Trick or Treat (1986)

Eddie Weinbauer (Marc Price) is your typical high school misfit, just bullied rather more cruelly by the jocks than average (well, at least where I come from), and with fewer friends to keep him sane. Obviously, he’s turning into a very angry young man, and is really not terribly far from the mental state that might turn one into a school shooter or something comparable.

The core of his life – apart from a heavy crush on non-mean popular girl Leslie (Lisa Orgolini) is metal, or really, his intense fixation on the hair metal of Sammi Curr (Tony Fields), a hometown hero for the non-mainstream of the town whose plan for a return Halloween high school concert has just been thwarted by that most terrible of monsters, concerned 80s parents. Being a teenager, Eddie takes the poser and his message about “metal warriors” rather more seriously than they deserve. Then again, when your typical school day mostly seems to consist out of being tortured by bullies, and your parents seem to be all too happy to ignore you, Sammi Curr is a rather more attractive alternative, looking good in the little leather he wears.

Things turn from potential school shooting or movie about teenage suicide to metal slasher when Curr dies in a mysterious fire, and a friendly DJ (Gene Simmons) gives Eddie the acetates to Curr’s final, unreleased album. Said acetate apparently hosts the soul of the singer, offering Eddie the power to take vengeance on his tormentors. At first, it’s clearly quite the kick for the kid to see his enemies supernaturally driven before him, but once the things Curr does in Eddie’s name turn from nasty but non-lethal revenge into increasingly brutal and dangerous murder attempts, he decides to put a stop to the bad metal menace. Which, as it turns out, is easier said than done.

For my tastes, the directorial debut of character actor Charles Martin Smith is by far the best of small group of metal-themed supernatural slashers made in the 80s. If that sounds like damning with faint praise, it’s really not Trick or Treat’s fault that the rest of its sub-genre is quite so bad.

Smith never made a horror movie after this, but he shows great instincts for the somewhat overblown 80s version of the genre, working the series of increasingly silly and great set pieces to best effect, milking these set pieces for all the fun his budget is worth. How silly do things get? Let’s just say that this a movie where a Halloween concert by an undead metal musician who shoots lightning from his guitar isn’t even the climax, and a scene of walkman induced ear-melting orgasm is just the flavour of the day.

Uncommon for its sub-sub-genre, Trick or Treat is a genuinely well shot film, too, well-paced, with better acting than you’d expect (plus a terrible and pretty funny cameo by poor, confused Ozzy Osbourne as a TV preacher), and even a script that mostly makes sense when you accept the set-up.

Apart from being a much better film on the level of craftsmanship than other metal horror, this is also an entry in the genre that manages to have its cake and eat it, too, portraying an evil metal musician in league with Satan but not looking down on the music or the fans. In fact, the film’s biggest strength apart from its great set pieces is how seriously and compassionately it treats Eddie, turning the character most films of this ilk and era would treat just as the bullies do into its eventual hero, a young man who realizes when he has gone too far and does everything to make amends. Which is of course today’s normal state in most films and TV shows, but is not a part of the tradition of metalsploitation horror at all.

All that and a big high school Halloween concert that ends in a lot of death? How could one resist?

The Raven (1935)

Dr Richard Vollin (Bela Lugosi) is an interesting guy: a surgeon of genius, he has now retired to his mansion to do probably nasty experiments in a hidden lab. A great admirer of Poe, he also spends his free time quoting the man and spouting some highly dubious ideas about Great Men and the Torture of Love (caps most certainly his). It’ll come as no surprise to anyone that Vollin has also tricked out his house as a death trap with various mechanical torture devices – some of them inspired by Poe, of course.

When Judge Thatcher (Samuel S. Hinds) convinces Vollin to return to the operating room to save his daughter, professional dancer Jean (Irene Ware), Vollin falls madly (well, he does everything madly) in love with the much younger woman. She seems to develop something of a crush on the man too, so much so she’s even including an interpretative dance number of Poe’s “The Raven” in her program. Too bad she’s already engaged to be married to the intensely boring Dr Holden (Lester Matthews). Seeing the situation before anybody else involved, the Judge tries to warn Vollin off Jean, but only causes the man to lose it completely.

Now officially tortured by love™, Vollin presses the criminal Edmond Bateman (Boris Karloff) into his services by first doing some very evil work on his facial nerves and promising to make it all better if he behaves. It’s all part of Vollin’ genius plan to take his vengeance on the Judge, Holden and Jean. Finally, his death trap mansion can get a real workout.

This is clearly an attempt by Universal to repeat some of the magic of Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat, again putting Lugosi and Karloff into a tale full of torture and cruelty (some of it of course only implied) and quite a bit of perversity.

That it isn’t the classic the Ulmer film turned out to be is at least in part caused by the decision to let go of most visual tropes of expressionism, and instead aim for a visually naturalistic approach that’s much more Warner than Universal, and so results in a film that never looks and feels like anything coming out of Universal. Lew Landers (then still working as Louis Friedlander) is a great choice for this approach, though, and provides the material with quite a bit of pulpy energy, presenting the tale with a snappiness very atypical of Universal’s approach to horror, and lighting starkly was is usually hidden by shadows.

The script is, as was usual with Universal, a bit of a mess that leaves many a question open: why, for example, is Vollin taking so much effort with getting Bateman on board supposedly to have him do what he cannot do when he wants to get off freely after his “revenge”, when all he then does with Bateman is use him as his in-house murder assistant?

Logic is of course beside the point here: in truth, the point of the movie is to try and get away with implying as much gruesomeness as it can get away with (which is rather a lot), and to provide Lugosi and Karloff with proper horror movie star roles. That, it does very well indeed.

Karloff does get the more sympathetic role here, starting out as your typical working class murderer (with some bad phrenological nonsense thrown in), getting a pretty Frankenstein’s creature-like make-over (because that’s what sells tickets), and eventually sacrificing himself to save the day. Karloff makes this work rather well, giving a genuine likeability and sadness to a guy who really only wanted to be left alone somewhere.

Lugosi, on the other hand, is allowed to go all kinds of crazy, spouting line after line of impressive portentous nonsense, including all sorts of Great Men as the Übermensch business. His performance of all this is gleefully sadistic, with some of the best moments of evil gloating in his career when he shows Bateman his new, “improved” face in a room completely surrounded by mirrors. Vollin, as he plays him, is the kind of man who builds his own tower of bad theories so he can justify all of his sadistic impulses to himself (while blaming love). It’s pretty fantastic, really, as is the film, at least when you don’t go into it expecting The Raven II.

Lycantropus: The Moonlight Murders (1997)

Original title: Licántropo: El asesino de la luna llena

The small town of Visaria (which locates the movie right in Universal Horror land, just in the 90s) is beset by a string of terrible murders taking place on nights of the full moon. If not for certain circumstances suggesting human agency, the state of the corpses the killer leaves behind could only be read as animal attacks, as if the victims were mangled by something like a wolf. Well, most of the murders, that is.

I’m sure local bestseller writer Waldemar Daninsky (Paul Naschy), suffering from blackouts, daytime hallucinations concerning the tragic circumstances surrounding his birth, visions of his long murdered romani mother Czinka (Ester Ponce) and their clan’s doom-prophecies sprouting head Bigary (Javier Loyola) who talk much of his curse and how unpleasant their undead state is, and general malaise, has nothing whatsoever to do with anything.

This return of the great Paul Naschy to yet another version of his ever-doomed werewolf (that’s not a spoiler, surely) protagonist Waldemar Daninsky as directed by Francisco Rodríguez Gordillo was meant as a bit of a comeback for the actor, writer, director, producer and monster-lover, after he had to lighten his workload (which in his world meant making only about a movie a year, apparently) for half a decade thanks to massive heart problems and assorted health issues. Unfortunately for Naschy, the film wasn’t terribly well distributed and flopped rather badly.

I can’t help but suspect this had rather a lot to do with changes in fashion that probably simply didn’t make yet another werewolf film with Naschy a terribly great proposition for whatever audience this sort of project still had in Spain. Even Naschy’s more nihilistic 80s films always had an old-fashioned quality surrounding them that has never been the sort of thing to pull in audiences, unless your film takes place in Victorian England and is about some idiots of nobility and wealth, of course.

