October 26 2021, 06:01

Planet Terror (2007)

Director: Robert Rodriguez

If Killer Klowns is lovingly sewn together by your coulrophilic neighbour (wait, no...), Planet Terror is a grindhouse pastiche ruthlessly tailored by a master craftsman. It’s ridiculous fun, and as much as I am not an admirer of style at the expense of story, this did make me laugh out loud at the sheer excess of it all.

Lieutenant Muldoon tries to buy a consignment of a biochemical weapon, DC2, from an arms trader for his mercenary army, but some people already infected with DC2 escape. Cherry Darling is a stripper who quits her job, runs into her ex-boyfriend El Wray, and after a car crash leaving town, has her leg ripped off by a pack of marauding flesh-eating mutants. Dr Dakota Block is planning to leave her husband for another woman during their joint shift at the local hospital, but just as he finds out, the DC2 infection hits the local population. All of these characters, and more, converge in a relentless circus of cheesy dialogue and amusingly extreme violence.

This film has everything from a rogue scientist who keeps his adversaries testicles bottled to a stripper with a machine gun for a leg. I particularly enjoyed the ‘missing reel’ that skips through a chunk of unnecessary plot to get to the action. Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarentino collaborated in the making of this and the Tarentino-directed Death Proof, with both films released as a double feature, Grindhouse. They weren’t a hit in 2007, but I think this is glorious fun.

October 25 2021, 06:03

Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1987)

Director: Stephen Chiodo

Clowns on screen have never frightened me, not even Pennywise, although on the page he was a different proposition. Killer Klowns from Outer Space isn’t a film that’s trying to scare you. It’s more of an adult cartoon playing things for grotesque laughs, but it does take the question it asks very seriously: what if alien clowns came to earth to turn people into candyfloss snacks?

Mike and Debbie are making out in the woods near Crescent Cove when they see something fall from the sky. They discover a circus tent spaceship and the bodies of two local people dissolved in a wrapping of candyfloss. The town’s Sheriff doesn’t believe them, so they try to convince his Deputy, Debbie’s ex-boyfriend Dave. Clowns from the spaceship arrive on the streets and start to turn everyone into candyfloss balls, which they collect for food. Mike, Debbie and Dave, along with two friends in an ice cream truck, find the spaceship and face off against the clowns’ giant leader.

But this film is not about plot—it’s about the series of set pieces where clowns approach unsuspecting humans and find amusing ways to dispatch them. The awesome mixture of set design, costumes and puppetry creates a surprisingly real and coherent world that is straight out of a B-movie, but could actually be happening. It’s a one note tune, for sure, and I did get bored in places, but there are also weird wonders here, and I can imagine anyone who saw this too young, perhaps because of a mean older sibling, or lax babysitter, might be scarred for life. It’s not a good film, but it’s also amazing, and I don’t want to think about any of these clowns knocking on my door in the middle of the night.

October 24 2021, 05:30

Scream 4 (2011)

Director: Wes Craven

The original Scream changed the course of horror cinema, but I didn’t enjoy Scream 2 or 3 half as much, so when Scream 4 came out to mixed reviews, I skipped it. That was a mistake. Scream 4 is closer to the original, and yes, it’s another complicated, stabby whodunnit, but it embraces teenagers use of social media, and has things to say that are still relevant now.

Sydney returns to Woodsboro on the fifteenth anniversary of the original killings to promote her new book. Dewey is now Sheriff, and is married to ex-journalist Gail, who has writer’s block. Sydney has a niece, Jill, in the High School, which presents us with another set of teens for the Ghostface killer to brutally pick off.

We’ve seen it all before, but that’s the point, and the meta conversations about fourth installments of franchises were predictably fun. A lot of people die, and it could be my age, or because of the way of the world now, but seeing someone stab dozens of people in a small town felt much more disturbing in 2021. I didn’t guess the killer, just like I didn’t in the first film. This one’s motives are unexpectedly chilling. The amusingly-titled fifth installment, Scream, is out in a couple of months. October 2021 is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first Scream. It’s a terrible shame Wes Craven wasn’t around to direct Scream 5 (a.k.a Scream). Rest in peace, sir.

October 23 2021, 06:20

Muppets Haunted Mansion (2021)

Director: Kirk R. Thatcher

I started this journey with an adapted video game, and nearing the end I find myself watching an adapted amusement park ride—Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion meets the Disney-owned Muppets to create Muppets Haunted Mansion. The first period of The Muppets, 1976—1981, coincided with my pre-teen years, so I remember being allowed to stay up past my bedtime to watch it. Those episodes are on Disney+, and they’re still funny. They feel fresh and on the edge of anarchy, which is astonishing when you think how complicated it must have been to make back in the seventies. This film is a long way from that golden period.

