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Movies (Horror)

30 Days of Night (2007)

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Zombos Says: Good

I award the movie two and a half stars because it is well-made, well-photographed and plausibly acted, and is better than it needs to be…Otherwise, this would be a radio play. I have pretty much reached my quota for vampire movies, but I shouldn’t hold that against this one. If you haven’t seen too many, you might like it. If you are a horror fan, you will love it. (Roger Ebert, from his review of 30
Days of Night)

Dear Roger,

I must take umbrage to your potentially snarky comment regarding horror fans. Not all of us automatically gush in delight at the sight of crimson fountains of blood spewing from severed jugular veins, torn open by shark-toothed vampires ripping into screaming victims. To the contrary, many of us are quite demanding in our never-ending search for skillfully crafted storylines that merge terror and drama
competently, above and beyond the usual frights.

Right off the bat I can tell you weren’t paying close attention to the movie: it’s Barrow, Alaska, not Barlow. The only Barlow I know is in Ohio, and they certainly don’t have to worry about 30 days of night or ravenous vampires for that matter. On the other hand—

 “You are getting a little off topic,” said Zombos, peering over my shoulder.

“You’re right.” I stopped typing and collected my thoughts. “Maybe I should start over.”

“Good idea,” he agreed.

Dear Roger,

I take exception to your cavalier comment regarding horror fans liking 30 Days of Night just because it’s a horror film; especially after you begrudgingly gave it two and a half stars. Not all of us children-of-the-night critics pile on the hyperbole when a highly anticipated vampire film hits the big screen, even if it does contain an interesting premise. I can’t believe no one thought of it before Steve Niles
and Ben Templesmith grabbed it for their graphic novel.

Speaking of the graphic novel, originally conceived as a three-issue series containing very evocative illustrations that grab each panel and–

“Are you writing about the movie or the comic book series?” asked Zombos.

—But I digress. I agree that the story becomes the usual struggle for survival against murderous fiends, but what did you expect? It’s a horror movie, where victims usually struggle against nightmarish fiends, and try their best not to be eaten, bitten, hack-sawed,
disemboweled, tortured, and, generally speaking, grievously harmed in any way.

I’ll grant you the Sheriff doesn’t do too good a job of it—saving townspeople, that is—but at least he gives it his best shot. It’s nice, too, that his estranged wife can finally find something they both can share in, like staying alive.

The opening events, with the mysterious burning of all the mobile phones, and the butchering of all the huskies in town should have alerted Sheriff Eben (Josh Hartnett) that trouble was brewing. And when Renfield’s cousin (Ben Foster) shows up to chill us with
his icy words heralding approaching doom, I’d be hauling my ass out of town right quick. But then we wouldn’t have much of a horror film, would we?

Granted, when the vampires do arrive, they’re the usual Goth-looking, shark-toothed, black-eyed night-crawlers with just a hint of fashion. And like you said, they are “a miserable lot.” One thing you didn’t mention, however, is the odd way they spill copious pools of blood. It never ceases to amaze me when scriptwriters turn vampires into werewolves, having them rip out throats in geyser-like sprays of
arterial blood, wasting their food source in an orgy of sadistic destruction. More blood winds up in the snow than in the stomachs of these guys. Go figure. Sure, as you said, they shwoosh around a lot, teasingly just out of sight, but they aren’t zombies you know. Zombies dawdle; vampires shwoosh. It’s the nature of the beast.

I agree with you on that whole non-Hammer speaking thing; bad call here. If there’s anything worse than vampires ripping out your throat in large chunks, it’s having to listen to their really tedious pontifications before they do it. The dialog here is not a keeper, and the subtitles to translate their click-clack-clucking speech is irritating. For some odd reason, I kept imagining they came from Russia, though I can’t fathom why.

“I thought you were writing this review to refute Ebert’s two and a half stars, not agree with him,” commented Zombos. “Maybe you should focus on that?”

“Oh, right. Let me think this through again. You’re right. I’ll start over.”

