Scary Movie Month 2014, Day 7

Bad Dreams

This was a pleasant surprise. Stop me if you've heard this one before: Jennifer Rubin is in a psych ward, she's having dreams of a psychopath who was killed in a fire, and all around her other inmates of the ward are dying mysteriously in what appears to be a rash of suicides. The fact that that exact sentence can also be used to describe A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors (released one year prior to this) is exactly what kept me away from this one for so long, I figured it was just a cheap knockoff of the Nightmare movies. I was wrong, and I'm happy to be so.

Rubin is the lone survivor of a Jonestown-like cult led by the ubercreepy yet somehow still compassionate Richard Lynch. Lynch is pretty great, as scary a presence as he is you can still see how people would fall under his sway. Rubin is less great, but she's fine. She's beautiful (and bad, for you Taryn fans) but she's also kind of blank. I would love to have seen someone with a bit more experience at the center here, someone who could really convey the pain, delusion, and ultimate inner strength that the role calls for. The other people in the ward tend to lean toward the cartoonish, but Dean Cameron and E.G. Daily each get a couple of moments that elevate the rest of it. There's also able support by Bruce Abbott and Harris Yulin, and Charles Fleischer makes a great impression in his one scene, as he often does.

While there isn't much in the way of real scares, there's still a lot of disturbing imagery and a few gruesome moments that make it a worthwhile watch for horror fans. The ultimate resolution is actually quite satisfying and reasonably well thought out. Maybe it's just a case of lowered expectations but I really enjoyed this one quite a bit. The central premise (and terrible poster) don't do it any favors in the originality department, but it's not just a cookie-cutter "pretty girl menaced by undead monster" movie, and it's surprisingly solid.

Scary Movie Month 2014, Day 6

Final Exam

I'm kinda torn on this one. On one hand, it's a pretty typical slasher movie minus any memorable setpieces or kills. On the other hand, I respect that they were trying to do something a little bit different with a formula that was already growing tired, even by 1981.

Lanier College is in finals week, and to add to that stress there's a shadowy figure with an Anton Chigurh haircut prowling the campus with a butcher knife and an urge to kill. Eventually. Like most slasher movies, we open with a kill, but then there's about an hour without any bloodshed (outside of a "harmless prank" that if attempted today would easily result in a campus lockdown and a stack of real dead bodies all on its own. My, how times have changed).

The movie is a weird hybrid of frat comedy and slasher movie, and not only does it do a poor job of balancing those things, it's not particularly good at either one. The frat stuff isn't funny, and the slasher stuff isn't scary or suspenseful. There's not even any mystery, the killer is unmasked and (SPOILERS) his identity and/or motive are never discussed. Dude just hates finals and mom jeans, I guess. To be fair, I actually like the choice to make the murders unmotivated, there's sort of a realism in that that ups the creep factor, it just doesn't make for a terribly entertaining movie.

Most of the violence is kept offscreen, and frankly the movie suffers for it. It's not like the audience for these things has an insatiable bloodlust, but we do expect some memorable kills if you're not gonna bother giving us any suspense. I appreciate the choice of the filmmakers to show less onscreen bloodshed, but they don't balance that choice by giving us characters to care about or a mystery to solve, it's just a lot of waiting around for things to get all stabby again.

It's disappointing, but still a far cry from the worst the genre has to offer. I feel like if it had a setpiece toward the middle like the raft sequence from The Burning it would be much more fondly remembered.

Scary Movie Month 2014, Day 5

Stephen King's A Good Marriage

Well, poop. I'm a big fan of Big Steve, and this is the first time he's adapted his work (for film, not tv) in 25 years (the last time was Pet Sematary). It was not worth the wait.

A Good Marriage was a novella from Full Dark, No Stars. It was less than 100 pages and there was just plain not enough there to sustain a full-length feature. Also, so much of the story is dependent on Joan Allen's character's inner monologue that it's impossible to translate the stuff that really works to the screen.

Allen plays a woman who accidentally stumbles (quite literally) onto evidence that her husband (Anthony LaPaglia) is a notorious serial killer. It's inspired by the real life case of Dennis Rader, better known as the B.T.K. killer, who was a devoted family man who also had a habit of torturing and murdering women and children. There was a movie made about Rader, not a very good one but better than this, that starred Kane Hodder in the lead and he was very effective as a family man with a horrifying secret. As scary as Hodder is, there was a gentleness to his performance that is surprisingly absent from LaPaglia's here. LaPaglia goes straight for menacing, and it takes away from the story, it only serves to make you wonder why she didn't recognize that he was a psychopath in the first place. Also, there are two or three too many "it was a dream" shock moments that don't shock at all, thanks to Peter Askin's flat, uninspired direction.

Lastly, Stephen Lang plays a retired detective on LaPaglia's trail and he's an actor who fascinates me because he has exactly two modes, very good (Manhunter, Tombstone, Crime Story) and very, very bad (Avatar, this) with absolutely no in between. He's fairly terrible here, all quirks and mannerisms, making his character into a terminally-ill Columbo caricature that feels completely inauthentic.

There's a good story in here, but not every story is meant to be a movie. I hate to say it, especially with King's direct involvement, but this is about as uninvolving and inessential as thrillers get. For King completists only.