Gonzo decides to miss his friends Halloween party to take up an invitation by The Great MacGuffin, his favourite magician, to stay a night at the most haunted mansion in the world. He takes his friend, Pepe the King Prawn, who thinks he’s going to party filled with celebrities. They arrive to find the house filled with ghosts, and a challenge to face their greatest fear and survive the night. If they don’t succeed, they will be stuck in the house for all eternity.

I watched it with my twelve-year-old daughter who hates anything scary. We both jumped a couple of times, enjoyed the songs, and had fun with it. It’s not a good film, it’s a corporate film, like an amusement park ride in fact, but there are enough little references for horror film fans to keep it interesting, and the nostalgia effect is strong. But Disney Muppets are not Jim Henson’s Muppets, that’s for sure.

October 22 2021, 05:30

Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972)

Director: Sergio Martino

I can’t decide if I’m enjoying these borderline gialli. Sergio Martino knows how to build tension, as characters roam the rooms of a massive run down mansion in the Italian countryside, and it depends if I’m in the mood for overwrought acting and sleazy drama. I’m not even sure what the ridiculously long title means: Your Vice Is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key? I suppose it means the basement, but it could also be the cupboard Irina gets locked in with Satan (the cat).

I’m getting ahead of myself. Oliviero is an abusive husband, professor and writer of novels. He has writer’s block and has become an alcoholic, abusing the women living with him. A killer murders a woman he has agreed to meet, and the police question him. Then his housemaid, Brenda, is murdered, and he forces his wifre, Irina, to help him hide the body in the basement. When his niece, Florina, arrives, she is suspicious. Her brazen sexual appetites arouse both Oliviero and Irina, but Oliviero is becoming more and more brutal with Irina, and we keep seeing a figure watching the house from the trees.

The sex in this film is deviant from the start, with the hippies willingly coerced by Oliviero into humiliating Irina, then Irina provokes him by wearing his dead mother’s dress, and he rapes her. He sleeps with Brenda, a black servant who he denigrates, then with his niece, Florina, and when Florina asks him directly if he slept with his own mother, the implication is that he did. His mother’s portrait sits above the dining room, and her cat, Satan, torments Irina, just like Oliviera does. The final act is a blizzard of switches and double crosses. Actually, his vice is surely his mother, and perhaps it is Irina who has the key. Maybe. It’s all a bit insane.

October 21 2021, 05:58

Censor (2021)

Director: Prano Bailey-Bond

Censor has been on my radar all year, since I heard about it, partly because it was set in the era of video nasties, and partly because it seemed to speak to the whole experience of watching horror films. It didn’t disappoint. Enid Baines is a censor at the British Board of Film Classification. Her parents decide it is time to have her long-missing sister declared dead. Enid is a vigilant censor who is seen by some of her colleagues as excessive, but when a man kills his wife and children, copying the gruesome death in a film Enid recently passed for public viewing, she blames herself, and her daily life, the films she has to watch, and memories of her sister, begin to bleed together.

There’s a great interview with director Prano Bailey-Bond in the June issue of Sight & Sound magazine, where she talks about the psychological act of self-censorship, and ‘the positive power of forbidden cinema’. Enid is even more censorious of her childhood memories than she is of the films she watches in work, and as her gentle ex-psychotherapist colleague says, it’s amazing what the mind can edit out to protect itself. Her parents are sweet, but massively repressed, and Enid keeps her colleagues at arm’s length, while not seeming to have any friends. She is alone with her trauma, cutting films to keep the public safe, but also fascinated by what’s in them.

The final act is clever, and funny, which slightly spoils the atmosphere, so by the end I found myself a little disconnected from Enid’s plight. The whole film is really well-crafted, with a fantastic performance by Niamh Algar as Enid, who wills into her reality that which she is desperate to be true. To quote Bailey-Bond, where she is talking about horror audiences: ‘In the fiction of the horror world, they can have what they want, when they can’t in real life.’

October 20 2021, 06:17

La Llorona (2019)

Director: Jayro Bustamante

Some subjects are horrific enough without the added charge of being in a horror film, so I had been avoiding watching the much lauded La Llorona. It’s about the aftermath of the trial of a general who ordered the genocide of the Mayan people in the Guatemalan Civil War. Elderly former general Enrique Monteverde is found guilty, but his conviction is overturned, and he retreats with his family to their house in the city, which is surrounded by noisy protestors. The servants all leave, and the housekeeper, Valeriana, accepts the help of a young woman from her village, Alma. Trapped in the house, strange things begin to happen to the family, and the ghosts of the past insist on being heard.

