Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers

(1995) **1/2

I recall seeing this with JPX when it first came out and thinking it was the worst movie ever. It was the first Michael Myers movie I viewed since #2, so rather suddenly I was thrown in with Michael’s niece, Celtic baby rituals and some guy in a black hat. I wasn’t feeling very charitable towards the doddering Donald Pleasance, either. So I was mildly surprised when I threw this in and it wasn’t quite that bad. It wasn’t particularly good, mind you, but certainly not the wandering mishmash I remembered.

We open with a rather painfully long scene of Jamie Lloyd giving birth. Seems she’s been a captive of the group led by the black-clad mystery man from #5, a group that finally fleshes out the Celtic/Samhain/Halloween presence hinted at since #2. They employ Michael as sort of a free-lance security guard, and when Jamie escapes with her baby he takes off after her. I would’ve liked to see Danielle Harris reprise her Jamie role, but it’s just as well she didn’t do it since Michael impales her quickly. I suspect that would have honked me off.

(If they’d just let him kill her in #4 or #5, would he have stopped since he has no blood relatives left? I mean, do the math, people.)

Then we’re back in Haddonfield, where Tommy Doyle (the babysat kid from the first movie, played by the likeable Paul Rudd) lives across from the old Myers house, recently occupied by the relatives of Laurie’s adoptive Strode family. This includes unbelievable Asshole Dad and the actual mom from Better Off Dead, hee hee. She doesn’t serve any Frahnch fries, though. We get the basic “don’t get killed” plot along with a “keep the baby safe” plot, and a more subdued Loomis is on the scene. This time around I liked him a lot more; I thought the beard suited him. There is one line of his I remembered griping about in ’95. I think he says “do you mean to say—“ (that Jamie had a baby), but it sounds like a gout of escaping wheezy air instead of speech. Eh, he was old.

This was the third movie I watched over the weekend that featured uncontrollable minions. The Phantasm balls, the Jason hands from Hell, and this time Michael himself: as the Celtic cabal is prepping for whatever it is they do, he walks in and whacks the lot of them. Suckers!

There was only one scene in this movie that maintained its flagrant stupidity from my viewing of it ten years ago. Michael stuffs one of his kills in a tree, and the discovery happens when a little girl spends two whole minutes saying “Mommy, it’s raining red” without 1)looking up, or 2)knowing what blood looks like. I suppose that’s a decent conclusion for this review: this movie won’t piss you off too much.

New Nightmare

(1994) ****1/2

Wow. After a trio of really mediocre movies, Wes Craven returns to the helm and shows us that the Kreuger/Craven team is totally money, yo. This might have been the first time I've watched this movie from beginning to end, and I was impressed. Damn impressed.

Wes obviously thought really hard about how to make the character interesting again, and he came up with a doozy of an idea. Well, actually it was the same idea, just moved to a new place: here. Starring as themselves are the key players of the (good) Elm Street flicks, and Craven too, trying to come to grips with the strange emergence of a new, darker Freddy who is crawling out of their nightmares.

One feature that makes this work is the balls-out level of the self reference, which crescendos with a closeup of the script Craven's writing. It's the script for the very movie you're watching, and it reads "close-up on computer screen, fade to black" and then fades to black. This is a level of meta-ness that will make you dizzy, and it's deployed with skill (and much more smoothly than the similar bag of tricks used in Scream).

A wonderful feeling of dread settles over the sunny LA setting. Freddy's manipulations run concurrent with a series of earthquakes, putting everyone on edge. After the first major death (Heather Langenkamp's husband - gutsy move), her young son carries the bulk of the encroaching fear as he tells how "the mean man" is trying to climb up to the foot of his bed every night. The wrong kid can sink any movie, but this kid pulls it off amazingly. The moment I realized how well it had come together was when Heather asked him where he learned the Freddy chant, and he says "little kids singing...under my covers." Atchi matchi, it's giving me the willies right now.

Despite all that good stuff, the best thing about this flick is Freddy. When Heather is telling Robert Englund about her nightmares, he asks "is it me?" She says "no, darker" and she's right. There's a slight makeover: the claw is now part of Freddy's hand, his face is more skull-like, and he's sporting a long black coat that really makes him seem like a creature of shadow. More than his new looks, he works a menacing presence that reminds you of his scariest moments. He ain't funny this time, he's a creature made of fear. Literally.

