The Bringers of Wonder

(1976) ****

Okay, here we go with another HORRORTHON entry: "The Bringers of Wonder", a two part episode of Space: 1999. Not suitable for Horrothon, you say? Nonsense! This is two hours of pure fear! Take it from me. (If it were merely an ordinary single episode of Space: 1999, of course, I wouldn't dream of besmirching Horrorthon with such feeble, sub-par material. It's the story's deserved expansion to a full two hours of syndicated British television that makes all the difference, "doubling" the fear if you will).

By the way I am going to LOSE Horrorthon; let there be no doubt about that. If the four of you are The Partridge Family, I'm Reuben. We all knew this already; no need dwelling on my "irrelevant court jester" status. I accept my lot in life.

On Moonbase Alpha, two unrelated events herald the TWO HOURS OF PURE FEAR I mentioned above. The first is that Commander John Koenig goes nuts and crashes his Eagle spacecraft near the nuclear waste dumps. If the preceding sentence doesn't make any sense to you, suffice it to say that "The Bringers of Wonder" is a story set within the fictional context of "Space: 1999," or rather, within the single most absurd set of premises ever foisted upon the television viewing public in the history of the medium, and that includes My Favorite Martian, CopRock and The West Wing. All you need to know is that it's essentially Lost in Space except instead of a spacecraft they're using the entire mass of the Earth's moon to travel around, and instead of loveable kids there's an angry Australian and an angry Italian and a woman who can turn into a dizzying array of stunt men in rubber monster suits (more on this below). Koenig's daylight madness causes him to barely miss the domes of the nuclear waste dump (where, two harrowing hours later, the story will end) and crash into the unforgiving lunar terrain, whereupon the spacecraft erupts into flames. (I just realized that the beginning of "The Bringers of Wonder" must have been the source for a plot point that I stole much later on, for a story of my own.) Koenig's mysterious "crazy flying" behavior in the opening is never explained (which, somehow, succeeds in making the entire story that much more eerie; at least, that's my opinion).

Putting Maya into the wall
(note 220-volt "European" electrical outlets, requiring extra adapters for electric shavers, etc.)
The episode (*cough* *cough* sorry, "horror movie" *cough*) now abruptly slackens into an extremely slow-moving pace that will be maintained with almost 100% consistency throughout the story. First, Koenig is rescued, hospitalized, diagnosed, and treated, over the course of several days, during which he remains comatose. All of this occurs under the aegis of Moonbase Alpha's Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Helena Russell, M.D., Ph.D, a character portrayed by the most dreadful actress ever to step before the cameras or audience in any medium ever including industrial training films and voice-overs for technical school television ads. That's right, Koenig has been moved to a couch to be ministered over by the one and only Barbara Bain, with her hair bleached nearly white (while Catherine Schell's naturally blond hair is dyed a nauseating red, which, along with Schell's Cruella deVille makeup, serves to appease the unfire-able Ms. Bain, then-husband to actual actor Martin Landau). I think I'd chose the monsters over that. (Later in the story, Koenig is actually bound into his medical couch with straps, while Dr. Russell continues to hover over him, serenely holding out medical apparatus in front of herself or vaguely peering at the intruments on the wall. Did I mention two hours of pure fear?)

Koening has too much "A"
Koenig's medical dillemae keep him out of action for thirty-five minutes of screen time -- which is all it takes for Moonbase Alpha to plunge into the most dangerous impending catastophe they'll ever face, in all forty-eight episodes (or, forty-seven, if you take into account that "The Bringers of Wonder" is really just a two-part story and not two separate episodes). When Koening regains consciousness, he awakens to a nightmare so severe that it has him very upset indeed; not to mention the added problem of being the only person on Moonbase Alpha who has the slightest idea that anything's wrong.

But what's the problem, exactly, you ask? In a word:

MONSTERS.

"And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you"
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900)
That's right. Never mind obscure waste products of nuclear fusion (see: difficulties involved in storing such safely); aliens who quickly misunderstand the humans' intentions for demonstrable reasons; delicate translation problems with life forms too strange in their essential nature for us to communicate with them; beings or entities interested in seducing the Alphans to their own way of life, which would be limiting in some way; mutinous Alphans selling out the moonbase's precious resources for their own enrichment; dangerous astronomical phenomenae; erosion of the moonbase infrastructure; social or technical problems within the base itself. In fact, never mind any of the countless interesting and/or dangerous things that could happen to a 20th century human moonbase propelled through the distant reaches of our galaxy.

