Category Archives: Horror

Annual Re-watch: The Wicker Man (1973)

 

With the coming of May it is time for me to re-watch one of my favorite horror films 1973’s The Wicker Man. Starring Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee The Wicker Man in so many ways of quintessentially an early 70s film, low budget, stuffed with ideas and deeply cynical. Because I was already comfortably nestled in my overstuffed chair instead of using my Blu-ray edition of the film with the most recent edits and restorations, I watched the version currently available for streaming. This is the abbreviated edit compressing the events into just two days from three and with several scenes deleted.

Scottish West Highland police, and deeply devote Christian, Sergeant Neil Howie (Woodward) arrives by seaplane to the isolated island of Summerisle following am anonymous letter that a young girl has gone missing. The residents lie, misled, and confuse Howie with shifting narrative from there is no such girl to the girl had died. The islanders are also fervently pagan worshipping the old god of pre-Christian Europe offending the pious policeman. Lord Summerisle (Lee), the island’s leader, is convinced that Howie’s suspicions of murder are misplaced as they are a deeply religious people. Convinced the girl’s disappearance is tied to the pagan practices and with his seaplane sabotaged Howie is forced confronts the conspiracy alone in a desperate race again time and the coming May Day celebrations.

The Wicker Man is a unique film, simultaneously inhabiting the genres of folk horror, art house film, and musical while maintaining a consistent tone of dread. The production was troubled and the sale of the studio before completion led the final product being hacked down to 88 minutes without any real regard to story or quality. Over the decades various versions of the film have surfaced and been restored but the original edit has never been found and the original negative are believed destroyed, making The Wicker Man an enduring cinematic myth. Lee long maintained that he loved the script so much he appeared for free and that it was his favorite screen performance. Director Robin Hardy returned to Summerisle decades later for the sequel The Wicker Tree but failed to recapture the glorious magic of early seventies film. 2006 witnessed a remake of the film starring Nicholas Cage as the investigating officer but the sly and subtle conflict of culture theme was replaced with what many consider to be blatant misogyny.

No matter what version you watch The Wicker Man remains one of the most interesting, unique, and enigmatic movies.

The Wicker Man is currently streaming on Shudder and Amazon Prime.

 

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Chekov (Chekhov – corrected) Would Be Very Disappointed

 

I recently watched about a third of a horror movie, Game of Death, currently streaming on Shudder and it is a perfect example of how not to construct a story.

This movie has the very brief running time of a meager 73 minutes. Given such a short length this is the sort of movie that needs to hit the ground already sprinting at full speed perhaps in mid-action with flashback to fill in the audience on how the set-up was established.

But that is not how Game of Death (2017) starts. No, the movie wastes 8 full minutes more than 10 percent of the entire film watching the seven ‘characters’ party at rural home. This extended sequence does very little to reveal character, I honestly couldn’t tell you any of the defining elements of any of their personalities, present no dramatic tension or conflict, and carries no foreshadowing of doom. It is fully wasted time.

Eventually the characters take a break from drugs, swimming, the least erotic sexual scenes I have witnessed in a long time to play the titular board game and get the plot moving. Naturally they do not understand the ‘rules’ of the game and when they fail to make their first kill before the timer expires, a timer I might add that display no countdown so neither the characters nor the audience can judge how dire the situation is, the first of the seven has his head explode. The cast misinterpret this as someone shooting at time and when a neighbor appears concerning about the vast amount of screaming coming from the home. They take him hostage assuming that he was the shooter. To do this one of the guys produces a pistol and I asked the same question the rest of the cast voiced, ‘where did you get that?’ Yup, a gun that proves to be vital as that character, and his terrible trigger discipline, force the others to kill random people to sate the game’s appetite, appears wholly unestablished not even in those wasted 8 minutes from the start.

People do not do this in your films, short stories, or novels. Vital and critical elements of your story must be established before they are employed.

I switched off the movie and removed it from my Shudder queue. There are far too many decent and great films to waste my time watching something this spectacularly bad.

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Streaming Review: A Nordic Nightmare: Koko-Di Koko-Da

 

Of late I have been watching a lot of Nordic Noir television programming with my Sweetie-Wife and then stumbled across this Swedish horror film Koko Di Koko Da. (The nonsense title is a sung refrain from a nursery rhyme.)

Married couple Tobias and Elin, three years after the sudden death of their daughter, camp in an isolated wood trying to repair their relationship. While camping they are besieged by three murderous characters from the nursery rhyme that inspired the film’s title and are killed. The sequence of events repeated in a Groundhog Day style loop with only Tobias remember each repeating cycle.

