Scary Movie Month 2015 Day 4: Burying the Ex

Burying the Ex

Well, that could have gone better. I mean, it's not a terrible movie, not by a long shot, but it's also very...disposable. It pains me to say that about something by Joe Dante, one of my favorite filmmakers, but unfortunately it's the truth. Even his famously troubled Looney Tunes movie was much more satisfying (and much, much more Joe Dante) than this limp zombie comedy. 

Max (Anton Yelchin) is a regular guy working in a store that I wish we saw more of, a horror themed novelty shop called Bloody Mary's. I honestly could have watched an entire movie based around just Max doing their inventory, but alas had to watch this instead. Max has just moved in with domineering vegan (an oxymoron, that) girlfriend Eve (Ashley Greene) who is making him miserable. Still, he promises to be with her forever while in the presence of a little genie devil statue shortly before she's hit by a bus. Oopsie. Eve has promises to keep, so she claws her way back from the grave just as Max begins a relationship with Olivia (Alexandra Daddario), the girl of not only his dreams, but probably the dreams of 90% of male Joe Dante fans. 

What follows is a series of sitcom-level misunderstandings (if Chrissy was suddenly undead on an episode of Three's Company it probably wouldn't play too terribly different than it does here) punctuated by gross-out zombie jokes. There are a few scattered chuckles, but it's all very forgettable and has surprisingly little personality, especially for a Joe Dante joint. There is (of course) a welcome cameo by Dick Miller, but it's not enough to make it feel like Dante's heart is truly in it. Not that I won't still watch anything he does, but it's sad seeing a filmmaker with such a personal stamp working on autopilot.

In fairness, it may work better without the expectation of "a Joe Dante film" heaped upon it. I watched it with a friend who doesn't much care about who directed what and she enjoyed it more than I did, so mileage may vary for all you non-nerds out there. Even divorced from those Dante-enhanced expectations I still have issues with the movie (no character behaves like an actual human being) but it's amusing enough to pass the time, I suppose. 

Scary Movie Month 2015 Day 3: DEATHGASM

DEATHGASM (2015)

"I can't tell if I have a fear-boner or a boner-boner" -Giles (Daniel Cresswell), "DEATHGASM"

New Zealand is full of insane people. That's really the only explanation I can think of for this deliriously vulgar splatstick insanity, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a full ear-to-ear grin the entire running time. 

It's the story of a couple of metalhead teens who start a band called DEATHGASM (because, according to the one who comes up with the name, lowercase letters are for pussies) and accidentally awaken a horde of demons after playing an ancient cursed song (called the Black Hymn, because of course it is), like you do. This leads to an over-the-top gorefest that does Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson (very clear influences, but the movie remains 100% its own thing) proud. Honestly, I thought splatstick couldn't be this much fun anymore, I felt like Evil Dead 2 and Dead Alive were the last word on it, but DEATHGASM is an unexpected, amplified blast of fresh air.

From deadly dildos to guitars equipped with table saws, the blood never stops flowing (or spraying, or shooting, or doing pretty much anything blood can do) and the laughs stay consistent the whole way through. Also, stick around after the credits for a pretty funny bit that makes sure you end the whole thing still smiling.

What really surprised me was how likable the characters were, even when they were being kinda dicks. They could have come across as obnoxious very easily, but they stay on the likable side of that divide and keep you rooting for them. Even side characters like the other band members are more than just one-dimensional jokes, which goes a long way in movies like this where you don't necessarily want to see some people have their spines forcibly removed. That being said, you will see people have their spines forcibly removed. DEATHGASM is, as its tagline states, Brütal as Fuck, and I wouldn't want it any other way. 

Scary Movie Month 2015 Day 2: Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2

Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2

After loving New Nightmare yesterday it made me want to revisit this, its spiritual cousin, another sequel (albeit a franchise-killingly early sequel) that exists as a commentary on its predecessor and exists with one foot in the movies and one foot in reality (so to speak).