As Horrorthon fare goes, this is a pretty rich movie, full of clever commentary about our country's often bizarre relationship to our fiction. But at its heart, like the best horror flicks, it's about what scares us.

Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday

(1993) **

Sigh. This one is stupid down to its very roots. It starts with a deceptively promising opening, as the scantily-clad girl dashes out of the house at the first sign of trouble (smart) and flees into the woods, Jason stalking behind her, sporting his new "rutabaga head" look. Suddenly the big man's surrounded by spotlights and a SWAT team is peppering him with bullets. Turns out she was a scantily-clad agent, ha ha, and we're finally seeing the authorities muster the right response -- the one we've been waiting to see for years. They blow him to bits and then it's off to the morgue and cinematic suckery.

Just after the coroner discovers that Jason's heart is filled with some unknown black liquid, the heart starts beating. Naturally, the coroner grabs it and starts greedily devouring it like a tar-filled calzone. Then all these orange lights swarm out of the Jason parts and go into the coroner. Get it? He's being possessed. Wow, gosh, jeez, thud.

In principle, I'm not against the "disembodied killer that possesses people" idea. I haven't seen Fallen, but the same premise is done really well in both The Hidden and Shocker (oh wait a second, Shocker sucked). But this is a Jason movie, dammit; didn't they learn their lesson with #5? Even if I got an iota of fun out of seeing Jason's murderous glare coming from regular, unmasked people, I want the mask, dude!

Unfortunately, ripping off The Hidden is only part of the game, as they open up new story ideas that amount to a huuuge pile of horse hocky. This is all thanks to a foolish, instantly-unlikeable bounty hunter played by the captain from 21 Jump Street. He's supposed to be the movie's tough guy, but I hated every moment of his screen time. For some reason he's the only one who knows that Jason can only be killed by a blood relative, and only with a special dagger that this dude happens to have on him. Apparently someone decided, at this very late stage, that they weren't ripping off Halloween enough. So here's Jason's sister and niece, and here's the Voorhees house!

In the end, Jason's host body totally craps out and he emerges as a little demon puppet (if they were smart, it'd have a face like a hockey mask). Instead of putting a bucket over it, our hero (the guy from Friday the 13th TV series) drops it like a spooked housewife and Jason manages to use his sister's corpse to rebirth himself. You heard me. When the kill stroke finally happens, big muppety arms come out of the ground and pull Jason down. They try to inject some drama by having the arms nearly pull TV series guy down, too (I guess Hell has the same safety standards as the Tall Man), but I was just laughing at the arms.

In the end Freddy's hand reaches out of the dirt and grabs the hockey mask. Whatever. I say skip this clunker.

The Mummy

(1959) ***1/2

The Mummy has always been the poor man's classic monster. Menacing, I suppose, but just never able to compete with Draculas's focused intensity or Frankenstein's freakish size and strength. Even the self-loathing Wolfman would not likely opt to trade places. To top it off, the name itself sounds dangerously close to "mommy". The original Mummy movies from the 30's are harmless fun, but mostly just laughable. The Boris Karloff incarnation would wreak a fair amount of havoc, but he wasn't capable of mustering up a sense of intimidation. He hobbled through his reign of terror looking like a mortally wounded patient on the run from a nursing home.

Recent years have not been kind either. The Mummy sat on the bench while the Frankenstein monster was brought back to life by Deniro, the Wolfman by Nicholson, and vampires by Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt. I won't get into the recent Mummy endeavors but it looked like the character tried to find relevance by switching genres entirely. Brendan Fraser? The Rock's head on a scorpion's body? What the hell was that? BRENDAN FRASER?!

So it's a relief to know that there is a great Mummy movie out there and that movie is Hammer's 1959 rendition. The story stays the same. A group of archaelogists defy local warnings and remove the ancient Princess Ananka from her tomb to display her to the world. The ancient spirit of Kharis is brought back to life to seek revenge on those who intruded. While the Mummy picks off the infidels one at a time, the tortured backstory of Kharis is slowly revealed. Christopher Lee showcases his horror range and takes the character to new depths, both as the young Kharis and the monster it has become. Peter Cushing plays the last survivor of the expedition and the two of them go at it. No love loss there, Lee and Cushing faced off countless times over the years. The feud continued even after Cushing's death when Lee moved in on his Star Wars turf. Someday soon they'll be duking it out in Hell. Excuse me, I have something in my eye.

