Head of the Family

(1996) **

I had to check this one out after JPX's hilarious review of it last year (I recommend you read that first).

I've been feeling like maybe I've been hitting too many quality movies this year, and here's the perfect andidote. I think the budget for this movie was several big boxes of Jolly Ranchers that the crew had to go and trade for stuff. The town consists of the diner, the sidewalk outside the diner, and the inside of the diner. It's so small that one biker thug is the whole mafia. The only other thing in town is the Stackpool's house.

Ah, the Stackpools. They were an antidote of a different sort, since I watched this the same day as the two Chainsaws. This gang of freaks is nowhere near unnerving as the Hewitts. And that head! It really is worth watching this silly movie just to see the big head. After seeing the picture of Myron by himself (in JPX's review), I thought his head was just slightly larger than normal. But it's giant! The effect is entirely achieved with forced perspective, the cheapest special effect ever. Every shot of Myron is like the one above, where he's parked next to someone who's obviously a few feet behind him. It's his ginormous hands that give it away.

Like this movie, Myron's budget of genius intellect is of the shoestring variety. The whole caper starts because he's discovered hijacking motorists for his evil scheme, which is some vague plot to get himself a body. These people are captured, half their brains are removed, and then they live gibbering in the Stackpool's basement. None of this has yielded any kind of useful result, mostly because Myron can't find a victim with a head the size of a beer keg.

When blackmailed, he caves immediately. When they seem to have Lance the blackmailer on the ropes, he effortlessly confounds Myron again with a story about a second lawyer with the evidence. In order to coax the lawyer's name out of him, Myron intends to set girlfriend Loretta on fire, but...hang on while I stop giggling...okay, first she has to be in a scene about Joan of Arc starring a bunch of the half-brained dudes from the basement. This is by far the longest scene in the movie, and while it does involve Loretta getting naked again, by this point I was pulling the hairs on my arm to stay awake.

"You can't light a fire in here," says Lance, "you'll burn your house down." Myron laughs evilly and explains that he's fireproofed and ventilated the room. It's like the Special Olympics of evil genius or something. At some point Myron tells Loretta he's too busy plotting world domination to deal with a relationship (I'll have to remember that one), and I thought "What world domination? You're stuck feeding a bunch of morons, your evil plans suck! And anyway, you're just a great big head!"

I'm not telling you to see this, but in its way it's the quintessential Horrorthon movie.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning

(2006) ****

I didn't rate this one as high as some of my colleagues, but I'll certainly attest that it's special. Most of all it gets high marks for successfully completing its mission: the story of the Hewitt clan's transformation into homicidal cannibals. It also boasts some steller scenes of gore.

Our story begins with baby Leatherface's birth on the skanky floor of the slaughterhouse. Due to advanced hideousness he's tossed in the dumpster, where Luda Mae Hewitt finds him cooing peacefully while she's out scavenging for tasty meat scraps. I imagined his first few hours on Earth -- wrapped in butcher paper in the dark, surrounded by the smell of blood and decaying meat -- as a big influence in the events that follow.

The credits provide a montage of young Tommy's childhood, a series of pictures with hands covering his face, first those of others, then his own. We see images of the young lad finding his first dead animal and eviscerating it in a shed -- his portentious first foray into the ruby treasures beneath the skin. When our story opens proper, the meathouse has been condemned by the board of health (several decades too late, by the look of it). By its last day of business, the town itself has dwindled to Leatherface's boss, the Hewitts, and one cop. Forced away from his work table of entrails, Tommy disgruntledly beans his boss with a sledgehammer and so that one cop fetches Tommy's uncle to finesse the situation. If you think that's a bad move, try turning your back on ol' Uncle Charlie while he cools in your police cruiser, staring at the shotgun on the dash. Charlie (so named only once) dons the dispatched lawman's uniform -- gotta love those head shots -- and becomes Sherriff Hoyt, the closest thing to the law in this murderous big country.