I am sorry to report that this movie simply did not work for me. There are two major factors why I found this movie unsatisfying.

First off, Tobias is a thoroughly unlikeable character, and his treatment of Elin is abominable. It is clear that she does not want to camp but he ignores her feelings entirely for his own desires. In addition to neglect and thoughtlessness Tobias after he is aware of the time-loop that they character are trapped within more than once abandons Elin even before the murderous characters appear. By the midpoint of the movie, I wanted nothing more than for him to die terribly and for Elin to escape. Mind Elin is not a very pleasant person either but as a character she is far more sympathetic than Tobias.

Secondly, more than once the film shatters its point of view with animated intermissions and unmotivated shifting to another character. I think the filmmakers were going for a more stylized and symbolic approach but instead of crafting emotional responses that created only confusion.

The ending holds no catharsis and no resolution but simply terminates the story without explanation or rhyme or reason. This may work for some but for me it was a disappointment.

Koko-di Koko-da is currently streaming on Shudder.

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Streaming Review: The Howling

 

It has been nearly 40 years since I last watched Joe Dante’s werewolf feature The Howling. My last viewing was either videotape or a pay channel during the early 80s only a few years after the film’s release in 1981. Based upon the novel of the same name Gary Brandner the movie along with An American Werewolf in London, released the same year, presented a radically new approach to werewolves in cinema that The Howling, despite a slew of sequels, failed to make the same level of cultural impact.

The film, departing heavily from the novel, centers on journalist and local news anchor Karen White who survives a traumatizing encounter with serial killer and as part of her therapy, along with her husband Bill, secludes herself at a rural facility known as ‘The Colony,’ administered by notable psychiatrist. While living at The Colony Karen discovers that not of her co-residents are exactly what they appear to be and there may be a connection to the serial killer.

There is a reason why The Howling is not as well known as its sister werewolf film An American Werewolf in London, and that is far fewer interesting things happen in it. This film takes a great deal of time establishing its characters and its environment while providing precious little dramatic tension or conflict. With a brief running time of just 91 minutes, it has little room for leisurely establishment. The cast is good and well positioned, the cinematography has a glow to it that enhances the unnatural world of the colony and the transformations by Rob Bottin are groundbreaking, but the complete package fails to get over the top and aside from an ending sequence that is stellar the film is largely forgettable.

The Howling is not a bad film nor is it a great one but rather exists in that uncomfortable middle ground of being basically serviceable. While it has logic and character motivational problems that are left wholly unresolved or explained its novel approach to the cinematic werewolf makes it worth at least one viewing.

The Howling is currently streaming on Shudder.

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Werewolf Transformations

 

Sunday night I watched The Howling first the first time in decades, long post about that film to come, and it got me thinking about the changing nature of werewolf transformations in cinematic history. My thoughts are guided by the films I have actually seen and should not be construed as an exhaustive study.

1935’s Werewolf of London preceded that other Universal werewolf film by six years. It shares almost none of the mythology that the next film planted solidly into popular thought and in many ways plays more like a retelling of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde. The transformation from man to hybrid wolf and man takes place during subtle cuts. The character passes behind foreground objects such as pillars and emerges partially transformed going through successive stages until fully changed in a werewolf in tails and top hat.

1941 changed werewolves forever with Siodmak’s script for The Wolf Man. This is the film that introduced silver as a werewolf’s bane and many other lasting tropes. Talbot’s transformation, unlike Werewolf of London, happens on-screen by way of lap-dissolves where in succeeding shots, dissolved into each other to create the illusion of a single take, hair and appliances are added to the actor until the change is complete. The process was time consuming and difficult for the actor and never fully convincing but remained the method of onscreen werewolf transformations for the next 40 years.

1981 witnessed the release of two werewolf films, The Howling, with transformation effect by Rob Bottin, and An American Werewolf in London whose transformations were designed and created by Rick Baker, both men would go on to produce some of the most legendary make-up effects in the last sixty years.

Both men utilized bladders, puppets, and vanguard make-up techniques and appliances to create on-stage, in-camera, transformations that had never been seen before. Audiences watched as body parts swelled, extended, pushed out from human to wolf proportions, in elaborate and minute detail. However, it was Baker’s An American Werewolf in London that changed the paradigm not only for film but for literary werewolves.