It can’t have helped the film’s position at the time that it simply isn’t terribly good. Lycantropus certainly does attempt to forgo Naschy’s old, sometimes shoddy, monster movie romp style in favour of something slower and more cerebral and psychological for a change, but the script (of course also by Naschy) isn’t terribly good at it, going through plot points, twists and developments even the less genre savvy audience members will see coming from miles away. We spend an inordinate amount of time with characters of little interest, and waste even more of it until Naschy actually gets to don his wolf garb, which happens so quickly and is over with  even quicker, the film might as well just not have bothered.

It’s not a total wash, at least: the cinematography by Manuel Mateos is often very beautiful, if rather staid and conservative, making things look rather pricier than they often did in Naschy’s prime. The performance of a physically clearly diminished Naschy is fine, too. Age lends him some of the gravitas he never quite could reach in earlier decades, and while his own script doesn’t actually give him enough opportunity to shine, he still makes the best out of it.

In short: Believers (2007)

Paramedics and buddies David (Johnny Messner) and Victor (Jon Huertas) follow a call to some godforsaken country garage. There, they are trying to save the life of a badly wounded woman (Deanna Russo) who just escaped from what looks very much like a cult with her little daughter. Before they can do much, a trio of armed men arrive and take everyone prisoner, while the gas station attendant proceeds to hide the ambulance.

The captives are taken to an industrial looking compound. There, they will eventually learn they are now in the hands of a group of former scientists, mathematicians, and so on, who have come to believe the world is going to be ending soon after discovering some kind of god formula. Obviously, the group will be the only ones to transcend the end and continue humanity afterwards, but there are some things they have to do first. Among them, either convert or kill any non-believers who came into contact with them. apparently, though the film stays vague about this. All of this is your standard UFO death cult business, of course, but there seems to be something genuinely strange going with the paramedics’ captors that might suggest there’s some truth about what the group’s leader, known as The Teacher (Daniel Benzali), says.

Like his one time creative partner Eduardo Sánchez, The Blair Witch Project co-director Daniel Myrick didn’t have a lot of luck with the projects he did after starting his career with an all-time classic horror movie. Like in the case of Sánchez, some of his movies really deserve better than they got, financially, commercially and critically. Case in point – at least for me – is what may very well be the best UFO death cult movie ever made, a direct-to-video affair effectively enough directed and cleverly enough written it is never all that difficult to ignore its budgetary limitations.

And those limitations are really very limited indeed, leading to a film that mostly takes place in the same shitty warehouse or warehouse-looking set all cheap movies of this era took place in, with production values that sometimes look as if the filmmaker had to fight for every scribble of weird formula on a toilet wall. Yet still, it works: there’s genuine tension to the proceedings, as well as a pervading feeling of true Weirdness, as if there truly is some kind of revelation of a horrible truth lurking behind the ugly and shoddy looking surroundings. In fact, the way Myrick (and DP Andrew Huebscher) use and shoot the grottily quotidian locations they can afford only emphasises the genuine feeling of strangeness of the narrative by virtue of contrast.

All of which is a bit of a wonder in a film that by all rights should have ended up as just your typical late 00s warehouse-bound horror movie.

The Bloody Sword of the 99th Virgin (1959)

Original title: Kyûjûkyû-honme no kimusume

Warning: I’ll spoil the hell out of this sixty decades old movie!

There is trouble afoot In a particularly remote part of the Iwate prefecture, a part of Japan that’s apparently seen as the most backwoodsy of places. The area the film is concerned with is dominated by a huge cultural gap between the people of a mountain village and their neighbours in a nearby valley town. Where the population of the latter is thoroughly modern and partially westernized, the mountain folk keep themselves separate, clinging to all kinds of traditional ideas, superstitions and rites, and perhaps worse. Right now, the young-ish new, and certainly not local, priest of a mountain temple is trying to change this and drag his flock into the 20th century. A first step in his campaign (he also seems to have saved the village from an epidemic, buying himself quite a bit of street cred with it) is his refusal to leave the mountain when the once a decade Fire Festival will start in a couple of days. Unlike in the rest of Japan where this is apparently a festival of communal joy and togetherness, these villagers lock themselves away from the spirits on this night, demanding all outsiders like the priest descend into the valley, so not to enrage whatever wanders the night.

There’s something worse than a relatively harmless superstition going on here, though. A hag (says the film) roams the countryside looking at people wrong; two young women from Tokyo disappear. Turns out, the villagers want all outsiders gone from their mountain because their version of the Fire Festival needs virgin sacrifices, the blood of the victims being used to coat a sword made in a tradition secretly kept alive for nearly a thousand years. This year’s sword is supposed to be the last one, a tradition of murder finally fulfilled, but the ladies from Tokyo happen not to fit the virgin part of the sacrifice, so the village needs to get ahold of some proper virgins stat – but only the blood of outsiders is allowed.

Eventually, after quite a bit of death and mystification, and with the assistance of an expert in traditional sword smithing techniques, the police (among them a very young looking Bunta Sugawara) begin figuring out what has been going on under the townies’ noses for centuries.

Apparently, the portrayal of the mountain folk in Morihei Magatani’s Bloody Sword did not go over well with various advocates at the time, and so it is one of those Japanese films that weren’t actually banned but were seldom or never shown out of self-censorship. From here in Germany, and after decades of backwoods horror and folk horror, the portrayal of the mountain populace is not terribly offensive. At the very least, every larger character from up top is portrayed with as much, sometimes more, actual characterisation and shows motives beyond “is crazy mountain person”, and they are treated as people even when they sacrifice women in creepy cult rituals. There may very well be some racial stuff going on here I don’t get from my comfy chair in Germany, of course.

On a metaphorical level, and very much keeping in the spirit of the body of works we now call folk horror, Bloody Sword is a film about the past and its traditions as something dangerous and poisonous that, having hidden itself for a time, comes back to the surface during the course of the film. Tradition here means a rejection of change, and an utter conviction that doing inhumane things and causing suffering is one’s duty when tradition demands it, instead of a reason to turn away from these traditions and change. Which is obviously a theme rather important in Japanese post-war cinema even outside of folk horror, though generally treated with rather more ambiguity. Of course, virgin sacrifices are not a terribly ambiguous thing, ethically speaking, last time I looked.

As is absolutely typical of Japanese commercial cinema of this era, the film contains a bunch of wonderfully shot and staged sequences. Magatani (a director with whom I am unfortunately completely unacquainted outside of this film) is an equally adept director of quietly poetic shots of people wandering down a mountain path as he is of the very effectively creepy cult rituals, going from scenes of dramatic dialogue to those of bloodied victims of murder with what feels like natural ease. The grand finale even contains some very adeptly done action, with bow-wielding cultists fighting a force of policemen who eventually pack out machine guns (just in case you haven’t gotten the “tradition vs modernity” memo by this point). Which is not the typical climax to a folk horror film. But then, the film then ends on the surviving policemen honouring the graves of the people they killed, while the surviving villagers look on sullenly and more than a little shell-shocked. The past clearly has added another thing that won’t stay buried to its arsenal, even if things are peaceful, for now, and the present has taken quite a toll as its own kind of sacrifice from these people.

The way on which we get to this point is moody and interesting, sometimes quietly creepy, with dramatic conflicts that always try to provide a bit more complexity to issues and characters than their standard trope treatment needs. A sense of disquiet, and perhaps guilt, subtly hangs over everything.

In short: Folies Meurtrières (1984)

A masked killer stalks and slashes various women, using whatever tools are around. The killer often uses a male corpse(?) as an accessory in the slashings (and there’s a reason for that). A plot twist that’s actually pretty interesting ensues, and we end on a set piece right out of an American Golden Age horror comic (most probably not published by EC).