Dear Roger,

I don’t think it fair to award only two and a half stars to 30 Days of Night. The acting is earnest and effective and the cinematography captures the setting sunset and onset of darkness beautifully, exemplifying the isolation of Barrow in the cold Alaskan winter. The action sequences are handled well and move the story at a brisk pace, holding the tension well as vampires descend on the town and systematically wreak havoc, breaking into homes in search of prey, and snatching people in fast shwooshes of action across the snow banks.

After awhile it does all seem to blur into the same old vampire stalking, victim-dying pattern, but while the story becomes the usual struggle for survival, the interplay between Sheriff Eben and his estranged wife (Melissa George), a law-enforcement type herself,
adds depth to the storyline, and more involvement from us: there’s nothing like a couple getting back together to bring out our concern for their safety.

Horror films could use more romance.

That interlude with the little vampire girl in the general store is worth noting. So what do you do with a blood-thirsty little vampire girl anyway? Cute kid? No, but still a kid. It’s nice to see some good old axe swinging, vampire head-chopping, here and there. The film could have used more of that. There’s nothing like romance and heads flying to spice things up.

I must admit I was a tad disappointed after Sheriff Eben’s inspiring speech about the townspeople being natives and using their experience with the cold and darkness to fight the interlopers. Not much in the way of that experience shone through, and everyone
pretty much froze their asses off in the dark instead. After that dangerous foray to the general store to get supplies and potential weapons, not much was done with that stuff after all that, either.

Speaking of that 30 days’ full moon lighting that permeates the streets and buildings of the supposedly darkness-enshrouded town, you do have a point. I found it odd, too. The film starts off with things going dark after the blood-thirsty cretins disable the generator, but interiors and streets suddenly become brightly lit, with light coming from somewhere. So much for that 30 days of darkness thing. More murkiness in the town would have shaken things up better.

 “Damn, I did it again, didn’t I?” I said.

Zombos nodded, rolling his eyes.

“Oh, hell.”

Dear Roger,

I agree with you: the film is a solid two and a half stars and horror fans should love it in spite of its few inconsistencies.

Yours Truly,

Zoc

PS. We still miss you.

Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007)

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Zombos Says: Fair

Half-way into the movie I started to wonder why I wasn’t feeling the love. Where was the lingering taste of candy corn on my lips, the smell of burning pumpkin innards, charred by candle flame, in my nose? Certainly there was no suspense, or even anticipation of it, from the unstoppable bogeyman as I watched Rob Zombie’s re-imagining of John Carpenter’s 1978 retelling of The Hook urban legend, Halloween. Of course, Zombie didn’t have actors like Jamie Lee Curtis or Donald Pleasence to bolster his story, but since he spent much of the film focused on the unkempt Daeg Faerch as the young Michael Myers, perhaps that’s a moot point. Or maybe not?

Making Myers more psychotic serial killer than ghost-like supernatural force to reckon with may be the cinematic equivalent of getting toothpaste and dental floss in your trick or treat bag instead of mouth-watering chocolates and sugary sweets. With Zombie’s penchant for dysfunctional, white-trash families, and potty-mouthed, libidinous characters you really really don’t care about, and lingering stares at his all too familiar blood-splattered tableaus, the hairs-rising-on-the-back-of-your-neck quality of the original story has been carved out and replaced with the pedestrian graphic violence prevalent in today’s horror repertoire.

Subtlety is not one of Zombie’s stronger directorial abilities. He prefers to show everything, raw and bloody, and provide a rationale for why Michael Myers slices and dices like crazy. With a stripper for a mom, a Bowery bum for a father, a very loose unsisterly sister, and school chums that despise him with a passion, Michael will either become a born-again Christian, or a serial killer. While some may argue both cases can be the subject for a horror film, Zombie chooses the latter, and promptly drains the Jack-O-Lantern life out of the franchise.

