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Movies (Drive-in)

Re-Animator (1985)

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Zombos Says: Excellent

 

Re-Animator with Jeffrey Combs–one of my favorite horror and sci-fi actors–is an outrageous onscreen realization of H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West: Reanimator series of short stories.

Stuart Gordon directs this gory-to-absurdity film with one body part humor and multiple body parts ‘Theater of the Grotesque.’ Comb’s exuberance and intensity as Herbert West is a perfect melding of histrionics and gleeful, devil may care, hubris. Add Richard Band’s driving, Bernard Herrmanesque score with its incessant and forceful strings and sardonically playful cat and mouse orchestrations, and what you have is a treat that most any horrorhead would die for, along with the organic, freshly-popped popcorn drowning in real butter and salt.

The film wastes no time in establishing its gory, black comedy tone as it opens in Switzerland, with West kneeling over the just revived body of his teacher, Dr. Gruber. Unfortunately, as with all of his reanimations, Dr. Gruber does not take well to the revivification and experiences an eye-popping side effect; literally, that is, as both pop. As the law moves in, West moves out to Miskatonic University Medical School. West, who has an incredible knack for getting out of tight spots he continuously puts himself into, is introduced as a promising medical student. He is intense, arrogant, and just itching to inject his mysteriously glowing solution into anything remotely dead. Rooming with a fellow medical student, Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), West quickly takes over the basement for his bizarre experiments.

As I watched the film and munched on my popcorn, one thing that struck me about most horror films from the 70’s and 80’s is they usually have a well-written script, crisp dialog, and a solid plot logic that seems to elude most horror films done today. While current films may be more sophisticated in artistic and special effects designs, many seem to lack the simple ability to tell a coherent story with memorable dialog. But I digress.

Once in class, West, in a humorous scene, starts loudly breaking pencils during Hill’s pompous lecture–one snap for every comment he passionately disagrees with. West accuses Hill of being a hack who’s stolen Dr. Gruber’s work. Both inevitably lock horns and Hill strongly recommends that West switch to using a pen. Their antagonism and professional rivalry soon leads to a Grand Guignol showdown of oneupmanship that still stands out as one of the most gorily entertaining showdowns in horror cinema.

It all starts getting out of hand with Rufus the cat. In a scene both funny and chilling at the same time, West reanimates Cain’s pet after Cain and his girl friend Meg, Dean Halsey’s daughter, find Rufus in West’s fridge next to the Coke (things do go better with Coke). Faster than you can say weird-product-placement, West revives the dead Rufus in the basement with the usual side-effects.

All hell breaks loose as West and Cain fend off the furry fiend’s attack with anything at hand. The lone hanging light that illuminates the room is knocked back and forth, alternately casting the basement and the action in light and darkness. One lucky swing of the bat and the cat is now juicy minced-brain pie sliding down the wall.

Cain, not believing his own eyes, watches as West once again injects the now mashed-up feline. “Don’t expect it to tango,” West quips as he injects the serum. “It has a broken back.” While the cat doesn’t tango, it does, once again, come back to screeching life. Now convinced that West’s serum can reanimate the dead, Cain joins him in finding fresher subjects to experiment on. They go to the morgue to find a fresh cadaver, and settle on one fellow who died from unknown circumstances. West injects the serum, they wait, and he impatiently injects a greater dose.

–At this point the film suddenly stopped! Our theater screen went black! While theater personnel rushed to fix the problem, someone in the audience came up with an apropos game: who would you reanimate if you could? The audience joined in and one very bright fellow said, “Vincent Price!” That’s the kind of answer I like to hear–

In a very short time we were back with Herbert West, Dan Cain, and the cadaver. It comes to life, and once again all hell breaks loose as the newly reanimated body wreaks havoc and mayhem.

Dean Halsey unfortunately manages to walk into the bloody havoc and mayhem and gets some fingers bitten off as he defends himself. In an orgy of gory, West brings down the reanimated cadaver with a whirring skull-saw through the chest move, but not before Dean Halsey is much the worse for wear and quite dead.

Did somebody say dead? Dean Halsey is quickly injected with the serum as West pluckily seizes the opportunity for another test. You really must admire his intrepid spirit. Meg walks into the gruesome scene just as her dad is reanimated with less than stellar results. West reassures her: “He’s not insane: he’s dead.” She, of course, is noticeably upset and confused by the whole mess.

Later, while examining the zombie-like Dean Halsey, Hill realizes he’s as dead as a doornail and goes after West for the serum. While Hill gloats over his superiority, West takes the flat end of a shovel to his head, sending it flying through the air. Trying to prop up the not so good doctor’s head in a pan, West eventually gives up and grabs a paper spike and impales the head on it. He injects the head with his serum, then decides to inject the headless body too, quipping, “I’ve never done parts.” Sure, why not? He’s been so successful already.

Doing parts, however, turns out to be a bad idea. Hill controls his clumsy, headless body to whack West unconscious. Taking his head with him, he heads back to his office, and the now bipartisan doctor uses his head (in a manner of speaking) to command Dean Halsey to do his bidding, like some dead but reanimated Renfield.

Hill’s head (stay with me on this) heads to the morgue while Dean Halsey heads to get his daughter, who Hill has a fancy for. The unconscious Meg is brought back to the morgue where Hill has her stripped au naturale, and proceeds to give her head with his head, aided by his headless body. West walks in on them, chides Dr. Hill for not using his head purely for science, and soon discovers that the cadavers in the room are under Hill’s control, too. All bloody hell once again breaks loose as cadavers, in various states of leaking morbidity, attack West and Cain.