Apparently, some people call this kind of film “Murderdrone” now, clearly in a direct attempt to make me – yes, me personally – feel very old indeed. At least in the case of these rather astonishing forty-five minutes of murder shot on Super 8 by Antoine Pellissier, I can see the point of the term, though. The washed out, wavering quality of the footage – which is often edited rather well indeed – of people wandering through non-descript places, the homecooked gore, the warbling synth score that really seems to consist of someone randomly pressing a single key and holding it for a minute or so, the nearly complete lack of dialogue and often of any sound beyond the music whatsoever can indeed combine into a rather hypnotic atmosphere, until what many a viewer would hardly call filmmaking at all transmutes into a very particular, repetitive mood you can nearly touch as if it were something physical.

Given how unexpectedly clever and savvy about the structures and rules of the slasher genre the final ten minutes of the film are, I wouldn’t even be surprised to learn Pellissier did this on purpose. In any case, Folies Meurtrières something rather special, if most probably only for a very distinct number of people.

Music Monday: Double Mirror Edition

Santo and Blue Demon vs. Dracula and the Wolf Man (1973)

Original title: Santo y Blue Demon vs Dracula y el Hombre Lobo

Four centuries ago, a wizard named Cristaldi thwarted the combined efforts of Dracula (Aldo Monti) and the Wolf Man (Agustín Martínez Solares) to conquer the world. Of course, there’s a prophecy saying the terrible duo will return from the dead (un-undead?) to take up their old world domination project and take their vengeance on the descendants of Cristaldi. Now (well, in the early 70s), a hunchbacked criminal and occultist named Eric (Wally Barrón) revives the vampire and the werewolf hoping for monetary dispensation (though he’s shrewd enough not to bring the topic up with the the two).

First, the undead and the hairy one want their vengeance, though, and make their plans for the most sadistic way to ambush and murder the contemporary Cristaldi patriarch (Jorge Mondragón), a professor of SCIENCE, his daughter, and little granddaughter, as well as his niece Lina (Nubia Martí). However, Lina just happens to be the (very, very young) girlfriend of the hero of the masses, international man of mystery and adventure, lucha champion, inventor of the radio watch, and all-around fighter for justice, El Santo (Santo). So it’s easy enough for Cristaldi to ask a competent monster fighter for help. For once in a Santo movie, some of his earlier movie adventures seem to have happened in the film’s world, and our hero doesn’t poopoo the Professor’s explanations about the supernatural threat. He is, in fact, all in on protecting the attractive young women of the family against evil.

Despite Santo’s presence, the Professor is taken off the board to only return as a zombie in the last act; the wolfman goes undercover as a man named Rufus Rex (I would have called myself Lon Chaney, Jr.) to woo the Cristaldi daughter, and danger threatens from all sides. It’s the sort of situation where even Santo needs help, so he calls in the redoubtable Blue Demon (Blue Demon, if you must ask), who also makes a good chess partner, as we will learn. Together, they just might manage to keep at least someone named Cristaldi alive.

In the world of Santo movies, Miguel M. Delgado’s S&BDvsD&tWM takes up an upper middle position, quality-wise. It’s not what people who aren’t at least semi-regularly watching lucha cinema like this would call a good movie; on the other hand, the film, for the most part, lacks the cornucopia of filler business that make up the greatest parts of the truly bad entries into the Santo canon. So there are no musical numbers, zero painful hours of comic relief, and most scenes actually fulfil a function in the narrative. Admittedly, there are three short wrestling sequences that have nothing whatsoever to do with the rest of what’s going on, but that sort of thing does come with the territory of lucha cinema and would be bizarre if it weren’t included. Even better, in a weird but useful decision, the final wrestling match takes place after the actual narrative of the film has ended, so the easily bored can simply skip it and will miss nothing whatsoever.

Before that, there would be rather a lot to miss, though, for there is a lot of enjoyment to be had. As always, there are wonderful sequences of our masked heroes going about their masked daily lives, resting their weary bones and brains with a bit of chess, all the while wearing most excellent casual 70s outfits – Santo’s are bit more man about town, Blue’s tend to the more sporty – like all the best superhero dreams come true. The villains’ plans are needlessly complicated, too, and the film knows it. When Eric asks the undercover Wolf Man why the hell they are going through the whole rigmarole of seducing the Cristaldi daughter before kidnapping her when a more straightforward kidnapping and murder would be much easier, the dog-faced one simply explains that this would be too simple. Which sums up the ethos of horror pulp villainy beautifully, and enables quite a few fun scenes of Santo and Blue punching minion wolf persons and a couple of gangsters, so I’m all for it.

The production design, apart from Santo’s wardrobe, is rather on the impoverished side, with wolf man make-up that looks more like dog-faced boy make-up, and not exactly the most convincing vampire fangs, and sets that – apart from the Cristaldi home – do tend to the empty. However, someone involved the production clearly decided that there needs to be some fun, mildly macabre, or strange detail in each scene, so the nearly empty cave set with Dracula’s and Wolfie’s coffins also has a fire breathing bat and wolf head, vampire women are dressed in red full-body veils (okay, probably just red lingerie), and wolf people apparently practice a variation on the Holmgang on wolf persons who run away when beaten by Santo as well as their enemies. There’s also a magic dagger that is apparently a moral philosopher. Consequently, there’s nary a scene that doesn’t provide at least some moment of delightful entertainment.

I also particularly enjoyed Dracula’s portrayal as a right prick with an inflated ego, the kind of guy who delegates killing his enemies to his underlings even when it’s clear it’s not going to work (after attempt number three or so), and a guy you can absolutely believe will watch his last underlings get beaten up by masked wrestlers instead of attacking with them.

In a surprise move for a Santo movie, this year’s girlfriend Lina is actually doing useful things beyond getting kidnapped, even saving our heroes’ bacon at least one and a half times, all the while comporting herself like someone with certain signs of an actual personality. Hell, there’s even a moment or two here where I can actually believe she and the big S are close, which isn’t anything I’ve ever encountered in any lucha movie before.

So, it’s all very good fun, at least if you can be seduced into Mexican monster mash movies with masked wrestlers.

Three Films Make A Post: Be careful who you click with.

Friend Request (2016): There aren’t really too many social media based horror movies that work for me (and don’t get me started on “Black Mirror”), so Simon Verhoeven’s decent attempt at one here is something of a highlight of the sub-genre for me. It’s also a pretty decent supernatural slasher. To wit: the main character (as played by Alycia Debnam-Carey) is somewhat more likeable than is typical; our tragic undead villainess tends to murder her victims with the help of goth-inflected magical murder dioramas; and there are even some interesting ideas on how to transfer some old witchcraft tropes to the late internet age. That’s more than enough to keep me entertained for ninety minutes.

Pentagram (2019): How easily I am entertained is further demonstrated by how okay I was with this ultra-cheap little number directed by Steve Lawson. Four thieves find themselves trapped in the works, well, the pentagram, of a painfully incompetent occultist (soon deceased), while a demonic force lurks outside. Badly written and very earnestly played heart to hearts between talking clichés ensue, as well as scenes of people angling for candles with the help of tied together pieces of clothing, underwear, and so on. Obviously enhanced to hilarity by ill-advised dramatic slow motion. But hey, I wasn’t bored, so I’m not complaining.

Midnight Thunder aka Guntur Tengah Malam (1990): Over in Indonesia of three decades ago, A. Rachman tells us this very traditional tale of an aunt losing the ownership of the family mansion to her nephews and nieces and proceeding to hire a black magician to take care of these house robbers. There’s quite a bit of very mild sex, a couple of “visions” of people with badly pulped faces, a handful of attacks by an invisible force, and even a bad martial arts fight, all enhanced by one of those synthesizer scores that won’t ever stop repeating the same chords and “atmospheric effects”.
It’s neither as crazy nor as good as many other Indonesian horror movies made before (or after), but, which is today’s refrain, there’s enough of the fun and mildly spooky here for the film to be entertaining enough. And at least the big pool dunking scene is properly great.

Seasonal Podcast Recommendation: The Lovecraft Investigations

To my great surprise, I've never recommended Julian Simpson's trilogy of Lovecraft reworkings that go under the umbrella title of "The Lovecraft Investigations". They are using the old "fake true mystery podcast" format to mix elements of HPL's original tales, occult history, all kinds of forteana, and certain recurring motifs of Simpson's audioplay work in delightful ways.

