Horror Challenge entry #3: Daybreakers (2010, Michael & Peter Spierig)
A stylish and darkly funny social satire with horrific elements for much of its running time, but it’s clearly a film where the concept was a strong draw yet the Spierigs never quite figured how to fully utilize it. They set up the world, set up the conflict and set up the characters, yet on the evidence here they never quite nailed down how to resolve that conflict with the characters and world provided. What was pretty neat starts to go wobbly around the midway point, when the vampirism cure starts to foreground itself; by the third act, the film has broken down into generic action-packed blood-n-bullets mayhem, with convenient heel turns (and vice versa) and heroic characters who are never as dead as expected. Also, Ethan Hawke is such a wet blanket, I mean really, and the good-brother/bad-brother conflict is weary, weary shit. I know I’m in the minority on this, but I have to say I still prefer the Spierig’s scrappy crappy debut Undead.
Horror Challenge entry #2: Blood Bath (1966, Jack Hill & Stephanie Rothman)
Nothing I come up with is going to be as on-the-money as the film’s own critique of itself: “An interesting technique, but it needs something.” Given time and space to shape it, Blood Bath could have really worked, colliding modern-art phoniness with a particularly dark strain of classicism. The “dead red nudes” painted by the chief antagonist (a painter who believes his ancestor was a vampire, is haunted by a ghostly muse and might know that said vampirism runs in the family) are pretty striking, and some early shots, notably Daisy in the courtyard, display a Gothic framing and use of shadow that anticipates the burgeoning giallo genre. Yet, as expected of any project with as tortured a Frankenstein history as this one, it never quite hangs together - no tension is allowed to build because the cross-cutting of the two main plots robs them both of momentum, and scenes go on too long or serve no purpose other than padding. Roger Corman did what he could to rescue what he considered a hapless and unreleasable film, from what I understand, but forget A Bucket of Blood - this isn’t even on the level of Color Me Blood Red.
Horror Challenge entry #23-#28 (plus): The tragic end
I just didn’t have the mojo this year, man. Some of that is attributable to an injury that kept me more or less bedridden for the first two weeks of the month, which meant more than one film a night was tough since I tend to nod off while watching films in bed. That doesn’t explain my flameout in the second half of the month, though. I hoping to hit at least thirty, but alas, ‘twasn’t to be. Oh well, what the hell, here’s what I got anyway.
#23: Delirium (1972, Renato Polselli as “Ralph Brown”) Before cranking out The Reincarnation of Isabel, the team of Polselli, Mickey Hargitay and Rita Calderoni came together to essay this offbeat spin on the giallo genre. Hargitay is excellently creepy as a police psychologist who is tormented by his own impulses to kill, and Polselli directs this with a nice amount of polish and skill (the opening sequence is a dazzler). Shame, though, that the narrative breaks down in the home stretch - more questions are raised than answered by the bugfuck climax. The film doesn’t end so much as it flames out.
#24: My Bloody Valentine (1981, George Mihalka) First-wave slasher benefits greatly from finally being available in its uncut form, but it benefits even more from possessing a solid and palpable sense of place and atmosphere. It’s not enough to be set in a blue-collar milieu a la the soggy remake of this - the milieu has to convince, and it’s to this film’s credit that its depiction of the spirited roughneck culture in this old mining town indeed convinces. What that does is make the downtime between killings (of which there’s a lot - Mihalka doesn’t fully cut loose on the murder front until an hour has passed) tolerable, maybe even something to be enjoyed, rather than something to plow through in impatience. Still has its share of lame material (the lost-love plot thread works no better here than in the remake), but it’s about as good as this genre gets.
#25: The Last House on the Beach (1978, Franco Prosperi) Not only is this film dead-ass boring, it seems ashamed of its own exploitative material - anything that’s even mildly spicy is either cut down into inference or stylized so heavily that the impact vanishes. Snore.
#26: Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned (2008, Brian Thomson) I’ll bet this seemed funny while it was being made, anyway. The Lloyd Kaufman cameo made me laugh at the very least.
#27: /Slither (2006, James Gunn)/ This movie is so freakin’ awesome. I love it.
#28: The Return of Count Yorga (1971, Bob Kelljan) Practically the same film as the first, and I’d accuse Kelljan of repeating himself if he wasn’t doing it as essentially a way to correct the mistakes made on his first go-around. From the opening scene, this Yorga is a far more confident, dark and creepy-cool venture than its predecessor, with Kelljan openly displaying a Eurohorror-influenced vibe that was only hinted at in Yorga the first (love that slo-mo hallway chase!). Bonus points for the well-deployed Creepy Kid, and even more bonus points for the terrifically handled final scene. Robert Quarry, as before, is awesome.
And just for posterity, here’s three stragglers I took down on Nov. 1st.