Dean Halsey, vaguely realizing his daughter is in danger, goes after Hill and grabs his head between his hands (that’s Dr. Hill’s head between Dean Halsey’s hands), and squeezes it like a really big zit.  West, fighting  the cadavers, heads over to Hill’s headless body and injects it with two syringes full of reanimation serum.

Faster than you can say hellz-a-poppin, Hill’s body explodes in a geyser of entrails and organs. An eerie white light blasts forth from the now exploded chest cavity, and a very large, large intestine snakes out and around West, pinning him to the floor in a Lovecraftianesque tour de force.

Cain and Meg manage to escape the room, leaving West to his fate of Re-Animator sequels, but Meg is soon killed by a relentless cadaver as she runs for the elevator.

Can you guess where this is going? Right! Cain rushes Meg to the emergency room, but when all else fails he injects her with the reanimation serum. Tsk, tsk, they never learn, do they? Lucky for us.

Re-Animator is definitely one of the top fright flicks of all time. It’s gory fun, witty, and horrifying with a capital H.

Movie Review: Pirates of the Caribbean
Dead Man’s Chest (2006)

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Zombos Says: Excellent

Yo ho yo ho, it’s the pirates life for me! Crack open the rum, and butter me bum, this sure is a fine film. Before I drag my dead man’s hairy chest to the office after spending the night watching me boy Jack Sparrow shiver his timbers, I want to put a few comments to digital paper for you landlubbers.

This summer movie sizzles! It has everything a good swashbuckling movie should have. It’s a treasure chest full of pulse-pounding adventure and more; and more includes beautiful bonnie lasses, handsome men, rigorous swordplay, dastardly scoundrels, flogging, a scintillating score, and thar be monsters aplenty. Aye, mateys, monsters! From the legendary Kraken to old squidhead himself, Davy Jones, and his barnacle and mollusk-encrusted crew of the damned, they will take your breadth away through the clever and seamless use of CGI, makeup, and damn fine acting.

And sloshing his way through it all, from ship to island, is rum-soaked Jack Sparrow—oh, sorry, Captain Jack Sparrow. Just as he escapes from a nasty prison that features eye-plucking crows and very uncomfortable accommodations (wonder if they will add that to the Disney ride?), Bootstrap Bill comes calling with an untimely message from Davy Jones. Seems Jack made a bargain with the sea-devil many years ago, and his time’s run through. But always-conniving Jack brokers an interim deal, involving 99 souls, or so it would seem, to take his place aboard the Flying Dutchman, and he soon embroils Will Turner and Elizabeth in his little gambit with his impending eternal date with destiny. But Jack, Will and Elizabeth have their own agendas, and each go their separate ways until their paths cross a wee bit amidships, right about when we find them in Tortuga.

Gore Verbinski starts with a portentous opening scene of unused teacups filling up to overflowing with a torrent of rain water, and from there the story spins deliriously from stem to stern—like a drunken pirate—from ship to ship, island to island, and all of it leading our hapless heroes and heroines always, inexorably, back to the Flying Dutchman.

But before Davy Jones will have his due, Jack and Will, along with the Black Pearl’s motley crew, must escape the clutches of a bunch of very hungry natives. In a volley of hilarious scenes reminiscent of a Bugs Bunny cartoon, Jack fends off the natives with fruit while trussed up like a suckling pig, and his crew rolls—literally—through the jungle in giant cages to escape their captors. And once they are free, it’s time for the Jack to double-cross Will, and for them to meet the damned ship on a stormy night.

The Flying Dutchman and its crew are bleak and imaginatively hideous. Being damned at sea for a hundred years sure takes its toll. As the crew ages in their begrudging servitude to Davy Jones, they change. But not in a good way. They become one with the sea, and the sea and its denizens become one with them. Davy Jones himself sports a new doo of writhing tentacles and a lobster claw in place of one hand, and his crew runs the wondrous but icky gamut of sea life, from fish to crustacean, and any semblance to the humans they once were is purely coincidental.

Which is unfortunate for them; especially the ones pulling deck duty the longest. They eventually wind up as part of the deck itself. In one heart-stopping scene, one of these crewmen pops out from the hull, leaving some important bits of himself still attached, to convey a cryptic message to Jack. The foley team earned their paychecks with these scenes, as they pulled out all the stops with their squishing, shell-clicking sounds that echo from the man-fish crew and Davy’s squiddy, breathing sack of a head. I dare you to eat another clam, oyster, or mussel and not think about this film. Go ahead. I double dare you!

And when the Kraken attacks, all breathing stops. Both in the movie and in the audience. First comes the thud as it bumps the hull of the ship, then the tentacles rise slowly up out of the ocean surrounding it. And then the cracking and crunching starts, like a walnut being slowly crushed, and men go up and away as they are picked like ripe fruit off the vine.

Oh, and yes, there is Davy Jones’ chest, which contains a most important artifact. The island interlude to retrieve the chest and escape Davy Jones’ crew is a highlight in the film. Everyone squares off, and friends soon become enemies as desperation and opportunity set in.

For those not in the know, this is the second film in a trilogy, so the denouement, with Jack caught between a rock and a hard place, will leave you breathlessly waiting for the third film. And you might want to stay a bit after the credits roll: a little ditty of a funny scene back on the island of hungry cannibals is worth a look.

So set your sails for the nearest theater port and hoist a few—bags of hot-buttered popcorn that is. This is the summer movie to see. Or be damned me hearty!

The Flesh Eaters (1964)
The First Gore Film?

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Zombos Says: Good (but just barely)

Back in 1964, The Evil of Frankenstein, 2000 Maniacs, and Black Sabbath flickered across theater screens, as well as other notable horror movies. Then there’s The Flesh Eaters; a B-Movie that, while not very good, is not all that bad. Written by Arnold Drake and directed by Jack Curtis , it combines pulp-dialog with a minuscule budget confining action to a small tent, a Long Island beach, and a few over the top characters.

