Recent Viewings, Part 2

[M.10rda]

THE FLESH EATERS (1964):
This slightly grisly and somewhat forgotten monster flick exists in a strange liminal space - too late and too hip & happening to be mistaken for one of the mild-mannered, kitschy science-horrors of the 1950s, but too early and not sophisticated enough to join the late 60s horror vanguard of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD et al. Its reach also unquestionably exceeds its grasp, so to speak - at least in a budgetary/technical sense. Yet it's got heart and brains, as well as more blood than most flicks from '64, and that counts for a lot.

Following the earliest instance I can track of the famous pre-credits "fatal skinny-dipping" sequence that would later be seen in JAWS, PIRANHA, and many others, we follow a small cast of miscreants as they become stranded on a small and deserted East Coast island. There's not too much threat on the island itself - well, besides the island's resident sinister ex-Nazi scientist - but the island is surrounded on all sides with dime-sized silver aquatic creatures that dissolve human flesh at the touch. There's some pleasing attrition as the characters contest w/ these little bastards, and as the survivors  approach the climax, they realize that the ex-Nazi's tinkering has had an unforeseen effect - the "flesh eaters" are assembling like Voltron to become one giant kaiju flesh eater.

That grand finale was (I'm sure the first- and last-time filmmakers would admit) not really covered by their funding. The F.E. Final Boss is only the most glaring of several lapses in quality control when it comes to SFX or complicated cinematic techniques. (FLESH EATERS also has the worst day-for-night shooting and editing this side of OASIS OF THE ZOMBIES - shooting DFN on white sand, it's a killer!) But these shortcomings are almost charming, really, because (unlike a lot of legitimately bad Bad Movies) there's a ton of professionalism on display in all other departments. The dialogue is smart and often funny. All of the actors are better-than-competent or even compelling. And besides the hapless DFN, FLESH EATERS is otherwise shot really nicely, w/ some highly effective stark compositions and suspenseful action sequences. (The crisp B+W on the Media Blasters DVD looks just lovely.)

So, yeah, the ending is a touch goofy, but if FLESH EATERS was made 20 years ago instead of 60 years ago, it would've been hailed as canny camp pastiche on a low-budget. So why not appreciate the genuine/vintage article? Tons of fun, some good use of fake blood, and more female flesh than in most '64-era horrors. (...Much of it eaten, naturally.)

3.5/5
Also an early appearance of one of my fav genre tropes - the victim who won't stay dead! Screenwriter Arnold Drake never made another horror movie but his estate still gets checks from WB and Disney. He created the Doom Patrol in the early 60s (and one of the Teen Titans) as well as some other DC characters, and wrote a short run of strong X-MEN issues in the late 60s (and introduced a couple characters who are still around). As comic book writers go, he was a better screenwriter than Pat Boyette, director of DUNGEON OF HARROW! Too bad Drake didn't get another shot at the big screen.

[RCMerchant]

^ The tiny "flesh Eaters" F/X in that film was done by scratching the film with a pin so it looked like shiny dots zipping back and forth on screen. The ex-Nazi was played by Martin Kosleck, who played Joseph Goebbels in a number of WW 2 era war films (he also appeared opposite Lon Chaney Jr. in the MUMMY'S CURSE and Rondo Hatton in HOUSE OF HORRORS.)

[FatFreddysCat]

"Trick or Treat" (aka "Ragman," 1986)
Eddie Weinbauer (Marc Price, aka "Skippy" from TV's "Family Ties"), a heavy metal obsessed high school nerd, is crushed when he learns that his rock idol "Sammi Curr" has died in a hotel fire. However, Eddie soon learns that by playing Sammi's final album backwards, he can communicate with the rocker's undead spirit! Eventually he figures out that Sammi is merely using him as a pawn for his Ultimate Revenge, which leads to heavy metal mayhem at the high school Halloween dance.
A cheesy as hell, dumb as dirt, but oh-so-metal cult horror classic with a great performance by Price as the dorky Eddie, a killer soundtrack by Fastway, and brief cameos from Gene Simmons and Ozzy Osbourne. It falls short on gore (and the guy playing Sammi can't lip synch worth a damn!), but this time capsule of the 80s "Devil music" and "backwards messaging" panic is still loads of goofy fun.