Bonus film #1: Night Train Murders (1972, Aldo Lado) It’s like Aldo took a look at Last House on the Left and thought to himself, “Not a bad idea, now how can I spin this so that it’s actually a good movie?” Takes its time with its setup (the terrorization doesn’t start in earnest until the film is half over), paces itself carefully, exercises reserve so that its big shocks hit all the harder and makes its narrative more believable… this, folks, is how it’s done. Possibly even more cynical than the Craven flick, as well, with a class-based social critique centered around the character of The Woman on the Train; all this, plus it gives us a random passenger on the train and uses him to ensnare the viewer in his own presumed voyeurism with a stroke so clever and cruel that it hurts to think about it. Is there anything this film can’t do?
Bonus film #2: Oral Fixation (2009, Jake Cashill) Starts off surprisingly well, like a script-flipped Lifetime movie with a nasty body-horror edge to it (I visibly cringed when the chipper blonde psycho dug out one of her own teeth so that she could have an excuse to see her dentist, the object of her obsession), but some time in the second act it takes a turn towards the silly and never quite recovers; the third act is nothing less than an act of self-immolation. Not as bad as the reviews would have you believe, but not essential viewing or anything.
Bonus film #3: Lucifera: Demon Lover (1972, Paolo Lombardo) It’s like they threw a Satanic-orgy movie and a soap opera broke out. Fuck this nothing of a movie.
Horror Challenge entry #17-#22: Quick words to catch up
I think Adam is gonna whup me this year, unless I go bugfuck nuts next week. I’ve gotten caught up in other things. (I only got in two — TWO! — films this past week. I suck.) Anyway, here’s some brief thoughts on films I haven’t written about yet:
#16: Thirst (1979, Rod Hardy) Takes the class metaphor implicit in Browning’s Dracula and runs all the way home with it, creating a system wherein a group of privileged bloodsuckers descended from nobility (the lead, a woman the clan is trying to coerce into their way of life, is a relative of Countess Bathory) sustain their hungers via controlled blood farming and exploitation of semi-willing donors. As both a slashing metaphor for the allure of moral compromise as a path to financial gain and as a unique, institutionally bright take on the vampire genre, it’s solid stuff. Good B-movie cast too, with Henry Silva, Robert Thompson (from Patrick) and David Hemmings among the featured players. Shame, then, that lead actress Chantal Contouri is the weak link — while she handles the dialogue scenes and any bit of business that requires her to play haughty, she’s far more awkward when attempting to express states of extreme emotional distress. Which dampens much of her character’s arc.
#17: It’s My Party and I’ll Die if I Want To (2007, Tony Wash) No-budget spam-in-a-haunted-house flick showcases some pretty neat dimestore FX ingenuity. (Tom Savini has a cameo as an electrician, implicitly sanctifying the filmmakers’ efforts with his mere presence.) That’s about all it showcases, though: the filmmaking is rudimentary, the actors are mediocre, the characters are mostly obnoxious. Wash doesn’t do anything you can’t also find in The Evil Dead, Night of the Demons or any other film in this genre, really; you can’t fault the enthusiasm, though, and it looks like this was at least fun to make. So there’s that.
#18: The Uninvited (2009, Charles & Thomas Guard) Tries hard to maintain a semblance of fidelity to its source material… so much so that it ends up feeling like an imperfect wax simulacrum. There’s a far more interesting movie in here, one about the painful and awkward dynamic of resentment between teenagers and those they perceive as intruders into their carefully-composed familial worlds; this intriguing film, alas, is thrown over for tired shocks involving dead kids.
#19: Friday the 13th (2009, Marcus Nispel) Aren’t these things supposed to be, you know, fun? A humorless, grim version of this series was about the last thing the world needed, but fuck it — this is the 21st century, and the classic slasher has no place in the era of slickly aesthetized torture. So here he is, your ‘roided-up and angry as fuck Runnin’ Jason, as emblematic of the mean-spirited film that spawned him as Classic Jason is of his more mechanically goofy outings. Has exactly one inspired moment (Willa Ford’s death scene, a neat little symphony of cause and effect as related to aquatic breasts), and given the film surrounding it, I’m tempted to think of it as a happy accident.
#20: Count Yorga, Vampire (1970, Bob Kelljan) Robert Quarry cuts a striking figure as an ancient vampire — his seedy, weary elegance gives the impression of a man hiding something and wanting you to know that he’s hiding something, that he considers you beneath him and he’s only just holding his poisonous contempt in check. He’s a sight better than the film, really, which plays out like a cross between a superhero origin story and a J-horror discovery narrative. There’s a lot of meandering and time spent wandering around, reiterating things that should be plainly obvious… until, starting at the first meeting between Quarry’s Count Yorga and Roger Perry in the distaff Van Helsing role, turning as it does into a barbed war of words to rival anything in Inglourious Basterds, Kelljan abruptly kicks this shit into high gear. The propulsive third act forgives a lot of this film’s sins. I have it on good authority that the sequel dispenses with this film’s faults. Which makes me kinda excited.