But listen for yourself:

Doctor Who: The Dæmons (1971)

The planned opening of a barrow in the not at all suspiciously named village of Devil’s End  - on Walpurgis Night to boot! – awakens the interest not just of a TV team but also of the Third Doctor (Jon Pertwee), at this point of the show exiled to Earth, without a functioning TARDIS and working with UNIT, while driving around in a canary yellow old timer.

Turns out what’s buried under the barrow is the last survivor of the alien race that is the original model on which all tales of horned devils and demons throughout human history are based, and the thing is really not very nice at all. Further complicating things is the presence of the Master (in his Roger Delgado incarnation, aka the best male one), who really wants to be endowed with the elder thing’s power, even if he has to go undercover as a vicar and dabble in black magic to do that. Well, and sacrifice the Earth and all of humanity.

I don’t think I’m going to get into the habit of writing about classic Doctor Who serials here, though you never know with me, but this five-parter written by producer Barry Letts with Robert Sloman under the pseudonym of Guy Leopold, and directed by Christopher Barry, is too fitting for the season not to.

As people who know their classic Who history will understand, the era of the Third Doctor, as well as about the first half of the stint of my beloved Fourth Doctor Tom Baker, was particularly and pretty consistently close to the horror genre, with many a British version of classic monster movie tropes, and quite a few moments for children to go through the classic hiding behind the couch ritual. The serial at hand, with its ancient evil hidden below rural soil, black magic rituals and a not quite right village, is also clearly part of the folk horror spirit of the time, as well as paying homage to the Nigel Kneale method of mixing horror and science fiction approaches.

Because this is 70s Doctor Who, there are also some well-shot arrows cheerfully aimed at the spirit of fascism (the Master didn’t call himself that without reason), some companionable poking at the officer class with the Brigadier (obviously, Nicholas Courtney), and a bit of an anarchic spirit of just going for tales bigger than the budget should reasonably allow.

Though, when it comes to visual attractions, this serial is actually rather richly realized, with a lot of location shooting (as always then with the BBC, shot on better filmstock) that really provides the tale with the sense of place it needs to work, as well as some great sets. The latter, as is typical of this Who era, may look cheap to modern eyes (and probably were) but were clearly built with love and attention, showing a focus on the telling detail that is usually more than enough to convince me of a cheap set actually being what it’s supposed to. Hell, somehow, the production even manages a handful of properly effective action scenes here. Add to this the often great and highly strange sound design so typical of several decades of BBC TV, and Barry’s genuine ability to create a sense of strangeness and mystery when the script calls for it, and the whole serial looks and feels really rather impressive.

The plotting of these things, with their cliff-hangers every twenty-five minutes and their stop and start structure is certainly an acquired taste, but this serial certainly makes up for this by throwing a fun or clever or endearingly goofy idea a minute at the viewer, seldom suggesting any dragging of feet. So we get - aside from the whole back plot about the truth about the shittiness of humanity caused by ancient aliens - attractions like a living gargoyle as portrayed by someone capering in a rubber suit, a very shouty Devil progenitor (which makes sense, because he is really very tall, and must have gigantic lungs), the Master finding out why you should not call up what you cannot put down again, a Weird Science machine that’ll make the Brigadier’s “technical chap” sweat quite a bit, an invisible heat barrier, evil Morris Dancers, Delgado really getting into the black magic rituals, a perfectly bizarre sequence in which the local white witch saves the Doctor’s life by pretending he is a wizard, and so much more.

The only annoying element for this contemporary viewer is the way the series at this time treats the companion, Jo Grant (Katy Manning), whose main function is to be patronized by writers and Doctor alike, and to get into trouble so she can be rescued. Even here, when she’s actually doing something to save the planet during the climax, she’s still treated like a mascot more than a human being or a hero afterwards.

Despite of that, this is certainly a top tier example of classic Who, bringing ideas intelligent and weird, whatever the British version of pulp values should be called, quite a bit of subtext, craftsmanship, as well as a great sense of excitement to the screen.

Grotesque (1988)

Lisa (Linda Blair) takes her friend Kathy (Donna Wilkes) with her to a get together of her family in some rather impressive mountain vacation home to help her through a bout of lovesickness. Lisa’s Dad, Orville Kruger (Guy Stockwell) is one of the great special effects makeup artists (though the work of his we see doesn’t really sell that greatness too well). He’s also in the habit of putting on some of his masks and entering the bedrooms of young friends of his daughter to really give them a fright, but that’s not going to be the sign of a coming killing spree by an effects artist you might expect.

In fact, Kruger, his wife Malinda (Alva Megowan), Lisa and their guest will fall victim to a home invasion by a gang of punks led– as far as that verb applies to insane ranting – by one Scratch (Brad Wilson). For reasons, Scratch and the Sniffs (bad punk band name not actually included in the movie) believe a famous effects guy like Orville will have loads of money, perhaps even gold bars, squirreled away in a hidden treasure room in his home. When neither gold nor treasure show up, the gang instead decides on a small rape and murder spree only Lisa will survive.

Even though there aren’t valuables hidden in the house, there is indeed a secret room there, a room in which dwells the huge, deformed and mentally not exactly healthy foster son of the family, Patrick (Robert Apica). Once the punks’ search leads to his room, he makes his displeasure with them murdering his family violently clear, turning the next twenty minutes of the movie into a bit of a slasher with the twist of the slasher killer being the (sort of, if you’re not into murder) good guy.

And that’s not the last change of sub-genres Joe Tornatore’s Grotesque will go through. After a tiny bit of American gothic horror, punksploitation, 70s style home invasion and slasher, there’s still enough time left for some hilariously weird tough cop time, and then a bit of vigilante business with Orville’s cosmetic surgeon brother Rod (Tab Hunter) – who came too late to get slaughtered or help anyone – which turns rather EC horror, after which there’s still a bit of time left for some of the goofiest, bizarre and tonally dubious fourth wall breaking imaginable. All of which goes to show that, if you simply don’t care for coherence and have never heard of the concept of a throughline, you can pack an astonishing amount of stuff into your movie.

Obviously, none of this is developed or sensibly connected in any way, shape or form, lending Grotesque a quality of randomness so pure, it’s difficult not to be surprised in which direction the movie’s going to go off in next. Hell, as it stands, you couldn’t even say who is supposed to be the film’s protagonist.

All of this, needless to say (but I’ll do it anyway), does not lend itself to a film with much of a dramatic, emotional impact. Everything is so disconnected, even the sleaziest exploitation bits can’t really hit anyone’s guts, so that this movie full of theoretically risible elements begins to feel weirdly friendly and companionable.

It is also wildly entertaining, not only thanks to its random march through all subgenres of horror that could be squeezed into it, but also because so much of the film is endearingly goofy, starting with Orville’s certainly not award-winning award-winning effects, going through the least plausible punk overacting by actors who clearly weren’t any such thing you’ll ever enjoy (we get equally unbelievable cops later on, too) and ending on a meta-horror bit so random and pointlessly, improbably bizarre, it’s impossible to find words for it that’ll do it justice.

And this, ladies, gentlemen and everybody elses, is why humanity is great (at least as a cosmic joke).

In short: Trilogy of Terror II (1996)

Like the original Trilogy of Terror, this was also directed, produced and partially written by the King of TV horror of his time (which were long gone at the point this was made), Dan Curtis. Like the 70s version, this TV production tells three half hour tales of horror and suspense while utilizing a single actress as the lead in all three stories. Lysette Anthony has the difficult honour of following in Karen Black’s footsteps, and while she’s no Karen Black, she does a good job going with whatever the film throws at her in any given tale.

The first story, “The Graveyard Rats” is a rather free adaptation of the Henry Kuttner weird tale which adds a noir set-up to the giant rats in a graveyard business of the original. That set-up is the segment’s main flaw, mostly because it doesn’t really connect terribly well with the giant rat business, turning this into an EC style tale of bad people finding a brutal and ironic end where the end isn’t actually properly ironic. However, the final five minutes of the segment are a fantastic example of how to shoot around not terribly convincing special effects and turn them threatening via the magic of effective editing and clever lighting.

