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Co-written and produced by horror icon Dario Argento The Church was originally slated to be part of his Demons franchise, but the director wanted it to be more of a standalone project and elements tying to the earlier films were excised from the script.

ADC

A new librarian comes of a German cathedral built on the site of a massacre of witches with the mass grave beneath to the building and along with an artist restoring artwork with the church stumble upon its ancient secrets releasing the evil it has suppressed.

Despite the re-write at the insistence of director Michele Soavi The Church bears many of the hallmarks of an Argento story. Events follow one another in a sequence but there is actually little cause and effect to the unfolding story creating the sense that things ‘just happen.’ It takes the movie quite a while to get going with much of the front half a dreary slog that neither establishes mood no explores or illuminates character. The second half is a succession of lesser characters facing and dying in strange and inexplicable manners as the evil forces from beneath the church grow.

The Church, for a religiously themed horror, lacks any real sense of morality or even message. The massacre in the opening makes the knights seem quite sadistic and evil but the power from the witches is equally brutal without cause or reason. In this manner the movie much like Argento’s work in general, set-up for elaborate ‘kills’ but lacking in a cohesive plot or narrative.

I have yet to find an Argento guided project that really works for me and The Church is simply another piece that mostly bored me.

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In 1968 when George A. Romero released the extinction level event movie Night of the Living Dead and altered the cinematic landscape forever an editing mistake when the titles were changed dropped the film into the public domain robbing him of his justified rewards for such an original creation.

21st Century Film Corporation

In the late 80s, working with his original producer John Russo and his talented make-up special effects artist Tom Savini he produced a remake of the film in hopes of pulling the original back into copyright. Romero failed to achieve his legal goal but did release in 1990 the newly envisioned Night of the Living Dead.

The bones of the original are the bones of the remake. A disparate collection of characters take refuge in an isolated farmhouse as a mass of undead reanimated corpses lay siege seeking to devour their living flesh.

Led by Patricia Tallman as Barbara and Tony Todd as Ben the plot and for all intents and purposes the characters are the same as the ’68 version. Mr. Cooper remains the principal human antagonist with his wife Helen more of a placeholder than a character and their injured daughter Sarah the ticking undead bomb within the building. Tommy and Judy, the young couple caught in the disaster have a little more to do this time around, though Judy’s (Katie Finneran) high pitched screams grew tiresome quite quickly and she was unconvincing as someone who supposedly knew their way around a truck and its operation.

Patricia Tallman’s Barbara unlike the progenitor character is not a woman incapacitated with grief and trauma but rather, once she recovers from the shock and horror of the events, the voice of reason and rationality as the men bicker, fighter, and lose their sense of proportion and objective with their overly emotional manner.

The most irritating aspect of this film was not the lackluster cast, excepting Tallman and Todd, but rather the unmotivated and pointless repeated fade to black between shots.

Film has a grammar. Dissolving between shots shows an intense connection between the subject of the two shots. Hence when Vader and Luke are communicating telepathically in The Empire Strikes Back fast dissolves indicate that for these two it is as if the space in between doesn’t exist. Fading to black at the end of a shot is most often used to denote a passage of time. It can be minutes, hours, days, years, centuries are any appreciable jump in time for the story. In the 1990Night of the Living Dead someone, either director Tom Savini or editor Tom Dubensky decided fade to black between shots when no change in time had passed. Barbara stays downstairs, Ben goes up to search. Fade to black. Fade up on Ben reaching the top of the stairs. That should have been a straight cut to not a fade. The first time it happened I thought that they were forced into by having missing coverage that would have made the edit jumpy and abrupt, but it was a stylistic choice that persisted throughout the film and proved to be a great irritation.

The 1990 version modifies the ending significantly and proposes a different theme than the original. Overall, the film is effective if flawed but frankly the original is the version to watch.

Toho Studios

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Toho studios celebrated 30 years of the King of the Monsters, Godzilla, in 1984 with The Return of Godzilla. A re-edited version with clumsy inserted scene featuring Raymond Burr, much like how the original was treated, was released in the US the next year as Godzilla 1985.

Eschewing all of the continuity since 1954 Godzilla Returns places itself as the direct sequel to the original film with the kaiju once again raising from the seas and raining disaster upon Japan.

