I remember seeing this film on its original theatrical run back in 1981. In those days I was still a sailor in the United States Navy and was fairly new to San Diego. Downtown, which was much grittier back in those days, held a number of run down grind-house movie theaters and one was the Balboa. (The Balboa is still there, though now it has been renovated into a nice venue and this month I will be there to see Eddie Izzard live.) I do not recall ever seeing a preview for this film, but the poster with the declaration ‘from the creator Alien” seduced me into the theater.

Dead & Buried is a curious horror film. Produced after Alien and Halloween it has both a creepy atmospheric style coupled with explicit gruesome on-screen ‘kills.’ In addition to two elements it also has a very 70s sensibility presented in a drenched in paranoia and coated in cynicism. It even ends the film on a freeze-frame, a device that was very popular in the cinema of the 70s but along with split framing, very quickly fell out of favor in the glassy fast paced 80s.

The story is about a small town cop, Dan Gillis, whose has returned to his home town of Potter’s Bluff along with his wife Janet. Tourists and other people just passing through the coastal Rhode Island community are waylaid by the locals and brutally murdered. During the horrific acts of violence the townsfolk display no emotion and record everything with still and motion photography. With corpses piling up and vanishing Dan quickly finds himself working a mystery that soon extends beyond the natural as people reports seeing the murder victims now walking around the Potters Bluff. Increasingly Dan suspects that his wife is involved and with the assistance of Dobbs, the town’s undertaker and coroner, he attempts to discover the horrific truth behind the small scenic town.

I really like Dead & Buried. The film has only a few jump scares relying principally upon tone, mystery, and the brutal attacks to create it sense of dread. (Though it must be said that the first jump scare is one of cinema’s best and I shall not spoil it by describing it to you. If you have seen you know exactly what I am referring to and if you have not you are in for a startle.) The films was a modest budgeted affair but boasted talent, among the actors you have James Farention as Dan Gillis, Jack Albertson as the quirky undertaker Dobbs, and a pre-Nightmare on Elm Street Robert England in a small supporting role. Behind the scenes you have Ronald Shusett and Dan O’Bannon, the authors of Alien, writing the screenplay, and legendary effects wizard Stan Winston producing the make-up and special effects.

Not a movie for everyone, particularly if on-screen violence and murders much like a slasher film is not for you, Dead & Buried is an underappreciated horror movie that straddles the interest cinema of the 70s and the 80s.

So in the spirit of the season I plan to watch a lot of horror film between not and Halloween culminating in a big screen presentation of the 4K restored Night of the Living Dead supervised by George Romero before he passed away,

Saturday I watched two horror films.

First The Norliss Tapes:

This was a made for TV movie from 1973. A published is concerned with one of his authors, Norliss, who had been investigation and debunking the supernatural goes missing. At the author’s home he finds a series of tapes and the film to the story recorded on those audiocassettes.

Written by the talented William F Nolen this film just did not work for me. I will not hold Nolan too responsible, working for a network is an exercise in notes, meddling, and uncredited re-writes. This movie is about Norliss uncovering a mystery and the truth behind the story. Sadly they filmmakers never cracked the essential trouble in making a mystery, how to handled the tons of exposition. This film was 70% people telling each other things and very little dramatic conflict or narrative. I think that this project exists solely to attempt to cash in on 1972s TV movies The Night Stalker. That TYV film generated tremendous ratings spawned a sequel and a series. The Norliss Tapes, with the particular style of voice-over narration and its central monster of a reanimated corpse draining pretty women of their blood, feels like a rush copy of 72s monster success. Thankfully it was short, 72 min.

The Second movie was Split

It is a shocking twist that M. Night Shyamalan can still make really good movies. Split is the story of three teenage girls kidnapped by a man and held captive in some underground industrial center. Making their predicament worse their captive has multiple personalities and a vague unmet personality ‘The Beast’ has terrible plans for them. James McAvoy plays the kidnapper and the trio of girls is lead by Anna Taylor-Joy from The Witch and Morgan. This movie is taunt, tight, and tense. The actors play their parts well, the script works without major holes, and the direction is sure footed, building suspense and tension in scene after scene. This one is worth watching, get the blu-ray and pop it in.

Saturday night I attended a screening of 1979’s Dawn of the Dead. (Apologies to a friend who didn’t make the screening. Had I known you would have trouble finding the theater I would have changed my mind on the logistics.) This is only the second time I have seen

Peter(L) & Roger

this film in a proper movie theater environment and it still works and moves at a good brisk pace without losing theme or character. What happened last night though is that I started think about the relationship between Roger and Peter. Spoilers will follow.

Brief recap: Fran and her boyfriend Stephen, television news people, have stolen the station helicopter in order to flee the zombie apocalypse. They have invited their friend Roger, a swat team officer to flee along with them. After a harrowing incident in a large public housing building, Roger has invited Peter to also join them. It is clear that Roger and Peter only met for the first time during that night’s action and Peter is a total unknown to either Fran or Stephen. They fly in the helicopter for more than day and end up in a mall that has been overrun by the dead. Here it becomes a story of the survival and dynamics of the band of four characters.

