The SHOCKtober Revision

I wanna post a mess of things for this, the Halloween season. I always begin with big intentions and then life gets in the way. I'm hoping it will not be so this time around and, emboldened by already having twice as many posts on the House this year as last (though that's a low bar to clear), I'm hoping to have twice as many posts for October as thru the whole year so far.

So a bit of a cheat, here, though I sincerely hope you'll find it useful. Long time hero-of-me Stacie Ponder is also feeling similarly prolific over on her revitalized Final Girl, and she's resurrected SHOCKtober!, in which she solicits her readers to submit their favorite horror films and then counts down from least to most popular. I submitted a list last time but didn't consult it when submitting anew. You may see the below as an evolution of my tastes, though honestly I believe there are more tried-and-true selections this time out than last. For both lists, however, I restricted myself to one film per filmmaker and no more. And both are submitted in the event you're looking for something appropriate to watch over the next month - if you get a chance to give any of the following eyes, your proprietor says go! Can you stand the excitement?

At ease, Leslie.

THE LIST (including links to my reviews, if they exist):

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (Fuest, 1971)
The Beyond (Fulci, 1979)
Black Sabbath (Bava, 1963)
The Brides of Dracula (Fisher, 1960)
Byzantium (Jordan, 2012)
Cat's Eye (Teague, 1985)
Creepshow (Romero, 1992)
Crimson Peak (del Toro, 2015)
Dust Devil: The Final Cut (Stanley, 1992)
Eve's Bayou (Lemmons, 1997)

Exorcist III (Blatty, 1990)
Ginger Snaps (Fawcett, 2000)
Ju-On: The Grudge 2 (Shimizu, 2003)
Kuroneko (Shindo, 1968)
Lair of the White Worm (Russell, 1988)
The Moth Diaries (Harron, 2011)
Phenomena (Argento, 1985)
Prince of Darkness (Carpenter, 1987)
Son of Frankenstein (Lee, 1939)
Wolfen (Wadleigh, 1981)

HELL NIGHT

Any College, U.S.A. - Greek Row is rocked by a wild, wild night of costumed partying. A contingent from Alpha Sigma Rho splits form the festivities and brings four pledges to a house shrouded in horror. And what a house it is:


Previously owned by the Garth family, the mansion has been empty ever since Mr. Garth killed his entire family (including some seriously deformed children) before hanging himself. The four pledges must spend the night herein to prove their worthiness. The gate is locked behind them, and a long night begins.

The 1981 film combines two sub-genres of horror, melding the then-fashionable slasher horror with the somewhat outmoded spooky house horror. Watching the film I was struck by the effectiveness of the location shooting - between the lovely, well-dressed sets and the costumes affected by the partygoers, the film plays like a strangely time-tripping, almost Gothic effort.





It's a modest film, to be sure, but it comes by its passionate cult honestly, balancing some genuine shocks with some quietly realized characters and plot details. Some details are left for us to figure out (the details of what really went down at Garth Manor twelve years ago are hinted at but never pieced together - a remake would surely kill its pacing by over-explaining these matters). The weirdly conservative morality of the slasher model is nicely upended when the bullies are killed first.
Stock characters exhibit reservoirs of decency, including a sex-crazed goofball (Vincent Van Patten, natch) who comes thru in the end, sneaking into a police evidence room to retrieve weaponry to bring to the rescue. Even the inevitable sex is put off by characters who wanna get to know each other first.


I watched this (and I'm glad I did) on assignment from the Final Girl Film Club, run by the recently relocated Stacie Ponder. A discussion surfaces there now and again debating whether 1977 or 1981 is the better year for horror. Hell Night is a compelling argument for 1981: a deft balance of two horror formulae, making effective use of a few locations, and telling a simple story with a smart eye to detail and a surprisingly deep capacity for atmosphere.

THE FUNHOUSE

Four teenagers - the virginal Amy, her first-date Buzz, her friend Liz, and Liz's schmucky boyfriend Richie - take in the attractions at a sleazy traveling carnival. On a dare from Richie the gang decide to spend the night after hours in the carnival's funhouse, but after witnessing a murder find themselves running for their lives through a very dark ride.