[Jim H]

I've been watching a lot of movies, a few highlights:

The Shadow Strays - from the director of The Night Comes For Us, another brutally violent and gory Indonesian action flick.  This is quite similar to the Night Comes For Us plot wise, and has some of the same problems.  Point in fact, they're almost across the board worse.  Some of the fights strain credibility too much, it's hard to care about some of the side characters, and some of the action staging is a clear step down.  It's still entertaining at least, even though it's definitely a full half hour too long.  I rewatched the Raid and the Raid 2 recently, and god damn, they're just much better films from the same crop.

Grave Encounters - Solid found footage film.  Good slow build of creepiness, and a good concept.  Good acting too.  It's interesting how this concept has since been copied numerous times - I guess it's an evolution of the Blair Witch formula, but this feels like a further refinement.

Hell House 2 and 3 - Badly acted and mostly badly written wastes of time.  They're surprisingly watchable despite that, but I can't recommend them

Hell House prequel - I forgot the name, but this is a big step up from 2 and 3...  But still not as good as 1.  I'd say just watch 1.

DEER CAMP '86 (2022)

   A group of goofy friends from Detroit head into the woods for their annual deer hunt at their uncle's cabin - only to run afoul of a monstrous, vengeful spirit after a local Indian girl is murdered.  This was better than I expected - a nice homage to 80's horror.  4/5

As a born and bred Michigander, been meaning to watch this.  Knew lots of people in my hometown in suburban Detroit that went up north to go deer hunting, in my childhood it was probably about 1 in 10 families that did it, something like that.

[indianasmith]

THE JACK IN THE BOX RISES (2024)

   This was a decent little horror flick, nothing exceptional but worth the watch.  A young woman named Raven is tasked to find an ancient cultic box in which a demon has been imprisoned in order to pay off her father's debts to a ruthless crimelord who is also a collector of occult artifacts.  The home of the last owner of the box has been converted into an elite girls' school, so she goes in undercover as a student to retrieve the box and free her father. But someone has let the demon out . . .
    A fun watch, could have been better but I have definitely watched worse!  3.5/5

[Rev. Powell]

MOTHER, COUCH (2023): A mother sits on a couch in a furniture store and refuses to leave, despite the best efforts of her three children. The scenario sounds Bunuelian and indeed it gets gradually more absurd and surreal as it goes on. Ultimately, it doesn't achieve too much in terms of addressing familial resentments, but it's reasonably entertaining, sometimes funny, and the fantastic cast are at the top of their games: Ewan MacGregor, Ellen Burstyn, Rhys Ifans, Lara Flynn Boyle (underutilized), and F. Murray Abraham (in an amusing dual role as twins). Taylor Russell even manages to keep pace with these legends. 3/5.

[Trevor]

I tried to watch THE DEMON again but gave up again. I can't believe I knew the director and that the DOP on this pile of 💩 was a mentor of mine 😳😳😳

[M.10rda]

The ex-Nazi was played by Martin Kosleck, who played Joseph Goebbels in a number of WW 2 era war films (he also appeared opposite Lon Chaney Jr. in the MUMMY'S CURSE and Rondo Hatton in HOUSE OF HORRORS.)

I knew he looked familiar! I've seen HOUSE OF HORRORS... always enjoyed me some Rondo. Kosleck makes a highly punchable Nazi.

[Jim H]

The Funhouse - Finally watched this, been on my list for years.  It has some good atmosphere and visuals (the credit sequence is great), but really doesn't gel for me.  The kids kind of suck and the story isn't interesting, but the father of the monster is a solid actor, and there's a kind of interesting undercurrent about sexuality.  I dunno.  I didn't care for it, but I can see why others might.

Random note, Dean Koontz wrote a novelization of this, which sounds a lot wilder.

[zombie no.one]

The Funhouse - Finally watched this, been on my list for years.  It has some good atmosphere and visuals (the credit sequence is great), but really doesn't gel for me.  The kids kind of suck and the story isn't interesting, but the father of the monster is a solid actor, and there's a kind of interesting undercurrent about sexuality.  I dunno.  I didn't care for it, but I can see why others might.

yeah a 2nd or maybe 3rd tier slasher for me... I'd put it in the same kind of ballpark as HELL NIGHT, and TERROR TRAIN. feels quite dated compared to some other slashers from the same era... 

[M.10rda]

SALEM'S LOT (2024):
This was Madame's pick and then she spent much of the running time smack-talking it. This third screen adaptation is the shortest, which is good, but a mixed bag. It plays most of the hits, so to speak; stays pretty faithful to the source material in many ways; and, when it revises plot elements, the result is mostly agreeable. (The finale seems like a bad idea at the outset but then ends up paying off.)