Stories like this one are not new and many of the issues raised have been tackled in other setting, most often with a nuclear attack providing the collapse of society and the isolation of the characters. It has also been common to have the dynamic been that there is one couple and another man or two without a romantic or sexual partner. When this happens a very common complication is the frustrated sexual desire created by the only woman in the area being bonded to another man.

This never happens in Dawn on the Dead (1979.) Stephen and Fran have issue with their relationship but no hint of desire or attraction is ever apparent in either Roger or Peter. Rather Roger and Peter express a powerful bond for each other. They hatch plots together, trust each other implicitly in times of great danger, and when Roger is bitten, sealing his fate to die and rise as an undead, it provokes the strongest emotional expression from Peter. Nothing else in the story’s events comes breaking Peter’s locked-down facade of control like Roger decline, death, and re-animation. Even after Roger passes from the plot, Peter displays no interest in Fran, instead retreating away to giver her and Stephen room romance as he spends the time at Roger’s grave. At the climax of the film, after battling a marauding outlaw gang, and Stephen’s death, when Peter and Fran escape together, there is no sexual or romantic undertone. The chemistry simply isn’t there.

Perhaps the close bond Peter and Roger shared is the brotherly bond of fellow soldier, men who face terrible times together and who must trust each if they are to survive. However, they have no history together in the field. They have only just met, and there’s the case of no interest in Fran. Apparently Stephen, a character with a markedly fragile ego, had no issues or concerns in inviting another man to flee with he and his girl. Is that perhaps because he knows Roger well enough to know Roger does not care for women and thus he presents no threat? Could it be that Roger’s impulsive offer to Peter a man he had just met was prompted by fully functioning gay-dar?

In the text there is no conclusive proof of this hypothesis but neither can the film falsify it. It is a question that each viewer will have to answer for themselves.

Saturday night a friend, myself, and several member of the San Diego chapter of the HWA went to a screening of IT. I have not seen the 1990 adaptation nor have I read the book so my review is based solely upon the screenings I attended.

IT is based on the mid-1980s horror novel by Steven King and the story had been previously adapted in 1990 into a two part miniseries. The story concerns a group of just barely pre-teen adolescents of outcasts and misfits that call themselves ‘The Losers Club.’ When they discover that the rash of child disseverances currently plaguing the town of Derry Maine is the works on dark supernatural forces, they take active control of their lives and battle the demonic force. The’ big bad’ takes the form of Pennywise, The Dancing Clown making this a particularly difficult film for those that find clowns inherently creepy or frightening. The original story dealt with two plot line the Loser Club as children dealing with Pennywise and a 27 years later as adult when they discover that Pennywise has returned. The film wisely adapts only the children’s story then attempt too much in a single film.

The movie works well enough. It has plenty of suspenseful scenes that work, it has a number of jump scares that are well timed and effective and utilizing an ‘R’ rating it does not shy away from the more graphic elements of horror. . While all of the on screen talent is good and credible in their performances it is Bill Skarsgard as Pennywise that dominates the film. That said for me the film’s ending didn’t quite find its target. I do not think that this is an artifact of the split storyline. Plenty of questions are raised about the town of Derry and Pennywise but very few are any are truly answered. From what I know of the novel the adult storyline barely answer these questions either. Perhaps the sequel will tie this up, and after a 117 million dollar opening weekend there will be a sequel, but I can only judge this film on its own merits. The movie works, I enjoyed seeing it, but the lack of a strong ending weakens the presentation and it is not going to be joining the other horror films in my library.

The weekend just passed was a pretty good one, though not without its frustrations. (Nothing compared to my family back east dealing wit hurricane Irma. Everyone is well, safe, and for that I am thankful.)

The most irritating aspect to the weekend and the reason there were no daily updated about the festival was that my desktop computer began misbehaving. The issue appears to be resolved but for several days there any attempt to use any browser was futile, pointless, and terribly frustrating.

That said, the weekend was a blast. This was the 8th annual Horrible Imaginings Film Festival, San Diego weekend devoted to new and fresh horror cinema. Start my festival director Miguel Rodriguez the fest attracts entries from around the world with both short and feature films exploring the entire range of horror.

Most people think of horror as a narrow genre but that does it a disservice. While horror certainly includes the spooky supernatural stories of ghosts and monsters, the stalking unstoppable killer, and outlandish aliens, the genre also includes thrillers and psychological stories. There were a number of critics and film experts that considered the academy awarding film The Silence of the Lambs as a horror movie. HIFF covers all that and more. With themed blocks centered around the themes such social issues or LGBTQ subjects Miguel Rodriguez shows that horror can make you think as well shiver.

This year’s selection of movies, both short and feature, were outstanding. I had hoped each night or morning to give you a few stand out titles but those computer woes I mentioned earlier killed that idea.

This years low point, the films that did not work for me, were still quite good and I can’t say that I ever felt I had wasted time sitting in the lovely venue at the Museum of Photographic Arts in Balboa Park.

In addition to seeing wonderful films, movies that for the most part I could never see elsewhere, I also helped man the information table for the San Diego Chapter of the Horror Writers Association. On Sunday I was there for several hours talking stories, films, and writing with people who are much better at this craft than myself, learning from their feet.

I can’t recommend enough if you have an interesting in horror cinema and have the means, come to San Diego next year, see our large and wonderful park, and have you blood chilled and your spine tingled.