These are fairly simple brushstrokes, but they accomplish a lot. Leatherface commands a real presence as big "retarded" Tommy, who just wants to chop and chop meat. "That slaughterhouse meant more to this community than anyone will ever know," says Hoyt, and it did: it kept a huge, strong lover of carcass-hacking away from the nice folk. And it was somehow reassuring to find out that "Sherriff Hoyt" is just a guy in overalls who put on a new personality with the badge, it made his a cozy kind of crazy. For the first time we're coming into the story before the victims do, and I appreciate the priviledge.

Enter the victims, the debuting carload of youngsters. They're appealing enough, but I found the mechanism of character development to be a little forced. The conflict is that little brother Dean isn't really going to boot camp after the trip, he plans to draft dodge in Mexico while his brother Eric returns to Nam. Right before they burst a big cow with their jeep, we discover Eric is only returning to protect Dean anyway. My problem is his deep lovey-dovey girlfriend played by Jordana Brewster: she should know this. As soon as she finds out the Mexico plan, this should have come up, saved us some trouble and maybe even that cow. I know, I know, all that stuff is just meant to show us how much these people care about each other, but it's cheesily done. Eric and Brewster have this annoying routine they do about how many kids they'll have and what their names will be, and I sensed the unsubtle hand of coproducer Michael Bay in the batter. I liked the dynamic of the cast in the remake better.

I liked Eric, though. As soon as they're in the patrol car, and Dean asks what they're going to do, Eric says "I'm going to kill this crazy son of a bitch." Thank you! I said. Way to see the forest for the obnoxious, gun-toting trees. Later he shows more iron when he can't see what ol' Tommy has done to his forearm (he skinned it). He matter-of-factly asks "did he cut it off?"

The development of our killers is the main event, however, and develop they do. With Hoyt steering and Tommy doing the heavy lifting, they christen the Hewitt house with that first hellish chainsaw roar, a bisected biker, and a big, big stain on the upstairs rug. Tommy, fascinated with his first chainsaw kill, thinks "oh yeah, I've got another one of those in the basement." For me, the gore crescendo was poor Jordana hiding under the table as the tip of the chainsaw is waving in her face, spraying the table victim's blood all over her. It was like the drill murder in Body Double but a million times cooler. Gnasty.

Also worth mentioning: They had a dinner scene, which the remake lacked. It's kind of a Chainsaw thing. The camera work had a lot of badly-stylized "shaky cam" going on, not at toxic Blair Witch levels but disappointing after the artful shots of the remake. I might admit both of the women are prettier than Jessica Biel, but they're no Jessica Biel. Diora Baird, who plays Dean's girlfriend, does like to do scenes in her underwear. Here's another one here.

Lastly, it's great that both remake and prequel bring back John Larroquette as the narrator, but the body count he credits to the Hewitts over the following four years seemed too low to me. I did the math: subtracting the deaths from these two bookend movies, that equals one vanload of teens every eight months. I wonder if any of them solved mysteries and had a talking dog.

Trick or Treat

(1986) ***1/2

Trick or Treat is a special flick. Anyone who was ever picked on by the jock A-hole, or anyone who was ever into different stuff than other people and suffered because of it, can find resonance in this movie.

The story follows high-schooler Eddie Weinbauer, played with energy and sensitivity by Marc Price (SKIPPY!). Eddie is a pariah at his suburban high school because of his love of heavy metal music. He's got a very small cadre of pals, friendly and sound of mind; he lives in a perfectly normal home with his mom, who raises him with obvious concern and obvious care. There's really nothing objectionable about the kid. But his meathead classmates, not knowing what to make of him and his different clothes and music, are at best accusatory and at worst downright sadistic. He takes great solace in the lyrics of his idol, rocker Sammi Curr, who endured similar torments at the very same high school a few years earlier.

Then Eddie hears the news that Curr has died in a hotel fire. Distraught, Eddie is comforted by a generous gift from a DJ friend of his (none other than Gene Fuckin Simmons!) --- the studio master, the only copy, of Curr's last album. Like any 80's metal album worth a damn, this one is crawling with backwards messages. Eddie listens to them and, in following their instructions, he stages a magnificent retaliation towards the jock a-holes.