The monsters have a meeting
No, this is just monsters, straight up. They're...well...monsters. They sort of stand there. Then they shuffle around. They never make any noise or move quickly or change the direction in which they're facing, and they don't really have any limbs with which to menace a potential victim. What makes them so dangerous? MIND CONTROL.

A monster influences Tony's mind so that he sees and hears Frankie Valli
These monsters posssess the amazing ability to cut the actual film of the episode itself, so that the story's action keeps moving over to an altogether different sequence with the same actors miming the same actions. In other words, the Alphans think they're doing something else, and we get to see that, as well as what they're actually doing (or, being fooled into doing), intercut together with devilish irony. The whole thing, as I keep saying, is really very unsettling; I mentioned something about TWO HOURS OF PURE FEAR above, and the aliens' disquieting power to subject their victims to frantic cross-cutting is certainly the driving force behind that fear.

The monsters' plan is to make the Alphans blow up the nuclear waste dump on the far side of the moon, to feed off its energy. (There are a great many things wrong with this plan, starting from the concept that the explosion would tend to vaporize the monsters themselves, and ending with the minor matter of the nuclear waste dumps already having been blown up in the Series Premiere; this inconsistency is not addressed.)

Koenig is powerless to stop the monsters from shuffling towards him
The monsters shamble around and, physically, are in no way threatening. The cast works very hard to convince the viewer that they are somehow repulsive, terrifying, etc. but I actually think they're kind of cute. ("Elmo" cute, not "Cameron Diaz" cute, obviously.) As has been pointed out by many, these are sort of like "Sid and Marty Kroft" monsters. I could do without the fluids pumping through all those plastic tubes, but I imagine that one gets used to that. I also can't imagine how the monsters sleep since they can't close their eye and can't really lie down. No, it's the monsters' terrifying mind power that puts the tension across; I suppose the contrasts have a certain Ambrose Bierce irony to them, if you will; that is, Koenig himself appears as the monster in Alan Carter's perfervid, alien-planted fantasy of driving around -- they can't see who he really is, but they're as repulsed by Koenig as Koenig himself, earlier, was repulsed by the actual monsters.

Koenig tries to warn Alan Carter, but Carter erroneously "sees" him as a character from one of Octopunk's movies
Is it good sci-fi? I don't actually know the answer to that question. I am too blinded by my own ridiculous childhood memories of how this thing was, somehow, like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dracula and The Wizard of Oz combined. Such is the mind of a nine-year-old with a black-and-white TV.

In Kubrickville, the monsters are reduced to the fabric of dreams themselves
Is it horror? Gentlemen, I submit to you that it is, in fact, nothing less than the ultimate horror. The absolute nihilism of the slimy monsters chills me to the very bone; as I think Hannah Arendt remarked in her treatise The Banality of Evil, "to expect recognizable purpose from evil is to misundertand its nature" or some such. (Actually, okay: I made that quote up, you caught me. But I didn't make up the title! That's real Arendt, damn it!) Staggering towards Kubrickville, those walking intestines with sawed-apart whiffle-ball eyes are relentless even when their power is gone -- the base simplicity of their dark crusade has one reeling at the cold, inhuman disregard of all other life in the face of such unslakable thirst for "power." Such uncaring, murderous brutality from those whose abilities are so wondrous! They have the sophistication to synthesize convincing total illusions of unyielding persuaive power; of creating and flying vast starships across vast interstellar distances; all to stagger around amid their lemming-like prey; the sustenance of the nuclear explosions cannot silence the voices of the damned (in this case, the victims, as the Alphans came perilously close to becoming themselves!) Gentlemen, I give you "The Bringers of Wonder (Parts 1 & 2)" -- A nuclear nightmare indeed. Can we really know where we're going as we harness the power of the atom—with no regard for the dire consequences that await? What about OUR "illusions?"