Some reviews of the film voice frustration at the slow pace and lack of scares. La Llorona explores an important historical event with commendable weight through a famous Mexican ghost story. Every shot is considered. Doing some research, the small details of the La Llorona legend are dotted all through the film, none more important than Alma teacing Monteverde’s granddaughter, Sara, to hold her breath underwater. The meaning of this becomes shockingly apparent at the end.

Over the end credits, there is a heartbreaking arrangement of the Mexican folk song, La Llorona, which means the weeping woman. She has much to weep over.

October 19 2021, 05:50

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Director: Zack Snyder

This time last year, I took a chance on George A. Romero’s Land of the Dead, and in the summer I believed the hype and watched Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead. I must have a hunk of moth DNA in me, because I was drawn by the good review flames of Snyder’s original zombie remake, Dawn of the Dead, an adaptation of Romero’s original script for his... Dawn of the Dead.

Ana, a nurse, wakes up to the start of a zombie apocalypse, and manages to escape her zombified partner and the chaos on her local estate. She hooks up with a police officer, Rhodes, and three other survivors, and they manage to get to a local shopping mall. More people arrive, but so do the zombies, until the mall is surrounded by tens of thousands of the undead. In trying to help a nearby friend, they realise they can’t just stay where they are and wait to die, so they concoct a plan to escape.

Why did Snyder do it? (For the money.) Why did Romero let him? (He didn’t own the rights, and the rights-holder wanted the money.) And why did I choose to watch it? (I’m saying genetic weakness.) It’s a stylish, pacey rehash of Romero’s vision, with all social commentary taken out—an action film, and a decent one. Sarah Polley, giving a strong central performance as Ana, is easily the best thing about the film, especially in the excellent opening sequence where she goes about her evening, casually missing the news reports and emergency messages, until the next morning the zombies are literally at her bedroom door. If only Snyder’s Army of the Dead had a fraction of this average film’s charm.

October 18 2021, 05:47

Night of the Demons (1988)

Director: Kevin Tenney

I might have been too harsh on Saw, but it can take it, and this is the eighteenth film of my #31DaysofHorror. I’m in a dip. To lift my spirits, I wanted a palate cleanser, but rather than go uptown, I went as far downtown as I could go, to the eighties trashy delights of Night of the Demons.

Angela and Suzanne throw a party on Halloween night at an abandoned mortuary on the outskirts of town. A disparate group of misfits arrive, and to frighten everyone, Angela has them play a seance-like party game which summons a demon through the furnace in the mortuary’s basement. The gate they drove in through turns into a wall sealing them in, so when the demon possesses Suzanne, it spreads an infection through the party-goers, and for the remaining few it becomes a fight to survive the night.

The first half is a slog—a cheesy, unfunny, teenage sex comedy. However, the second half saves the day, with some brilliant gore, jump scares, and plenty of imaginative set pieces. There’s a definite influence from Evil Dead 2, with the demon’s eye camera moving through the house, and the demon women making wisecracks. Angela dancing possessed in front of the fire, the film cutting creepily as she moves, is a definite highlight, as are all the special effects. I’m still thinking about the scene where Suzanne pushes a stick of lipstick into her nipple. Judy, who is there with the awful Jay, is dressed like Alice in Wonderland, an apt, fun touch, and the look of the demon itself references the demon at the end of Jacques Tourneur’s classic Night of the Demon. A decent Halloween choice.

October 17 2021, 06:50

Saw (2004)

Director: James Wan

I really, really didn’t enjoy Saw. Perhaps it’s because Triangle was so good, or my age, or the film’s reputation, although this first one is considered by many to be a bit of a horror classic. Two men wake up chained by the ankles to radiators on opposite sides of a locked room. There is a dead man between them with his brains blown out, clutching a tape recorder. Each man has an envelope containing a tape in his pocket, and when they play them, they hear the voice of their captor explaining the rules of the game he demands they play. Gradually they reveal how they came to be in the room, and why the Jigsaw killer might want to teach them a lesson.

Honestly, it’s like a cocaine-addled inverse Seven. The acting is hammy (I know it must be hard to believably play a man who’s just sawn his own foot off, but still), the jumping around through time annoyed me, and the games within games nature of it felt manipulative and weak. Triangle made an incredibly complex plot feel meaningful and emotional, but this just made me feel grubby. Perhaps, as Danny Glover says in another franchise he is part of, I’m getting too old for this shit.