With its neo-Nazi marine biologist, Professor Bartell, played with malicious glee by Martin Kosleck (I doubt he could play any other type of role), an All-American pilot named Grant Murdoch (Byron Sanders) who keeps taking his shirt off, Omar the beatnik (Ray Tudor), and glowing parasitic flesh-eating nasties stripping flesh from bone faster than you can yell “that’s gonna hurt!” the movie is a fast and fairly fun 87 minutes. It’s also touted as being the first gore movie by some reviewers,
though that’s debatable.

It opens with two frolicsome young people going for a dip, only the dip goes for them and they wind up picked clean down to the bone. Cut to the big city and Laura Winters (Rita Morley), movie starlet and lush, who, along with her comely assistant Jan (Barbara Wilson), needs a quick flight to Provincetown for one of her few acting gigs.

Enter Grant Murdoch with his square jaw, v-shaped torso, and cocky attitude. He piles the dames into his sea-plane and off they go, right into a bad storm, with a frozen gas line, too. He needs to land the plane fast and any island will do. He picks the one with the anti-social marine biologist and his parasitic pets. Murdoch moors the tipsy Ms. Winters on the beach first, then moors the plane. Bartel pops out of the water wearing his wet suit and frightens the melodramatic actress. Then she finds finds one frolicsome young person’s skeleton on the beach, reigniting her melodramatics. Murdoch becomes suspicious of Bartell after the professor blames it on sharks.

They need to secure the tent against the coming storm. A few stock footage shots of crashing ocean waves later, Murdoch and Jan go for the luggage as the storm lightens up. Murdoch, in-between putting the moves on the curvaceous Jan, notices Bartel going the long way for supplies that were supposed to be just in back of the tent.

Winters, who desperately needs her ‘glass bottle’ luggage, designed by the Jack Daniel’s company, slips into something a little more low-cut. Bartel starts putting the moves on her with a flat real-men-are-neo-nazi-marine-biologists line. She calls him a tin god. At this point, the dialog becomes either what did he say? bad or man, that’s so bad it’s funny bad.

She runs away from him and heads to the plane to slosh more liquor. More pulp-dialog kicks in again as she goes into a maudlin soliloquy Hamlet would be ashamed of. Finishing the booze she dozes on the beach. Bartel, meanwhile, continues his gloating when he comes across a lot of glowing fish skeletons. He also unties the mooring lines to the plane.

The next morning, Murdoch and Jan find Winters and the fish skeletons, prompting Murdoch to blame the actress for untying the plane in a drunken stupor, and telling Bartel “face facts, professor, we stumbled onto a living horror!” Winters, taking her dramatic cue, runs away in shame and grabs her luggage floating in the water. Murdoch races to stop her. She freezes on top of some rocks jutting out into that parasitic smörgåsbord and can’t jump back over to him. Mr. All-American jumps over to her. He picks her up and attempts to jump back over the water-filled gap in the rocks—with her added weight. Bartel comes running over with a knife to slice off the chunk of Murdoch’s leg skin which is now smoking and bloody and hurting like hell after he slips into the hungry devils . An unexpected gore effect and effective.

Gilligan—I mean Omar—the kooky beatnik now shows up on his rickety raft.

Is it me or do also think he looks like Tony Timpone from Fangoria magazine?

He sailes right into the flesh-eating parasite-filled water. They go after his beatnik sandals as Murdoch yells at him to “shut that big mouth of yours before you become a skeleton!” He makes it to the beach sans sandals. “Boy, that’s one lovin’ appetite, man,” he remarks. Bartell becomes annoyed by Omar’s jive talk.

Don’t we all.

Later, Murdoch and Jan come across a huge solar battery. Murdoch questions Bartel on its use and he tells them it’s to power his equipment. Bartel suggests shocking the parasites with it and demonstrates  the effect electricity has on them. He knows the effect is only temporary, but with the parasites stunned, he plans to leave the island. Alone.

Huge positive and negative cables are quickly run down to the water in preparation for electrifying the entire ocean with the 10,000 volt battery. While others are running cable to the beach, Bartel gives Omar a parasitic-cocktail. Omar’s indigestion soon bubbles out of his gut in a bloody scene, ending his beatnik days for good.

As Bartel rigs up a fake death for Omar to fool the others, Winters discovers the shocked parasites in the tent are very much alive, and growing into something nasty. She knows Bartel knows, but now he knows she knows.

He kills her and buries her in the sand, but she still has one more performance in her.

A sailor approaches the island in a small boat only to get a splash of parasites in his face. Scratch one sailor. Another good gore effect, but randomly inserted into the story.

Murdoch and Jan confront Bartel. He pulls out a German Luger.

It’s at this point in the movie I realized Murdoch doesn’t grow facial hair and Jan stays fresh as a daisy.

Bartel, now gloating over his success as an evil Neo-Nazi marine biologist, monologs about the Nazi experiments he researched on behalf of the U.S. government. (Included on the DVD is the cut flashback sequence illustrating those evil experiments with unclothed, nubile young woman, of course.)

Murdoch takes his shirt off again—not sure why—and Jan is sent back to the tent to get the lead containers the professor needs to store parasite samples. She see’s the unexpected effect electricity has on the parasites as they: “have mutated into a monster beyond belief. A slimy, bloated thing!” but is too late in warning them not to shock the entire ocean.

In proper horror movie fashion, while impending doom approaches, they fight among themselves. Meanwhile, a way is discovered to kill the creature; Bartel gives some cockamamie pseudo-scientific “nucleus sensitive to hemoglobin” explanation. They create a weapon to deal with the creature soon to appear.

Then they go back to fighting among themselves.

