Archive for the ‘31 Days of Horror’ Category

  • 05 Nov

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    A Short Video Summation of an October of Horror

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    As a final wrap-up of my October horror viewing spree, here’s a short compilation of scenes from each movie I watched (2 clips from each film not including the bonus snippets at the end):

     

  • 02 Nov

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    A Month Of Horror – Chapter 8

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    Yeah, I’m surprised October’s over too…32 horror films in the month is my final count – a 33% drop from last year’s total. I blame Toronto After Dark for keeping me busy…

    The last four for the month:

     

    The Shiver Of The Vampires (1971 – Jean Rollin)
    It’s quite surprising that it’s taken me so long to get around to seeing one of Jean Rollin’s art-horror films – you’d think this stuff would’ve been right up my alley. And indeed, it most certainly is. For whatever reason, I just never thought to dive into his output until one of his titles pretty much randomly came up in my lengthy list of items to investigate. In this case, the horror derives almost strictly from images – not sound, not story, not character and not slow builds of tension. It’s all about the visuals. The bright colours mixed with neutral tones, the bits of bright blood red dotting the frame, the creepy statues and artifacts littering the castle, the faces of the undead vampires and the surprising places they can be found. The camera plays its own part occasionally as when it spins around inside a circle of all the characters or becomes the POV of the doomed central character. The nominal story has a newlywed couple visiting the bride’s favorite cousins in their castle. Unbeknownst to her, these vampire hunters became the hunted and now must put up with eternity. The main female vampire (who converted the cousins) slowly pulls the bride over to “her side” as the hapless husband can do nothing. Throw in a large portion of nudity, gothic outfits and a psychy soundtrack (a slightly twangy low rent version of Goblin – the great band who did the soundtrack to “Suspiria”, “Deep Red” and other Argento films) and you’ve got yourself a memorable picture.

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    Two Thousand Maniacs (1964 – Herchell Gordon Lewis)
    As a director, Lewis wasn’t exactly known for his specific style, storytelling ability or his way with actors. I think even he would say that he wasn’t so much a filmmaker as he was a businessman. By pretty much any account, “Two Thousand Maniacs” is a terrible, terrible movie – the acting is atrocious, useless dialogue scenes go on and on and the whole thing looks completely drab. Except for the blood (primarily what Lewis is known for via both this film and “Blood Feast”) which was bright and vivid. The idea was to shock with scenes of dismemberments and other such gore-filled activities and in this movie’s case, they certainly had a structure that leant itself to such requirements. One hundred years after an entire Southern town has been wiped out by the North during the Civil War, it suddenly reappears and their “centennial” celebration is focused on finding some sacrificial Northerners to kill at their festival. It’s a different spin on Brigadoon and as an idea certainly isn’t the worst one for a gorefest. The odd thing is that it isn’t filled with as much chopped up flesh as you would expect (of course, in 1964 it was rather infamous for a few scenes of severed limbs). It’s not that I necessarily wanted or needed to see more gushing blood, but when that’s all your movie has going for it, that’s all you can hope for.

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  • 01 Nov

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    Playing Horror Catch-up: Vol 3

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    One last set of horror capsules from me, and relatively on time, too! Go me. I would actually have had it ready yesterday except I knew we were going to watch Friday the 13th last night and I wanted to include it. It’s been a solid month of catching up for me, with several big-name horror films crossed off my list. My overall new-to-me favorites for the month are The Cat and the Canary, Carrie, and The Descent, but I enjoyed everything I saw to one degree or another. I think next year I’ll have to come up with another title – I feel relatively caught up now with the big-name things that everyone expects me to have seen.

    The Cat and the Canary

    It figures that my favorite new-to-me film of the month would turn out to be a silent. I think I’m made backwards or something. Heh. Anyway, this “old dark house” film was namechecked at the screening of The Bat I went to earlier this month (capsule review), and even though I liked The Bat well enough, THIS is the film it largely wanted to be. I saw “largely” because this film is not a crime film in the same way, and those crime elements are solid in The Bat. The Cat and the Canary focuses on a last testament left by a crotchety old man twenty years ago – he stipulated waiting twenty years after his death to read it, and this is the time, with all his relatives gathered like vultures in his spooky old house to find out who will get his fortune. His instructions are complicated, involving a second inheritor if the main one proves to be insane, which leads to much suspicion all around. Add in a potential escaped lunatic running around through hidden passageways in the house and a mystery involving the family diamonds, plus some well-done comedy around the disparate group of people, not to mention the quite excellent Expressionist-style cinematography and really innovative animated titles, and this is a super-fun time. Is it scary? Well, maybe not, but there are some moments of genuine suspense and tension, and a few of the visuals are extremely creepy. I wrote a bit more about it here, along with more screencaps.
    1927 USA. Director: Paul Leni. Starring: Laura La Plante, Creighton Hale, Forrest Shanley, Tully Marshall, Gertrude Astor, Flora Finch, Arthur Edmund Carew, Martha Mattox.