The adversarial quality of Carpenter’s film, exemplified by Jamie Lee Curtis struggling to survive the normally festive Halloween night, and Donald Pleasence earnestly warning of the bogeyman, sustained the tension and suspense of Michael’s return to Haddonfield. Zombie erases this adversarial plotline by perfunctorily moving from sex-romping victim to sex-romping victim in well-orchestrated, but uninvolving mayhem as Michael goes after his now grown up baby sister. There is no anticipation of violence here, and therefore no suspense or real scares from the unexpected. Michael kills anything in sight so knowing what he’s going to do next is a no-brainer. He’s going to kill everyone in sight. Ho-hum.

Malcolm McDowell’s Dr. Loomis is more social worker than psychiatrist, and doesn’t have the vulnerability that made Donald Pleasence’s more fearful Loomis more interesting. When McDowell tells Michael—after the body count has been steadily rising—that “I’ve failed you,” I thought to myself “Ya think?” Zombie’s Dr. Loomis laments why Michael is so screwed up he can’t be helped; Carpenter’s Dr. Loomis realizes Michael is just plain evil, he’s dangerous, and needs to be locked away forever. Which one do you think would sustain more tension in the storyline?

The trend toward making serial killers humongous in stature also works against subtlety here. Tyler Mane’s Michael Myers is visually imposing, but evil is most devilish when it comes in  average height. And how the hell did little Mikey grow so big anyway? Mask-making is hardly a resistance-exercise, and that’s all he did in his little cell; make paper-maché masks of all kinds to hide his face.

Zombie does toss in a few nods to the original film, and makes good use of the original soundtrack. There’s also a nod to his former band, White Zombie, as  Murder Legendre briefly pops up on a television screen. Zombie continues this theme as classic horror movies appear on television screens here and there. Numerous cameos include Micky Dolenz and Sid Haig.

Zombie knows his craft, but relies on trash-violence and unsavory characters to tell his story every time, demeaning the level of
artistry Carpenter showed in the original. Giving Michael Myers a sordid background, filled with animal cruelty and vicious murder, removes the mystery behind the mask, making this just another slasher film whose action  could have taken place at any time during the
year. But this movie’s monster is supposed to be the Halloween bogeyman, damn it.

Re-imaginings like these make us realize what makes a classic so classic. That, at least, is a good thing.

Phantasm (1979)
Beware the Tall Man

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Zombos Says: Very Good

Welcome to your nightmare, Mike.

Your parents are dead and your brother Jody is thinking of dumping you off to your aunt while he hits the road in his Plymouth Barracuda muscle car. I’d be depressed, too. It’s no wonder your imagination starts running wild. I’d start imagining all sorts of phantasms if loss and abandonment were uppermost in my mind.

Being a kid in the 1970s doesn’t help much, either. After that exuberant, but now defunct, 1960s high, Tom Wolfe’s aptly named “Me
Decade,” is spinning out of control like a bad, long, hallucinatory trip that begins with a glittering disco ball and quickly morphs into one of the Tall Man’s sentinel spheres sticking out of your forehead, drilling into your brain.

Phantasm is Don Coscarelli’s acid trip on the dark side. With many social institutions losing their veneer of propriety in the 70s, Coscarelli made sure to beat up our quaint notions of peaceful death, comforting undertakers, and simple horror movies. His low-budget film, initially financed by his dad and picked up by Universal after a rough-cut showing, is a tad dated in the special effects department, but
remains a scary, bizarre, trip centering around Morningside Mortuary with Mini-Me versions of recently deceased people popping up, flying metal balls with nasty skull-drills popping up, and a tall sneering gentleman from another place far far away popping up. Able to lift long coffins with a single arm, and endowed with abilities far beyond those of mere mortals like Jody, Mike, and Reggie—the guitar-playing ice-cream man—the Tall Man is one cantankerous and dangerous undertaker.

So go ahead, toss an ABBA platter onto the old turn-table and crank up the volume if that will help make you feel better for a little while. It’s time to have that safe, comfy, feeling blown out from under you, when even in death you get no respect.

Can you dig it?

