Spooky Season: The Church (1989)

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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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I am Falling Behind

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The writing of my folk/cosmic horror has fallen a little behind the schedule. Just 3 or 4 thousand words shy of where I want to be by the end of October. Still, the novel might be completed by the end of the calendar year, particularly if it ends up between 80k and 90k words.

Right now, I am at the most challenging part of my novel writing process. I am more than halfway through the first draft and the sensation that I haven’t a clue how to make the whole piece work is quite strong. This mid-plot doldrum and uncertainty occurs even with a carefully outlined book and seems more intense with this work which I am writing without the safety net of a prepared outline.

Still, there are aspect of this manuscript that have me very happy. My three point of view characters have strong distinct voices, and I have confidence in the material even if I don’t have that for myself.

This weekend is likely to be rejuvenating for me. We have a small local convention to lift my spirits and on Monday I am driving to Hollywood to see Quatermass and the Pit one of my favorite films projected from a technicolor print.

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Spooky Season: Night of the Living Dead (1990)

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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.

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Spooky Season: Rumours

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So, not the classic album from Fleetwood Mac but rather the black comedy/satire film starring Cate Blanchett.

Elevation Pictures

Written and Directed by the team if Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson, and Galen Johnson, Rumours is set during a working dinner for the G7 leaders, the chief executives, Presidents and Prime Ministers, of the leading democratic economies, as they attempt to draft a provisional statement concerning some crisis left by the script undefined. Dur the course of the dinner, which takes place in a gazebo, the supporting staff vanish, and the world leaders are left to their own inept devices while confront by undead bog bodies and mysterious giant forest brains.

With haunting cinematography from Stefan Ciupek and a striking color pallet the film has an impressive look to it and is further enhanced by a cast is excellent actors including Charles Dance as an American president with a wholly unexplained strong British accent.

The script provides numerous humorous incidents and character studies and yet for me failed to land fully. The target of the satire, ineffectual leaders providing only rehashed, recycled, and generic observations on problems facing the world is sharp enough the point of the satire seemed to have passed me by entirely. It was clear that the filmmakers have little regard or respect for world leaders but provided no other path or course of action.

The film doesn’t go as far as to live wholly within a realm of ‘dream logic’ like something from David Lynch yet and it is beyond our own sense of reality. (The lack of any ‘protective services’ is simply never addressed. In the film’s world the U.S. President, not to mention the others, simply have no one guarding them day and night.)

What enjoyment I derived from viewing this film lays entirely with the cast and their performances, particularly with Cate Blanchett who simply commanded my attention every moment she existed on the screen.

I honestly am glad I took the time to see this in the theaters, but I also cannot recommend this film as anyone reaction is likely to be so idiosyncratic as to make recommendations pointless.

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Spooky Season: My Best Halloween Prank

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I really do not do pranks as a general rule but this one from my youth worked out rather well.

My sister lived on a corner plot of land with a paved street running alongside. From the street, which saw many trick & treaters on Halloween night, her house would be on your right, her backyard directly in front of you, and a garage with peaked roof on your left. The far side of the peaked roof was shaded by citrus and fruit trees.

I ran a monofilament line from the trees down to the base of the house, passing over the downslope of the garage’s roof and across the back yard. On this I placed two coat hangers at right angles draped with a sheet for a simple and classic ‘ghost.’ A second monofilament line allowed me to let the ghost slide down the line, matching the slope of the roof, or pull it back up toward the top.

When dusk and evening came the lines were impossible to see and as trick & treaters patrolled the neighborhood for candy, I let the ghost ‘walk’ down the garage roof.

Now, my penchant to be on that roof was well know and people simply assumed that we me in a sheet proving a little holiday spirit. As people passed, they noticed the ‘ghost’ and stopped to watch, enjoying the spirit of the performance.

Hidden on the reverse slope of the roof, I let the device slide to the very edge of the roof and for a moment it stayed there, as if I had walked to the edge.

With everyone convinced it was just me in a sheet, I let it take one more ‘step’ off the roof, hovering in the air.

People gasped and then laughed loudly as they realized the gag.

That moment, when what you think you know, a person is there in a sheet, turns into something you didn’t expect and don’t understand is the essence of both horror and comedy. A rule has been broken and it can either be shockingly funny or shockingly horrifying.