My Bloody Valentine

(1981) *1/2

Gosh, what an excellent title for such a superfluous movie. Utterly lacking in suspense, good scriptwork, professional-level acting, and good hair, My Bloody Valentine has managed to tie itself for last place on my scoresheet with Leprechaun 3. That's right folks: this movie actually has the dubious distinction of having at least three Leprechaun movies be better than it.

The small mining town of Valentine's Bluff once played host to an annual Valentine's Day dance dating back over 100 years. They haven't had one in twenty years. Last time there was a Valentine's Dance, a maniac killer named Harry Warden ran amok and killed several citizens. Harry had been a worker in the mine, but was part of a closing crew that was carelessly left behind by the two safety men who wanted to get to the Dance earlier. The crew met with a horrific accident, of which Harry Warden was the only survivor. All frakakt because of the accident, he killed the two safety men with a pickaxe.

So twenty years later, the town is holding its first Valentine's Dance since the murders went down and the violence is starting back up again. A series of chocolate heart boxes are found containing freshly cut human hearts. Included with the hearts are Valentine cards containing threats of more violence if the festivities aren't halted.

There's an anxious mayor and sherriff, played lamely by two regional theater veterans, who were around for the first murders and freeze at Harry's very mention. They decide to call off the dance when the chief organizer is found dead in her own laundromat. The killer had stuffed her in one of the dryers and she came out all melted and toasty -- it was pretty sweet.

Anyway, the rambunctious young miners and their frumpy, flannel wearing girlfriends, unaware of the heart-grams being delivered, decide to throw a party anyway. And several of them get mangled -- one gets his face stuffed into a pot full of boiling hot dogs and there are all sorts of pickaxe mishaps. The actual character of Harry Warden sports a reasonably sinister look, all helmeted and gas masked.

The movie contains a surprise ending which was somewhat audacious considering how utterly underwhelming the movie that preceded had turned out to be. The very last 20 seconds or so feature the villain slinking off into the recesses of the cave howling continued vengance and other assorted insane snorfely noises, which was probably the only part of the movie I liked, mostly because it meant that the movie was over and I didn't have to watch it anymore.

But dude, what a kickass name!

The Brain That Wouldn't Die

(1962) ***


Mad scientist Dr. Bill Cortner has been hard at work developing drugs designed to prevent tissue rejection during limb transplants. His unethical methods have yielded messy results, including a growling creature heard but not seen behind a locked door in the laboratory. While speeding down winding roads with his fiancée, Jan, one day, he crashes his car. Bill is fine but Jan is decapitated. A funeral is held and everyone is sad. Just kidding. Bill takes Jan’s head back to his laboratory and in true Herbert West style keeps her alive on a tray (this is actually pretty gross for 1962 standards) with the intention of finding a hot girl to murder so he can attach Jan’s head to the body. Jan is actually opposed to this plan and spends her time being pissed at Bill while formulating an escape plan with the creature behind the door. Meanwhile Bill finds his body donor, convinces her to come back to his place, and drugs her.

Then some bad stuff happens.

Wow, what a gem of a find! The Brain That Wouldn’t Die is great, stupid fun. This is classic “mad scientist” stuff. The fx are decent and overall the film is fairly graphic. It’s obvious that elements of Re-Animator were taken from this film including Herbert West’s sour mad scientist. This is the first film from my 50-Chiller-Movies pack that was worthy of the $20 purchase. So bad it’s wonderful.

The creature behind the door is finally revealed.



Don't take my word for it, watch a clip:
The Brain That Wouldn't Die

Ringu

(1998) ***1/2

I've only seen this once before, and compared it unfavorably to the American remake when I reviewed The Ring in 2004. Maybe I should try to review this as its own movie and not compare it to the remake, but I can't. Mostly because the Ring is SO MUCH BETTER.

Okay, I'll go through the laundry list and then maybe I can give Ringu some respect.

-- The corpses Samara leaves behind in their wake are horribly decayed, while the Ringu victims look more like the Joker got them.



-- The videotape is too short. What a ripoff getting killed for watching that.