It's a testament to the tenderness with which Eddie's character has been handled thus far that I found myself clapping heartily when Eddie has his moment.

But as the action ramps up, my enthusiasm flagged a bit. I don't blame the FX --- it's the 80's; they did the best they could. And it should be obvious that my issues were not at all with performance or direction, or even script. The dialogue is smart and all of the technical aspects are handled quite professionally. Admittedly, the movie's main weakness was something unpredictable at the time and it's this:

Heavy Metal music from the 80's just isn't scary.

It was thought to be by wimpodites and grandmas everywhere, but here we are 20 years after the release of this film and we've seen all of these guys get old and wrinkly and they are all now, quite simply, laughable people. Nobody, and I mean nobody, still looks at Alice Cooper and thinks, "man, what a scary dude." That's the leverage Trick or Treat had at the time, was that all these guys were still young and still slinky and edgy. Now, their Samson hair holds no more power. The illusion ended the moment of the first rock n' roll plastic surgery. (I mean the first one that wasn't performed on Little Richard.)

So the metal climax of this movie is sort of a goofball exercise, with Sammi Curr exploding in a ball of electricity all over town, wreaking thunderous rock n' roll destruction wherever he lands. All I could think, watching him flop around in his lusty leather pants was, "Ice-T is going to show up in five years and kick this guy right in the nuts."

Anyway, I really liked Trick or Treat and wanted to give it just one more half-star, but the anachronistic subject matter makes that just a bit too much of a reach.

ps - Keep a close eye out for the director cameo (Charles Martin Smith -- the little mousey dude from the Untouchables and American Graffiti) and for Ozzy Osbourne, himself, in a role as a rock-hating bible thumper.

Ravenous

(1999) ****1/2



Standing ovation!  It's very easy to forget that horror movies can contain great acting and original storylines.   I'm not sure how this juggernaut of a movie eluded me for seven years but better late than never.   

Set in the Western Sierra Nevada Mountains during the 19th century, Guy Pierce plays a recently promoted captain of a small military outpost.   A desperate, disheveled man named F.W. (played brilliantly by Robert Carlisle) stumbles into the camp and tells his horrifying tale of survival in the wilderness.   The group that he was traveling with got lost and was forced to live in a cave for three months without rations.  After the first member died of starvation, the others had no choice but to use his body as sustenance for the sake of their own survival.   He then explains how one member of the party went crazy and murdered the other companions.  F.W. narrowly escaped and miraculously found the military base.  

Before a search party sets out to recover bodies and apprehend the killer, a Native American officer details his tribe's legend of the cannibal. Eating humans, he explains, provides mystical recuperative powers but the ensuing thirst for blood consumes all rational thought.

Later that night, a young officer recovering from a nasty spill wakes up to find F.W. quietly LICKING HIS SCABBING STOMACH WOUNDS!!!!

To reveal anything further would be a disservice to this outstanding film. Ravenous is solid, top to bottom. Carlisle deserves an award for this role even if I have to be the guy to make one for him. Though it pains me to see him pigeon-holed as a psycho, it's partly his fault for being so damn good at it. Not even David Arquette's buffoonery can slow this one down.

Venom

(2005) **1/2

Set in backwater Louisiana where not a single person has a southern accent (thank God) tow truck driver Ray is having the worst day ever. Not only does he lose control of his car plunging it into a river, but his voodoo practitioner passenger’s suitcase, which happens to be full of deadly, computer generated snakes, springs open releasing it’s deadly contents. Yes, Ray is bitten to death. Luckily this is a slasher film and Ray is quickly resurrected once he reaches the morgue, killing the mortician, of course. Ray becomes the Michael Myers of the South, stalking a group of unlikable “teens” we can’t wait to see die. As is always the case in this type of film, one of the teens, Cece, the granddaughter of the voodoo practitioner, quickly figures out why Ray was able to come back from the dead. Apparently those weren’t just any ordinary computer generated snakes that attacked Ray. His voodoo practitioner was into some weird shit. It seems that she was able to drain the souls of people and place them into snakes thus saving the people from damnation (yeah I don’t really get it either). Thank goodness Cece knows how to stop Ray.