The second tale, “Bobby” (a do-over of a Richard Matheson script Curtis had already used in his anthology movie Dead of Night) is the clear high point of the film. It is the tense tale of a grieving mother using a black magic ritual to bring her dead son back to life, slowly realizing that what has returned isn’t exactly what she asked for. It’s an excellently paced, thematically dark and very suspensefully executed story, featuring a surprisingly creepy child turn by Blake Heron. This part of the film hardly makes a bad move. Well, the big special make-up reveal isn’t great.

Finally, the film finishes on “He Who Kills”, a direct sequel to the 70s trilogy’s much loved “Zuni Doll” segment (which was actually called “Amelia”). It’s not as great as you’d hope for: for one, “Bobby” did the whole “woman stalked and attacked in isolated setting” quite a bit better and more intense just minutes earlier. Secondly, there’s really very little that is an improvement or interesting change in comparison to the original Zuni doll bit. Of course, it is still efficiently and competently filmed, treating its adorable little monster in a way that must fill Charles Band with envy even decades after. It may not be as good as the original segment but it is still very good fun. Props to whoever did the voice acting for the doll’s incessant vocalising – it’s as impressive as it is silly.

As a whole, this is, not surprisingly, clearly inferior to the first Trilogy, yet if you don’t compare the two directly but try to treat this as its own thing, there’s quite a bit of enjoyment to be had here.

Music Monday: Season of the Love Witch Edition

Bloody Sect (1982)

Original title: Secta siniestra

The relationship of Helen (Emma Quer) and ex-mercenary Frederick (Carlos Martos) does not stand under a happy star. Their first trouble starts when Frederick’s mad wife, whom he keeps, as is tradition, hidden in the attic, pokes his eyes out when she finds him and Helen in the aftermath of sex. There must be some divorce and marriage business going on afterwards, for the Mad Wife ends up in an asylum with what will turn out to be very bad security while Helen swears never to leave Frederick. No word of criticism towards the treatment of wife number one is uttered, obviously. Why, she’s even wild for having a child with the guy. Reader, she married him, and so on.

Alas/fortunately, Frederick has some sperm trouble and will never be able to fulfil his wife’s wish there. Eventually, they decide to try artificial insemination. As luck will have it, they end up in a fertility clinic that has been infiltrated by the not at all suspicious members of an inept Satanist sect. So, Helen is soon carrying the Anti-Christ.

Being pregnant with the son of Leonard Satan (at least his sect minions call him Leonard) has its drawbacks: there are particularly violent mood swings, a hunger for raw flesh, really nasty, though curiously symmetrically applied, rashes on Helen’s face, and regular bouts of terrible pain. On the plus side, Helen really doesn’t seem to get any larger at all with Satan Jr. No pillows were budgeted for the production, apparently. Also not great is that the trio of cultists we encounter have a terrible tendency to make their own work very difficult indeed, killing people by strangulation, with adorable fake bats or just with telekinesis for the tiniest reasons, really making themselves rather obvious. Admittedly, they do manage to keep Helen and Frederick isolated and under the control of one Sister Margaret (Concha Valero) for a time, and get a handful of murders in.

But eventually, they will also turn out to be the kind of cult who can be beaten by a little boy and a blind guy, a cult worshipping a baby Anti-Christ who melts when encountering a random cross-shaped object ten meters or so away.

To state the obvious, when talking about Ignacio F. Iquino’s Bloody Sect, one really needs to wear one’s psychotronic glasses to stay in the proper frame of mind to appreciate the film. Iquino’s direction is flavourless and without any sense of mood. Every single scene is lit absurdly brightly. Our director also seems not to have realized how bad his actors and his effects are, nor did he have any plan to work against any of these tiny little problems.

So everyone’s insane mugging is staged with flat acceptance, suggesting that in Iquino’s Spain, wild eye-rolling, pantomimic facial expressions and wild shouting are indeed the way human beings communicate. This leads to a very peculiar mood where characters’ actions aren’t just illogically scripted but where their general insanity, their willingness to shrug off even the greatest weirdness, as well as the plot’s complete lack of common (or other) sense are treated as if they were the most quotidian things imaginable. Incompetent but insanely over-murderous Satanists whose appearance is generally accompanied by wind coming from nowhere and red light, mad women in the attic, and the cutest fake bats that were ever meant to suck a blind man’s blood, the film seems to say, are just not that strange in its world.

This does of course not a conventionally good film make (one might even suggest the actual filmmaking here is pretty dire), but to my jaded eyes, Bloody Sect’s insistence on filming utter weirdness as drily as possible turns it into a rather special little film. And special beats good, not just in October.

In short: Scream and Scream Again (1970)

A serial killer stalks the clubs of London, listening to funky tunes and luring attractive young women into his sports car to drain their blood. Plodding Detective Superintendent Bellaver (Alfred Marks) is on the case but police procedure is little help against the weirder aspects of the case. Perhaps young assistant medical examiner Dr Sorel (Christopher Matthews) will be of more use.

At the same time, we regularly pop in with a man trapped in some kind of medical facility who loses one of his extremities after the other. We also spend a little time in an unnamed Eastern European country where things are rather more fascist than communist. Here, we witness how one Konratz (Marshall Jones) kills his way to the top with his evil version of the Vulcan nerve pinch.

Eventually, these plot lines…well, actually, no, they don’t really converge, and only a very polite viewer will not call Konratz’s sudden appearance in London in the final act utter, pointless and awkward bullcrap.

I understand that this Amicus production directed by Gordon Hessler has found some admirers over time, but I have no idea what’s to admire here: the slow pacing of what should be a potboiler? The decision to slow things down even further by the film’s constant changing between totally disconnected plotlines? The inability of the script (by Christopher Wicking) to actually unite any of it? The total randomness of what will go for an explanation of what’s going on in the end?

Though one might call the film’s chutzpah even calling itself a film admirable. There’s really no connective tissue to any of what we see at all, things just happen for no reason, Peter Cushing pops in for a scene, Christopher Lee and Vincent Price for three, connections are insinuated but don’t make any kind of sense. It’s all very much like a dream – not an interesting one, alas, but just a crap assortment of random nonsense that’s not even interesting to look at.

(Un)funky Friday: The Halloween Playlist Edition

Because six hours of spooky (and not so spooky) music curated by the purveyor of this humble blog are exactly what is called for during the best season of the year.

The Monster of the Opera (1964)

aka The Vampire of the Opera

Original title: Il mostro dell’opera

Sandro (Marco Mariani) the somewhat hyperactive director of a modern dance troupe has finally found the right place to make his dream project come true. It’s a long-abandoned old theatre that comes with a caretaker who only speaks in dire warnings and insinuations. Obviously, the place is supposed to be cursed. So there surely isn’t a vampire running around behind the scenes just waiting to get his teeth into Sandro’s prima ballerina (or however you call the position in modern dance) Giulia (Barbara Hawards) and whoever else takes his fancy.

Apparently, Gilulia is somehow connected with the vampire’s great love who doomed him to his bloodsucking existence, and the rather strange events he begins inflicting on the dancers are part of some plan for eternally recurring vengeance. Well, either that, or he really likes to poke underdressed women with a humungous pitchfork.

The Monster of the Opera was directed by Renato Polselli. Given that he also brought us The Ballerina and the Vampire, a film not containing any ballerinas but quite a bit of dancing, it’s pretty clear that the man had a genuine interest in putting some (or a lot of) dancing into his gothic horror movies, an interest clearly going above and beyond the opportunity female dancers lend the exploitative mindset to put women in outfits you’d otherwise never get away with. Unlike the earlier ballerina movie, being a sleaze genuinely seems to be only the tiniest part of Polselli’s motive for all the dancing – rather, this appears to be a genuine attempt to use modern dance as a part of the horror business.