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Spooky Season The Return of Godzilla

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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Spooky Season: Zombies and Vampires

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While ghosts and ghostly stories remain the top of my preferred horror sub-genre listing there have been a few Zombie and Vampires entries that I enjoyed.

When you speak of zombies the mind nearly always flies to the modern incarnation of that revenant created by George A Romero for his film Night of the Living Dead. Few people think of the interpretation taken from a bastardized understanding of voodoo. However, both species of zombies have given us interesting and compelling films. Of the mindless hordes out to consume living flesh I think the best film is Train to Busan and of the voodoo variety I’ll admit a real liking of Sugar Hillwhere a woman takes vengeance of the mob with zombies.

Vampires feel related to the modern zombie. Corpses revivified by some means now feasting on the living. While the zombie seems to symbolize massed humanity and the fear we harbor of being in its crosshairs the vampire, particularly since Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire has come to be a stand in for unique individuality. The persistence of personality over death and time. So much so that the idea of the terrifying vampire seems to be as lost as the voodoo inspired undead slave.

I think the domestication of the vampire from terrifying monster stalking you for your precious blood into hot (even if they are actually room temperature) and engaging lovers has a lot to do with the stripping away of the mystic and magic of these creatures.

Take blood. A vampire requires blood for its continued existence. In folklore when the vampire is discovered in its lair it is not pristine and lovely but rather fat and gorged on blood like a tick. Today however the movies and stories and books are likely to have heroic vampires that live off the blood stolen from banks or cast off from slaughtered cattle. The blood has been stripped of its magical nature as the life force coursing in your veins to simply being a nutrient, as though the vampire metabolizes it into energy like we do with sugars and carbs. This mundane reinvention stripped away the supernatural and with it the horror.

I have hope that this Christmas we might get a proper vampire and not a rock and roll one with Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu.

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Spooky Season: The 2 versions of Dawn of the Dead

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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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Trump and the Cardinal Virtues

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At a recent event hosted by Univision Kamala Harris was asked if she could list three virtues of her political rival Donald Trum. Like Hillary Clinton before her this question stumped her with Harris only managing to pay some services to Trump by saying she believed that he loved his family, a safe statement that would enrage no one.

The story got me thinking, what if we matched the seven cardinal virtues with Trump? Would we be surprised by any of the answers? Each virtue traditionally has a corresponding vice, so for each I think the test is which better fits the know personality and action of Trump, the virtue or the vice?

Chastity/Lust

Well, this one’s pretty much on the vice side. A man who has been adjudicated in court of sexual assault, criminally convicted for covering up sexual affairs, and who boasts his personal Vietnam was not getting an STI. This virtue cannot be listed as one of his.

Faith/Idolatry

Again, there is no question. He sells bibles but displays them proudly upside down while calling for violence the man has shown no interest in faith and not only idolizes himself but expects others to do so. This virtue too cannot apply.

Good Works/Avarice

There are no good works that can reasonably assigned to Trump and his lust for money may very well exceed his lust for flesh. Even when it came to his own protection detail, he charged the government for freight for his expensive hotels unwilling to lose a single dime. Avarice it is.

Concord/Discord

It is a virtue to have an agreeable nature and a sin to be pointlessly disagreeable. Again, Trump nature makes this an easy call. A man known for his screaming and demanding nature while expecting subservience from everyone else can hardly be called ‘agreeable.’

Patience/Wrath

His anger at even the slightest perception of an insult is well known. Trump routinely calls for violence and harm upon those who he perceives as enemies, without every showing the slightest ability to forgive or even delay his own gratification. Wrath wins.

Humility/Pride

Well, a man who slaps his name is giant letters on everything he can and who has never ever admitted error, and who cannot, in his mind, ever lose only be cheated raised Pride to levels rarely seen.

Six virtues so far and not one can be credibly associated with Trump. Is this going to be a clean sweep?

Sobriety/Indulgence

Here’s one we can actually give to Trump. He is sober. The loss of his older brother to alcoholism apparently affected him deeply and he is known to be a non-drinker and non-intoxicating drug used.

1 out of 7, clearly a failing grade.

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Spooky Season: Werewolves Within

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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.

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