While both transformations achieve similar on-screen effects, Baker’s imbued the changes with bone cracking agony for the tragic character afflicted by this curse. David’s first and most elaborate transformation in the film is a grueling, painful, and terrifying ordeal because nothing about it appears even remotely tolerable. He suffers, and the audience along with him, through every moment of the change.

And just like that the agony of transformation became canon. To this day I read werewolf stories where the author takes the time to describe the breaking and reforming of bones and he painful shift from human to wolf. Authors I am sure that have never seen An American Werewolf in London follow the template that Rick baker laid out 40 years earlier.

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Me and Movies Theaters When I was Young

 

For some inexplicable reason lately, I have been thinking about the movies theaters I frequented when I was a tween and a teenager.

Until about age of 10 I lived in rural North Carolina and my only solid memories of going to the movies were drive-in theaters with big bags of homemade popcorn and gloriously colorful Hammer horror.

After my father passed away, we move to Ft. Pierce Florida and soon started going to the theaters there.

The Sunrise Theater was just over two miles from my home on 32nd St and I walked the distance to see their presentations. The Sunrise was a single screen theater and the place I went to the most for my movie fix. I remember a number of fun Saturdays watching films like Escape from the Planet of the Apes, Race with the Devil, and The Towering Inferno in that darkened air-condition space.

Ft Pierce did have a multi-screen theater I seem the remember the name being the Village Twin, but I could be wrong about the name. It was just over three and half miles from my home and I also walked and sometimes biked to that theater for movies. It was there that I saw Jaws, Superman: The Movie, and Alien. I still have quite vivid memories of speeding home from Superman pumping the peddles hard with Willams’ iconic score playing in my head.

The final place to see movies in Ft. Pierce was our drive-in theater but as we had no family car, my mother did not drive, I only saw one film there. A Movie I was so desperate to see that I went on my bicycle to a drive-in, Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.

Movies have always been and always will be a major element of my life.

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Ghost Stories and Mysteries: Minefields of Exposition

 

All stories require exposition. From romances set in the modern day to period pieces, fantasies, and science-fiction all tales require a level of explanation about the characters and how their lives and histories intersect with the larger world around them, but ghost stories and mysteries raise the bar for the writer in both the amount of exposition required and the skill to deploy it in a satisfying manner.

Ghost stories often turn on a mystery, why there this ghost, what events created it and what is needed for the restless dead to finally rest. In that way a ghost story is an often, but not always, a mystery where the dead actively participate. Mysteries are built upon the fact that there is hidden knowledge that will be revealed and its revelation with illuminate both plot and character in a satisfying way.

For both types of stories, the exposition usually arrives late, near the end, when the final pieces are slotted into place and the truth is finally uncovered. This is the moment of greatest danger for the writer.

It’s very tempting and trap to have one character deliver the exposition in a massive info dump laying out all the particulars of the plot and how the various elements interlock creating the narrative. If managed skillfully and with dramatic tension still alive, look to Knives Out for a fine example of this performed masterfully both in the writing and by the actors, the reveal can be exciting and dramatic. Done badly and it’s a boring scene with usually one actor forced to attempt to salvage the story by eating the scenery.

This week I watched The Nesting, a title which makes no sense whatsoever, a horror movie and Gloria Grahame’s final film performance, about an agoraphobic woman and her experiences in a haunted house. The core story and set up are perfectly serviceable but when it comes time to deliver the expositions we are treated to John Carradine, sadly far past his prime, attempting to deliver a clunky info dump as his character dies. The film was hardly working before and this badling worked exposition killed what little life remained.

If you are writing a ghost story or mystery, take particular care around the final exposition, remember that a scene, including expository ones, require tension derived from a character trying to achieve something and facing obstacles in that pursuit.

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Incomplete Observations on Vampyres (1974)

 

Among the curated horror movies currently available on SHUDDER is the mid-70s ‘erotic’ (read, naked women) horror flick Vampyres.

Hailing from the UK, Vampyres centers on a pair of lesbian vampires living in a dilapidated country manor, the same used for the exterior shots of The Rocky Horror Picture Show and many Hammer productions, where, with carnal seduction, they lure unsuspecting victims.

One weeknight after I have finished my writing for the evening, I usually like to relax by watching videos before bed and I have watched at least the first act of Vampyres and witnessed perhaps the worst serious sex scene committed to celluloid. I literally laughed out loud when the couple began ‘making out’ because it looked so clumsy, so fumbling that I was immediately remined of the comedic version of the scene in Syfy’s series Resident Alien, and yet this was supposed to be titillating rather than laughable.