Your proprietor wishes more movies were made like this, with a competent but largely unknown cast (peppered with a couple of veterans) doing solid work in a film whose creativity and atmosphere trumps its low budget. There's a good script at the heart of this: the story observes the tropes of the slasher genre that was in full swing when the film was made, but the scope of the film includes a healthy dose of carny life (the family) to flesh out its antagonists, and locates its horror not in a single rampaging killer but more diffusely, throughout a carnival and into the very film itself.

That many of the characters are believable help immeasurably, starting with Amy, a final girl played with complexity, innocence, and just he right amount of knowning sexiness by Elizabeth Berridge. Cooper Huckabee brings a nice curiosity to Buzz (look at his reactions during the freaks-of-nature scene). For all his lower-class manliness ("...works in a filling station," Amy's parents observe), there's a soulfulness and sensitivity to Buzz; you can see why Amy likes him, and there's a nice willingness-but-awkwardness to the start of their date. A number of veterans fill out the carnival's staff, from Kevin Conway's chameleonic performances as three different barkers to the always-game Sylvia Miles' wild turn as a raunchy fortune teller. All of the actors bring their characters' shared histories and little pieces of business to bear, and I suspect that director Tobe Hooper presided over a fair number of solid improvisations.



Unsurprising that Hooper, director of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Salem's Lot before, is as adept at maintaining pace and atmosphere. The carnival is brought to vivid, grimy life, offering any number of experiences both joyful and creepy. The film itself is directed like a darkride, a winding trek through dissociated shocks and weirdness before building to a frenetic finale. From the childish antics of young Joey to the animated dummies that populate the funhouse (vivid, otherworldly characters in their own right) to the final laugh from the funhouse's Laughing Sal-style figurehead, the film leaves us dazed and entertained, and reeling from the touch of something weird and sleazy.

Written for the Final Girl Film Club, presided over by the lively and lovely Stacie Ponder.

ONIBABA

Japan, the Warring States period. A peasant woman and her daughter in law scratch out subsistence by slaying wayward soldiers and bartering their weapons for food. Into their midst comes Hachi, a neighbor/AWOL soldier who tells them that their son/husband was killed. The triangle that forms between these three characters has sharp corners indeed, and the intensifying jealousy, lust, and hatred between them kicks into overdrive when one of them comes upon a terrifying demon mask.

Kaneto Shindo's Onibaba treads similar territory to a number of Japanese films of the 50s and 60s. Films like Fires on the Plain capture soldiers and civilians alike on the run from conflict, their desperation to survive turning them to extreme behaviors that reveal the ultimate darkness within the human soul. Perhaps because its supernatural aspects are more overt, Onibaba is less effective and horrific than similar films. Though understandably driven to desperation by ongoing lives of trauma, the uniformly unpleasant characters of the film are difficult to feel for on a visceral level, diluting the impact of their ultimate fates.

But Onibaba is a visual marvel, making maximum use of its evocative susuki field settings. As fond as your proprietor is of the theatrical, artificial mise-en-scenes of Japan's most audacious filmmakers (and their art directors), the wind-swept susuki creates a lush but threatening presence that is a striking and ever-present character (a chorus, perhaps) in its own right. Superstition reigns powerfully over the film's characters, with summer frost rendering crops barren and two-headed calves portending danger. This free-wheeling chaos has turned gender roles topsy-turvy (Freudian imagery plays powerfully throughout): men are reduced to fleeing cowards, and the two women turn phallic spears on their male victims, and dispose of their prey in a gaping, yonic maw that lurks in the scenery like a shark. It's an effective liminal zone, and one becomes as tense and lost in the on-screen bewilderness as any of Shindo's characters.



If the simplicity of the script belies its origins in a short Buddhist parable, the actors hit their respective one notes with gusto. Sketchy though Onibaba sometimes is, aspects of it linger, be it the silent-then-batshit score of Hikaru Hayashi or the susuki, restless but quiet as it shakes ominously in the wind.

This review is part of the Final Girl Film Club, run with efficiency and verve by the wild and wily Stacie Ponder.