This paint-by-numbers slasher flick fails to excite on any level. Yes we get the standard deaths, like tree impaling,

but after seeing these kinds of deaths a zillion times in all the Friday the 13th movies, they do nothing here. Yawn.

Why not watch the trailer?
Venom

Tamara

(2005)**


Poor, unattractive Tamara; the kids in her high school hate and actively bully her and the kind teacher she has a crush on rebuffs her affections. To add insult to injury, she is accidentally killed when a school prank goes terribly wrong. Luckily Tamara was into witchcraft (gee why was she so unpopular?) and manages to return from the dead stronger, angrier, and hotter. Now completely pissed, Tamara takes on the jocks and their girlfriends who were responsible for her death. When not killing the popular kids she works on getting her favorite teacher away from his wife.

If you think this sounds a lot like Carrie you’d be right, the premise is almost exactly the same. Tamara is one of those films that asks us to believe that the protagonist is really homely,

only to be transformed like this when she comes back from the dead,

Apparently we’re supposed to think, “Wow, look at her, she’s gorgeous! How can that be, she was so butt-ugly before…” Give me a break. I love it in movies when the “ugly ducking” is merely wearing a pair of glasses and has curly hair only to be transformed later when her glasses are removed and her hair is straightened. I always wonder what message this gives people who wear glasses who have curly hair. Anyway, while I’m all for taking revenge on those who killed you, Tamara is ultimately an unsympathetic character. For example, why be cruel to the schoolteacher you had a crush on when all he ever did was support you while others bullied you? Tamara’s revenge is of the yawn variety here and 3 weeks after watching it I’m laboring to remember anything significant about this movie. Oh yeah, the lead is really homely.

Watch the trailer, which gives away the whole film:
Tamara Trailer

Mad Love

(1935) ***



"I, a poor peasant, have conquered science, why can't I conquer love? You must be mine."

Creepy-as-fuck Peter Lorre plays Dr. Gogol, a brilliant surgeon who is obsessed with actress Yvonne Orlac, the star of a Parisian Grand Guignol theater production. After watching her perform her role 47 times he is devastated to learn that she is quitting acting forever in order to move to London to marry her famous concert pianist husband. Meeting with her after her final performance, Dr. Gogol hints at his desire and creeps Yvonne the hell out. As the props from the play are loaded into a moving truck for storage, Dr. Gogol arranges to have a wax dummy of Yvonne used in the play sent to his house for undoubtedly masturbatory purposes.

How could you not want me, baby?

And so the story ends, we think. However on route to meet his wife, Yvonne’s husband, Stephen, is involved in a terrific train accident, which renders his hands useless and in need of amputation. Suddenly world famous Dr. Gogol isn’t looking so creepy, is he Yvonne? Praying upon his previously stated desire, Dr. Gogol is easily convinced by Yvonne to operate on Stephen. In a stroke of medical brilliance that can only occur in the movies, Dr. Gogol, unbeknownst to everyone, attaches the hands of a knife-murderer, who died in the same train accident, to Stephen. At first all goes well. Stephen is unaware that he has someone else’s hands and he begins practicing for his musical comeback. However, strange things begin to happen. Stephen experiences murderous rage at times and damn but aren’t those hands good at throwing pens into walls and making them stick (I tried this and it only left a blue mark). Soon Stephen’s father is murdered and Stephen becomes the primary suspect. Meanwhile Dr. Gogol is trying everything he can think of to turn Yvonne against her husband in order to win her affections.

Goddamn Peter Lore is creepy!