Writer/director Gary Dauberman also wrote ANNABELLE, THE NUN, and the two IT remakes, none of which I liked much or at all. Nevertheless he's clearly studied how to set up and deliver jolts and how to frame scary action. But a lot of his effort seems to have gone into making SALEM'S LOT look super-duper-duper 1975-ish. Madame kept leaning over to me and saying "It's the 70s... did you know that? It's the 1970s... this takes place in the 70s... in case you hadn't realized, this film is set..."  Tobe Hooper's version, which was actually shot in the 70s, looks nothing like Dauberman's film. It's an unctuous nostalgia flex and it didn't work for us.

The acting by the low-octane cast is variable. Lewis Pullman makes for a very soggy leading man. Pilou Asbaek... is no James Mason! (Though he occasionally sounds like Peter Lorre, so that's something.) Alfre Woodard on the other hand is 71, looks/acts 40, and injects a lot of juice in what could be a throwaway role. The single strongest element is this version's Mark Petrie. Dauberman wrote him as a sharp and single-minded kid w/ a moral compass, then cast against the traditional grain and, without changing a word of dialogue, automatically made the entire film much more interesting.

The biggest shortcoming? The vampires just don't look scary. Worst of all, Barlow looks like a poor yard animatronic from Spirit Halloween. The credits rolled around midnight and we put on the Hooper version. We fast-forwarded through many long, slow, talky parts to get to the three or four really incredible moments from the original. Hooper was never very good at directing exposition or character development, but MAN, for a decade there he could make you poop your pants on command. The vampires in the Hooper version are still freaky as hell, and Reggie Nalder in white greasepaint is an effect that no amount of prosthetics or CGI will ever match.

3/5

The underappreciated Bill Sadler is also in this. No one else got a memo from Dauberman about doing a Maine accent, but then Sadler showed up on set locked and loaded, and nothing in the world could hold him back.

[FatFreddysCat]

"Evil Dead 2: Dead By Dawn" (1987)
Square-jawed hero Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) makes the poor decision to return to that ol' cabin in the woods, where of course the Deadites are waiting for another round of demonic possessions, murder, dismemberments, and mayhem.
Honestly, "Evil Dead 2" is little more than a re-tread of the original, but it's lots more fun, with a more slap-sticky sense of humor and a slightly higher budget that allows for more elaborate gross-out bits. "Evil Dead 2" cemented Bruce Campbell's status as a cult B-movie icon, and of course director Sam Raimi went on to do "Darkman," three "Spider-Man" flicks and a "Doctor Strange," so everything turned out quite well for them both.

[M.10rda]

THE WITCH (2015):
Watched the first 10-15 minutes w/ Madame circa 2017, iirc, but she tapped out when the baby disappeared - and was wise to. Our niece was three around that time and Mme. 10rda was and still is sensitive about harm to babies and small children in movies. We watched something else. I know it's highly regarded by some on this site and by many movie fans generally, so, figured it was the right time to finish it.

It's well-made and I can admire its craft.

About 30 minutes in (following the baby), there's a scene where ATJ is recovering eggs from a coop. There's a slightly grisly moment where she notices that one has dropped to the ground and broken. In that moment, I thought I knew the point that THE WITCH was trying to make about the human perspective on our relationship to the natural world, and I started looking for reinforcement of that theme. By the end - by the final two scenes, certainly - it was clear to me that THE WITCH is making an entirely different point altogether. I think the point it inevitably makes is a pretty common one in film and in other media, and a less insightful, original, and provocative one than the potential central theme that had been alluded to earlier. That doesn't make THE WITCH a bad movie - just ultimately, for me, an underwhelming one.

3.5/5 I'm glad other folks love it, though.

[Trevor]

I watched Sole Survivor (1970) again: still eerie and affecting.

[M.10rda]

More SPOILERS than usual for both MIDSOMMAR and HEREDITARY below - FYI.

MIDSOMMAR (2019):
Second viewing of a film I reacted strongly to the first time and wanted to watch again, particularly after seeing THE WITCH. I think I understand MIDSOOMAR and my response to it better this time. It remains a masterfully directed and shot film, and is clearly a significant improvement on HEREDITARY in many or all regards, some of which I'll discuss below.