I’m not sure I’d quite call it a successful attempt. Particularly in the film’s early stages, there seems to be an overabundance of dance numbers, not all of which are terribly well integrated into the plot, and the heavy lifting for the horror parts of the film is done elsewhere. Namely, right at the start of the film, in an exceptionally nightmare-like, heavily expressionist vision/dream sequence Julia and the caretaker seem to share (the film keeps it somewhat ambiguous) that isn’t just incredible to look at as something that feels like a refugee from some fantastic lost masterpiece of expressionist silent horror filmmaking, all built out of shadow, over cranked and undercranked camera work and images taken directly out of one’s nightmares but which also prefigures the strange mood and nightmare logic the film will take on in its third act, after all the dance numbers and the lounging of half-naked 60s hotties is done with, and the very early 60s portrayal of artistic people being energetic is through.

Then, the film actually makes pretty brilliant use of the dancing as part of the plot, too, trapping the dancers on stage via invisible walls, threatening them to dance or get sucked dry or pitchforked by the vampire, and suggesting nothing so much as the mediaeval dancing sickness to the viewer, turning what was once sexy-ish and a bit exhausting truly macabre, and deeply strange in feel.

Which is more than enough reason to power through one dance number too many during the first two acts, and makes this a rather interesting example of various attempts to transplant Italian gothic horror into modern times.

Cut and Run (1984)

Original title: Inferno in diretta

After stumbling upon the aftermath of a very violent massacre committed on members of a drug smuggling gang, TV reporter Fran Hudson (Lisa Blount) and her buddy and cameraman Mark Ludman (Leonard Mann) are put on the track of a curious drug war that seems to go on all around the United States as well as (somewhere in) South America.

Clues soon lead to one Colonel Horne (Richard Lynch) who supposedly died at Jonestown, and the missing son of an executive in Fran’s TV network,  and to an unnamed part of South America, so off to (some part of) South America our heroes fly. There, they’ll have to evade the soft attentions of crazy people and the cult of native warriors who are somehow (the film never explains) under Horne’s sway. Awkward attempts at Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now quotes happen. Michael Berryman does his wild Berryman thing, so there’s quite a bit of gore, too.

Fortunately for the softer stomachs and hearts in the audience, Ruggero Deodato’s Cut and Run – at least in the rather gory cut I’ve watched – does not follow the trail blazed by the director’s masterpiece of making any viewer feel like shit Cannibal Apocalypse and contains very little footage of animals getting tortured to squick the viewer out. Since the film fuses Italian jungle action and elements of the cannibal movie, Deodato obviously and cleverly having deduced that cannibals alone don’t cut it anymore at this point, there is some sexual violence and quite a load of implied racism to get through, though not double the amount than in each genre alone, at least.

It also has to to be said that Deodato’s use of sexual violence here very clearly isn’t meant to turn a viewer on, but rather part of the director’s typical project (at least in this part of his career) of putting us off of humanity altogether while still doing what is expected by an exploitation movie. To my eyes, one of the things that makes Deodato’s movies from this period – which pretty much ends around this point in his filmography - rather more interesting than a lot of its genre siblings is how clearly the guy means his general hatred of Western complacity and how earnestly he tries to shock his audience out of it. Which can lead to a film like Cannibal Holocaust only few people will want to watch a second time even when they are – as I am – sympathetic to the director and his project, or one like the film at hand that’s not fun enough to really work as an exploitation movie, but not unpleasant enough to make you (well, me, at least) feel really bad.

On the exploitation and horror front, there are – if you find a version of the film not cut to hell – some rather creative gore bits to watch, as well as small parts for Karen Black, John Steiner (who really goes to pieces for his part) and other genre favourites. There’s generally enough of a good bad time that it’s a reasonably enjoyable film to watch if you’re into this sort of thing like I am (and anyone who isn’t will already have closed this tab a couple of paragraphs earlier), particularly since Deodato isn’t bad at all at pacing the film’s more extreme moments with the inevitable slow parts. I also approve of Richard Lynch doing a Marlon Brando impression for a bit, as well as the completely pointless attempts at exploiting Jonestown for additional shock value.

In short: A Child’s Voice (1978)

The golden age of radio in the UK. The excellently named Ainsley Rupert Macreadie (T.P. McKenna) writes and narrates serialized ghost stories on a nightly radio program that closes out the daily programming schedule. Things turn rather spooky in real life when he starts to tell the story of a little boy and stage magician’s assistant who disappears under curious circumstances. After the first episode, a child calls Macreadie on the phone, asking him, in words very close to ones the little boy in Macreadie’s story uses to not continue with the tale. Macreadie does continue; things do not go well for him.

This short film from Ireland directed by Kieran Hickey is very much made in the spirit and style of the BBC’s Ghost Stories for Christmas. Clearly, something was in the air on the isles at this time. This is a lovely little film that makes all the right decisions to create a thick, decidedly creepy atmosphere out of a lot of shadows in a couple of very small rooms, sound design that at times might as well have come from the Radiophonic Workshop, and an unhurried (which is code for “slow, but purposefully so”) pace that understands that it’s much easier to let the uncanny enter after you’ve prepared your audience properly for it. And, because this was clearly made with my tastes in mind, it really is the uncanny, so no complete explanations are ever forthcoming, and the whole truth about what is happening here is left as undisclosed as the end of the story Macreadie is beginning to tell will be.

McKenna’s lead performance is lovely, making the character neither too pompous nor too nice. In a very clever touch, the film adds Valentine Dyall’s well-oiled voice as a narrator, so the story about a man telling ghost stories on the radio is told to us by a man who did indeed tell ghost stories on the radio, an extra frisson in a wonderfully effective tale that uses the spookiness of certain kinds of technology, like the telephone and the radio in their early years, the liminality of the disembodied voice, to great effect.

Music Monday: Monster Mash Edition

Madhouse (1974)

Paul Toombes (Vincent Price) has built a nice career in Hollywood for himself by starring in a series of horror films in which he plays one Doctor Death, as written by his close friend, the former actor Herbert Flay (Peter Cushing). When Paul’s fiancée is murdered by someone wearing his Doctor Death costume, most of the world, including himself, is pretty sure he is indeed the man responsible.

After years spent institutionalized, and some time of private seclusion, Flay has convinced Toombes to return to acting and the role of Doctor Death in a British TV show produced by the despicable (so, very much a classic producer type) Oliver Quayle (Robert Quarry, squeezing much slime out of a not terribly deeply written part). Paul is really doing this in the name of friendship for Flay. For his friend seems to have hit on hard times financially and, as we will learn after a while, privately with a rather arachnid situation concerning his wife Faye (Adrienne Corri).

Things do go wrong very quickly, for someone dressed as Doctor Death begins to kill off various people Paul meets (sorry, Linda Hayden!), while our protagonist’s public behaviour becomes increasingly erratic. Which is what happens to a guy who isn’t too sure if he is actually committing a series brutal murders.

This AIP and Amicus co-production directed by Jim Clark does have a pretty bad reputation, so I found myself positively surprised by the film when I finally got around to watching it, after literal decades. Sure, it’s not at all on the level of comparable Price vehicles like the lovely Doctor Phibes films or Theatre of Blood, but more often than not, this is a rather delightful bit of meta horror. It is perhaps not as deep as one would like, and sometimes a bit ploddingly paced, but otherwise, I find very little to dislike here.

Price is certainly putting – as was his wont – a lot of energy into his part, portraying Toombes as a bit of an unluckier version of himself, providing nervy energy, big emotions, and a truly frightening shouty mouth, while also keeping the guy sympathetic and likeable.

One might have wished for a bit more of Cushing on screen, but what’s there is as perfectly delivered as always. Plus, there’s a pretty incredible moment I won’t spoil even when talking about a movie nearly fifty years old that’s all Cushing’s right at the end of the movie, a moment silly, darkly funny, perfectly macabre and oh so well delivered. And really, as a fan of both Cushing and Price, it is a great joy to see both of them interact at all.

There are a handful of truly great moments like that very last scene sprinkled through the whole of the film, usually mixing that dark humour, a grotesque or macabre idea, and a tinge of melancholy with perfectly appropriate overacting by Price or Corri.