Given the social mores of the time, things that are easily stated or shown onscreen today are only hinted at in the early days of cinema. Director Robert (The Cabinet of Dr Caligari) Wiene is clever in his ability to convey Dr. Gogol’s salacious perversion for Yvonne. During one early scene the camera focuses on Dr. Gogol as he watches Yvonne perform. Onstage Yvonne is being tortured while tied to a rack and Dr. Gogol can hardly contain himself. Peter Lorre was the perfect choice for this role, I mean, look at those pictures; the guy just exudes neighbor-to-keep-your-kids-away-from. Mad Love is a fun b-movie with enough surprises to keep you engrossed in the absurd premise it asks you to buy into.

Check out Dr. Gogol making Yvonne uncomfortable:
Peter Lorre - Surgeon (Mad Love - 1935)

Halloween: Resurrection

(2002) **(1/100)


Lazarus died and was entombed for four days, so the story goes, before Jesus Chroist showed up and coaxed him, alive, from his tomb. What most accounts of the story missed is that, when he emerged from the tomb, he smelled pretty much the way you'd expect a man who had been dead for four days to smell. So that's one thing he and Halloween: Resurrection have in common.

First, a brief synopsis: A group of college students is invited to star in a reality show based out of the decrepit Myers house. He shows up and kills most of them. The end.

I watched this movie with subtitles -- My downstairs neighbor is a dick, and I try to keep to a minimum the number of times I have to deal with him. Anyway, there's a subtitle towards the end of the movie when we're down to our last two victims that reads, "[Scary music playing]."

There could just as easily have been a subtitle under Busta Rhymes explaining, "[Busta is explaining his entire thought process on the matter]."

Take, for example, this scene the night before the killings. Busta convinces one of the contestants who is having second-thoughts about the show to stick around. She leaves and he has this to say to himself:

"Ol' Freddie boy, damn you good. Shit you come up with off the top of your head, boy. Why don't you just pat yourself on the back?" [pat, pat, pat]

He's proud of himself for his charisma. Did everyone get that? Busta. Is. Proud. Period.

Still not convinced? Let's take a look at Busta's polished toasting skills in this elegant and informative toast to his wife (Tyra Banks):

"This is to us, for successfully putting together something collectively so ingenious as a team and a duo that we should definitely be able to secure a lot of food on the table for ourselves as long as everything goes as nicely as it's going right now."

Much also has been said of Busta's overuse of the word "Mothafucka!" So I took the liberty of counting them all. There are five. To his credit, though, he manages to only say it twice in the first 1:20 of the movie, and in those last ten minutes or so, he's getting chased by a guy with a knife -- it's Busta Rhymes for pete's sake; of course he'd drop tons of F-bombs if you tried to kill him.

So yeah, totally pointless movie. I did, however, like at least the idea of killings caught on camera in a reality TV show. It's got sort of a popcorn snuff thing to it. And Michael Myers is still an effective and terrifying bad guy 6 movies later. There's an awful serenity in every step he takes. Busta Rhymes encapsulated it perfectly in this taut explanation to a gaggle of TV reporters.

"Michael Myers is a killer. That's all."

HA! Just kidding. I left some words out. Here's the whole thing:

"Michael Myers is not a sound bite, a spin-off, a tie-in, some kind of celebrity scandal. Michael Myers is a killer shark in baggy-ass overalls that gets his kicks off of killing everything and everyone that he comes across. That's all."

He's right. Sometimes I think of baggy-ass overalls and my blood turns to ice in my veins.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

(2003) ****

On Thursday I watched the Chainsaw remake and then went out an hour later to catch the Chainsaw prequel.  I am officially burned out on the Mad Hillbilly genre for the rest of the ‘thon.  I just took Wrong Turn, Wolf Creek and the Rob Zombie movies off my Netflix queue.  I can’t take any more road trips gone bad.
 
Remember in 1999 when I said that, just as Empire Strikes Back spawned a tsumani of sequels, Phantom Menace would do the same thing for prequels?  No?  Damn, I should’ve written it down.  Anyway, I’m pretty sure Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the first movie to have a remake AND a prequel made of it, which makes it the vanguard of 21st Century Hollywood.  Of course, the prequel is based on the world of the remake, so it’s kind of like when Doc and Marty have to travel backwards from the parallel world where Biff is rich and has the big casino.  Have I lost you yet?
 
