axe-wielding maniac who asks "do you read Sutter Cane?" while goggling at him with his malformed eyes.


Turns out the guy is Cane's agent, and the only person to have read more than a few chapters of the new novel. Still convinced he's being played as part of a publicity stunt, Trent takes the job and travels with Cane's editor Linda Styles to the fictional New Hampshire town of Hobb's End, the setting for most of Cane's stories. The fact that it's a fictional town is offset by the map Cane has concealed puzzle-style within the cover art for his books.

There's an amusing line when Linda Styles is talking up her star author: she says "forget Stephen King, Sutter Cane is yadda yadda." I was amused because this movie is an obvious valentine to Stephen King: the fictional New England town, the popularity, the name Sutter Cane -- even the font on the books' covers looks like King's books. At this point, the only H.P. Lovecraft influence is in some of the artwork.





Events in Hobb's End proceed more Kingish than Lovecraftian, as the citizens and the town itself exist exactly as in Cane's novels, down to a particular loose, noisy floorboard in the lobby of Hotel Pickman. When Cane himself finally appears, he gives his editor the skinny: his stories -- all his stories -- were not products of his imagination but rather dictations to him by hideous beings from an outer reality. In the Mouth of Madness is their final work, enabling their entry into our world on a gateway of collective human imagination. His readers' minds will go first, and then their bodies. The changes in the town's ficitonal populace are templates for this change; they all start wielding axes while gradually transfoming: first the subtle alteration of the eyes and faces, eventually into huge tentacled monstrosities in the image of their new gods. The events described in the book are the events we are seeing in the movie; eventually they will overwrite reality itself.

Here is where the Lovecraft influence is strongest. Not the fiction/reality part, but the idea of unthinkable beings lurking in the darkness outside of our universe. I was reminded of a passage from The Call of Cthulhu that describes the eventual return of the Outer Gods when the time is right:

"The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom."

While not quite the masterpiece of Halloween or The Thing, I heartily recommend checking out this John Carpenter morsel. Watching it, I kept thinking what would've happened if the final Harry Potter was some sort of apocalyptic mind bomb; I for one would have been first in line for my axe, that's for sure.

The actress playing Linda Styles ain't so great, and while I really like Sam Neill I found his character's tenacious skepticism a little hard to buy. The few special effects on display are a teensy bit on the weak side, but that's offset by some clever cinematography that never gives you too long a look at any one thing. I was lucky to get this shot in one try, these critters are only in focus for a split second.


These are niggling points in an otherwise creepy and clever story. Because of how it plays out, the story has a high degree of self-awareness, yet that never got tired or annoying. At this late stage in self-aware filmmaking I consider that an achievement in itself.

GIANT. KILLER. SPIDERS.

(aka Eight Legged Freaks)

(2002) **1/2

At least here the title of this movie can be as HandsomeStan wishes it. If you haven't read his excellent behind-the-scenes account of this movie, here are chapters one, two, and three.

Somewhere I got the idea that I was saving the best Kari Wuhrer movie for last. As it turned out, this was neither the best nor last film in my Kari fest, but it was the one in which she looked the best. I suppose it's a bit of a bummer that my horrorthon sub-festival hardly featured any naked Kari when according to her Wikipedia page she's been in over a dozen sexploitation movies, but at least in this one she's looking pretty hot as the MILF sheriff of a small Arizona town.


Here she is getting clumsily hit on by David Arquette. (He's about to try and subsequently fail to open his heart to her, and the twist on the resolution of that problem (much later) is a nice spike in the quality of the writing.)

When this starts it's got a decent shot at being a damn good monster movie. The premise is neatly spun (oops, sorry), as a dealer in exotic spiders starts feeding his stock on the toxic crickets from a nearby pond. As the critters grow they travel around the mining tunnels that honeycomb the town, so when they pounce they're kind of everywhere. There's a real sense of infestation: for example, shortly before the barber sees his buddy get eaten in his armchair (see below), a couple of the nasties scurry by the front window. He doesn't see them and they don't see him, it's just a good build on the emerging disaster.

"Well, at least I'll die in hideous pain."

Check it out! It's HandsomeStan's legs!

Except for copious amounts of green slime, there's no real gore going on in this PG-thirteener. However the body count is fairly impressive. As the populace flee, a good percentage of the folks onscreen are pounced upon or pulled underground, and it's too crazy a scene for anyone to stop and try to help anyone else.

In general the action is pretty worthwhile. During the "jumping spiders attacking dirtbikers" scene, which I recalled from my first viewing as being somewhat gimmicky, I found myself really digging it. All in all this seemed like it had the makings of a decent cheap monster thrill: good action, legitimately scary monsters (spiders! eew!), a comedy/horror sensibility that wasn't too heavy on the comedy...

and then...

I think I only started noticing it during the siege of the mall; for some reason the doofuses (doofi?) in charge decided the spiders needed to be emitting little laughy gremlin noises as they scurried around. During the stampede you could count on whichever bug zipped nearer the camera to emit this "heeheeheehoohoo" sound, which needless to say completely screwed up the vibe. By making the spiders funny, they actually made them not even as scary as the gremlins from Gremlins. A very bad choice. The movie's street cred wasn't all that solid, and this touch -- which, once it starts, happens over and over -- tipped things in the wrong direction. It's weird how one little detail can do that, but looking back I don't feel like giving this movie a three-star break, and I might've. Maybe the powers that be will send Kari Wuhrer over here to change my mind.

"Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!"

In between the original Cloverfield trailer (which debuted in front of Transformers) and the new, longer one (which is currently showing in front of Beowulf) the filmmakers have apparently been re-working a lot of the effects. The "Statue of Liberty's head tumbling down Broadway" shot, in particular, has been re-done; I made a comparison to show the difference between the old and the new versions of the shot (from the trailers posted at Apple). (Click on the link and then mouse-over to see the more recent version of the same frame.)

Basically the scale has been corrected, more detail and texture have been added, and the lighting environment is more faithful to the surrounding geometry and illumination. Interestingly, the modeling and animation are identical during the first half of the shot (the head spinning through the air); the handoff to the new model occurs during the motion-blur (which is coordinated with the jumping cars). The debris is re-animated as well; the yellow cab in the extreme background (that breaks the head's fall) is revealed to be CGI along with a couple of the other cars (since they don't flip the same way). It's not often that one gets to do a direct comparison, frame by frame, of two "drafts" of the same piece of SFX in this way; for the 0.1% of the population who are as interested in this stuff as I am, it's a fascinating object lesson.

Fat Cat Sat Hat

(1973) *****

Jordan inspired me to find this one, which is clearly a thematic descendant of Mahna Mahna. Just look at those guys...they're all about their shades and their turtlenecks. And I mean that quite literally, as they have no other features. I commented before that Henson math states fur and/or feathers = crazy, and these cool characters offer the perfect counterpoint. Click here to watch.

Happy Thanksgiving, folks!

Mahna Mahna

(*****) 1969

The Original And Best (TM) (click here to watch). It's all about Henson, as the commenter says. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.