Dominique is Dead

(1979)**1/2

David wants his wife Dominique dead. Instead of just offing her in the usual manner, he decides to slowly drive her insane. By playing mind games with her (e.g., hanging a “corpse” in the den, scary sounds, etc) he achieves this goal fairly easily. Convinced that she is going crazy, Dominique kills herself. However, the tables are soon turned as Dominique haunts David; or is he just going insane himself?

Not bad for a .50-cent film picked up in the supermarket on an impulse buy. Although I didn’t predict the ending, I’m assuming that most will. Still, this low-budget effort is just gripping enough to warrant a viewing if you’ve run out of other things to watch. One thing I love about 70s horror is that reputable actors were cast in these films, lending some credibility and respect to the genre. Here we get Cliff Robertson and Jean Simmons. I know, I know, those names aren’t too familiar to you, but when you see them you’ll say, ‘Oh yeah, I recognize them’. Certain trends emerge when you watch as many horror films as we do. We’ve spoken about the awful humor of 80s horror, yet we haven’t really discussed the age sea change. Up through the 70s the casts of horror films were, for the most part, older and more distinguished. During the 80s reputable people shied away from the genre and studio heads became bent on casting younger actors and actresses. From a business perspective this would seem to make sense. After all in the end films are ultimately just a business and horror films typically court the youth market. Unfortunately this means that we get idiots like the Smallville guy starring in The Fog. The best horror films in the past decade have had older casts with better actors and actresses. Look no further than The Ring, The Others, and Frailty to see my point. Ultimately older and better casts make even weak horror efforts more tolerable. Dominique is Dead is not a good film, yet it's made more tolerable, and dare I say more respectable, because of the cast.

Matango: Attack of the Mushroom People

(1963) ***

I was drawn to this film as I had a similar experience at a Phish show a few years back. A group of seven set out to sea to escape the hustle and bustle of city life. The group consists of a writer, a professor, a student, a couple of sailors, a movie star, and another woman who isn't a movie star. Let's just call her Marianne. One inevitable severe storm later, the crew are shipwrecked on a desert island. Unfortunately the island is not as user-friendly as Gilligan's. The only potential sustenance is a meager supply of turtle eggs, some roots and an abundance of giant mushrooms. When they peruse the log of another abandoned ship that washed ashore, they learn that the island was once used to study expermental radiation. Every member of that crew who set out to find food never returned. The log also warned not to snack on the local mushrooms or else you run the risk of mutating into some sort of half human/half mushroom person. Eventually one crew member succumbs to temptation and it all culminates in good old fashioned bugout.

Toho Studios (famous for the Godzilla flicks) delivers what is promised in the title and I must say I took quite a shine to the look of the mushroom people. The story drags for a while (including a love triangle subplot that took precious time away from the mushrooms) but all is forgiven in the grand finale.

Phantasm II

(1988) ***1/2

Man, I really overestimated the amount of flicks I was going to cover. I wanted to get to the remaining Hellraisers, Phantasms, and also Army of Darkness. I ditched the Child's Play movies altogether. However, having some rare access to a VHS player, I couldn't resist packing Phantasm II into the home stretch.

The second outing doesn't have as much of the whacko charm of the first one, but it's the same uniquely-flavored whacko charm. The movie opens with the end of the first, except we get to see what happened next. This is courtesy of footage I assume they shot in 1979 but didn't use (yay!). Then we see Mike all grown up, lying his way out of the asylum he's been stuck in since he related the story we just saw. Mike has gone from skinny kid with 70's hair to James LeGros, who kinda Melrose-Places up the movie a bit with his hunky good looks, but that's fine. Reggie returns to drive Mike home, and with him returns the "get things done" attitude I was so jazzed by in the first flick. In F13 #5 they gave fake Jason the high body count by introducing characters and instantly whacking them; here we don't even see the characters. Reggie spouts off all the people waiting at home to see Mike: "Aunt Martha's coming, my daughter can't wait to meet you," etc. -- and then through the windshield we see his house blow up.