It's Alive

Mr. and Mrs. Frank Davis, after experimenting with fertility drugs, find themselves expecting a second child. What they do NOT expect is said child (with a birthweight of a robust 12 pounds) emerging from the womb and killing everyone in maternity. The mutant child carves a bloody swath across L.A., and soon various law enforcement and corporate interests enter the ring to contain, study and/or destroy the wayward child. And the Davises are torn apart as Frank obsesses over being the one to kill his child.

Your proprietor loves himself some Larry Cohen, so when the call* went out to watch and review this film I jumped on it. I think I'd only ever seen it on cable at a young age (not to worry - despite being banned in several countries it was released here with a PG rating), but have quite a few friends who remain scarred by it. Having happily digested some of Cohen's later films, I was pleased to find that it balanced solid genre thrills with the loose, seemingly improvised and decidedly offbeat character moments that pepper his other films. And though the film is clearly a product of the 70s (from its costuming to its excavation of then-contemporary issues of abortion and environmental mutation), it's unfortunately very much of the present. As various characters sounded off on the damage we do to the environment, and thus to ourselves, I kept flashing to the oil disaster that continues to darken the Gulf Coast, and wondering what manner of offspring it might sire.

One of Cohen's unsung strengths is his selection of collaborators, and the leeway he gives them. Several people from the locations where the movie was shot were pressed into service as bit players (the Scots nurse who escorts Davis toward the delivery room is particularly fine), but Cohen's bigger name players do fine work as well. The young FX artist Rick Baker crafts a memorable (if little-seen) monster that helps strike a primal chord. Veteran film composer Bernard Herrmann had already begun a 1970s second wind with de Palma's Sisters, but his work on this film (resplendent with his usual low-end woodwinds and his recently discovered bass guitar and Moog synth), overblown though it sometimes is, helped re-establish his name amongst the young generation of filmmakers.

But my favorite surprise of the film was the lead performance by John Ryan. I recognized him as one of several go-to actors regularly pressed into service as paramilitary assholes on M*A*S*H. He brings a similar intensity to Frank Davis. And Cohen just lets the camera run on him when Davis, confronting his child in a dark corridor, feels his murderous impulses give way to fatherhood. It's a great piece of understated acting, and when Davis starts crying he's not alone.

* = This review is part of the Final Girl Film Club, hosted as always by the gorgeous and glorious Stacie Ponder. Take a look at her SPACE GIRLS series.

THE GATES OF HELL

When a priest commits suicide in a cemetery in Dunwich, the resulting bad vibes are picked up during a seance in New York City. It becomes clear that the good father's death has opened a portal to hell, and a disparate group of folks have only three days to get to Dunwich and close the portal before a flood of demons come through it and destroy the world.

Your proprietor saw this at the house of good friend and frequent commentator Mark Nigara. Coincidentally, this film (and a few of the other notables in the oeuvre of director Lucio Fulci, including HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY and THE BEYOND) were released contemporaneously with the studio albums cut by Ronnie James Dio with Black Sabbath. Mark had been paying hommage to the late RJD all week, and some of the Dio-era Sabbath proved a perfect prelude to the Fulci double feature ahead of us (the second film seen, HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY, was reviewed here previously).

THE GATES OF HELL, as the title suggests, boasts enough gruesome imagery and atmosphere to fuel several heavy metal albums. Fulci sacrifices realism, production value, all but the most bare vestiges of a plot, and any sense of logic to craft a dreamlike, genuinely suspenseful descent into hellacious fantasy. Some scenes - the suicide that kicks it all off; a harrowing rescue from a premature burial; the attack on a tavern by some angry spirits - are textbook examples of suspense filmmaking.

But other scenes, man, I don't know: a makeout session ends with bloody tears and vomited entrails; Bob, the town pervert, is dispatched for scant reason with a table drill through the head; the truly baffling coda that may signal the resurgence of the damned. By all accounts Fulci embraced all manner of experimentation on his films - indeed, the aforementioned coda has been said to be the result of a free-wheeling mashup by Fulci of random footage culled in the editing room. There is an artfulness to Fulci's insanity, and every so often a gruesome scene comes from so far out of nowhere that it does feel like some 3 AM dispatch from the cinematic subconscious. Bob's toolshed lobotomy is completely unconnected to the supernatural forces gathering in Dunwich, but the sheer excess of it (I'm astonished the drill didn't bore into his eye, frankly) suggests a deeper connection to the film around it.