If I wanted to criticize anything, it’s that Clark (who is much better known as an editor) is rather too workmanlike a director for the material at hand. Certainly, someone with a bit more verve and style behind the camera could have made even more out of the sense of melancholia for things lost that has turned grotesque for quite a few characters, and could probably have given the murder set pieces a bit more weight and dynamics. However, that’s what stands between Madhouse being a great entry into the Price canon instead of merely being a good and interesting one, and so feels like a bit of a non-complaint.

Three Films Make A Post: A Tasty Horror Film!

The Meateater (1979): This tale of a family reopening an abandoned cinema and having to cope with the mild carnage the crazy person who dwells there like the Phantom of the Cinema causes, is an at times dreary affair, the sort of low budget business where actors barely seem to be able to remember their lines, much less deliver them well, and where things stop and start randomly. From time to time, David Burton Morris’s film drifts into more interesting directions, when (the man was a film student, after all) the Phantom of the Opera gets quoted pretty directly, expressionism rears its shadowy head, or a shot really hits the right mood of desolation and the decay of something (or someone) beloved. These moments don’t make up much of the movie, alas, so it needs a certain person in a certain mood to fight through the dreary rest of the film.

Nightbooks (2021): Whereas this Netflix family horror production directed by David Yarovesky is professionally made and acted throughout. It’s a nice enough film, if a bit too desperate to make its moral very very clear (because American filmmakers do tend to think all children are stupid, I assume). There are some creative and fun moments, the production design does find the point of child friendly gothic unreality very well indeed. There is, in short, very little to complain about here, if the grown-up viewer doesn’t go into the film expecting their world view to be realigned by watching it. Plus, the kid actors aren’t bad, and Krysten Ritter seems to have a very good time doing her evil witch with interesting fashion sense bit.

Chompy & The Girls (2021): My highlight of this post is this slightly less family friendly horror comedy by Skye Braband, in which a very late father-daughter first meeting soon turns into a joint fight against a gentleman with a very large mouth, a propensity to eat little girls, and eventually the voice of Udo Kier. Braband manages nicely to balance the increasing weirdness of their plot with some traditional US indie style family business, and various jokes that actually happen to be funny. The latter is of course not always a given in indie horror comedies. Add to this how well Steve Marvel and Christy St. John turn their flawed newly-found father-daughter duo likeable and fun to simply see interact, and enjoy yourselves thoroughly.

Short Film Friday: Intruders

In short: We Need to Do Something (2021)

During a tornado warning, a family – mother Diane (Vinessa Shaw), father Robert (Pat Healy), teenage daughter Melissa (Sierra McCormick) and younger son Bobby (John James Cronin) – shelter from the storm in their big bathroom. In this sort of situation, family tensions do tend to escalate. It certainly isn’t helping that mom and dad are in one of those she cheats/he’s a prick kind of moments in their relationship, nor that Melissa seems particularly desperate about the health of her girlfriend Amy (Lisette Alexis). However, there’s worse things than being huddled up together with people one is supposed to get along with but doesn’t: quickly, the family are locked in by a fallen tree. They find themselves stranded in their bathroom for much longer than they reasonably should be, long enough that cannibalism might become something to talk about. It seems there’s something worse going on than a storm and its aftermath, with some thing sneaking around the periphery. And what’s with the flashbacks Melissa has to her teen romance with Amy?

If you wanted to be facetious, you might say Sean King O’Grady’s We Need to Do Something (with an excellent script by Max Booth III based on his own novella) is the best horror film about a family locked into their own bathroom ever made, a new highlight in bathroom films, even. However, the film has rather a lot more going for it than just this set-up, and turns out to be a bit of a tour de force through family problems, witchcraft, guilt, and what may or may not be a Weird apocalypse.

Tonally, there’s certainly a very dark, sardonic sense of humour on display, something that’s twisted and wry at the same time. The humour is never used as comic relief, but rather the opposite, a way to intensify and escalate the family catastrophe on display, as well as a method to help turn the circumstances our protagonists encounter stranger and more discomforting. There’s a finely drawn sense of ever increasing doom surrounding the family, the sense of forces from the outside pushing them just long and hard enough to tease out their inner weaknesses and lies, yet also twisting them and making them larger and less familiar than they should be.

The acting ensemble really gets into the very specific tone needed, grounding the increasing derangement on display in something that feels natural and real (not necessarily pleasant and easy, of course), so that the film’s stranger moments hit all the harder.

We Need to Do Something is, apparently, one of those films particularly not for everyone. I suspect its tone simply will not work for everyone (which seems perfectly alright to me), nor will its approach to ambiguity and resolutions make everybody happy. Me, I felt rather at home here, or as at home as the circumstances portrayed allow.

Gonjiam: Haunted Asylum (2018)

Original title: 곤지암

Warning: the EMF activity meter shows “spoilers ahead”!

The merry crew of YouTube ghost hunting channel Horror Times has a great coup planned: a live stream from one of the most haunted locations in South Korea, the dilapidated Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital (which is an actual place with an appropriately dark history over here in the real world). There, the team – plus three young women as guests, because nobody likes a sausage fest – will try to wake the local ghost population and attempt to open the door of the mysterious room 402, which supposedly leads to death and doom for anyone attempting it.

Things do indeed become very spooky. The séance used to awaken the spirits has rather too good results, and things proceed from there accordingly. Of course, the early spirit manifestations are faked by the three core members of the ghost hunters; but soon enough, the real supernatural rears its rather murderous head.

At first, this South Korean movie by Jeong Beom-sik feels rather a lot like just another POV horror movie about ghost hunters actually encountering what they are trying to make money from. But where many (though not all) films of this type tend to be amateurish and awkward in production and structure, Gonjiam’s script (as written by Jeong and Park Sang-min) very quickly shows itself to be very tight and effective, going through the minimal necessary character bits and shots of young people farting around efficiently. Where too many films of this type spend half of their running time getting their boring characters to the place of their demise, the film at hand knows what its audience has come to see and gets through preliminaries in a quarter of an hour or so. From then on, things flow rather wonderfully: plot reveals come earlier and hit much better than usual, and the spooky bits start early and escalate quickly. Comparing a film’s narrative to a clockwork doesn’t always sound like a compliment, but when the clockwork runs as well as it does here, it is a good way to praise the sheer craftsmanship of the approach.

Which does lead to the main criticism one could raise against Gonjiam, namely its lack of depth. Despite some nods towards the shadowier periods of South Korea’s history via its choice of haunted spot, there’s very little interest on display to say anything at all here - apart from “don’t screw with ghosts” I suppose – adding this to the group of horror movies that really only ever want to be a spooky good time for their audiences. However, the film is so brilliant at simply being said spooky good time, timing every creepy little and big shock perfectly, using every trick in the horror book so effectively, that criticising it for not also having Big Important Things to say simply seems to be beside the point and churlish.

The film shows considerable breadth when it comes to the shaping of its spooky goings-on, too, going from classic suspense set-ups and moments, over very folkloric inspired ghosts to the sort of spatial weirdness I typically find irresistible in a movie, shaping all of this into a real machine of increasing tension. Little of this is original, rather it’s the sort of thing where you can see the sources for nearly every single element, but still feel yourself dragged inexorably through increasingly great set pieces, mentally praising the filmmakers for their good taste in borrowing instead of criticising them for it.

Because this is a film about a group of people who actually planned their little ghost hunting jaunt beforehand, the POV angle is never used as an excuse for things to look a bit crap: there are a lot of cameras involved (not all of them held by mortal hands, it turns out), and nobody confuses them with salt shakers, so Jeong has free hand to stage his scenes like in any proper movie, using the POV basics as a sign of authenticity and to make things more intense for his audience.

Speaking of authenticity, Gonjiam has learned a bit from the books of the great carnival hawkers of our genre too, and so, as I’ve already mentioned uses a real run-down asylum for its backstory. Because the owners really did not care for a horror movie about their ruin coming to the cinemas (there was apparently even a law suit involved to keep the film off the screens), the film was shot elsewhere. Supposedly, the filmmakers then recreated as much of the actual building’s floorplan as possible for the filming. Which may demonstrate a deep belief in authenticity, or filmmakers who really know the kind of talk that’ll sell tickets. In any case, William Castle would have been proud.