What is crystal clear is that the film has no characters. Oh, actors come in, deliver lines, and fumble at each other nude bodies, they do not portray any sort of actual person. “Ted” in the first act picks up one of the vampires, Fran, while she pretends to be hitchhiking. We are supposed to believe that she seduces him but without any convincing dialog it’s just two people who decide to go to her house and screw. Ted has no motivation beyond his supposed attraction to Fran. He wasn’t coming from anywhere, or going to any place on his drive, he exists only to have scenes with a vampire. Scene after scene is devoid of any motivation on the character’s part. People do things to achieve goal that serve their needs the exterior reflecting the interior here they just get wine glasses, drink, and screw without anything beyond the walls of the set existing.

I can see why I have never heard of this movie.

 

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A Harebrained Film: Night of the Lepus

 

A dozen years after the release of her cinematically legendary showers sequence and eight years before she would appear with her daughter Jamie Lee Curtis in John Carpenter’s

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atmospheric horror film The Fog, Janet Leigh, along with DeForest Kelley three years after Star Trek grounded, starred in a most unusual SF horror movie 1972’s Night of the Lepus.

Adapted from the satirical SF novel The Year of the Angry Rabbit by Russell Braddon, NOTL’s central conceit is the Arizona countryside suffering nocturnal assaults from mutated giant rabbits.

The film attempts and fails to build credibility for its premise by opening with a faux newscaster intoning seriously about rabbits upsetting the delicate ecological balance in Australia after their introduction to that continent. From there the story moves to Arizona where rancher Hillman is dealing with a rabbit infestation of his own. Rather than deploy harsh poisons to deal with the pests his friend Clark (DeForest Kelley) at the university puts him in contact with a husband/wife team of scientists Roy and Gerry Bennett (Gerry Bennett played by Janet Leigh.) The pair decide that using hormones to make ‘boy rabbits act more like girl rabbits’ is the solution to Hillman’s troubles and begin experimentation on rabbits captured from the ranch. The filmmakers use the Bennett’s young daughter both as clumsy exposition, ‘Mommy what is a control group?’ and the method by which a rabbit already mutated by the artificial is released into the wild to infect the ranch’s rouge population. And yes, the film tries to force the idea that hormonally changing one rabbit somehow infects other without the use of a bacteria or virus. Despite the EPA having been established two years earlier the scientific pair also have no hesitation in developing and deploying an unknown effect into the ecology without significant testing as their timeline from concept to eradication was mere weeks.

The greatest hurdle the filmmakers failed to clear isn’t the lack of character arcs or scientific illiteracy but rather no amount of slow-motion photography on miniature sets and even with fake blood smeared on their snouts, rabbits cannot look credibly frightening. Rabbits as a violent lethal threat belongs solely to the domain of British farce and not in the dying giant animal genre.

I found Night of the Lepus streaming for free on a Roku channel, but they interrupted the movie every ten minutes for a block of five commercials. even minus those interruptions except for comedic entertainment I could not recommend this strange unique movie.

 

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Horror Review: Thirst (1979)

 

As part of the Ozploitation cycle of cinema 1979’s Thirst is low on budget but big on concept.

The film centers on Kate Davis (Chantal Contouri) a successful businesswoman about of take a several week vacation but instead is kidnapped by a mysterious cult-like organization, The Brotherhood, taking advantage of her expected absence to indoctrinate her into their lifestyle of modern vampirism.

The Brotherhood is riven by factions, all who wants Kate to fully embrace their lifestyles, but who differ in what methods that consider acceptable with Dr. Fraser (David Hemmings) more reverential of Kate’s ancestry while Dr Gauss (Henry Silva) and others are willing to using dangerous conditioning methods even if Kate’s sanity shatters.

Directed by Rod Hardy and photographed by Vince Morton Thirstis competently made and achieves quite a bit on tis limited budgets. It never answers the question of The Brotherhood are gaining actual benefits from their dietary choices or if they are simply mad as such considerations are actual incidental to the thrust of the story and Kate’s struggle to retain her agency and identity. It is a pleasure that unlike several other films of the cycle there was no attempt to disguise the characters or the setting as American but instead the film is presented as natively Australian.

With an extended dream/nightmare sequence dominating the film’s second act Thirst is not a horror movie that relies upon ‘kills’ or ‘jump scare’ to provoke a reaction from its audience. Its sedate pace and its emphasis psychological threats over physical ones means it is not a film for everyone but its thematic treatment of industrialization and the wealthy literally cannibalizing the lower classes make this a very interesting movie that will have strong appeal to some.

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