As unforgettable as many of the setpieces in THE GATES OF HELL are, the full-tilt approach Fulci takes to the material keeps the film from remaining unsettlingly in the mind. If figures prominently in the run-up to THE BEYOND, Fulci's masterpiece, which perfects the fantastic scope of the previous film while amping up the apocalyptic fantasy. But that's a review for another time.

THE GATES OF HELL is reviewed here under the aegis of the Final Girl Film Club, run as always by the sharp and sparkly Stacie Ponder.

BLACK SABBATH

A lone woman is terrorized in her apartment by increasingly disturbing phone calls. The caller is closer than she thinks.

A travelling nobleman is taken in by a family in a remote cottage, who find themselves under attack from supernatural forces.

And a nurse called to prepare a dead body steals a ring from the corpse, without heed to the considerable consequences.

Mario Bava's anthology horror film BLACK SABBATH adapts a trio of short stories (including Tolstoy's "The Wurdalak"), using devices from literature, theatre, and film. The stories play linearly, with each more suspenseful than the last. Each story unfolds at its own pace, but adds to the whole of the film. But despite the differences in scope of each tale, Bava employs similar visual strategies for each one, adding to the unity of the whole. All three stories are suffused with ominous purple backlighting. Doors and windows uniformly conceal something dreadful, but never for long - something or someone horrible peeks through a frame in each tale, and the sound of a creaking door is always bad news.



Horror icon Boris Karloff delivered several memorable performances in the twilight of his career, and in addition to appearing in the central tale here Bava deploys him as a playful narrator in the film's framing sequence. Karloff's iconic weight helps seal BLACK SABBATH's classic status, but he returns the favor by happily playing along with Bava's more freakish impulses. The downright Brechtian final shot features Karloff riding away into the night, and you can't help but laugh with him as the artifice of the film is slowly, hilariously revealed around him.

BLACK SABBATH is very much a 60s horror film, but I don't remember any other horror movie firing so assuredly on so many fronts. Its free-spirited, even genial qualities don't detract from its thrills (and some genuinely terrifying moments, particularly in the final episode), but instead add up to a unique experience, even in the varied history of the anthology film.

(This review created for the Final Girl Film Club, run as always by the talented and terrific Stacie Ponder.)

THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL

1983ish. College student Samantha is looking to get her own place. The ideal apartment is within her reach but out of her price range. Salvation seems to come in the form of an odd but lucrative babysitting gig at a house outside Samantha's college town. After getting a ride from her best friend, and negotiating terms with the quietly bizarre couple who live in the house, Samantha is left alone with her unseen charge.

High above, a lunar eclipse.



Shooting on film and recreating a more-than-convincing 1980s milieu (right down to a pizza parlor whose wares your proprietor could practically TASTE), writer/director/editor Ti West has crafted a meticulously old-school, low-budget horror flick. And yet for all of the intelligent filmmaking and storytelling on display, it doesn't serve any ultimate point. THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL is happily free of ironic campiness, and also steers clear of genre commentary now familiar in modern grindhouse exercises. In the end, I felt like I'd sat through a genuine, mid-80s horror programmer, of its period but undistinguished. West sticks to his guns right down to the ending, which may have been powerful in 1983 but today is cliched, too-familiar, and predictable. West has succeeded in his goal, no question, but there's nothing personal in THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL. There's energy and personality, but no soul. Without that investment, I have to wonder why West bothered in the first place.

...

But there's a scene I keep coming back to. It's none of the baby steps taken toward the film's denouement, none of the layers that get peeled away to reveal more of the mystery. It's a scene about halfway through, in which Samantha, installed in the house, bored and (she believes) unwatched, throws on her Walkman (yes, an actual Walkman), and dances through various rooms and hallways to The Fixx's "One Thing Leads To Another." Jocelin Donahue's built a thoroughly relatable, and likable, heroine up to this point, but somehow it's this scene that tips Samantha over into our sympathies. It's a breezily lyrical moment that, unlike similar scenes in other movies, feels necessary, and it lingers long after the film's well-realized but programmatic thrills quickly fade. And the Fixx track sounded just dandy on a theatre sound system.