Two minutes later and the movie is where it belongs: reckless gun use and muscle cars. Mike and Reggie pursue the Tall Man, whose corpse-enslaving repertoire has expanded to wiping out small towns. They grab some girls and soon we're fighting creepy morticians, enraged jawas and flying death balls. (About those things: ever notice how they don't discriminate between intruders and the evil staff? No OSHA on the Tall Man's world.)

The mystery dynamics of the Phantasm universe are such that it's easy to accept every whackadoo thing they throw at us, like the weird claw that pops out of the Tall Man's head at one point. I admit I made a little "hmm?" noise when he uses telekenesis to hang the priest with his own rosary, but he caps off the scene by saying "You think you go to Heaven when you die? You come to us!" I thought Yowza, that's right. Whatever the Tall Man's strange origins are, they do involve enslaving the dead. Is he a sci-fi type threat or a supernatural one? To its credit, the movie doesn't tell us.

This is a worthy successor, displaying the same creepy, gory fun as the original. Recommended.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

(1976) ****1/2

(In preparation for this review, I watched both the original Don Siegel version and this one, consecutively. I maybe could have squeezed two reviews out of this, and looking at the scoreboard, I could certainly have used the other one, but onward.)

The basic nuts and bolts of the two movies are the same: duplicate humans, sprouting from enormous seed-pods, replace our loved ones, copying their mannerisms and their memories down to the very finest detail, but with no emotional edge whatsoever. These newer vege-humans are detached and logical --- frictionless and free from sensitivity. Comparing the '56 and '78 versions won't be at all fair to the original, which is simpler fare for a simpler time. The '78 version is grimmer and meaner. The cinematography, writing, and acting are all far more polished, two decades later. This is all to be expected: social thought became more sophisticated, so our movies had to as well. So no more picking on the '56 version, which did the best it could.

Things that make the flick tick:

1 - Big-city setting -- Gutsy move placing this story in the middle of San Francisco. I always get a kick out of recognizing my haunts onscreen. But a bigger setting means an inability to hide behind dialogue. Who needs a 10 minute description of how awful it would be to see these meta-humans shuffling lifelessly down Market Street when we can see it for ourselves? Also, the SF setting makes for some outstanding establishing shots, including one pearl of a shot of a thin mist passing over the Transamerica building. I don't think I've ever seen SF look so gorgeous on film, nor so stark or imposing.

2 - Music -- It's odd how effective the Moog-synth sound is here. It sounds crappy and dated in the contemporary music of the time. Here though, it sounds just the way it's supposed to sound: weird.

3 - Leonard Nimoy, bitches -- In an age of extreme anxiety, in which psychological problems weren't treated with namby-pamby sensitivity, but rather carved like a pumpkin with the knife of cold logic, is there anyone in the entire world that would have made a better choice for the role of the psychologist than Mr. Logic himself, Spock? He's made a career out of just being smart and his arguments here are so clear and earnest. His central argument to his co-stars is pretty much, "the reason you're freaking out right now is because you're silly and human, so just calm down and be rational." This concept in psychology was overwhelmingly popular in the 70's --- the reason you're unhappy is because of this thing, this thing, and this thing, and if you'd just calm down and see that, you'd be happy. And it's one of the most remarkable mechanisms of the script that this is the *exact* point of view of the invading organisms. There's genuine relief when our cadre of stars finally convinces Nimoy that they aren't deluded. And that this scene is immediately followed by the revelation that Nimoy is, in fact, already one of the vege-men, is one of the most delightfully shocking moments in the script (which I've now ruined for you by not putting a spoiler warning beforehand -- sorry).

Other points to note: *Great* lighting, especially in the chase scene at the pier; Jeff Goldblum at his most Jeff Goldblumy; yes, that's Robert Duvall as the priest on the swingset; the shot of the vege-man, pressed against the pebbled glass in the Public Health building as Brooke Adams and Donald Sutherland walk by gave me a huge jolt -- and this movie is full of huge jolts; did we really need to watch Veronica Cartwright massage oil into that big fat belly for so long? Yes, we really did.