I'm only one guy but I was dissatisfied w/ HEREDITARY on my first viewing, and revisiting that one has only made me more skeptical of its value. My biggest issue initially was Alex Wolff, and indeed he's a major liability to the film. But even his soggy, inert performance notwithstanding, HEREDITARY's dark ending struck me as even more incidental and even glib on a repeat visit. One of my cinematic pet peeves is onscreen sadism or suffering purely for the sake of sadism and suffering. Another pet peeve is the celebration or vindication of evil in the absence of criticality. Both of those complaints are eminently applicable to HEREDITARY... and could in some ways be equally applicable to THE WITCH.

MIDSOMMAR has in common w/ those films its cruel parade of human suffering as well as in an ending that similarly leaves the scales of moral justice imbalanced. But whereas HEREDITARY employed such trappings to no compelling thematic end, MIDSOMMAR does arrive at a thesis which is troubling yet not in any way frivolous and maybe even profound. To paraphrase a classic Roger Ebert review: HEREDITARY was just the story of one sad incident, whereas MIDSOMMAR is the story of a process.

Although WICKER MAN is frequently evoked in discussion of MIDSOMMAR (and w/ good reason), I think it's even more appropriate to invoke CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST, that hoary simultaneous satire and reaffirmation of cultural trauma tourism. The most famous example of white folks entering into the world of non-white folks and pooping all over that world, CH at least paid off its problematic premise w/ the wholesale slaughter of those white colonists. Ari Aster astutely flips that narrative here with the help of the priceless William Jackson Harper, America's much underesteemed answer to Daniel Kaluuya. He's a far more tactful and (reasonably) ethical descendant of the documentarians from CH, and crucially he enters into a hermetically sealed world of white folks doing extremely sketchy and troubling white s**t. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he and his crew are punished for far more marginal transgressions than those of the white anthropologists in CH. It is, after all, 2019.

But of course, Josh (Harper) is only nominally punished for his transgression. Aster makes it clear that Josh's fate was fait accompli, like Inspector Howie's fate as soon as he set foot on Summerisle. The fact that he does a thing he knows he's been forbidden to do within the community is in fact coincidental (besides the reasonable equivocation that what he does is both anthropologically and morally understandable under the extreme circumstances). His meatheaded buddies Mark and Christian, on the other hand, are kind of bad guys on some trivial, domestic level... which isn't to say they deserve what they get. Connie and Simon are inherently blameless - they react reasonably to the horrible things they've been ill-prepared to witness, and of course they were ill-prepared by Ingemar, the ar$ehole supposed friend who lured them to Sweden on false, sinister pretenses.

Ingemar, Pelle, and everyone else from the Halsingland commune are truly and (in the literal sense) naturally the Antagonists.  They believe what they are doing is both holy and just, but so did Lord Summerisle and his loons - and what Halsingland is up to is both qualifiably (in the moral sense) and exponentially (in the mathematical sense) worse than what the Summerislers were up to. The fact that Aster allows viewers some moderate equivocation about the monstrous Swedes is a feature of the film, not a bug. Their cheerful conviction and even Pelle's logical-sounding arguments are inherently fallacious. Everything they cherish and perpetuate is the product of their attempts to rationalize an infantile invalid's warped fantasies. In essence the Swedes are just more self-serving predators, living on the flesh and blood of outsiders and (sometimes) each other. Aster's racial inversion of CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST enables viewers to reach a defensible conclusion that you couldn't feel good about in Deodato's original: the entire commune needs to be nuked from orbit, "just to be sure".

I haven't even mentioned Dani (Florence Pugh). MIDSOMMAR has a dark ending, but at a glance it could've been worse - for Dani, anyway. She appears to have found what she was searching for the last 140 minutes since the pre-credits sequence - a community that can at least perform empathy, if not actually experience it or be motivated by it. We don't know what happens to Dani after the credits role; we don't know if there's a big Wicker May Queen waiting for her in her near future. But realistically what's the best possible case scenario for Dani? Perhaps she spends another 40-something years among this horde of sunny, glazed maniacs who affirm and reinforce her least constructive instincts and emotional pathology. If she makes it to 72, all she's got to look forward to is the cliff or the hammer. America as we know it today is a cold and messed-up place, but I'll still roll my dice and take the chance that I might somehow make it to see 73!

4.5/5 Deeply worrisome film but does feel relevant and enlightening on the eve of another Presidential election...