    The Fog

    This was a nearly random pick off Netflix Instant (not totally random, because I have been meaning to watch more John Carpenter films), and I knew almost nothing about it. I haven’t seen the remake or anything. I ended up really enjoying it – Carpenter has a talent for the kind of creepy scares that I love. Not quite jump scares, but where something just appears (with no cut or music to make it a jump) or you become aware of the bad guy’s presence and it sends chills down your spine. I love that, and there are several scenes in here that did that for me. The story is based on a ghost story (told wonderfully by John Houseman to a bunch of kids in the first scene) about a group of people killed 100 years earlier when their ship wrecked in a massive fog. Legend has it that when the fog returns, so will they, and this apparently is the year for it. Fog is creepy anyway, hiding things until they’re right upon you and tending toward exactly the kind of reveals I just mentioned. And there’s more to the story, as the priest in the town uncovers, that means these ghosts are not just unsettled due to their violent deaths, but actually seeking revenge. Not all of this plot works out totally, and the end is fairly nonsense-making, but on a scene-by-scene basis, I loved this. I actually liked it a little bit more than Halloween, which I’m sure I’ll get eviscerated for, but it’s because I like the ghost back story more (despite the nonsense-making). Halloween is the tighter, better movie, but The Fog appealed to my sensibilities more.
    1980 USA. Director: John Carpenter. Starring: Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Atkins, Janet Leigh, John Houseman.

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  • 31 Oct

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    Music in Film: Suspiria (1977)

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    Dario Argento’s Suspiria is justly celebrated for its bright, bloody set-pieces and flamboyant use of color, but it’s hard to imagine the movie being nearly as assaultive without the nearly omnipresent overwhelming score from the progressive band Goblin, who also provided the score for several of Argento’s other films. They recorded the music first, then Argento layered it into the film, a technique which works perfectly in this case, blending music into sound design to create sensory overload that matches, and sometimes even surpasses, Argento’s in-your-face visuals.

    This is the opening of the film, through the first set-piece, and you can already tell how important the music is going to be, from the initially delicate but creepy as hell main theme up to the frenzy of the horrific first kill. My favorite part of the movie, though, is actually the visually-subdued scene with the blind man and his dog walking into the square – a scene which is terrifying almost solely through the score and sound design. Suspiria beats you senseless with its stylistics (in the best way possible), and the Goblin score is a huge part of that.

  • 30 Oct

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    A Month Of Horror – Chapter 7

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    Here’s a sneak peek at the most recent batch of horror films from my month long bender (which will fall far short of last year’s number due to Toronto After Dark switching back to October):

     

    The Deaths Of Ian Stone (2007 – Dario Piana)
    Though I haven’t seen many of the “8 Films To Die For” series (otherwise known as the “After Dark Horrorfest” which shows its independent films over an eight day span in nationwide theatres), I haven’t heard a whole lot of positive response to any of the films even though last year’s fest was the fifth one. However, the concept for The Deaths Of Ian Stone sounded too good to pass up: the titular character dies every night only to wake up in a completely different life. Promising stuff that could go one of any number of directions. Unfortunately it chose one that abandons its premise early on for life sucking ghostly monsters that can take human form. Worse than that though, its main character is just simply unlikeable. Even worse, he’s just boring. As is the set of CGI-heavy effects of people turning into these black death spirit thingies. When he suddenly wakes up in a new life, Ian Stone has no recollection of his previous one so it just changes the situations within which this bland unsympathetic character exists. How exciting is that? Whatever rules the story had are shuffled to the side and it becomes generic in its rush to redeem Stone. If this is representative of the “8 Films to Die For” series, I can see why I haven’t seen overwhelming response to it (though you’ll see shortly, it isn’t completely representative).