-- I spend a lot of time griping about Ringu's Sea Goblin allusions in my other review, and it wasn't quite as silly as I'd remembered. This despite the line "Frolic in brine, goblins be thine." Sadako's mother is described as obsessed with the sea, and it's conjectured that the father might not have been human. That worked okay. But Ryuji has a vision of a press conference where Sadako stopped a man's heart from across the room. "She can kill someone just by wishing it?" he says. This setup for the final scene is completely unnecessary. It's like one of those narration blocks in the corner of an X-men panel that describes Wolverine's healing power again. The mystery is demystified before it even forms.

-- The cursed people don't experience the constant visions of their encroaching doom. In the remake, Samara's ill will is burning relentlessly into your brain all week, rising to that horrible crescendo. The feeling of dread is so absent here, I wasn't sure why Reiko even believed in the tape's lethal power.

-- No feeling of dread! The Ring is just dripping spooky malaise out of every pore. Ringu is a well-acted, pretty tight story, but sometimes it feels like a drama, sometimes it feels like a mystery thriller. The first few Asian horror movies I ever saw -- Ju-on, The Eye, Pulse, even Korei (Seance) -- all pack a scarier punch than this does.

-- Not enough Sadako. We see her kill that one reporter and then her dad clocks her on the head and down the well she goes. Never do we meet those who knew her and shudder at the memory. There are no "things she shows you." Even her father's hatred is never fleshed out.

In its defense, Ringu is an excellent story told in a lean, straightforward fashion. The Japanese tendency to accept certain psychic/spiritual beliefs is worked in well (although on this side of the pond I think The Ring takes strength from lacking any sort of accepted explanation for what's going on). The signature sound of the videotape is effectively creepy music from a spectral string section -- hearing just that when the death phonecall came was pretty cool.

And tiny shorts!

Most of all, Ringu is the origin of creepy little girls with long black hair and videotapes that kill you. Arigato, Ringu.

Boogeyman

(2005) ***

Young Timmy is awake at night in the dark. Objects in his room take on momentary life and then the light comes on, revealing, for example, a hooded villain sitting on his chair to be a robe Timmy has lain out earlier in the evening. The lights go out and the room comes alive once again. Hearing commotion from Timmy's room, Timmy's dad comes into the room, with reassuring words about old wives tales and empty closets. But the room snaps into momentary shadow and in the dark Timmy's dad is yanked into the closet and is never seen again.

15 years later, adult Timmy has buried the memory deep in his mind and has accepted everyone's explanation that his dad ran away. He now works for a college paper and, while spending Thanksgiving with his girlfriend's family (see? it's a holiday horror film!) he receives word that his mother has just died. He goes home for the funeral and to confront some of those awful memories with a night in his old home, only to discover that the Boogeyman isn't through with him.

I'm noticing a pretty clear hierarchy to scares in horror movies. The Leprechaun is pretty much on the lowest rung -- he presents a clear threat, but until he's got you cornered and is completely mangling you, he's more irritating than he is scary. On the next rung up, we find creatures that present a clear threat and are intimidating for any number of reasons, but that remain an organic threat, something you can think around if you understand it. I can't think of a movie example, maybe one of you will, but the thing that comes to mind is a tiger. Obviously scary, but with some thought and luck, you can overcome it. Next rung up are the inorganic beings. These are characters that present a such a formidable and unstoppable threat, they cut right to your terror centers. Jason and Michael Myers belong to this category.

Above that exists characters like Freddy Krueger and the Boogeyman. Not only do they present a threat, they are in control of fear in its purest form. They come at you from all directions and the direction from which you are least prepared to deal with them is exactly the side from which they take you down. Think of Tim Curry in It, "I am every nightmare you ever had. I am your worst dream come true. I'm everything you ever were afraid of."

Is the film Boogeyman successful in capturing that feeling? Yes and no.

One of the things I liked best about the movie's approach is that it leaves little nuggets of fear pretty much everywhere you look. Characters don't so much enter certain shots as they emerge like phantoms from the backgrounds. Also, everywhere Timmy goes, people seem to be watching him. It's shot in that same moody grey as in the Ring. If we're calling the film effect in the TCM movies "squalor," I'd call this color scheme "gloom." The dread of the first hour is pretty thick.