In the kooky climax, Bartel gets his comeuppance, and Murdoch and Jan square off against the much bigger, terrifying-tentacled-ocean-monster. Be prepared to be amazed as you watch Murdoch standing in front of the creature’s mouth. Its eye is about three stories above him. How he plunges his little weapon into it must be seen to appreciate fully.

You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, anyway.

Zen and the
Art of Ghost Rider (2007)

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Ghost rider
Zombos Says: Good

“Why’s he staring at you like that?” Lea Persig asked. Her raven-black hair moved softly in the light breeze coming off the water. As our perky garage mechanic, she keeps the numerous vehicles Zombos never rides in tip-top shape. She turned again to look at Zombos sitting on the veranda, sipping his coffee while glaring at us.

“Oh, that’s his Penance Stare. He’s just sore I went to see Ghost Rider while he had to take Junior to see Bridge to Tilapia, or whatever it’s called,” I said.

“That’s Bridge to Terabithia, you goof,” she laughed. She has such a wonderful laugh. “Tilapia’s a fish.”

“Whatever.”

“What’s the Penance Stare?”

“That’s the Ghost Rider’s main weapon against evil-doers. He forces you to look deep into his empty eye-sockets and soon you feel all the pain and suffering you inflicted on others.”

I smiled and waved at Zombos. He glared more intensely, took a sip of coffee, and glared some more. I still didn’t feel any pain.

“So what did you think of the movie?” she asked as I handed her another wrench. She was working on the 1960 Harley-Davidson Glide motorcycle to smooth out its ride. “I mean, was it any good?”

” ‘Any good’ is a broad range that can cover a lot,” I said. “I would say there’s some good in it.”

“Like what?” She wiped the grease mark from her pale cheek, with a handkerchief she always carried in her back pocket, and took a breather.

“For one thing, the story’s a nice departure from the usual slasher and cannibalistic-serial-killer or psycho-mutants-among-us storylines coming out of Hollywood these days. It’s always nice to see a return to the more supernatural underpinnings modern horror grew from. A well done good-versus-evil story can be inspiring.”

“Was it inspiring then?” she asked, putting her handkerchief away.

“Well…no. Not very much so. I suppose because the movie lacks sufficient emotional punch.”

“All right, then, what’s it about?”

“Bloody, sell your soul to the devil pacts, an errant son whose evil can plunge the whole world into Hell, and a stunt motorcycle-riding, demon-possessed, flaming-skull, blazing-chain wielding innocent rube named Johnny Blaze, played by Nicolas Cage, who’s tricked into playing bounty-hunter to bring back Hell’s stragglers to ol’ two-horns himself. But he must play truant officer first.”

“And that’s not inspiring to you?” Lea laughed.

“Why are Zombos’ eyes bugging out?” Zimba’s Uncle Fadrus asked as he walked up the path to us. He enjoyed taking early morning walks before breakfast, especially in the desolate woods surrounding the mansion. “Oh, wait. I seem to recall Zimba forcing him to take Junior to the movies last night. Never mind. What’s this about, Ghost Rider?”

“We were discussing how uninspiring it was,” I said.

“Yes, it does lack that essential emotional connection that would have made it a better movie. Certainly no lack of budget for the special effects, though. They were fairly good.”

“So you’re saying a movie is good if it has good special effects?” asked Lea.

Fadrus shook his head. “No, no. I’m just saying part of what makes a movie good is the way in which special effects are handled, if the script calls for them, of course.”

“The opening scenes in the Old West, with Sam Elliott’s narration, are good,” I said. “Computer-enhanced images embellish the action nicely. Then there’s the scene between Johnny Blaze and Peter Fonda’s Faustian Mephistopheles. One bit of visual genius has Meph’s shadow appear as a gnarled, bent-over creature in a flash of lightning—his true self. Another is a drop of blood from Blaze’s finger as he signs the devil’s pact. It falls to the ground and splatters into a crimson glimpse of souls suffering in Hell. Very artistic use of CGI, especially with faces as the hideous demon appears briefly with more comely features, revealing the evil within.”

“The blazing skull and flaming motorcycle are well done, too—uh, no pun intended,” smiled Fadrus. “Changing the colors of his cranial flames to reflect the Ghost Rider’s mood, blue for sadness, for instance, is a thoughtful touch. And that transformation scene as Blaze becomes the Ghost Rider for the first time, it’s painful to watch as red embers sear his flesh from underneath!”

“But in his characterization though, Nicolas Cage’s toning down of the original bad-ass comic book character is probably due more to merchandising needs than any artistic expression,” I added. “Just look at all those Ghost Rider toys in the stores. You wouldn’t be able to sell them with an R-rated Johnny Blaze, would you?”

“So you’re saying the movie isn’t very good because it worried more about merchandising toys than it did about telling the story?” asked Lea.

“Yes and no,” I replied. “Merchandising toys works for movies like the Fantastic Four because the original characterizations are more family-friendly to begin with. But Ghost Rider was not, originally, a family-friendly kind of character.”

Fadrus added, “And Cage’s eccentricities for the character like eating jelly-beans from a martini glass and watching skits with monkeys dressed as humans, are too contrived. I mean, really, he’s signed a pact with the devil for heaven’s sake.”

“Probably the strongest weakness in the movie is how the four elemental demon-boys summoned by Blackheart, Mephisto’s errant son, are so easily brushed-off by Ghost Rider,” I said.

“Yes,” Fadrus agreed. “After Blackheart shows up at that Hell’s Angel’s biker-bar in the middle of nowhere, happily turning everyone to dark muck, and then summoning those nattily-dressed Goth demons to take care of Ghost Rider, not much action happens between him and them. So little screen time is devoted to their battles, and when they do fight it’s a simple, unimaginative, knock-out punch that sends them back to oblivion.”