Reservations notwithstanding, I'm eager to see West's next picture, THE INNKEEPERS, the tale of the last employees remaining at a haunted hotel.

This review tweaked for the Final Girl Film Club, run as always by the awesome and amazing Stacie Ponder.

SLAUGHTER HIGH

Your proprietor took up the assignment* to watch and discuss SLAUGHTER HIGH with a certain bemusement; my own high school reunion is happening this coming weekend, and so the timing was somewhat amusing. What warnings would the film have for my own real-life situation? What could I learn from SLAUGHTER HIGH that I could apply to my return to my own high school environs, and the people therein?

The answer to both questions is: Nothing at all.


The film begins with the humiliation of a clueless teenage nerd named Marty. Lured into a locker room by the promise of a cherry-busting encounter with cool-girl Carol, Marty is instead captured on film being given a swirlie by, presumably, all of the school’s in-crowd (half of whom were filling film crew positions, a technical detail that your reporter appreciated). Marty tries to collect himself by doing some extra-curricular work in the school’s chemistry lab; he’s subjected to yet another prank that disfigures him.

Five years later the kids are invited to a reunion back at the old school, which they find in disrepair and slated for demolition. They find themselves trapped within, and stalked by a murderous madman wearing a letter jacket and a jester’s mask. Is their stalker a grudge-driven Marty, or something worse?

SLAUGHTER HIGH’s a compelling mess, initially drawing its characters VERY broadly, pursing comedy without wit and horror without suspense. The casting of Caroline Munro as Carol doesn’t help: veteran that she is and as fine as she looks, she’s clearly NOT the late-teens, early-20s the role calls for, and led your proprietor to initially wonder if Marty was being seduced by a school faculty member (most of the cast, like Munro, are British, and some of the American accents are...inconsistent). Post-high school we find that Carol’s an in-demand actress, negotiating a role with a sleazy producer. We know he’s sleazy because he has a PIECES one-sheet on his office wall. You remember:



Nice little in-joke there, as PIECES producer/co-writer Dick Randall was a producer on this film as well. The game-for-anything-but-thinking-nothing-through joie de vivre that made PIECES so winning eventually manifests in SLAUGHTER HIGH. As stupid as the first half often is, it does wear down one’s resistance – there’s a childish gag at about the film’s midpoint involving a funnel, and if you laugh at it (I did), you’re set for the film’s second half.

There’s a remarkable tonal shift that happens here: as Marty’s classmates get picked off, the film becomes more serious (even Harry Manfredini’s score, which had been a VERY 80s cheap synth pastiche, becomes more shaded and interesting here). Slasher fans will be pleased by the creative and varied kills used to dispatch the various characters. By the time we get to Carol’s inevitable one-on-one showdown with the killer the film’s built genuine suspense. And it doesn’t resolve as predictably as one might have expected.

Your humble scribe’s not one to enjoy movies ironically; I’m not a fan of the so-bad-it’s-good! kind of thinking. So I’m pleasingly perplexed by a film like SLAUGHTER HIGH. It’s not the work of competent auteurs, and the points it scores all feel like accidents. And yet in spite of itself it DOES score points: it’s less predictable than a more polished movie would have been, and the thing’s never boring.

I watched the film in the Lost Collection edition from Lionsgate, which offers an unrated, extended cut (yay!) in 5.1 digital audio (yay!) and in fullscreen ratio (boo!), the absurdity of which is totally in keeping with the movie. As is the optional Trivia Track, which picks the damnedest times to ask the viewer trivia questions or offer factoids about the various methods of murder deployed onscreen.

Though I’m not basking in the glow of a brilliant new discovery, I am pleased to have experienced SLAUGHTER HIGH in the run-up both to my own high school reunion and to Halloween. I can’t imagine any of my own classmates will stalk us wearing a jester’s mask; should this actually prove to be the case, I’ll be sure to write about it here. Assuming I survive, of course.

* = This review written for Final Girl’s October Film Club, run, as always, by the brilliant and beautiful Stacie Ponder.