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly what makes Phantasm a cult classic. While the direction is a bit rough, there’s a distinct momentum in
scenes, like a deck of cards being neatly shuffled with each card crisply riffling into the interweaving pile. While the acting is also a bit amateurish, there’s a disarming simplicity to each of the characters, making their nightmarish ordeal stand out against the ordinariness of their lives. While some of the effects are low-tech, they play on the absurd terror of the situation, and the eerie, almost dreamlike—or nightmare-like—situations that reveal more of the sardonic Tall Man’s alien nature, and his sacrilegious dwarfing-down of the bodies of loved ones supposed to be at rest.

The film opens with a glimpse of sex and murder precipitated by the Tall Man’s more feminine side. In a weird twist that disorients with its shock-blink between her and him, we’re hustled into a funeral that brings together best-buds even though the unexpected death of their buddy, Tommy, breaks up their musical trio for good. Now with little left to hold him down, Jody is ready to leave the small town, but Mike, his younger brother, doesn’t want to lose the only close family he has left. But Mike has little time to be depressed; the mortuary’s undertaker is a queer sort, and Mike starts to suspect why.

Or is Mike just punch-drunk from grief and imagining things?

Not knowing which end is up, Mike heads to his local psychic for help. She plays the old stick-your-hand-in-the-box trick and tells him to
control his fear. But fear from what? Leaving the psychic, he’s more confused than when he went in, so he stays close to his big brother. Trolling the local bar, Jody picks up the same “woman” who iced his bud, Tommy. Lucky for him, Mike interrupts his brother’s nocturnal romp in the cemetery before she can do any harm.

The next day, while following Jody around again, Mike sees the Tall Man walking across the street. A blast of cold air from an ice-cream truck attracts the Tall Man’s attention. Angus Scrimm is surreal as the lean, mean, undertaker-machine. His voice, his face, his whole body makes you want to run the other way when he approaches. Like the alien harvester in 1957’s Not of This Earth, the Tall Man is up to no good, and Mike aims to find out just what that is.

Taking a sharp knife with him, Mike heads to Morningside Mortuary.

Late at night, of course. A quick kick through the basement window later, he’s prowling around the creepy marble hallways. In no time at all, he’s barely escaping encounters with an oversized ball-bearing from hell and the Tall Man and his Jawa-looking munchkins. After slamming a big metal door shut before he’s caught, he’s startled to find the Tall Man’s hand, flattened, still moving, and sticking out of the tiny crack in the door frame. He lops off a few of its fingers, spilling yellow ichor from the stumps. Mike realizes it’s time to high-tail it
out of there. Before he goes, he grabs one of the fingers as evidence.

More nightmarish events ensue after underage Mike downs a beer or two and convinces Jody not all is right with Morningside Mortuary. Jody loads up the old family gun and heads there—again at night—but gets attacked by a dwarf and makes a run for it. Worse yet, a hearse chases after him, driven by a much shorter—didn’t we just bury him?—Tommy. Underage Mike pulls up in the bitchin’ Barracuda, and the race is on. Reggie pulls up in his ice-cream truck after the hearse crashes and they discover the diminutive Tommy at the wheel.

Jody sends Mike to Sally’s antique store for safety while they stuff the little guy into Reggie’s truck so the squirt can ooze yellow ichor
over all the popsicles. While perusing the antiques back at Sally’s, Mike’s eyes pop out when he comes across an old tintype photo of the Tall Man that comes alive (Stephen King uses the same effect in his novel, IT).

Looks like the guy’s been around for a long, long time. Great. Time to rethink their fighting strategy.

Reggie, the ice-cream packing, guitar-strumming dude, joins in the fight. Being an ice-cream packing, guitar-strumming dude, he gets whooped good when Tommy bounces back to angry life among the popsicles. When the three of them—Mike, Jody, and Reggie—regroup and converge on the mortuary, they find the gateway to another world, lots more angry munchkins ready for UPS Global pickup, and all about what the Tall Man’s been up to. Just when you think the story is nice-and-tidily ended, Coscarelli throws in a curve-ball. With three
sequels, the Tall Man is unstoppable.

