October Horror 2014 - Chapter 3

Let's dig into a few more tasty horror treats...


Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things (Bob Clark - 1973) - I'm not sure how this "let's get our friends together and make a movie" movie didn't completely collapse into itself, but it somehow stayed afloat even if about 70% of the frame at any given time seems to be complete blackness. Fortunately director Bob Clark (Black Christmas and a c.v. of films almost as diverse as Robert Wise) wisely decided to clad his group of friends in brightly coloured clothing for their night time adventure through an island cemetery for fun & games and inspiration for their play. None of them seem to like each other, so calling them "friends" might be a stretch, but they all seem to follow the egotistical and nasty director who performs a number of rituals over the graveyard. Without really meaning to, he ends up accidentally waking a whole assortment of dead folks. The last 20 minutes of the movie actually work quite decently with the troupe trying to battle and escape the zombies, but it's a bit of a challenge to get there.

The Monster Club (Roy Ward Baker - 1980) - Yet another of those great horror compilation films, this one has the huge bonus of having both Vincent Price and John Carradine in the wrap-around story. The club of the title is where Price's vampire brings his recent victim (Carradine) to regale him with a few tales of monstrous behaviour. The film gives itself a bit more room to stretch its stories by including only three of them and fortunately they all hit the mark nicely and retain the right tone of dark humour with their horrific situations. The Monster Club itself falls victim to some early 80s cheese in the form of the performing "rock music" acts, but it serves to keep things hopping. Price is just a joy to watch and you really wish there was more of him, but when has that not been the case?

The Town That Dreaded Sundown (Charles B. Pierce - 1976) - As a mix between narrated docudrama, slasher and low-rent comedy, this is an odd film...The murders in the film are apparently based on true events from the mid-40s and which were indeed committed by some hooded phantom stranger around the Texas-Arkansas border. Those crime sequences are handled reasonably well with a strong sense of menace and an imposing killer. The rest of the film, though, has little consistency with occasionally glacial pacing, completely useless details and a bumbling patrolman who is used at all the wrong times to bring unnecessary levity to the story. It's still of interest and I'm curious about the new version of this coming out soon, but this could have been a classic 70s thriller instead of a curio.

Gurozuka (Yoichi Nishiyama - 2005) - It's hard to be fully invested in a movie when the characters continuously act stupidly - something that is pretty consistent throughout Gurozuka and almost pulls the whole movie down with it. Fortunately, there are enough moments of creepiness and even genuine frights to keep things going. 7 young female film students go to an abandoned house in the woods to investigate and recreate what happened there 7 years previously. It's a shame that you essentially give up on the logic of the story and any attachment to the characters, but a solid atmosphere, good sound cues and those damn Noi masks (especially when they're bloody) managed to keep me, if not involved, at least curious what would happen.

October Horror 2014 - Chapter 2

I'm behind in my viewing, so I'm feeling a bit under the gun...After this batch it'll be time to pick up the pace again.


Dr. Terror's House Of Horror (Freddie Francis - 1965) - I'm a big fan of the old Amicus horror anthology films - titles like The House That Dripped Blood, Tales From The Crypt, Torture Garden and Asylum would give you 4-5 short horror stories with a variety of actors (as well as a bonus wrap-around framing device) and bring forth a great 90 minutes of entertainment. The tales weren't really overly gory or jump-out-of-your-seat scary, but they excelled in bringing horrific ideas into 15-20 minute long stories with dashes of black comedy. Dr. Terror's grab bag was the only remaining one of the Amicus omnibus films that had eluded me, so I finally caught up with it and it didn't disappoint. With Peter Cushing dolling out the fates to 5 men he meets on a train (via tarot card readings) and Christopher Lee and Donald Sutherland amongst the leads of the individual scenarios, the film breezes by at a fast pace and introduces you to plants with their own brains, voodoo jazz, an artist's disembodied hand, and a couple of different spins on vampires and werewolves. Great stuff.

Trouble Every Day (Claire Denis - 2001) - Art horror that builds to excruciating levels of unease and takes carnal desire to extreme lengths. Claire Denis' look at this (blood)lust is most famous for its 2 graphic sexual encounters, but the entire film reeks and drips of our natural urges. Vincent Gallo creepily plays (I suppose 'creepily' is somewhat redundant) an American who has just married a young French girl but is also battling an odd disease. In his mind, his only hope is a French scientist who seems to have dropped off the radar and is attempting to deal with his own individual patient. She has already devoured several sexual mates and is still hungry...With very little dialogue, Denis builds up a frightening scenario of the impossibility of dampening our baser and more dangerous natural instincts.