Here’s a comment I made on JPX’s review of this last week:  “I can't tell how I feel about remakes that are good movies but leave one asking why they bothered.  The Dawn remake was great because it added a new spin to the story in a number of ways, remakes like The Omen are horrible and sully the original, American remakes of Japanese horror are clumsy and miss the point but at least the J-horror is getting noticed -- but what about this one? Not good, not bad, not Japanese...I'll be exploring this question after the break.”
 
My answer starts by pointing out this movie has a lot going for it. I think it's a worthy revisit to the story, and that's not such a bad thing. When you think about it, Evil Dead 2 is kinda sorta a remake of the first one. However, I can't deny there is a little bit of an empty feeling left behind in the new Chainsaw's grimy wake. I think Summerisle's tag of "meets but does not exceed expectations" puts it perfectly. It's easy to resent any kind of "update" on a well-liked character. When they tossed in a couple lines to reconcile James Bond's implicit hatred of women, it clearly needed to be done. But it left a whiff of nostalgia for the good old days. So, besides making money, why update TCM? How did they do it?

The main difference I like to characterize as a change of color. I think of the first one as mostly muted green, which I see as the ambient color in the dining room and the feather-strewn parlor, also the interior of the van and the hitchhiker's shirt. It ends red, with the morning sunrise and bloody Sally screaming, but it's grounded in green. The second one is orange. The interior of that cave is bathed in orange, a perfectly lurid hue for that goof-ass late 80's movie. Ignoring the others, the remake's color is squalor. Not a color exactly, but a never-ending presence of dirt and grime that's been a growing vibe in horror since David Fincher's Seven. Look at any Saw poster if you're not sure what I'm talking about. Squalor has been the new black for several years now.



As that would suggest, the TCM remake is indeed a slicker, glossier version of the original. But I think they turned a lot of the right knobs on the equalizer, and they managed to leave the suck knob pretty much alone. Changing the opening hitchhiker encounter to one of the victims, and then having her blow her brains all over the van -- I call that a pretty smart punch.

I liked this batch of characters more than any of the others, including the prequel. I liked the interplay between Jessica Beil and her boyfriend played by Eric Balfour, since it was mostly built on an exchange of looks. Right after he yells out to the unseen presence in the mill, he looks her way and she gives a small nod. Great touch. I also found the character Morgan's encroaching breakdown while Sherriff Hoyt was taunting him very convincing.

And that Sherriff Hoyt, what a bastard! He's another creation of the remake, channelling the partriarchal Cook character from the original, but this time with a badge, a gun, and a big taste for mental and physical sadism. This guy is exactly the kind of character I could find unbearable, and it's a testament to the writers that he's as entertaining as he is. The bullying and mind-fuckery is just the opening act of his sociopathy; he's planning to eat these people. There's a great moment when Pepper, lying face down on the ground with the others on orders from Hoyt, screams "we're gonna die!" and she hasn't even laid eyes on Leatherface yet. Hoyt's craziness is murderous enough. He does, however, get too out of hand for me, and there were times when I was yelling at the kids that, whatever move they try, successful or not, they really, really needed to stop recognizing his authority as a cop.


So they got themselves a slicker, weirder-looking pack of hillbillies. That isn't the real triumph of this movie for me. It's the squalor again, in the way it's presented in the surrounding landscape and in the native's art projects. With the former, you get this feeling that the land around the Hewitt residence is just steeped in the various remains of their victims. Suitcases, shoes, glasses, false teeth -- any of this might at some point crunch underfoot. So too the strange fetish objects of the Hewitt clan litter the grounds: a victim's family photo is found preserved in a liquid-filled mason jar, the Ring kid's got a slew of found-object ensembles in the mill. It's an extension of all the bone sculpture in the original, with the clan spreading their work all around like little voodoo shrines. And when you get to the nucleus of this vast art display -- Leatherface's basement -- the projects are far more direct, containing human fingers, jaws, and everything else. That's always been the focus of the Chainsaw movies, really. The treatment of human bodies as the objects they are, to dice up and reuse the bits. Our insides -- stuff that's never more than a layer of skin away from any of us but might as well be in a different dimension for all we'd like to know -- are just nuts and bolts to the former staff of a slaughterhouse. The desktop surrounding my computer is cluttered with body parts too, except they're all legos.