Phantasm will leave you wanting more flying balls of death, more of the Tall Man’s shenanigans, and more munchkin-madness.

The Return of the Vampire (1944)

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Return of the Vampire publicity stillZombos Says: Good

Bela Lugosi’s career didn’t fare well after his initial fame withDracula. Having apparently failed the makeup screen test forFrankenstein—though he wasn’t overly found of playing the monster anyway—his reserved and aloof demeanor kept him from ingratiating himself with the Hollywood in-crowd. That, and the rapidly rising stardom of Boris Karloff after his noted portrayal of the Frankenstein Monster, put Lugosi in a deteriorating career position.

Although he created intensely unique and effective characters such as Dracula, Murder Legendre in White Zombie, and Ygor in Son of Frankenstein, he spent much of his time acting in lesser roles. After Dracula,
he portrayed a “real” vampire onscreen only two more times; as Armand Tesla in The Return of the Vampire, and as the more comedic count in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

Lew Landers’ The Return of the Vampire plays like a Brothers Grimm fairytale. You have your evil villain, the occultist turned vampire, Armand Tesla (Bela Lugosi), his reluctant servant who is tragically caught between good and evil and lycanthropy, and a wartime beleaguered, bomb-ruined London as backdrop seething with revenge creeping in the foggy night.

The story begins as the first World War ends. Lady Jane (Frieda Inescot) and Dr. Saunders (Gilbert Emery) must come to terms with a vampire in their midst. After he attacks a child, Dr. Saunders convinces Lady Jane that their problem goes beyond scientific understanding, and the two set out to find the blood-sucking fiend. But not before Dr. Saunders reads up on the annoying supernatural pests, written by one Armand Tesla, noted authority in the field.

It is an ironic, somewhat foreboding comment Dr. Saunders makes regarding the limitations of science to convince Lady Jane of the existence of something not analyzable under her microscope; only a few years later, the inexplicable horrors of the supernatural world will be supplanted by the inexplicable mutant horrors wrought by science and radiation. After World War II and the atomic bomb, vampires and werewolves would appear less frightening compared to the threats from giant ants, giant spiders, and giant blobs.

The shift from personal destruction to mass destruction has begun.

As night approaches, Lady Jane and Dr. Saunders find Tesla in his coffin and drive a steel spike into his heart, freeing Andreas (Matt Willis), Tesla’s werewolf servant, from his evil grasp, and ending Tesla’s reign of terror. Years later, in the aftermath of a World War II Nazi bombing raid, civil defense workers mistakenly remove the spike from Tesla’s heart, freeing him to seek vengeance on the family that stopped his vampiric-evil many years before. The scene is reminiscent of a similar scene in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, when Larry Talbot is freed from his tomb by two similarly bumbling, but not very civil-minded, grave robbers.

Andreas, whom the good Lady Jane took in as her laboratory assistant, once again succumbs to Tesla’s evil mind control and turns back into his rather huggable werewolf form, gleefully killing people in order to help Tesla assume a new identity and execute his nefarious plan of vengeance against Lady Jane and her loved ones. Andreas’ hirsute persona is more Jekyll and Hyde than a straightforward, rip-out-your-throat, bay at the
full-moon, kind of werewolf. He’s fully conscious of what he’s doing, but simply loves killing people and being downright nasty when under Tesla’s control.

Against the backdrop of bombed-out London—the aftermath of real horror brought about by the “Jerries”—Andreas and his undead master walk quietly amid the ruins unnoticed, anachronistic folkloric monsters in a tableau of a larger monstrosity, the death and destruction of war. It is an eerie composition; dark spookshow theatrics of cemeteries and fog mingling with scenes of carnage and black-out curtains.

The film moves well and Lugosi, while older, still plays the vampire with a sufficient touch of malice. The addition of his werewolf servant is an odd touch, especially since his servant doesn’t act like a werewolf—he talks a lot and wears a suit—but it does provide a unique aspect to the storyline and the need for redemption as Andreas fights for his salvation at the end. Why he becomes a werewolf when Tesla takes control of him is not explained, but Andreas retains his tie and voice whether he’s hairy or clean-shaven, which is either sublimely ridiculous or deeply meaningful.