Here's the thing about Blair Witch 2: it's not the worst. It's not good, not really, but it's certainly not the clusterfuck its detractors maintain it is. The original Blair Witch Project was a revelation, a cheaply-produced nightmare generator that made boatloads of money and kicked off the found-footage craze, for better or (mostly) worse. This one, which came out only a year later, takes a more classical approach while also being a radical departure from conventional storytelling thanks to a fractured timeline and a storyline that blurs the lines between movies and reality. 

The story follows a group on a "Blair Witch Tour" of Burkittsville, Maryland (the location of the first movie) as they explore the possible truth behind the legend of the Blair Witch and the movie The Blair Witch Project. Of course nothing is quite as it seems, and there are suggestions that an evil force is up to all sorts of murderous supernatural shenanigans among them. It's flashier, louder, and gorier than the first (not difficult, as there's not a single drop of blood shed onscreen in the original), but that certainly doesn't make it any better (or scarier).

Jeffrey Donovan (of Burn Notice and my mom's daydreams) is appealingly charismatic in the lead, and I applaud the audaciousness on display. The first movie was such a cultural phenomenon that it would have been a no-brainer for the studio to send a handful of kids back into the woods with a camera (and no tripod) for a total rehash, but instead they hired noted documentarian Joe Berlinger (the incredible Paradise Lost trilogy, feature-length group therapy session Metallica: Some Kind of Monster) to make a slick, nasty little meta-fiction. It doesn't work very well, the movie is a muddled mess with a couple of very bad performances and a dopey reliance on half-baked twists but still...the attempt at keeping the franchise fresh is notable and interesting and I'd rather see a movie reach for something new and fail than rehash the same old same old. There has been talk over the years of reviving the series and I'd have welcomed a return to Burkittsville with a third entry, but I imagine I'd have been alone in that theater. Better than being alone in the woods, I suppose. 

What's that noise?

Scary Movie Month 2015 Day 1: Wes Craven's New Nightmare

Happy Scary Movie Month everybody! As always, I'm gonna try to stick mostly to movies I either haven't seen or haven't seen in a long enough time that they might as well be new to me, but I had to start with this one despite having seen it a whole bunch of times because it would have felt wrong not to start with Wes. 

Regarding that whole bunch of times, this is a movie that I always admired more than loved. I thought it was clever and fun, but there was something that always kept me at a distance, unable to fully embrace it. 

Until now.

Maybe it's because I was paying more attention to the structure this time, or that somehow missing Wes has helped me to get attuned to the wavelength he was on when he wrote and directed this one, but whatever it was it completely worked for me this time, I absolutely loved it. 

For those unfamiliar with the story, New Line Cinema was finished with Freddy Krueger, having milked their cash cow dry by the fifth sequel to Craven's masterpiece A Nightmare on Elm Street, the appropriately titled Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare. Freddy had become a goofy joke, no longer scary and therefore no longer profitable. Business as usual in Hollywood except for one problem: the Freddy of the movies was keeping a real evil force at bay, and without that outlet the evil was set free to wreak havoc on the real world, starting with the people who made the Nightmare on Elm Street movies. 

Craven plays himself, along with Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, John Saxon, Robert Shaye, and various other Nightmare series alumni (from both in front of and behind the camera) all playing themselves. There's even a bizarrely shoehorned-in, blink-and-you'll-miss-them cameo from Tuesday Knight and Jsu Garcia. Langenkamp is the lead, playing a fictionalized version of herself being courted by Wes to play series heroine Nancy Thompson one last time. Englund plays both himself and the newly-designed Freddy, who is darker and more frightening than the pizza-faced trickster we've gotten to know over the years.

The performances are solid, grounded in a reality that horror movies (particularly franchise horror movies) don't often explore. Miko Hughes (Pet Sematary) is effective as Heather's son Dylan, the seeming target of Freddy's latest rampage, but there are a few moments where he's clearly acting which breaks the movie's spell a bit. 