#21: Paranormal Activity (2009 Oren Peli) If Peli had succeeded in drumming up any sympathy for the two characters here, I might be siding with this scrappy flick’s champions. But he didn’t. Rarely have I more wanted to shove myself through the screen and smack a couple of faces into sense. So fuck this undeniably effective but exasperating video wonder.
#22: Blood: The Last Vampire (2009, Chris Nahon) Remember in Kiss of the Dragon when Jet Li fought those two giant blonde guys? That was awesome. Nahon shoulda quit while he was ahead.
Horror Challenge entry #15: Dracula (1931, Tod Browning)
No, I’d never seen this before. Leave me alone.
Anyway… this seminal iteration of the Stoker story, today, seems a bit creaky. Its status as a stage adaptation is hard to miss, given how many static medium shots are featured here; though he does craft some indelible images (like the shadow of the captain lashed to the wheel of his death boat), it’s striking how large a stylistic gulf there is between Browning’s slightly staid direction and F.W. Murnau’s earlier telling of the tale with Nosferatu. And yet, none of the joint stiffness matters when Bela Lugosi is onscreen. From his first appearance, it’s easy to see why this was both his starmaking role and the role that ruined his career forever - he’s too good, too believable as the Count to not be instantly iconic, and too instantly iconic to be seen as anything else. If Max Schrek is death personified, slinking from the grave to steal away the life of any and all, Lugosi is the biggest progenitor of the vampire as class metaphor; Lugosi’s natural regal air, his refined noble elegance, makes Dracula truly seem like the Count he is. Living in a decaying castle, (rightly) feared by superstitious townspeople, he is a stark portrait of nobility gone to seed and surviving by feeding off those below his station. It’s an extraordinary, alchemic performance, and it elevates what would otherwise be a slightly stuffy (if wildly compressed) version of an oft-told tale.
Horror Challenge entry #9: Trick ‘r Treat (2008, Michael Dougherty)
Given the deafening hype this film has picked up (thanks to its mistreatment by Warner Brothers), it’s impossible for Dougherty’s debut to live up to mounted expectations. It’s not the savior of horror promised, and it never could be. Divorce it from the fanboy machine, though, and what you have is a scrappy little B-horror that trades in fright for the gleeful, prankish spirit promised in the titular uttering. It’s an omnibus feature, but the structure is unique - rather than the traditional Amicus style of one story after the next, the four tales of terror are intertwined, and characters from one tale often pop up as background or support in the other stories. It’s kind of like Babel, except with less suck and more decapitations. The first story, featuring Dylan Baker as a creepy murderous school principal with some body-disposal issues, is the sharpest and sets the tone for the rest of the film - light, fun, puckishly gruesome. The last story has Brian Cox as his most bellowingly cantankerous and some sharp filmmaking as its main assets; the two in the middle are second-string material but offer some good moments anyway (including, but not limited to, Anna Paquin wandering around in a fetching Red Riding Hood costume). A promising debut, methinks.
Horror Challenge entry #1: Grace (2009, Paul Solet)
Not a bad film, really, but definitely a frosh film - it seems a tad confused about what it really wants to be. Its plot follows a woman (Jordan Ladd, surprisingly good) whose baby dies in the womb three weeks prior to delivery after a car crash that also kills her husband. Nevertheless, she decides to carry the baby to term and ends up birthing what can only be described as a vampire infant. Basically, it’s a blunt metaphor for the physical and emotional drain a newborn can be on your average adult, and it’s at its most effective when exploring this space - Solet has a good eye for the creepy mundanity of everyday routine, and he gets a lot of mileage from Ladd alone in her house save for this insatiable creature, fighting fatigue and anemia and possible insanity. (I also liked how many of the second act’s interior scenes go fuzzy at the edges, a nice visual metaphor for Ladd’s half-there exhausted state.) But there’s also the underdeveloped and slightly muddled ideas about this baby possibly being caused by Ladd’s earthy crunchy vegan-liberal way of life, complete with midwife and repulsively photographed non-carnivore diet (the latter pointedly set at contrast to her outdoor cat’s natural animal ways that lead it to leave slaughtered rats at the doorstep). In this, it plays something like the photonegative of Ravenous except without Antonia Bird’s sure hand or cutting sense of humor - it seems to want to satirize this way of life without understanding why it should or how to really go about it. The climax devolves into standard horror stuff, which is expected yet a bit disappointing.