I vote for the former as it’s more fun to watch than try to explain.

After Dr. Saunders dies in a plane crash, his manuscript, detailing the exploit with Armand Tesla many years before, falls into the hands of Sir Frederick Fleet of Scotland Yard (Miles Mander). Lady Jane is warned she may be implicated in a murder if Tesla’s body is found, but Lady Jane takes up the good fight as she tries to convince Sir Fleet that body is still above ground and a vampire is prowling London. In true stiff upper lip fashion, she pouts in calm determination as Sir Fleet tish-toshes the notion politely, but both still work together to stop Tesla for good. As a woman of science and reason, Lady Jane’s strong-willed professionalism foreshadows the career women that will soon grace many a sci-fi horror film in the decade to follow.

The Return of the Vampire is a good B-Movie that got lost in the transition from the Gothic-horror cycle to the
scientifically-induced horrors of the 1950s. By 1944, Lugosi, the talking movie screen’s first great monster star, exchanged his opera cape for a lab coat in Voodoo Man, and again in 1945 in Zombies on Broadway, playing a mad scientist. In the emerging world of science gone amoral, mad science became all the rage.

For poor Bela, his return was short-lived. He got lost in the transition also. He deserved better.

1408 (2007)
Room for Terror

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Zombos Says: Very Good

While I readily admit that some hotel rooms I’ve spent time in were murder, none of them ever tried to kill me. Unfortunately for writer Mike Enslin (John Cusack), room 1408 in the Dolphin Hotel punches his number with a vengeance. With an ominous song blaring from the one-hour clock-radio heralding doom, hot and cold running ghosts, and concierge service to die from, he’s in quite a pickle; but, after all, he did insist on spending the night in it.

What is it about writers? Especially depressed ones that have lost a loved one and search for some truth behind that long dark curtain of the night? Enslin’s on a quest to find just one ghost, one real moan, one real hint of life beyond the pall. He’s so obsessed, he’s lost track of his own life, and wife, while spending night after fruitless night searching for hope shining off a ghostly glimmer. I feel for him. I watch Ghost Hunters on the Sci-Fi Channel again and again, hoping for just that moment, that one shining, incontrovertible bit of proof there’s more to death than meets the unseeing eye. If and when that moment comes, I hope it doesn’t try to kill me, too.

That’s the mystery of room 1408: what is the malevolent force residing in that room, driving people to mutilate and kill themselves? In true J-horror fashion, we never learn the answer, but the question is well-illustrated in psychological, not gory, terms, driving Enslin to fight both the room’s and his own inner demons. And they keep coming on strong, giving him little respite nor a good night’s sleep.

The postcard warning him to stay out of room 1408 is too enticing for him, so instead of heeding the warning, he heads to New York City to the Dolphin Hotel, to insist on spending the night in a room that’s killed fifty-six other guests—with one drowned in his chicken soup. The hotel manager, Olin (Samuel L. Jackson), sums it up best: “It’s an evil f**cking room.”

Not even Olin’s detailed scrapbook of news clippings and death photographs convinces Enslin to forgo 1408 and spend the night in the penthouse suite; but it does provide for a chilling, tension-building walk as Enslin peruses it, page by gruesome-death page, during his walk from the elevator to 1408. Once he enters the room, and nothing immediately jumps out of the closet, he relaxes a bit and pops open the bottle of high-priced liquor Olin tried to bribe him with; but that lets the spirits out, metaphorically speaking.

And once they’re out, hell starts to follow as the room’s evil entity makes its presence known by blaring “We’ve Only Just Begun” by the Carpenters, and fooling around with his turn-down service. When he can’t get out of the room, now that he realizes it really wasn’t a good idea to enter it in the first place, his hand-held recorder becomes more than a voice-recorder; it allows him to vent his fear, his anger, and his thoughts, giving us a front-row seat to watch his mental state go from cocky to scared sh*tless in no time flat.