It's truly astounding that this movie even got made. To take a franchise as popular and lucrative as the Nightmare pictures and completely turn it on its head is unheard of and a hell of a risk (also, sadly, the gamble didn't really pay off, the movie was not a hit, taking in about $18 million total, about half of what Freddy's Dead made three years earlier). Watching it now it's staggering to see just how ahead of its time it really is, between the documentary-like style in which it's shot and the dizzying blend of fiction and "reality" at the story's core. It's not a perfect movie and the final act is still a bit weak in comparison to what came before it, but it's a bold, ballsy movie that couldn't have come from anyone but Craven himself. 

Nightmares

1986. I was 10 years old, and wanted nothing so much as to be as cool as my worldly 12-year-old cousin Jon. I lived in New York, but I was in Maryland visiting my cousins and when the family stopped near the local video store, we jumped out to pick up a tape "for the kids" to keep us busy. 

I was vaguely aware of A Nightmare on Elm Street, but knew no details other than it was about people who died in their sleep. At that point I had never even seen a picture of Freddy Krueger, despite the fact that A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge was currently the hot new release, ready to wreak homoerotic havoc on the nation's televisions. There was a large cardboard standee in the video store, the same picture that adorned the Nightmare 2 box, Freddy leering around a corner, bladed glove pointed toward the viewer, a wall of flame behind him. It was one of the most singularly terrifying images I had ever seen. Thankfully, blessedly, the movie was all rented out. I was safe.

Except.

The first Nightmare was in stock, and within a moment was in Jon's hand (well, hands, as it was a chunky Betamax cassette, to this day still the only one I've ever seen). He was excited, and I couldn't let him know how scared I was. I looked back at that burned visage on the standee, watching us with a murderous intent clear in his eyes. I didn't know if I could handle seeing him in motion. 

Cut to later that night. Jon put the tape in the player (still a brand-new technology to us at the time) and settled into an easy chair. His sister Jessica (a tiny bit younger than me) and I were on the couch, ready to prove how brave and grown up we were. In the history of things that could be described as short-lived, few have been shorter-lived than that façade of bravery. 

The film opens on a pair of impossibly dirty hands, building...something. Something metal. Something deadly. As those hands worked, hammering metal, forging blades, you could practically feel the heat and the dirt and the sweat of that oppressive place. The scene is bathed in deep reds and browns, the colors of Hell. As the title of the movie comes up on the screen, the scene ends on a close-up of his creation, a battered leather glove covered with rusty metal plates, gleaming razors attached to the fingertips like the talons of an unheard of demonic beast. This is maybe one minute of footage (and I'm probably being generous with that), but it was enough. 

Jessica and I had a knitted afghan on our laps and at this point, we were so terrified that we pulled it up over our heads and watched the next couple of minutes through the tiny holes in the knitting. We didn't get much further. As the opening credits ran, a young girl was wandering through a dark boiler room, and he was there, the man who built this glove. He wasn't just following her, he was TAUNTING her. As her dream reached its end and he popped up behind her out of nowhere, Jessica and I let out a scream and I was no longer worried about appearing brave. I was done. I went into the bathroom, tears of fear and embarrassment streaming down my face. I spent that entire night too scared to sleep. That man was out there, waiting for me in my dreams. That night I truly believed I might never sleep again. 

Here's the thing...as scared as I was (and that was the last time I was truly to-the-bone terrified by a movie, the only others to scare me so deeply were Jaws and The Blob a couple years before) I became fascinated with that fear, and by extension with Freddy. I wanted to know how such a tiny bit of a movie could frighten me so deeply. These were those prehistoric pre-internet days, so I did what any enterprising young horror-fiend in the making would do...I went to the library. I took out books on horror movies, I devoured articles and reviews on microfilm (remember microfilm?) and learned the name and history of the architect of my nightmares, Wes Craven. I was enthralled by Craven, a soft-spoken intellectual, a humanities professor who left teaching and worked his way through Hollywood. 