Night Of The Eagle (Sydney Hayers - 1962) - I was actually looking for Michael Armstrong's 1970 film Burn, Witch, Burn (otherwise known as Mark Of The Devil) when I stumbled across this spiffy little chiller from the early 60s (sometimes also known as Burn, Witch, Burn). Shot in lovely black and white, it sits comfortably right alongside many of the Hammer psychological thrillers ("mini-Hitchcocks" as Hammer called them) made in that same decade - films that were less gothic horror and more about modern tales of evil lurking just beyond the corner. Titles like Scream Of Fear, Paranoiac and Nightmare provide small surprises, twist endings and a wonderful sense of fun and melodrama. Night Of The Eagle hits most of these high points as we follow a university professor who seems to be loved by all and his wife who knows the secret reason why. She's been using voodoo protection all this time, but when she is forced to stop, something will have to give: either his luck or her sanity. Possibly both.

I Married A Witch (Rene Clair - 1942) - OK, so I'm allowed to stretch the boundaries of horror a bit...Or, in the case of this trifle of a movie, a lot. The Criterion Collection released this last year during October, so it sounded like it might be a fun little ditty to toss into the cesspool this month. I expected there not to be many frights in this comedy starring Veronica Lake and Frederic March, but I didn't expect there would also be a dearth of laughs. With the star power involved and the wonderful poetic French director at the helm, I couldn't help but hope for something charming and memorable. It's well-loved by some, but I frankly found it incredibly disappointing - even for a throwaway comedy. Lake has that certain something about her, but she doesn't seem to feel comfortable in the role and overdoes just about everything (in particular the voiceovers that she and her warlock father do while they are in the form of smoke). There's little genuine here - Frederic March feels miscast, the line readings feel rushed (except for Susan Hayward who does well in a small part) and the story is forced. Lake's witch seeks revenge on March who happens to be a descendant of the man who killed her years ago, but things shift and love conquers all. Minus a few decent gags during a wedding scene, there is little impetus to keep things rolling.

October Horror 2014 - Chapter 1

Skeptical about yet another set of October horror reviews? Can't says I blame you, but I'm doing it anyway...


Comedy Of Terrors (Jacques Tourneur - 1963) - A less than auspicious start. You would think that with Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff all being directed by Jacques Tourneur (Jacques freakin' Tourneur!) that you might end up with a bit more than warmed over gags, broad dull humour and an uninteresting story with staid visuals. But that's exactly what you get here. Price and Lorre are occasionally entertaining just by their sheer presence as undertakers that need to create a market for their services, but it all becomes old pretty quickly. The musical score is possibly the worst part of the whole affair - it's overbearing as it continually tries to tell you what's funny with little whistles, blorps, xylophone runs and all manner of recycled generic bad kiddie TV show music. Painful at times.

Pieces (Juan Piquer Simon - 1982) - Pieces starts out with a bang (as a young boy puts an end to his mother's haranguing about the filth he is exposed to), but fairly quickly slides into the "pretty lame" categorization of slasher films as we fast forward 40 years to a series of killings of young sexually confident women on a university campus. The film moves from lame to seriously lame, but then seems to stake out territory in the so-bad-it's-good realm. This status is quickly followed by a shift into the sphere of no-that's-just-incompetent-filmmaking with a further shift into OK-I'll-admit-that-I'm-actually-entertained-by-this-silliness-and-HORRIBLE-dubbing. And then there's the bonus of a "WTF was that ending?" ending. So yeah...That was Pieces.

Society (Society - 1989) - Though it has its shaky "let's just dispense with the logical questions so we can move on with the plot" moments, Society is overall an entertaining, disorienting and somewhat stinging satire of class differences and how the rich feed off those below them. And when I say "feed"...Well, let's just say that the film is not overly subtle. This is especially true in its staggeringly grotesque last 20 minutes (even with the credit at the start of the film indicating that Screaming Mad George is responsible for the surrealistic make-up effects, you aren't really prepared for that final party scene). It's somewhat appropriate given the relationship between much of the upper echelon and those below - both then and even moreso now.

A Page Of Madness (Teinosuke Kinogasa - 1926) - This hour-long Japanese surreal look at the inside of a mental institution is quite remarkable - not just for its time, but from a modern perspective as well. The layers and layers of superimposed images attempt to provide an entry point to what it might feel like to have delusions, but the almost non-stop use of quick cuts, shafts of light, canted angles and bars across all entrances also leaves you feeling like there simply is no possible escape. The story suffers somewhat from the use of these techniques, but it almost doesn't matter. This is a creepy, unsettling and very sad film.