“The love-interest also wasn’t very strong, either,” I said. “Roxanne, as played by Eva Mendes, just doesn’t smolder.”

Lea laughed. “Any more puns and I’ll take a wrench to the two of you.”

“What pun? Oh, I see what you mean. Anyway, she’s a reporter, but doesn’t do much reporting, and when she confronts Johnny Blaze and he explains his hellish predicament, there are no sparks, there is no intensity in the revelation. You’d think a man living on the edge of damnation, well, you would think there’d be more fear, more emotional trepidation.”

Fadrus said, “And the dialog didn’t help, either. Come to think of it, the dialog was fairly poor throughout the movie. Here you have Lucifer, his crazy son, demons galore, and a quintessential fight between good and evil, and I can’t recall any dialog stood out or was inspiring. Even Peter Fonda here—in the movie Race with the Devil he’s more energetic against evil—does little to hype his Lord of Hell role. He’s too sedate. There’s no seduction to his evil.”

“So…so far, from what the two of you have said, the movie is not that good,” said Lea.

“I wouldn’t say that. There are some good points to it,” I said. “For instance, while it lacks emotional-pull, has no witty dialog, and needs stronger fight scenes, the story is coherent enough, the acting sufficient, and the promise of a sequel provides a second chance for improvement. I think of it more as a work in progress. There’s also something endearing about the Wild West origins to the story, especially in the beginning and at the end. Sam Elliott brings it out and his presence lifts the movie up a notch.

“Don’t forget this movie was done by Mark Steven Johnson, who also did Daredevil and Elektra, which were both disappointments. Even directors deserve second chances.”

I corrected Fadrus. “Third chances, you mean.”

“Quite!” he laughed.

Zombos ran up to us. “I’ve got Fandango tickets for Ghost Rider, matinee show. Who’s with me?” he gasped in between breaths. We all said “I am” at once, and were soon off to see it again.

Even movies—and Zombos—deserve second and third chances.

Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural (1973)

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Lemora A Child's Tale of the Supernatural movie sceneZombos Says: Excellent

Thanksgiving Day is always an interesting time for us. The Zombos and Zimba families, including those above and below ground, crawl, hop, fly (usually by plane), and drive to the mansion for the eagerly anticipated holiday festivities. Each year Chef Machiavelli outdoes himself, and this time prepared the three-tentacled octopus and turkeys with a wonderfully seasoned shrimp and yak-eye stuffing.

Speaking of stuffing, Aunt Vesta and Uncle Tesla were in their usually supercilious moods at the dinner table, spicing the repartee to new heights. Afterwards, dessert was taken in the grand ballroom and the conversations continued.

“I must agree with Zombos,” said Cousin Cleftus, adjusting the thick amber-colored monocle over his one good eye. Uncle Tesla raised his brandy, sniffed it with disdain, and sipped a little.

“Lovecraft’s premise that mankind’s oldest and strongest emotion is fear,” he continued, “while essentially correct, is incomplete. Fear is merely the emotional energy. You must define those elements that instill fear, and once you do, you will find what makes us fearful today is greatly different from what made movie audiences frightened years ago.”

“And today,” continued Zombos, “one fears not the supernatural unknown, but the loss of one’s authority over life. That theme is reflected more and more in this current Cinema of the Helpless. To have one’s life and death inevitably at the whim of forces beyond one’s control is essentially the basis of all horror, but those forces are no longer cosmic or alien in nature, but mundane and co-existing with us, and conspiring against us until they strike, leaving us helpless, or in pain, or dead. We live with the
monsters and they are us.”

Uncle Tesla sipped his brandy as he listened. He looked very much like Renfield in Dracula; not as portrayed by Dwight Frye, superb as he was, but Bernard Jukes in his stage portrayal. He glanced toward the desserts buffet with longing.

“When would you like to screen Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural in the cinematorium?” I asked.

“Lemora?” said Uncle Tesla, ecstatic. “Why, I’ve not seen that movie since the seventies.”

“It is a wonderful anamorphic version,” said Zombos.

Cousin Cleftus’ monocle popped out and dangled across his vast circumference.

“No, no,” said Zombos, “anamorphic, as in taking the wide-screen movie aspect and retaining it for the home screen. You get to see all the detail of the movie as it was shown in the theaters without losing anything on a smaller screen.

“Oh, I see,” said Cousin Cleftus, popping his monocle back in place.

“It is a wonderfully unpretentious southern Gothic, set in the 1930s South. From the blue-tinted night scenes to the zombie-like cancerous decay makeup of the wood ghouls, it is a movie that surmounts its low-budget limitations,” reminisced Zombos.

“And let us not forget the beautiful vampiress, Lemora, herself. Her Lizzie Borden appearance, paired with her pallid, Countess Marya Zaleska look from Dracula’s
Daughter is superb,” said Uncle Tesla.

“And what about those irrational actions of the rat-like bus driver during the frightful night ride to that vampire-infested town of Asteroth,” added Zombos, “wonderfully Lovecraftian in conception as the wood ghouls claw at the bus. The whole affair harkens to Lovecraft’s story the Shadow Over Innsmouth.

“Yes,” continued Uncle Tesla, laughing. “How on earth any sane man, knowing that he’s surrounded by murderous vampires, gets out of a stalled bus after saying he can just coast down the hill to the town—to fix the engine, no less—boggles the mind.”

“And he leaves the rifle on the side of the bus, of course, losing it,” I added.

“Of course!” said Zombos and Uncle Tesla together. “He deserved to be attacked.”

“The scene with the witch holding the red lantern and singing that weird folklorish song in close-up is unnerving,” I added.