The movie loses its momentum when it tries to step out of its dread. Eventually we get to see the boogeyman and it's a disappointment -- its look reminded me of the virtual dude in the Lawnmower man. Also the movie plays around with dimensions: doors open in one building and lead into others miles away, characters leap in and out of the sequence of time. It gets a little bewildering and in doing so, sacrifices that dread which should be the most powerful weapon in its arsenal. For what is the boogeyman but unlimited fear; the moment it assumes a face, that fear has limits, if not so much for the characters who are in the room with that dread and can feel how far it reaches, then at least for us as we can only see it and hear it, not sense it.

The movie's strongest moments are when it's exploring the fears of the people who see the Boogeyman. I particularly liked a side-story about a father who loses a daughter to the Boogeyman and then straps himself to a chair at the Boogeyman's doorway so that he'd have no choice but to confront him. He doesn't make it. The fear is too massive.

Solid effort, watchable, but it won't blow your mind.

The Hills Have Eyes

(2006) ****

Okay, this is my last mad hillbilly movie. I'm putting the rest off till next year, but I didn't want to wait for this one. Everything I'd heard about this when it came out sounded good, and Summerisle's and JPX's reviews clinched it. It did not disappoint.

Unlike those two amateurs, I actually saw the original, and the new one follows the old one's plot pretty closely. In both, the conflict happens in two rounds, with the Hill Folk overwhelmingly winning round one. And in both, round two is a story of family vs. family, and nothing gets more primal than that. And speaking of primal, these cannibals make the Hewitts look like Julia freakin' Child.

The reinvention of the Hill Folk as Radioactive Hill Folk is a fantastic choice, and it's played to the hilt. There are great places to visit, like the atomic test village full of mannequins or the bomb crater where all the cars get dumped (one character juuust misses seeing the bloody handprints on the other side of a Volvo while he's junk-shopping). And the makeup on these freaks is A-plus stuff. My favorite was the big angry rutabaga head guy, with the head brace like Myron Stackpool's.


Much like Alexandre Aja's High Tension, the violence in this story is artful while brutally matter-of-fact. And while there is plenty of pain doled out in Hills, I feel this is a notch above much of the torture-based cringing that's been on tap lately. I've also been inspired to add a new "best" to our "best of" wrap-up, and that's Best Victim Turned Badass.

Also notable: the desert setting seemed downright exotic after all those Texas fields. I loved that the good guys not only had a sacrificial dog for an offscreen death yelp, they also had a killer revenge dog. And never, ever dispatch a foe and then drop your gun on the ground and turn your back on the "corpse." C'mon, Alexandre, you sick Frenchman, you know better than that.

So remember, if you're driving on a lonely road in the middle of wide, lawless country, it's always a good idea to pack an extra car.

Silent Night, Bloody Night

(1964) **3/4

Not to be confused with Silent Night, Deadly Night, the 1984 movie about an axe-wielding Santa.

The Butler house has lain empty for years after the burning death of Wilfred Butler, the head of the household. A city lawyer shows up representing Jeffrey Butler, the sole remaining heir to the Butler estate to sell the property back to the town. The elders are eager to pay -- to a person, the four person council is pretty creeped out by the house. We learn that there is more spooking them than that a guy died there once.

The lawyer and his slinky European chippy spend the night at the Butler mansion, but are slaughtered with an axe before morning. One by one, the elders are lured to the Butler house by phone calls from a liquid, whispering voice claiming to be that of Wilfred's daughter, Marianne.

Little is known or spoken about the Butler family. Could it in fact be Marianne? Well, no, voice sounds a little too mannish. Perhaps it's Marianne's son Jeffrey, recently returned to town from California. Or maybe it's that unidentified inmate who just escaped from the local asylum. Gosh. What intrigue.

The gore is delightful in this. The axe murdering death has some nice butchery going down. There's a pretty great posse murder scene featured somewhere in there, which itself features a nasty eye gouge with a wine glass.

The problem is that everything between the gore is pretty dull. It's got elements of a mystery and a pretty good central history, but there's no sense of revelation or panic anywhere. The explanation of what's going on comes wholesale in narrations of newspaper quotes. That's not really a mystery. That's more like a riddle.

Nice performances and decent campfire story feel but, eh, you could skip it.