Another thing I dug about this film is that it's shot amazingly well. Look at these stills. It turns out it's the work of Daniel Pearl, who was the cinematographer on the original movie, which was his first. He also was director of photography on Zapped.


My point? I have no point. Look at the stills. Good stuff.



And speaking of good stuff, I've definitely found my "scream queen" for this year's contest. I've been discussing this with JPX and Summerisle, the founding brothers, and it wasn't much of a surprise that we all agreed: when these reviews were just things we emailed to each other, it was much easier grooving on the nudity. These reviews were always meant to tune each other in to just what you're missing or not missing in a given horror flick, and skin content is an important criterion. For the blog, however, I tend to sneak those facts in as little jokes. No more! This is an adolescent pursuit, after all. And while there's no actual nudity in this movie, as a fan of the feminine form I have to say: Jessica Biel is a hot-tay. Her face is a little odd, but whoever decided to dress her lanky, curvy frame in those jeans and tank top gets a hearty table-pounding from me. She's got a sexy walk, too. I was pretty pleased every time she walked in and out of frame.

So with all this going for it, why the ambivalent feelings about this remake? Well, for all the slickness they throw some tired old horror movie stupidity at us. Nobody in the original movie just sat in the van screaming while a chainsaw came through the roof, and throughout the movie there's a good deal of questionable hiding in enclosed spaces. That's not an update, folks. The other problem is Leatherface, who despite the neato art projects doesn't really come across with much of a personality. It's better than some of his incarnations, so it's not like a mistake's been made -- but he's too clean a slate. It takes the prequel to knock his personality into place. The shot of him without his mask is strange, too. He just takes it off during a moment of repose. As the only time in the whole series where we see his entire face, that was a funny choice.

Okay! In the spirit of freer dialogue, here are the worthy mentions of nudity and general hotness I've left out this year.

Killer Nun: I'mnotMarc was bold enough to point this out. The real killer nun, played by an Italian Playboy Playmate, lotsa naked.

Funhouse: Obligatory Tit Shot of, oddly, the "good" girl of the two women. The same actress would later play Mozart's wife in Amadeus. I'll be using OTS as an acronym from here.

Fear of Clowns: One victim is chased around her house in a towel, then the clown gets the towel. So there's naked, but it's not what I'd call super highly recommended naked. I already covered the shirtless clown.

Forest of the Damned: Well, I did mention this one, but how could I not? The monsters are naked chicks with teeth. That begin the case, there actually could have been a lot more nudity going on. And the two cutest women remain clothed.

Imprint: Hmm, there must have been some nudity in this, right? Prostitutes? I honestly can't remember.

FeardotCom: A video of one of the victims supplies an OTS or three.

Leeches!: I can't really do this honestly without mentioning this one, but the flesh in this movie is all male. No bare butts, but many loving takes on the legs and torsos of tan, muscular guys. If you've got a spouse or girlfriend who likes horror movies except for the universally female skin factor, and you're confident in your masculinity, give her a treat and pop this in. Works for gay men, too. Probably better.

Bloodrayne: Kristanna Loken peels down her bodice and she and a guy have sex standing up with most of their clothes on. Bland as it sounds.

Land of the Dead: There's a stripper in the background somewhere, and Asia Argento in her bra somewhere. This movie's good, though, there's plenty of other reasons to see it.

The Wicker Man: Same with this one, you should just see it. Plenty of skin, though. And there's lots of butt slapping. Stunt ass!

Man, that's it? I haven't been watching enough 70's movies.

The Crawling Hand

(1963) ***



"Have I ever steered you wrong?" - guy who doesn't see the crawling hand sneaking up on him.