Craven began his career pseudonymously in porn, and relatively quickly moved into something like the mainstream with 1972's The Last House on the Left, a revenge nightmare loosely based on Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, giving Craven the edge on Woody Allen when it came to introducing this neophyte cinephile to Bergman. The dichotomy of Craven's personality and his work was unlike anything I had ever seen. He was erudite and charming, where his movies (particularly his early work) were crass and mean. He reminded me of Hitchcock, another affable personality who was never so happy as when he was scaring the living shit out of you. 

I'm a big fan of commentary tracks, and Craven's are my favorite. In fact, the single movie purchase I ever spent the most on was the special edition laserdisc of A Nightmare on Elm Street, which was not only my first chance to see the film in widescreen but also my first chance to hear a Wes Craven commentary track. His background as a college professor was evident as he could speak not only to the particulars of the movie but also to the historical influences from the age of Dante Alighieri and onward. Listening to him is both an education and a pleasure, which is more than I can say for most teachers I've encountered. 

From The Last House on the Left to 2011's Scream 4, his final film, Craven was never less than engaged with his material. He wanted to scare you, and he had the tools to do it better than almost anybody else. I've seen everything he's done since Last House, and even when the movies didn't work they were at least interesting, often fascinating, messes. 

I think back fondly to the night that Freddy first scared me so deeply. Freddy Krueger is an icon, as instantly recognizable the world over as Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, Superman, or Mickey Mouse. Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, and Michael Myers are the boogeymen of my generation, as iconic and horrifying as the Universal Monsters were to our parents and grandparents. Freddy is still the one who towers above the rest for me, partly because he has personality and partly because he's the one who scared me so deeply. I'll never forget that feeling, and it's what drives me to keep going to horror movies today. I love horror with all of my heart, and it was Wes Craven who fostered that love throughout my lifetime. 

I'll see you in my dreams, Wes. Thank you for giving me so many nightmares, and for showing me that being intelligent wasn't antithetical to being absolutely fucking terrifying. You made me your fan for life and beyond. 

We are all your children now.

Unseen A-Z #2: Bang the Drum Slowly

B is for Bang the Drum Slowly 

That was quick. Two movies into this thing and I've already found one I regret not having seen much, much sooner. 

The truth is that I've sort of avoided this one over the years even though I've got tremendous affection for much of the cast, worried it would be too much of a Brian's Song-esque manipulative downer. Despite the fact that it's a movie centered on the friendship between male athletes wherein one of them is dying, it's not a downer at all. If anything it's a celebration of friendship, camaraderie, and baseball. Even as a baseball movie it's fairly atypical because it never comes down to one big game, one big play, one big moment. It's an intimate story in a setting that is anything but intimate, and it made me want to give everyone I care about a hug, preferably at a ballgame.

The lead performances of Michael Moriarty as star pitcher Henry Wiggen and impossibly young Robert De Niro as doomed catcher Bruce Pearson are absolutely stellar, finding pathos and humor while never getting overpowered by either one. The real standout, however, is Vincent Gardenia as coach Dutch Schnell. As evidenced by the address of this blog I'm already a fan of Gardenia's, but this is the best I've ever seen him. He received a well-deserved Oscar nomination for his role here, and his world-weary performance is something truly special. Also of note is Phil Foster in a small role as a con-man former ballplayer, he's a treat whenever he's on screen, and dig young, barely-recognizable Danny Aiello as one of the teammates.

You'll note that there's not a whole lot of gender equality in the above paragraph, but there's also not a whole lot of gender equality in baseball so I can't really fault the movie for that. Regardless, it's refreshing to see a sports movie that's not chock full of sports movie clichés as well as one that centers on believably human characters. It makes one long for a time when ballplayers seemed like regular, talented joes rather than the steroidal million-dollar-monsters on the field today.