“What’s even more unnerving is the sexual undertones running throughout the movie,” said Uncle Tesla. “What with Lemora’s amorous posturing toward Lila, the “Singin’ Angel,” and the ticket-taker’s provocative “what do you like best now, soft or hard centers?” comment when he holds the box of chocolates up to Lila as she buys her bus ticket.”

“The Catholic League of Decency condemned the movie, didn’t they? That probably ended its limited distribution in theaters prematurely,” said Uncle Tesla.

“Yes,” said Zombos. “I hear it became a cult movie in France, though. They tend to appreciate the artsy fare more than we do.”

“They restored the longer scene with the ticket-taker,” I said. “The actor’s wonderful, unctuous delivery, in close-up to show his creepy Peter Lorre eyes peering over the box of chocolates at the girl, is quite striking.”

“The choice of vibrant colors is also striking, especially when contrasted with the shadows and dark lighting in the movie. It gives a dream-like air to the story as much as the slow pacing, and languid performance by Cheryl Smith as Lila,” said Zombos.

“Let’s see it,” said Uncle Tesla. “I can’t wait any longer.”

Zombos told everyone to grab their desserts and follow him into the cinematorium. Uncle Tesla took his usual three and I pushed along the coffee and tea station behind him. As soon as everyone was settled comfortably, I began the movie; and enjoyed another helping of Chef Machiavelli’s Turkish Delight.

Bubba Ho-Tep (2002)
TCB, Baby, TCB

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Bubba-ho-tep
Zombos Says: Excellent

Poor Zombos. Another birthday has come and gone, another year much older. He is now at that nonretractable age where the over-the-hill birthday cards are no longer funny, no matter how many humanized monkeys, sun-glassed grandmas, scantily-clad woman, and you’re-not-over-the-hill jokes grace them. The poor fellow is tumbling down that hill at this point. He has entered into that past-tense territory; the somewhat foggy land of blurred memories and time-diluted dreams, where his reminiscences of the good old days bore everyone around him to tears in their constant retelling.

Zimba valiantly tried to cheer him up, and was partially successful when she flipped the TV channels to find King Kong Lives! What a bizarre movie. Zombos was practically on the floor by the time the “big” operation scene came along with Linda Hamilton wielding Land of the Giants-sized surgical instruments to perform open-heart surgery on the ailing ape. When they craned in the mechanical heart the size of a Smart Fortwo car, even Zimba was rolling on the floor laughing.

Zombos went back to his doldrums when the movie ended. I ventured into his closet, looking for something that would put a smile on his face again. Perhaps a bittersweet Don Coscarelli and Joe Lansdale tale of a mummy, an old Elvis Presley, and an older John F. Kennedy pretender, played against the backdrop of fading vitality, unfulfilled dreams, and the inevitable slack time between living hard and sleeping big would certainly cheer him up?

Bubba Ho-Tep is not a great movie but it does come close enough to do the job, like the really good Elvis impersonators. Bruce Campbell is the real Elvis Presley and Ossie Davis is a maybe JFK (as told by him, he was dyed black after the assassination incident), and both elevate this mojo-horror with sentimental charm and simple humorous gumption. The twangy guitar and acoustic drum laden score by Brian Tyler countrify this B-movie appropriately with a bittersweet mood—despairing one minute, glorifying the next.

Terror springs up in the Mud Creek Shady Rest Convalescence Home, where Elvis mopes his time away three stops past his prime. Seems he’s tired of the same old thing, day after day, and wanted out. Hiring Sebastian Haff, the best Elvis impersonator he could find to take over the life he no longer wanted, he hits the road as Haff, while Haff hits the stage as him.

Both men impersonate each other, but it looks like Haff gets the better half of the deal. When Haff overdoses, the real Elvis becomes trapped in Haff’s impersonation. No one believes Elvis when he says he’s the real deal, winding him down on his luck and sending him all alone to Shady Rest.

He’s stiffly glum and ornery, ruminating on what should have worked out right and his famous gyrations are now devoted entirely to using a walker to get around. He also suffers from a humiliating ailment on his little prince. His ego’s deflated so flat it’s detached him from with his surroundings: he lies in bed watching every day transpire in blurry fast motion and odd time slices. People treat him like the unimportant head-case with mutton chop sideburns and sparkling wardrobe old guy he feels like.

It takes a scarab beetle as big as a “peanut butter and banana sandwich,” and JFK, thirty-fifth president of the United States, to get him taking care of supernatural business with gusto.

After more than the usual dead old people go out the front door, Jack tells Elvis there’s a mummy scuttling through the halls of Shady Rest, sucking out the souls of its denizens through their butts. He knows this because he’s seen hieroglyphs in one of the men’s toilet stalls. The absurd discussion between Jack and Elvis regarding the discovery of these “stick pictures on the sh*thouse wall,” and Jack’s simple translation of them, leads both to surmise they have a soul-sucking Egyptian mummy roaming the halls. Jack’s copy of the Everyday Man and Woman’s Book of the Soul leaves no doubt about this.

No one really wants to be in the old-age home; not Elvis, not Jack, not Reggie Bannister, who plays the rest home administrator, not Kemosabe, the senile masked cowboy with toy cap guns, and not even the soul-sucking mummy wants to be there. How he wound up in a Texas rest home is as sadly commonplace as anyone else’s story. Since he’s trapped there, too, he has to take care of business to stay alive, or as alive a mummy can get to.

Coscarelli takes us slowly down the gloomy and empty hallways the mummy, dressed in cowboy duds—a Bubba Ho-Tep as Elvis calls him—roams, but the real horror in this movie isn’t the mummy, it’s the humiliation of old-age and the “always the hopes, never the fulfillments,” regrets as Elvis realizes he has lots of too-late-to-do-anything-now tucked away. There’s enough melancholia to go round for everyone at Shady Rest and Campbell’s narrations of his thoughts and dreams sets the tone against the raspy twang strum of the guitar punctuating the empty spaces between his words mood.