The Creeping Flesh

(1973) **1/2



There are two mostly separate stories going on here, both of which inch along at a snail's pace due to Hammer Film's typically long-winded storytelling methods.   Peter Cushing plays an archaeologist who returns from New Guinea with a rare skeleton.  His research leads him to the (ridiculous) theory that 'evil' is a disease and it has been passed on from his dead wife to his wacky daughter. He concludes that the skeleton he recovered is a pure form of this evil but could be used to inoculate his daughter before she goes off the deep end.  And then what happens is -1:14:33 followed shortly thereafter by -1:11:44.   And who could forget -1:07:25?  Ahem, sorry. I've developed a bad Horrorthon habit of staring at the time-remaining-display on my DVD player when watching movies I'm not that into.  

Luckily Christopher Lee is his half brother who runs an insane asylum.  When Lee discovers the bit about the pure evil, he has no choice but to get his hands on that skeleton for his own twisted agenda - experimenting on the nutters that he's supposed to be caring for. But what of the professional ethics involved in stealing?  "Oh indeed, indeed" he says reassuringly, "that is why I shall have to employ someone for whom ethics have no significance!"   Is there anything better than Christopher Lee being a bastard?  And can't he and Cushing ever get along?  Most of Cushing's life on earth was spent defending the world against Lee's diabolical schemes. 

The first hour drags on like an insurance seminar.   But if you can make it to the last half hour, your reward is a classic spooker with appallingly bad effects, even for its time. The skeleton grows flesh when it comes into contact with water and eventually grows into this totally scary monster:  



And if you're a fan of stage coach chases, you will not be disappointed with this one. "Hee-yaah!"   

The Hole

(2001) ***1/2


Four spoiled, entitled, prep school kids decide to throw the party of the millennium in an old, sealed World War II bunker hidden on school grounds. As is usually the case with such plans, especially if the plans are made in the context of a horror movie, things go horribly awry and as the film opens we see Thora Birch, sporting a forehead large enough to play racquetball on, stumbling down the corridors of her school bloody and battered.

After given much-needed medical attention, Birch meets with the school shrink and begins to spin a tale of innocent high jinx (e.g., playing flashlight tag), giving way to abject terror. Birch’s account of what happened, told in flashbacks, suggests that her best friend, Martin, who aided in the engineering of the event, locked the quartet in the bunker because he was jealous over Birch’s crush on one of the jocks at the party. Eventually Martin came to his senses and let them all out. Wait, what? As the shrink tells one of her colleagues in a phone call, Birch is clearly delusional/traumatized and is repressing the true events of the tragedy, which ended in death for her 3 friends. As the truth about what really occurred in the bunker emerges, again told in flashbacks, we question everything we learned about Birch during the first half of the movie. Is she as innocent as we initially believe or is there some sociopathy fueling her motives?

I picked this film up at a collectible show a few years ago and was instantly riveted (apparently The Hole was shelved and never released theatrically although it finally went direct-to-video recently). I love films that tell the same story from 2 different perspectives (e.g., Audrey Tautou’s “À la folie... pas du tout (2002)”) and this one delivers. All performances are terrific, especially Birch’s, whose role required some fairly complicated psychological nuances. Director Nick Hamm achieves an eerie claustrophobic feel to the bunker by slowly turning down the lights over the course of the film as things go from fun to terrifying. The true events of what happened in the bunker are greatly disturbing and surprising.

The Hole is notable for one other reason. Keira Knightley of Pirates of the Caribbean fame briefly goes topless. Don’t believe me?


Why not watch the trailer?
the hole

Silent Hill

(2006) ****

Rose's adopted daughter Sharon is a problem sleepwalker (skirting cliffs and such) and suffers nightmares in which she calls out the name Silent Hill. So Rose takes her to the real Silent Hill, a West Virginia ghost town deserted for thirty years after a still-burning coal mine fire poisoned the air. Chased by a suspicious biker cop down a dark highway, Rose avoids a little girl in the road and wipes out. When she wakes up, she's in a grey twilight world, with a constant rain of ash, and her daughter is nowhere to be seen.