An outstanding film on all levels.

Friday the 13th Part 3: 3D

(1982) Film *** Film experience in actual 3D **

Octopunk has been doing a bang-up job covering the Friday the 13th series and he already covered this film earlier in the Horrorthon (see below). I managed to catch a midnight showing of this film in Boston with 3D glasses, a barrel of popcorn, and Summerisle. What should’ve been the culmination of all our horror movie wet dreams was somewhat marred by the twofold detriment of having a projectionist who repeatedly screwed up the film and a morbidly obese twenty-something who sat behind us insisting on making “pithy” comments throughout the ENTIRE film. You know the guy I’m talking about. He’s that guy who believes he’s really funny but in the end he’s about as funny as a fart in an elevator. For example, in one scene a man is in a convenience store holding a jar of peanuts. Mr. Fat Fuck Funny yelled out, “He’s nuts!” Now you might be asking yourself, ‘Why didn’t you tell Fatty Arbuckle to shut the hell up?’ The main reason is because for some ungodly reason the audience kept laughing at everything he said, fueling his desire to continue his running MST3K commentary. Sigh. The other problem is that the projectionist kept screwing around with the duel projection system so that only the middle third of the film worked in 3D. When it worked, it was a lot of fun. However, most of the time the glasses didn’t make any difference whatsoever and we were seeing double. Sigh. I must remind myself that there’s a reason I don’t really enjoy going to the movies too much anymore. I don’t care if I’m labeled a cranky old man.

Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist

(2005)**1/2

This is the Exorcist film that was never released theatrically because the studio heads deemed it too slow for audiences expecting to see projectile vomiting and heads spinning around. After shelving this effort, it was remade into “Exorcist: The Beginning” (reviewed below).

In this initial effort, Father Merrin experiences a crisis of faith at the hands of the Nazis. After giving up the collar, he heads to East Africa where he joins an archeological dig that has discovered a Byzantine church buried and completely preserved. Learning too late that the church was built on top of ancient crypt where satanic rituals were practiced, Merrin unleashes a demon that immediately takes possession of a local peasant.

Brimming with theological discussions and ultimately lacking much in the way of gore or even true scares, the studio heads were on to something when they prevented Dominion’s release. If you’ve seen “Exorcist: The Beginning” already, than you’ll have a sense of déjà vu as you work through Dominion. Many of the actors are the same and some of the sequences, particularly a brutal scene involving Nazis, are almost note for note. There’s nothing wrong with creating a cerebral film, however, by inserting the word “Exorcist” in your title, you’re inviting trouble if you don’t deliver on the frights. Dominion was merely okay and probably would’ve been more interesting if it hadn’t been marketed as an “Exorcist” film. By asking timeless and provocative questions (e.g., why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?), this story might have fared better if it had been released as a stand-alone film without the pressure of shouldering the Exorcist name.

Carnage

(1972) **

Carnage starts in the past. A newlywed couple is shown standing in a romantic embrace with wedding music playing on the phonograph. Slowly, the groom reaches into a drawer, pulls out a gun, and blows his beloved’s head off. He then turns the gun onto himself. We later learn that this was a suicide pact because the bride was terminally ill or something like that. Fast forward to the (1972) future. A newlywed couple moves into the very same home, which is now apparently haunted by the ghosts of the first newlywed couple. When kitchen appliances start to do weird things, the couple slowly realizes that the house does not want them to live there.

So I watched this thinking that it sounded like an Amityville Horror kind of thing. The problem is that for the most part the “evil” house is merely an annoying house rather than really evil. In one scene the bride wants to write something down on a piece of paper. The house, apparently sensing her desire, hides the pad of paper she wanted to use! In another scene the bride is speaking to her father on the telephone and needs to do something in the kitchen for a moment. She tells her father to wait and she’ll be right back. As she goes into the kitchen, the house hangs up the phone! This isn’t a scary house at all; it’s a house that thinks it’s funny when it’s not. Okay eventually the house actually does a few lethal things, but for most of the film it just inconveniences its inhabitants. It’s never made clear why the suicide newlyweds don’t want anyone else living in their home, I mean, why would they care? With occasional sprinkles of graphic gore, Carnage definitely falls into the so-bad-it’s-fun category.