As is typical of this eras approach to the franchise the human story, one of dedicated military men, scientist, lost and found relatives, all are secondary to the spectacle of the massive monster trashing urban Japan. One does not watch these movies for deep exploration of the human condition and soul. (That you will find excellently done in Godzilla minus one.)

I watched Godzilla 1985 on its theatrical run, enjoyed it, but there little doubt that the inserted American scenes detract from the film and it is best to watch the original version with its original dialog track.

The Return of Godzilla is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

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I had originally planned to watch and comment on Cronos (1992) the first feature film from Guillermo del Toro, and I may still but when I attempted to watch it, I grew quite tired and far too exhausted for a foreign language film. Instead, I will contrast and compare the two versions of Dawn of the Dead the original from 1979 and the remake from 2004.

Both film deal with the world crashing into chaos with the now cliche ‘Zombie Apocalypse.’ The ’79 is a continuation of the plague that began with Night of the Living Dead while the ’04 goes from initial outbreak to societal collapse in the film’s opening minutes.

Laurel Group

Written and Directed by George A. Romero, the ’79 is at its heart a social satire and commentary on consumerism. The four principal characters are all people who have abandoned their greater duties to society for their own self-preservation and when flung by the zombie hordes into the outskirts of suburbia take refuge in an abandoned indoor mall.

Universal Pictures

Written by Guardians of the Galaxy fame James Gunn and directed by Zack Snyder the ’04 remake eschews the social commentary and satire for frenetic speed and a tale of pure survival. The characters, a much larger and more diverse collection, are simply the random survivors that have happened to have congregated at the shopping mall without the location providing any addition observation on humanity. The film has a few nods to the original that it drew its inspiration from, visual effects allowed Snyder to bring in the ‘copter that the original character fled with and Ken Foree from the ’70 makes a cameo appearance and restates one of his character’s lines from that groundbreaking film.

The ’79 while bleak in it ending presented the audience with at least the possibility that some of the characters may have found a sanctuary thew ’04 with its end-credit sequence eliminates any such ‘happy ending.’

I watched both films on their original release, the ’79 at a local drive-in theater and the ’04 at a mall’s multiplex. Both films grace my physical media collection but without a doubt it is the ’79 that is more often pulled from the shelves in played.

Gunn’s script is perfectly serviceable but lacks not only deeper meaning or theme but also Gunn’s eclectic and entertaining humor. Snyder’s direction is faster and better suited to modern audiences but lack the sly irony that Romero snuck into most of his movies.

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This spooky Season I think I will attempt to alternate between media I have already seen and enjoyed with pieces that are new to me and one I had not seen before is 2021’s Werewolves Within, a horror/comedy.

IFC Films

Finn Wheeler (Sam Richardson) a U.S. Forest Ranger recently reassigned to the tiny Vermont town of Beaverfield. A man with a deficit confidence Finn possesses a surplus of charm and congeniality. Befriended fellow newcomer postal worker Cecily More (Milana Vayntrub – you’ll recognize her from her spokesperson work for AT&T) Finn in introduced to the eclectic and farcical characters of the town. A snowstorm blocks all access into and out of the community just has a series of grisly attacks and murders begin and it is not long before the residents of the idyllic mountain village turn accusing each other of being the monster that stalks them in the cold winter dark.

It was not until the movie’s closing credits that I learned this was adapted from a video game of the same title, where the player is in a medieval village trying to uncover the secret of who is the werewolf. If they had approached this property as a serious film intent on being scary, I believe it would have failed utterly. I slotted this in the sub-genre of horror/comedy but more accurately it is a comedic horror. Each scene chooses comedy over shock or horror and the characters are drawn broadly with a decidedly farcical bend to their nature. If the choice was between playing it big for laughs or ‘realistically’ the consistent choice here was ‘go big.’

The cast, particularly Richardson and Vayntrub are charming and likable though What we do in the Shadows Harvey Guillen was given too little to do given his own comedic talent. Director Josh Ruben keeps the pace fast, never slowing down to let the audience question the choices either the characters or his own. Matthew Wise’s cinematography works witho9ut being flashy but lacks any deep style that might have elevated the movie.

Overall, it was an enjoyable but ultimately empty film that passed its 97-minute runtime without giving offense or earning great praise.

Werewolves Within is streaming on Shudder.