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    The Mask Of Fu Manchu (1932 – Charles Brabin)
    Now here’s an interesting artifact of the early 30s…Filled with great set design, interesting shot selections and a whole lot more torture than you might expect, the film also engages in some of the worst casual racism that side of Breakfast At Tiffany’s. It’s not just the indiscriminate references to “the yellow man” (after all, Fu Manchu throws it right back at them with his hopes to eradicate “the white man”), but the thought that Asians think of nothing else but to rule the world. While the British wish only to find Genghis Khan’s old artifacts to preserve them in a museum (even though they break into his old chambers with nary a thought to its preservation), Fu Manchu and his “hordes” want them so that they can convince the rest of Asia to follow them into world domination. When the Brits discover that this is the plan, they double their efforts to get there first. They do, but Fu Manchu has several devious plans up his sleeve to get them back. Possibly the worst moment of all was the patronizing comment from the wealthy English archaeologist to a Chinese waiter congratulating him for not aspiring to anything more than what he was and avoiding the fields of medicine, science and exploration. Perhaps I was reading the film wrong, but aside from some of the great visuals the story didn’t have much else to hold it together, so I had to focus on something…

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  • 29 Oct

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    Saturday Morning Cartoons: Hair-Raising Hare (1946)

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    What better way to celebrate Halloween weekend than with a little classic Chuck Jones animation? This is one of my absolutely favorite Bugs Bunny cartoons, with some of Jones’ best fourth-wall-breaking gags. Plus a Peter Lorre caricature, a robot paramour, a creepy Expressionist castle, and Gossamer’s best appearance. You don’t get better than that. The cartoon is really well-known, but it’s always worth watching again.

  • 25 Oct

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    A Month Of Horror – Chapter 6

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    I‘ve had my eye on Toronto After Dark the last few days (and the next few as well), so the output has been a bit slower. Some good solid movies in this batch though…

     

    Pin (1988 – Sandor Stern)
    Pin is not your ordinary doll/horror movie. Partially because “he” is a medical mannequin (used as a teaching device) instead of a child’s toy, but also because the film relies much more heavily on the psychological horror aspects of a young boy’s development into an adult than any Chucky style attack. As young kids, Leon and his little sister Ursula are transfixed by Pin when their father uses it as a ventriloquist’s dummy and teaches them certain lessons. Ursula realizes Pin is only a dummy at a young age, but Leon continues to think that Pin is an actual living being and part of their family. As he matures and can’t count on his parent’s support or help in typical growing up matters, he goes to Pin without his father being present (disobeying a strict order) and communicates with him. His father (another dose of Terry O’Quinn – that’s two for the month!) decides to remove Pin from the house, but after a car accident leaves Leon and Ursula as orphaned teens, Pin becomes more and more of an influence to Leon’s life. It’s not filled with jump scares nor will it make you shiver in your seat, but it’s something that aims at the horror of a broken individual. It’s hampered occasionally by some inadequate acting in several roles (though David Hewlett as the older Leon is quite good), but it worked far better than I expected it would.

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    Amer (2009 – Helene Cattet, Bruno Forzani)
    Gobs of style. Style piled on style over style – with style on the side. Cattet and Forzani’s tribute to the cinematography and atmosphere of Italian giallos mostly dispenses with dialogue and even, to a certain extent story. It’s premise focuses mainly on the sexual awakening of the same woman in three different stages – confusion (child), curiosity (teenager) & desire (adult) – with witches, murder and a variety of other real and surreal occurrences thrown in for good measure. It’s quick cutting, very arty and may drive some people for the Tylenol (or the remote), but I loved it. It creates very specific moods for each of the three stages and though there appears to be very little resolution in what occurs, the trip through it all kept me completely engaged because of the tension of truly not knowing where any of the stories were going and how they would present the next images. The colour (particularly in the opening section) is glorious and pretty much every shot is unconventional. Certainly self-conscious, but still quite the beautiful thing to see – in particular if you like rampant usage of close-ups of people’s eyes. Unnerving at times and a wonderful example of someone who wants to play and experiment in a given style.

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  • 24 Oct

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    Playing Horror Catch-up Vol 2

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    Another swath of horror films seen over the past couple of weeks, including a few that I’ve been meaning to see for a very long time: yep, I finally get to cross Carrie, The Wicker Man, and Eyes Without a Face off my to-watch list. Interestingly, I haven’t had any films this month jump out and become favorites immediately this month; Carrie comes the closest, but I have some reservations even with it. I’ve enjoyed just about everything I’ve seen, but I’m still waiting for one to completely knock me off my feet. Only a few more days, October! Get on it!