In short: Winterbeast (1992)

Life near an apparently much-used mountain lodge gets a bit dangerous when possessed totem poles, zombie-things, and the little sibling of the Giant Claw begin murdering tourists and locals, thanks to a Native American curse. Or demons. Or something. Fortunately, Sergeant Bill Whitman (Tim R. Morgan) and Forest Ranger Stillman (Mike Magri) are on the case and/or having a lot of nice little chats full of non-sequiturs, doing their best to fight the Winterbeast. Which of the monsters is this mysterious titular entity, I’m not quite sure. Probably the pseudo-giant with the demon rubber mask?

Winterbeast, directed by Christopher Thies, really is quite the thing. A regional Massachusetts-made artefact shot piecemeal over the course of several years during the 80s, it takes place in one of our neighbouring dimensions, where all rooms are about toilet-sized and there exist no filmic techniques to suggest anything about where anyone or anything acts or stands or runs in relation to anything or anyone else. Unless, of course, it’s an interior shot, where people are usually shoved so close together in the frame, one tends to expect they’re just about to start kissing. Which they don’t: instead, there’s a lot of very peculiar dialogue, sometimes in synch with lip movements, sometimes not, that manages to go into a lot of things in excruciating detail, without ever quite reaching what we humans describe as “sense”.

This, however isn’t the slow and boring kind of weird, no budget films: while the film’s first half mostly consists out of these awkward dialogue scenes, they are strangely interesting, always weird enough to suggest there might be something interesting or mind-blowing discussed, and curiously detailed – very much as if all of this indeed made some kind of sense in the minds of the filmmakers. And that’s before things really start to come together in the second half, when the sporadic effects sequences from the first turn into a barrage of cheap and cheerful stop motion monsters of indeterminate size that have the ability to wreak havoc without ever visibly touching anyone or anything. Obviously, Giant Claw jr. is my favourite among them, even though it’s not as big as a battleship, and rather as big as a chicken coop (or perhaps two chicken coops). There’s also an absolutely adorable chestburster rip-off that would probably turn Charles Band green with envy. Hats off to a final action sequence that’s so awkwardly edited, the relations between time and space are clearly going completely out of whack after an hour or so of the strain the film has already put on our continuum.

But wait, there’s more! Winterbeast also features what may very well be the greatest operatic mad scene in cinema, involving a cheerful ditty, a (otherwise very shouty) man wearing a clown mask and a dangerous jacket doing a long and awkward dance, a plastic Halloween pumpkin and a desiccated chestburster victim in an armchair. Also, spontaneous combustion.

If that’s not enough to tickle anyone’s fancy, the spirit of Halloween has truly left this world.

Music Monday: Pestilence Edition

Spectre (1977)

(This is based on the film’s longer UK cut with a bit of nudity and more sleaze that never made it to NBC at the time, for obvious reasons)

Former top criminologist turned occult detective William Sebastian (Robert Culp) calls his estranged former friend and associate, alcoholic sleazebag and medical doctor “Ham” Hamilton (Gig Young) for help in his newest case. He really needs a doctor, too, for somebody is regularly using magic to pierce his heart, leaving him not in ideal fighting shape. Ham doesn’t really believe in anything occult, and the men’s parting of ways some time ago might have had something to do with their difference in opinion. Ham is beginning to change his mind when Sebastian’s witch assistant Lilith (Majel Barrett) gives him a draught that causes an instant aversion to alcohol, and even more so when an oversexed succubus version of Sebastian’s client, one Anitra Cyon (Ann Bell) appears and tries to seduce our hero into what looks a lot like an erection based heart attack to me, or as much as a TV movie from 1977 can suggest that. But don’t worry, hitting her with the right page in an occult tome does get rid of her nicely.

After that business is through, we finally learn what the real Anitry Cyon wants from Sebastian and Ham: find out if she’s assuming right and her decadent brother Geoffrey (James Villiers) has indeed been possessed by EVIL, and when necessary, kill him. So off to Great Britain our heroes jet, piloted by Anitra’s other brother Mitri (John Hurt) who may or may not already be under a malevolent influence himself. There are further attempts on our heroes’ lives and virtue (such as it is), of course, action archaeology happens, and exposition tells of the time when druids and Christian priests teamed up to imprison Asmodeus.

This pretty incredible artefact directed by Clive Donner is another of the many attempts of Gene Roddenberry to make a successful non-Star Trek TV show, this time around with British money. I’m not surprised Spectre never made it to series, because it is absolutely bonkers. What we have here is a mix of a Dennis Wheatley style occult thriller minus Wheatley’s actual ideas about occultism (though fortunately also minus his unpleasant politics) with the toned down “sexy” fantasies of a middle-aged guy with very peculiar interests who never left the swinger party mindset behind, paired with the sort of random crap you put in your movie not because it is a good idea to use it, but because you think it is absolutely awesome.

As a serious horror film the result is of course pretty terrible, but it’s also ridiculously fun to watch, having given up all restraint that could turn it into a proper movie and replaced it with the mandate to just make as much absurd fun, and quite a bit embarrassing stuff, up as possible. So of course Sir Geoffrey proves his decadence by only employing young, female servants who try way too hard to be sexy; of course his sister dresses like the old maid in a 30s comedy; of course one of the main characters turns out to be Asmodeus and looks a lot like a bluish Klingon when uncovered. Of course there’s a particularly awkwardly staged satanic orgy with dancing bad and half-hearted even by the standards of bad movie satanic orgies (one hopes real-life ones are a bit more enthusiastic, because this really doesn’t cut it as a seduction to evil). There’s an evil sort of ape person costume; things feel evil to the touch; Asmodeus lives by rather complicated rules; Gordon Jackson wears demon make-up; more “how we get rid of demons” nonsense that makes not a lick of sense than one could possibly hope for is expounded upon, and so much more.

The film’s tone wavers between embarrassing – just cringe through the unbelievable scene with Ham and the three maids trying to “seduce” him and ask yourself how many people must have thought this was an idea that needed to be put to film – and utterly hysterical, Culp, Young, Hurt and Villiers hamming it up in each and every way possible. I am usually not much of a fan of Culp and find him rather bland and affectless, but clearly, if he wanted, he could take bites out of scenery so large, Vincent Price must have been jealous; it’s the only correct acting decision to take in this particular movie, too, for playing any of this straight would simply ruin the film by dragging it back to Earth from whichever planet Roddenberry was on at the time.

In short: Asih (2018)

1980. Eight-months pregnant Puspita (Citra Kirana), her husband Andi (Darius Sinathrya) and Andi’s mother (Marini) have moved to the country. Alas, the house belongs to the territory of the kuntinalak Asih (Shareefa Daanish), of future Danur fame, and we all know that Asih has a bit of a thing about children, even the not yet born. So the young couple is going to have to cope with some rather hefty supernatural troubles that won’t simply be resolved with the proper disposal of a placenta (though they will try that).

There’s really no reason why the Conjuring movies should have all the fun with spin-off prequels about some of their ghosts and ghoulies, particularly when the Danur-movies, from which this spins off, seem to have commercial clout in their native Indonesia comparable to the US advertorials for a couple of horrible charlatans.

Not looking at the commercial side of the business, I’m not sure the world exactly needed Awi Suryadi’s prequel to its universe’s mainline films. The Danur movies (as directed by Suryadi) themselves aren’t always the deepest horror movies, but they are consistently fun and interesting, sometimes even inventive. The first Asih isn’t quite so good. From time to time, Suryadi manages to find his usual flair for mood-building and the ability to turn clichés into a fun set-piece or two, but at least half of this not exactly long movie feels a bit too much like a creative team dragging their feet. There really isn’t enough material on screen to make for a full movie, and nothing we learn about our titular kuntilanak’s backstory changes all that much about what we know from the first Danur, making much of the film at hand simply feel rather too slight for comfort, particularly since it shows little interest in doing much with the more interesting elements about our victim family.

Let's start October with some old-timey spookiness.

Featuring Vincent Price and Ida Lupino.