Moriarty in particular has a talent for underplaying, making his character believable not only as a ballplayer but as the supportive companion helping his dying friend get the most out of what is certain to be his final year with the New York Mammoths. Again, this is not a movie of big "movie moments" and that doesn't only apply to the baseball, it applies to the character beats as well. There's no tearful deathbed scenes or emotional breakdowns, there's nothing that rings false. These characters are real people, for better or worse, and that's a refreshing and welcome change. This is a special movie, and I'm already looking forward to revisiting it just to spend more time with these people. I don't know that I can offer higher praise than that.

Unseen A to Z # 1: Amityville II: The Possession

I own a metric shitload of movies. I've seen the majority of movies in my collection, but there are also plenty I've bought with the intention of seeing them for the first time that still have the plastic on them. From 1997. Ahem. Since I show no sign of stopping the collection from growing anytime soon, I figured it might be worth my while to try an experiment to at least make a dent in the chunk of my collection that I've never seen, so I decided to go alphabetically and choose one movie that I've never seen for each letter of the alphabet and write a little bit about them as I watch them. It appears I can only do it this way once, as I only own one Q title I've never seen and one X title I've never seen, but other than those two I have a fairly wide range of options for each letter. The goal is to encourage myself to watch something new rather than, say, John Wick for the 85th time, and also to fill in some glaring #MovieShame holes in my viewing history (I'll note which ones I'm particularly ashamed of not seeing until now as I get to them). There's no real schedule to this thing (it certainly won't be daily), so let's see if I manage to stick with it, shall we?

So...let's get started! 

A is for Amityville II: The Possession 

I've seen the first Amityville Horror a couple of times and I am not a big fan. I also read the book and liked it even less than the movie, so I never had much desire to check out the sequels. That being said, a blu-ray set from Scream Factory is a siren call that cannot be denied so naturally now I own the first 3 Amityvilles in glorious high definition. This first sequel is actually a prequel, loosely based on the real-life DeFeo murders (in which 23-year-old Ronald DeFeo, Jr. murdered his parents and his four young siblings while they slept in their Amityville home, leading to the alleged haunting of George and Kathy Lutz when they bought the home afterward which was the basis for the first movie). 

In this fictionalized take, Anthony Montelli (aggressively unappealing human sweatsock Burt Young) moves his family into the soon-to-be-infamous Amityville house (actually shot in NJ, but what are you gonna do?) and almost instantly things start to get creepy. Objects move on their own, messages are painted on their walls, a drippy, cobweb-festooned crypt is discovered within those walls...you know, haunty stuff. The whole family is constantly fighting, verbally and physically. It's suggested that this is the influence of the malevolent house, but since we don't meet the Montellis until they're moving in we have no frame of reference to know whether or not this is just how they are all the time. Oh, and also the eldest son and daughter start fucking. This too is supposed to be seen as part of the haunting, but from the moment they're introduced they are very clearly intending to jump in each other's pants and wiggle around, so I don't know that ghosts had all that much to do with it. 

For the first half it's a fairly standard haunted house movie (except for the incest), but once the murders occur (in a well-staged, legitimately frightening sequence) it shifts gears and becomes a poor knockoff of The Exorcist as a priest (James Olson, fairly bland) attempts to exorcise the murderous demon from Ronald DeFeo simulacrum Sonny Montelli (Jack Magner). The second half suffers from the loss of the family and gets a bit draggy and repetitive, mostly suffering from the fact that we've seen all this exorcism stuff before in another, better movie. 

Awesomely-named director Damiano Damiani brings some fun (if sleazy) style to the proceedings, and there are some pretty terrific makeup effects (courtesy of the great John Caglione, Jr.) that do a lot to make this a better movie than the original, despite the fact that it's still not very good. I imagine that it would make for a tremendously fun midnight screening with the right crowd, but in the unforgiving glare of home video it's eminently skippable.