    Carrie

    I’ve had Carrie on my horror to-watch list every October for about three years – in other words, as long as I’ve had a horror to-watch list. I finally got to it! And despite its reputation and that I knew the basic beats of the menstruation-bullying-to-prom-night-revenge plot, the film still had a lot of surprises for me, most of them good. First off, Carrie’s mom is CRAZY – it’s a little disheartening to find yet another crazy Christian immortalized on celluloid, but I think it’s pretty obvious that she is totally off the deep end, not only extremely strict on Carrie’s interactions with boys, but insistent that natural biological functions are markers of specific sexual sins and that Carrie’s telepathic ability is a sign of demon possession. Although, to be fair, the film doesn’t really explain where that comes from. Anyway, what makes the film strong and memorable is the focus on Carrie, whose transformation into queen of the prom is utterly beautiful and utterly heartbreaking because you know what’s in store for her – the lead-up, though, is so well-done (if a bit retroactively cliched) that you ache for her to have her perfect night. The denoument had me a little baffled, I will admit, though, and undermines Carrie’s deserved revenge; I’m still not sure what I make of it. Plus De Palma has a tendency to go for flashy shots when he doesn’t need them – the writing and acting here is strong enough that he could afford to save those flashy moments for really striking scenes, giving them greater impact. Still, I enjoyed the film very much, likely my favorite of the month so far.
    1976 USA. Director: Brian De Palma. Starring: Sissy Spacek, William Katt, Piper Laurie, John Travolta.

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  • 18 Oct

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    A Month Of Horror – Chapter 5

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    Just for the record, Elisha Cook Jr. is awesome. I thought that needed to be said.

     

    Dead Of Night (1977 – Dan Curtis)
    No, not the classic 1945 anthology of horror stories called Dead Of Night, this is the 1977 not-quite-as-classic anthology of horror stories called Dead Of Night. In this case, it’s three completely separate unlinked stories (without even a wraparound story for good measure) that were made for TV and bundled together as a single movie. Actually, there is one uniting characteristic across all three of them: each story was written by Richard Matheson (he of “I Am Legend” fame and countless other novels and short stories). It shows through in the concepts behind the stories and the way they are structured (if not in every spoken line) and this helps to make for a quite entertaining 70 odd minutes. The opening story is the least effective, but that may be partially due to my inability to see Ed Begley Jr. as anything but the perpetually goofy Dr. Victor Erhlich from TV’s St. Elsewhere. He plays a young man devoted to restoring old cars and finds that his latest project has actually driven him back to its own past. I like the way the time travel element is handled (no weird vortex needs to be entered, etc.) and where the story ends up, but it’s all rather flatly told. On par with an average Twilight Zone episode (which still isn’t exactly bad). The second story moves things in a more interesting direction even though it begins and initially unfolds as your typical Victorian vampire story. Patrick Macnee stars as the concerned husband who calls in a friend to help find the reasons behind his wife’s apparent vampire attack wounds. The town is locking itself up at night and the servants have departed, but things may not be what you expect. A very nicely told and quite tense thriller. The final story simply entitled “Bobby” is, apparently, the one everyone remembers from its original showing on TV (similar to how everyone remembers that last story in Trilogy Of Terror with the tribal doll) and it’s obvious why that is. After a distraught mother contacts the spirit world and asks that her recently drowned son be returned to her, she gets a big surprise – he shows up in the pouring rain on the doorstep. However, and you had to see this coming, all is not what it may seem…The boy starts to question and turn on her until it becomes a bit of a life and death hide and seek game. Terrific use of lighting to build atmosphere (yes, it’s cliche to have a lightning storm happen during these type of scenes, but it establishes mood wonderfully well) and a kicker of a final image (that also leaves the viewer to fill in the blanks as to what happens next). I can imagine the talk in the grade 7 hallways the day after this aired…

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    Day Of The Dead (1985 – George Romero)
    Took me awhile to get to the third installment of Romero’s “Dead” films, but I’m (mostly) glad I finally got there. I’ll blame Romero’s tandem non-Dead films Martin and The Crazies for delaying me as I felt I needed to see them first. That actually worked out well since the former is likely his best film and the latter was still very solid and led to an even more solid remake. Back to zombies though…Day Of The Dead shares a lot with its predecessors: zombie bloodshed, crappy acting, rag tag group of individuals hemmed in by zombies, terrible character development, a satirical approach to broader subjects and poorly thought out dialogue. The good moments are awfully entertaining as the zombies really tear into their victims (apparently you really need to dig out those central organs for the tasty sections) and you never can quite tell when the next kill is going to happen. Yeah, the gore and effects are over the top, but I laughed long and heartily along with them. The overlong scenes of this group of twelve talking (I think it’s safe to say that stating that the movie ends with fewer than that is not a spoiler) occasionally threaten to derail the whole enterprise, but it always managed to save itself. The military characters are far too one-dimensionally racist, power-hungry and violent which in turn makes them awfully dull and waters down the larger satire of military control over large populations. Particularly when the scientists aren’t exactly an engaging lot either…Still, the zombie carnage is highly entertaining.