There’s a wonderful Carl Kolchak-bucking-the-odds feeling to this story: two men struggling to overcome their age-related handicaps to fight a supernatural force as uncomfortable in the world as they are. Elvis in his walker and best stage costume, and Jack in his wheelchair and best dress suit confront Bubba Ho-Tep in a fight highlighted by animated hieroglyphic invectives uttered by the mummy, with subtitle translations, and the duos frantic, partially ambulatory, attack aided by wheelchair and guile.

In the current cinema horror cycle where torture and grisly death await most victims and the would-you-like-fries-with-that franchising of stories to over-salted excess burning out the craft and skill of writing memorable, Bubba Ho-Tep is a little gem that should not be missed. Or, as Elvis would say, it manages to “TCB, Baby, TCB.”

Jigoku (1960)
A Hell of a Movie

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Jigoku movie posterZombos Says: Very Good

Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place; poor theology student Shiro (Shigeru Amachi) can’t seem to keep from going to hell and taking everyone else with him. The Criterion Collection brings Nobuo Nakagawa’s 1960 surrealistic terror and damnation cult classic, Jigoku, to DVD.

Like a nightmare, the film takes twists and turns that defy visual logic and story sense, plunging you—along with Shiro—into an absurdest world with no possible exit. Before you watch the film, I strongly recommend reading the essay by Chuck Stephens in the included booklet and watch the documentary Building the Inferno on the DVD.

Jigoku is not a film to see on an empty mind.

Perhaps it’s Shiro’s indecisiveness hastening his descent. The poor man is not a happy camper and, as he broods, his fiance, family members, and acquaintances suffer the consequences of his brooding. Then there is Tamura, Shiro’s evil friend. With friends like him, as the saying goes, you are sure to wind up in hell before breakfast. Tamura has an eerie way of popping up unexpectedly, and knowing all the dirt on everyone. Who, or what, is he?

But which hell are we talking about here? Every religion has its own claim to the greener pastures and turgid rivers of bubbling corruption. For Shiro, hell is a tenth-century Buddhist’s depiction of nastiness, complete with images from thirteenth-century Japanese Hell scroll paintings—with multiple levels of torture.

Bargain Basement, all out for dismemberment, disembowelment, and peeling-you-like-a-grape forever and ever; next stop, eye-gouging and tickling your feet until you up-chuck.

I never knew Buddhists had it in them. We need one to make a horror movie.

Shiro’s journey to torment begins with his insistence that Tamura drive down a bad road. Their car hits a gangster. Shiro implores Tamura to stop, but he speeds away, telling Shiro no one saw the accident, so why stop? But the gangster’s mom saw it all, and notes the license plate. She tells his gun moll she saw who did it and soon the two are planning to kill the killers.

Shiro, guilt-ridden, tells his fiancé, Yukiko (Utako Mitsuya), that he killed a man. He blames himself for the accident even though Tamura was driving the car. He insists they go to the police station and he insists they take a taxi, though his fiance would much rather walk. The taxi driver promptly steers the car into an unyielding tree and his fiance promptly dies calling his name.

Shiro now has more guilt to weigh on him. He suffers from lots of guilt, but we never know why. Just because he feels guilty most of the time, that’s no reason to send him to hell, is it?

Love-making out of wedlock is a hellish offense, perhaps, and his fiancé was pregnant.

As Shiro’s guilt-ridden brooding consumes him, he receives word that his mother is dying. He visits his family home outside Tokyo. We meet the odd inhabitants of the old-age home run by his unscrupulous father. His father is also riding his mistress to exhaustion as his wife lies quietly dying in the next room. Hell for sure, that one, guaranteed; and a hell-way ticket for everyone Shiro meets, including the unethical doctor, corrupt cop, and daughter of the drunken painter who paints scenes of hell in his spare time. Adding to Shiro’s angst is how the painter’s daughter looks exactly like Yukiko.

The gangster’s mom and moll find him. The gun moll confronts him on a wooden suspension bridge hanging high above a rocky chasm.

Any self-respecting horror-head knows where this is going.

In an almost comical scene, the moll trips over her own high-heeled feet just as she is about to shoot Shiro. Down she goes, and goes and goes, until she smacks into the rocks below. Creepy Tamura shows up to gloat over the incident and heap more guilt on to Shiro’s back. He and Shiro get into a tussle and down Tamura goes, and goes, and goes.

Smell that brimstone charcoal firing up for Shiro?

Up until now, Nakagawa filmed his characters together in twos or threes, with tight, sparsely decorated sets. He now opens up to show the evening party revelry at the old-age home, shifting between the carousing residents and a small party of shady characters, including his father, who served the home’s residents with tainted fish, his mistress, the immoral doctor, corrupt cop, Shiro, Yukiko look-alike, and—hey, wait a minute, what’s that gangster’s mom doing here? And what’s that she’s carrying? Looks like a big jug of—DEATH!

No, don’t drink it you fools!

Too late.

Suddenly, creepy—looking kind of dead—Tamura shows up again, but he isn’t gloating this time. He does manage to shoot Yukiko-look-alike to death. While Shiro strangles Tamura for that the gangster’s mom strangles Shiro.

With it looking like a Three Stooges skit, everyone winds up in hell.

And what a hell it is for a 1960’s film.

Nakagawa is called the founding father of Japanese Horror for his visual extremes of torment. Poised on the bank of the river Sanzu, Shiro and all those that fit into that hand-basket with him must now unpack and settle into their uncomfortable eternal accommodations.

No crowding please, there’s plenty of torment and pain for everyone.