After Octopunk's unearthing of this precious artifact last year, I felt I needed to experience this movie "first hand".   (Relax, I just smacked myself in the head.)  When a space mission goes shit-side-up resulting in the self-destruction of the shuttle, a dead astronaut's severed hand makes its way through the earth's atmosphere and lands on a beach.   A young couple who in the midst of a good old frolic (rolling around, laughing about nothing), discovers the hand. The two don't realize that unlike most body parts you'd find on the beach, this one is capable of murder!   The hand proceeds to go on a modest but memorable killing spree.  And that's pretty much it.  The Crawling Hand is every bit as baffling as it sounds, and probably funnier. Made in 1963, this movie wishes it were still the fifties. Whether or not the actors were trying or not is moot - they all fail, one by one.

Aside from a rubber prop that you'd find in CVS, there are no special effects.  Most of the time the illusion of the crawling hand consists of an actor's arm slowly moving towards the victim, with the frame cropped so you're unable to see the body it is attached to.

My wife the scientist had some very serious problems with the hand reaching the earth (let alone people's necks).  According to her, it would have spontaneously combusted in the first fraction of a second it was exposed to outer space.   There's absolutely no way it could have made it through the atmosphere, she added.   I was able to overcome this faux pas but still had a couple of issues of my own.   I guess I felt short-changed because they didn't give us a chance to know the hand, you know - as a being. They didn't spend any time developing its personality or giving a reasonable explanation as to why it felt the need to kill.   Maybe I missed something. 

Leprechaun IV - In Space

(1997) **1/2

My biggest problem with both Leprechaun 2 and 3, wasn't that they weren't scary or that they were cheap and campy, but that they were just really boring. They were trite jokes with stupid punchlines. As the closing credits rolled on Lep3, I contemplated using the month of November to build a time machine so I could go back in time and burn down Ireland before they invented the Leprechaun.

This one wasn't so bad though. Could have been because I wasn't flying solo as I was with Lep2 & Lep3 (I swear to God, though, I am not going to go back and watch either of them with company just to prove a point). Could also have had a lot to do with the shamelessly goofy idea of putting the whole franchise in outer space. Maybe it was that there's a new ghastly beasty our heroes have to contend with, in addition to the Leprechaun: a gigantic Spider/Scorpion/Computer/Austrian that skitters on to the scene 2/3's of the way through the movie -- one observation I've made through this saga is that the Leprechaun is just not a compelling bad guy. I know, duh, right? But seriously, he's far less a terror than an irritation with a deadly weapon. He's sort of like if you gave the kid from Problem Child a machine gun. The last thought in your head would be, "This little shit gets to kill me? I hate you, God."

But all of these, the space, the beasty, the company, probably didn't improve my opinion of this movie nearly as much as the following bit of trivia at the top of the IMDb trivia page for Leprechaun 4.

"The only movie in the series in which the Leprechaun doesn't rhyme."

Oh, thank the shimmering heavens. The rhyming was killing me a piece at a time. It was like if Peter Jackson had made sure, during the writing of the script of Lord of the Rings, to devote tons of screen time to fleshing out the character of Tom Bombadillo, only way worse because at least Tom Bombadillo knew how to write a decent rhyme. None of that here, save for one scene, completely digestible.

Also, oddly, the Leprechaun waits until the last quarter of the movie to even consider the state of his precious gold. The first 3/4s are divided between his ploy to marry an intergalactic princess and become a Space-King, a sidebar Aliens-style action thread, and a thread about turning the princess's blood into a regenerative serum. The latter is the best thing about the movie, mostly because of all of the screen-time devoted to the head-honcho of the spaceship on which Leprechaun 4 is based: a mad scientist whose body is mostly clunky machine after a lab experiment gone awry. His appearances in the first half are entirely via portable video screen.

Two more left to watch. If they're as watchable as this one was, I'll be a happy man. If not, I'm totally putting the time-machine idea into play and post 1300's Ireland can just kiss its ass goodbye.