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  • 14 Oct

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    Shorts Program: Une nuit sur le Mont Chauve (1933)

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    Cinefamily played this animated short last week before their feature silent presentation, and I loved it. It’s a bit on the experimental side, one of the earliest films (1933) from animation pioneers Alexandre Alexeïeff and Claire Parker using their pinscreen animation technique. I don’t really understand how the pinscreen thing works – apparently there’s a screen with thousands of pins, and you make the picture by pushing some in and others out, creating shadows of different lengths when lit from the side – but this is some of the most interesting, evocative animation I’ve ever seen. I’ve always found the Fantasia version of Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain” pretty scary, but this one is incredibly disturbing and hauntingly beautiful.

    Watch the short after the jump. I do apologize for the obnoxious logo soundbyte at the beginning.

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  • 14 Oct

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    A Month Of Horror – Chapter 4

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    It slices, it dices and it delivers horror!

     

    Man In The Attic (1953 – Hugo Fregonese)
    This 1953 retelling of Jack The Ripper, even at a fairly lean and condensed 82 minutes, feels a bit stretched – particularly with the two (not very good) musical numbers thrown in. Granted, they do provide moments which allow the infamous slasher (an alternately socially awkward and frightening Jack Palance) to get all hot and bothered by the main dancer’s overt sexuality. After moving into the upstairs rooms of the dancer’s parents’ house (the economy has impacted the family so they need to take in borders), Jack becomes the object of desire for the dancer and feels attraction for her as well. Unfortunately his prior scars haven’t quite healed and he is compelled to occasionally hit the streets and commit his heinous acts. There’s nary a drop of on-screen violence, but there’s some nice shadowplay and the two main killing scenes are somewhat chilling in how the women react to the unseen killer. Overall, not too bad, but heavily dependent on Palance’s nervous performance.

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    The Amityville Horror (1979 – Stuart Rosenberg)
    There’s something about 70s horror films – the steady creep, the look and feel of their surroundings and, as with the original “The Amityville Horror”, their pace. In this case, it grabs you early and ever so gradually reels you in with very few slow spots (OK, the sex scene between James Brolin and Margot Kidder was a bit longer than I would’ve liked…). To be honest, not much happens for most of the movie, but it manages to keep you just a little bit nervous throughout and always waiting for the next incident. I’ve somehow managed to avoid this blockbuster (I believe the short doc on the DVD stated that this was the largest grossing independent film ever at the time and held the record for a good 4-5 years afterwards) up to this point – I had always thought it would be a fairly tedious affair with much mumbo-jumbo. Instead it’s quite engaging and all the mumbo-jumbo segments are delivered with a whole lot of gusto from both Rod Steiger and Helen Shaver. The ending sort of gets away from the film a bit and it sputters just when it should be vrooming, but when a movie can build the tension this well (and throw in a bleeding stairway too), that can be forgiven.

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  • 12 Oct

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    Playing Horror Catch-up Vol 1

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    You don’t think I’m going to let Bob have all the fun, do you? Not likely! One of these years I’m going to get to stop using the “horror catch-up” title, because I will be caught up. At least of all the major things I feel like I need to see. I’m not quite there yet, and hopefully I’ll knock a bunch of horror must-sees off my list this month. The title has kind of a double meaning, too, as my boyfriend and I are taking turns catching each other up on films that we care about, and this being October, we’re giving that a horror theme, too. Which mostly means I’m showing him a lot of 1930s-1940s creepy dramas, and he’s showing me a lot of 1990s-2000s scarefests. Good thing we both like most anything!

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    The first [rec] was a fantastic example of the first-person camera found-footage technique (one of the few that’s fairly internally consistent), and made great use of its claustrophobic environments. The second one picks up right where it left off, with our intrepid reporter in the attack on the verge of being caught by the virus’s progenitor, then cuts to a SWAT team about to enter the building to shut down whatever is causing the attacks. The scares here aren’t as effective because they’re more out in the open – instead of a creepy feeling of something being just out of sight, the infected here are right there in your face. Which is more gross, but less scary. There are some really interesting things done with structure, though, as parts of the film are done from the point of view of a group of kids who think it’d be cool to break into the building – they’re pretty freaking annoying, but seeing some of the things from a different perspective is nice. The tension ramps up toward the end, and there’s a fairly neat use of night vision. I enjoyed the film, but it doesn’t have the pure viseral thrills of the first.
    2009 Spain. Directors: Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza. Starring: Jonathan Mellor, Manuela Velasco, Óscar Zafra, Ariel Casas, Alejandro Casaseca.

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