Scary Movie Month 2014, Day 4

The Nest

Note to self: next year, if the holiday again falls during Scary Movie Month, maybe watch the carnivorous-cockroach movie BEFORE the Yom Kippur fast, that way I won't have an appetite anyway.

The last story in Creepshow, "They're Creeping Up On You," has always given me what scientists call the heebie-jeebies. It's about a Howard Hughes-like germophobe trapped in his sterile home with a whole lot of cockroaches. It thoroughly creeps me out, but thankfully it's only 20 minutes or so long. The Nest, on the other hand, is a solid 90ish minutes of man-eating (and dog-and-cat-eating, animal lovers beware) mutant cockroaches rampaging all over a quiet seaside town.

Not only do these flesh-feasting insects infest the town, they also take on the characteristics of those they eat, leading to some truly grotesque animal- and human-sized monsters. The effects are hit and miss, but for the most part they work well. There are some genuinely sickening images here that I won't soon forget. All in all, I'm sort of surprised this one doesn't have a better reputation (maybe it has a better one than I'm aware of, I never heard of it until Scream Factory released it). It's fast-paced, gory, and more effective than you might expect. It won't change your life, but it's a fun, nasty little creature-feature. Grab a can of Raid and enjoy.

Scary Movie Month 2014, Day 3

The Video Dead

A hokey premise (a tv acts as a gateway for murderous zombies), a cast full of terrible amateurs, some inspired gore gags and an admittedly phenomenal poster all add up to a pretty crappy movie with a few (very few) standout moments.

Everything is very inconsistent, from the tone (I think it's going for intentional laughs at times, but I can't be too sure) to the makeup (there are a few genuinely disturbing-looking ghouls, and then there's one who looks like David Bowie coated with a thick layer of Colgate Total).

The one thing that is consistent: the performances are uniformly awful. There's more than one victim who appears to be laughing as they're meeting their demise, one can only assume that second takes were not an option. Also, the guy playing the "Quint" (his name was Joshua in this one, but all the phony-tough monster-hunter characters in these movies are always just trying to be Robert Shaw) was apparently hired through Rent-A-Joe-Don-Baker. I believe he was the economy model.

While yesterday's movie, TerrorVision, had a similar premise, it was stuffed with imagination, color, life, and even a touch of satire. The Video Dead reaches for nothing of the sort. You would think television = zombies could lead to something satirical or witty (even if it was hacky & obvious like in the John Herzfeld joint 15 Minutes) or even (heaven forbid) scary, but this movie isn't interested in any of that. The tv might as well have been any given doorway, the movie does nothing with the premise.

Side note: the only name I recognized in the credits was one of the zombies who was played by Anthony Ferrante, a former makeup guy who is now best known as the director of both goddamn Sharknado movies. I assume this is precisely where he honed those chops.

Scary Movie Month 2014, Day 2

TerrorVision

First things first, why isn't People magazine's "Sexiest Man Alive" not a title that Clooney, McConaughey, Cruise, etc. have to try to wrestle away from Gerrit Graham every single year? He seems to be the clear choice.

Anyway, he's a blast here along with Mary Woronov as a couple stuck somewhere between 70s swingers and 80s yuppies. He buys a newfangled satellite TV which of course is a teleportation device for slimy, drippy, rubbery, spectacularly practical aliens.

This is something that could only have come from the 80s, a candy-colored, purposefully artificial slime factory that has the tone of a kid's movie despite being R rated (though it would easily be PG-13 today, except maybe for the cartoonishly pornographic artwork on the walls). It's all very silly, but it's also very fun, a total sugar rush that isn't like anything else out there.

Scary Movie Month 2014, Day 1

Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (Producer's Cut)

In 1995, I saw Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (sans the 6 in the title of this new cut) on opening day. A lifelong fan of the series, I was excited for a new trip to Haddonfield, my first in a theater. 88 minutes later I was crushed, because it was one of the worst movies I've ever seen, no hyperbole. It was ugly, stupid, and seemingly assembled by an editor who was blind, incompetent, and possibly incontinent. Over the next 19 years, I heard stories of an alternate cut, available via blurry convention floor bootlegs, that was supposed to rectify so many problems with the theatrical cut.

Now that Scream Factory and Anchor Bay have teamed up to offer the fabled producer's cut on a beautiful, comprehensive blu-ray, I have finally had the opportunity to see the changes for myself.

Eh.

There's more Donald Pleasence (always welcome) and less gore (also welcome, not because I'm not fond of the red stuff but because the Halloween series was built on suspense, not gore), but there's also more awful dialogue about Druids and runes and stellar cartography and oh look at that I just fell asleep in mid-sentence.

No matter which cut you watch (they're both on the blu-ray), the movie is still a big bowl of fuck you. No suspense, no fun, just piles and piles of exposition, a handful of unbearably broad performances, and multiple stab wounds.

Not a great start to Scary Movie Month, but I'm still glad I finally got to see it, it truly is fascinating how a movie can be reshaped in the editing room. My goal this year is to watch a new-to-me movie every day of October, so stay tuned, fans of me failing miserably at things!