This movie is a masterpiece of mood and setting. The main character, really, is Silent Hill itself, and its nightmarish details are laid out with exquisite attention. Rose and Cybil, the cop, find themselves trapped in the ash world, and together they seek out Sharon and the truth. The landscape is stylishly decayed, but not the same squalor I've been describing in other movies; this is like squalor without the moisture, its own unique thing. Periodically the ash world is overcome by a darker evil, heralded by the judgement-horn tones of the air raid sirens. When that happens the dried paint and ash peel upwards, the hellish landscape worsening with a sharper coating of rust. When the Darkness comes, the truly lethal monsters stalk Silent Hill.

It's a wonderful realization of this scary, fictional world, and the feeling of being somewhere entirely else is complete. It's a creative hell, not quite riding the Christian framework, which reminded me of comic book writer Grant Morrison's vision of a closer-to-home, modern theology. And I'm a sucker for the move where a signal goes off and suddenly the whole world transforms into something worse. The only other example I can think of is the Tales from the Dark Side episode called The Last Car, depicting a train car you can never leave in which spectral things happen when traversing tunnels.

This is a notable high mark for movies based on video games, and a high point in the quest for scary CG monsters. The creatures of Silent Hill are mostly actors with computer assistance, but it's really the first time I've seen anything with an obvious CG styling that I'd call scary at all.

However, the two big problems I had with this when I first saw it still bug me. Up until 90 minutes in you're looking at a perfect five-star movie, with these compelling characters navigating this amazing, horrible place. Then comes the reveal, the video-game moment when you find out just what the hick is going on, and it leaves a couple of questions in its place. It's nitpicky, but the relationship between the worldly events and the supernatural ones is a little too murky for my taste. This probably wouldn't even rate as an issue if it weren't for big problem number two: I hate the denoument of this story. The climax unfolds just fine, but three feet from the exit door the plot goes inexplicably sideways. I'm not the kind of guy who needs happy endings or anything; well-wrought dark endings are the truly bold tales in this genre. But there's no reason for this big chunk of disappointment; it's just dropped anonymously in your lap. I'm also open to story elements that leave some of the interpretation to us, but there's a point where it's clever and there's a point where it's sloppy. Silent Hill gets a star knocked off for that sloppy.

Still, this comes highly recommended. It's a beautiful nightmare.

Leprechaun 4: In Space

(1997) **1/2

I'mnotMarc was contemplating the grim task of checking this one out last Friday and I felt bad and called shotgun. I think I got off easy, as this one was kind of fun. Stupid, oh yes -- stupid like stupid's bigger, stupider brother. But fun.

Budget-wise, this was only a few steps above Head of the Family. Here, check out this spaceship:


And they couldn't afford one extra for the cast. There's three scientists, a gaggle of soldiers and nobody else. Here's the mother ship's hopping night spot.


We never see who's flying the spaceship or working behind the bar or anything. Nor, for that matter, do we ever hear the word "Leprechaun." Sgt. Metal Head Hooker (not kidding, and he's got a big chrome plate in his head) refers to the wee elf as an "alien" who has been disrupting mining operations. And the little man, while still sporting the tight pants and buckles, is veering pretty wide of his mission statement. He's got a bunch of gold already, I guess, and now he wants to marry a bitchy space princess and be the King of Space. "Haven't ye read the lore?" He also engages in quite a bit of gunplay for a mystical sprite, and we learn that blowing him to bits with a grenade doesn't take, although on the bright side you do get to see him blown to bits with a grenade.

According to our resident Leprechaun movie expert, this is the first of these movies with any cheesecake, and the princess delivers one of the most laughably disappointing OTS's ever. That's because the spiked bra she's been sporting the whole flick turns out to be heavily padded. On the other hand, while the scientist is fleeing the spider monster, it actually manages to eat her pants off. I love modern movies that find some arbitrary reason to have the heroine suddenly in her underwear. It's such a Roger Corman move. Tremors and Deep Blue Sea both do that. Hilarious, and also...underwear.

Lastly, this guy is a riot.


So, if you're in a position where you have to watch one of the Leprechaun movies (and don't laugh, that could totally really happen), this is probably the one to go for. I could watch In The Hood and Back 2 Tha Hood to make sure, but...no, I won't be doing that.