With annoying demons sticking a pitchfork up your butt, or lopping off hands here and there—and let’s not forget the boiling and bubbling hot-tubs of blood (my favorite!)—this is Club Dread for the damned dead.

Need a beautifying skin peel? No problem, they’ll remove it all and leave chunky bloody bits for added zest. Need a pedicure? Easy, just go for a walk in a field of razor sharp needles growing like blades of grass. A field of feet sticking up out of the ground, while running hordes of annoying commuters not knowing which stop is theirs, embellish the toxic landscape. Nakagawa, and Kurosawa the production designer, stretch their minimal budget to its limits and create a horrific inferno comprised of jarring images, colors, and torments.

As each person is condemned to damnation for their sins and tortured in gory close-ups unusual for 1960s Japanese horror cinema, Nakagawa presents a nonsensical and almost non-linear montage of the netherworld. Is he winking at us? Perhaps he is telling us that religions telling people they must suffer eternal, barbaric tortures for daring to disobey religious edicts are ludicrous and cannot be taken seriously?

Shiro is told he must rescue his unborn daughter as she floats down the river of blood. Along the way, he meets both Yukiko and Yukiko look-alike, and Tamura.

Is Tamura a demon? Or Shiro’s doppelganger? Or just some really evil person?

Nakagawa mixes it so you never really know. He also ends with lotus blossoms floating through the air, a discordant image given their symbolic meaning of purification and rebirth. He leaves Shiro hanging, literally, as he tries to save his unborn daughter, now caught in the netherworld. Yukiko and Yukiko look-alike swirl parasols and smile as lotus blossoms float all around them.

Nakagawa’s film is both art-house and nonsense at the same time. He sends everybody to hell and has a rousing good time doing it in this Manga-stylized film.

 

Scarecrows (1988)

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Scarecrows

Zombos Says: Good

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Scarecrows is one of those horror movies that with better acting and better direction, and a more coherent script, would be quite compelling as a good example of a horror movie. As it is, it’s still creepy with effective makeup and gore effects, and does manage to maintain its mood of unknown evil biding time in the corn fields. A plus here is there are no dumb—but pretty—teenagers getting offed one by one, just very dumb misbehaving adults, so there’s a refreshing change of pace you will enjoy at least.

Similar to the storyline in the movie Dead Birds, there’s a precipitating robbery, an abandoned spooky house in the middle of nowhere, and demonic evil happening without explanation, in and around that house. The future victims are shown witless enough to run around aimlessly before getting killed, one by one, in ways that you and I would have easily avoided.

Escaping in a hijacked plane with a reluctant pilot and the pilot’s daughter after a lucrative robbery, para-military crooks are double-crossed by one of their own: a very nervous guy named Bert (B.J. Turner). Bert’s first mistake is made when he jumps out of the plane with the big—and very heavy—box that holds all the stolen money, with no plan on how he’s going to carry it once he’s on the ground. Being the dumbest of the bunch, he’s murdered first, but not before he finds the Fowler residence, nestled snuggly amid lots of ominous-looking scarecrows perched all around the wooden fence that’s covered with barbed-wire and lots of warning signs saying “stay away.” The weird weathervane on the roof, with the pitchfork and pteradactyl, is a clear sign this old homestead is more deadstead than homey. Bert makes his second mistake when he ignores all the warning signs.

Until he’s murdered, we hear what he’s thinking through his very unnecessary voiceover as he, way too easily, comes across the key to the decrepit truck in the yard. He hoists the box onto the truck and makes his getaway. Sure, why not? Decrepit trucks lying dormant for years in yards always have lots of gas in them, especially with today’s prices, and car batteries last and last, right?

Although he wears night-vision goggles to walk through the foliage and find the house, he TAKES THEM OFF to drive the truck away and TURNS ON the headlights instead to see where he’s going. The rest of the crooks, still circling in the plane, spot the headlights.

Brilliant. He deserves to die he’s so stupid.

I’m not sure why he needed night vision goggles in the first place since every scene is brightly lit, from the interior of the plane to the night-time scenery, even the house. The cinematographer was either myopic or recently graduated movie school, or he had to deal with really cheap moviestock and a skimpy budget.

Bert meets his demise when the truck dies in the middle of nowhere and the scarecrows get him. One nice touch, and there are a few of them, is when he opens the truck’s lid after stalling out. I won’t ruin the hair-raising surprise, but any fan of American Pickers on the History Channel will pretty much know what to expect with rusting derelict trucks.

The story-sense, what less cinema-minded people call common sense, falters when dead and stuffed-like-a-flounder-with-straw-and-stolen-loot-Bert returns to the house. The rest of the crooks rough him up, then realize he’s gutted and stuffed like a flounder. Dead Bert manages to put up quite a fight, grabbing one fellow by the mouth and pushing him through a window, causing him to bite off more than he could chew in a gorylicious scene to savor. At this point, faced with an obvious supernatural threat, you’d think the crooks would be racing out of the house and back to the plane pronto. Instead, they stay to look for the rest of the money, even if one of them complains “Bert was walking around dead, for chrissakes!”

The stolen money suddenly appears on the ground outside the house, and the crooks—being greedy and all that—go for the bait without stopping to wonder how it got there. One of them is cornered by the scarecrows, and with a dull handsaw, they make him less handy. Now dead and gutted himself, Jack (Richard Vidan) returns to the house and attacks the remaining crooks.

If you listen closely to Jack’s demonic growl you will hear the same monster-growl heard often in the Lost in Space TV episodes.

The last two survivors finally get smart and run like hell back to the plane.

But that doesn’t help.

For a B-movie, Scarecrows is more C than D. Still, the surprising amount of sustained dread and the 1980s evocative eeriness many of the scenes hold to the finish are worth a look-see. Especially on Halloween.