As the room’s temperature shifts from hot to arctic, and the paintings on the wall take on a Night Gallery-style life of their own, Enslin’s fear turns to rage as he fights the good fight to leave the room on his terms, not splattered on the pavement below, or, like one previous guest, stitching up his own, self-inflicted throat slice from ear to ear.

Cusack handles the three-sixty mood swing with verve, and his disoriented performance brings us into the room alongside him. Horror is best when served alone, and he proves it by keeping us asking if and how he’ll find the way out. Without lavish gore, director Mikael Håfström increases the shocks by first showing little, disquieting events that rattle Enslin’s composure, then increases the assault on his nerves with CGI-enhanced calamities that build in intensity. Gabriel Yared’s effective music is mixed in with harsh, discordant sounds and the pleasant-sounding, but tauntingly malign voice on the other end of the telephone, promising more unpleasant room service to come. All of this plays on our nerves, as well as Enslin’s.

Never has room service been this bad, or this much fun. In a summer of horror that can too easily become mired in uninspired by-the-body-count nihilistic splatter, 1408 goes back to the old school for its scares.  And it works.

Tap Dancing to Hell and a Pot o’Gold Part 5
One Hell of a Mortgage
House (1986)

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House1986
Part 4 

Zombos Says: Very Good

“I tell you I smell popcorn,” said Curly Joe. We had been walking for some time without any luck finding Zombos or Chef Machiavelli.

I sniffed the air again. My stomach grumbled. “I think you’re right, and smothered in butter with lots of salt.” My stomach grumbled louder.

Curly Joe started sniffing the wall. “Over here. It’s comin’ from this crack in tha brick.”

We leaned against the brick wall to get a better whiff. It gave way. We tumbled into a brightly lit room filled with ornate, comfortable furniture and the smell of freshly popped popcorn. Zombos was sitting in the corner with his feet resting in a large basin of water and Chef Machiavelli stood by an antique coal stove applying liberal amounts of salt to a big bowl of steaming popcorn. Puffing away at a church warden, a little, red-bearded, fellow watched us as we pulled ourselves up off the ground. He stood up from his overstuffed armchair.

“You!” said Curly Joe. “That’s tha little creep I was arguin’ with.”

“Oh, Sebastien’s all right,” said Zombos. “He was quite happy to get his tap dancing shoes back. They took me right to him, actually, and not soon enough, I can tell you.”

“My wife, god-bless her, hates my tap-tap-tapping, so she hid my pride and joys. I’ve spent the year searching for them. They missed me, too,” said Sebastien, picking up his shoes by the chair. They clicked together in agreement.

I stared at our diminutive host. “Forgive me for asking, but—”

“I know, I know, Sebastien’s not an Irish name and I don’t have an accent,” he said. “I grew up in France. Long story. You’ve been watching too many Barry Fitzgerald movies, I take it.”

Chef Machiavelli brought the popcorn over.

“This is wonderful. I’ve not had this much company in a long time. My wife hates visitors. I only married her because she looks and talks like Barbara Steele, my favorite horror movie actor,” he sighed.

“So she’s the one I heard callin’ ta me?” said Curly Joe.

“Yes, she’s a bit of a flirt, but I still love her. Sorry I conked you one, but she gets me so jealous and angry when she’s off and dallying around. But she’s away to her mom’s—nasty witch there, too—and I’ve got guests and popcorn and this new LED TV is hot to trot. ”

“Do you get cable or satellite down here,” I asked.

“Cable of course.”

“Hey, you’ve got a lot of DVDs here,” said Curly Joe, looking over the titles. “Haven’t seen this one in ages.” He held up House.

“Ah, you’ve found my real pot of gold you have. Yes, I can’t get enough DVDs. Let’s watch it, then,” said Sebastien.

 

In Steve Miner’s wickedly quirky House, William Katt (Greatest American Hero) plays Roger Cobb, a Valium pill-popping, flashback-plagued, Vietnam veteran and popular author who lost his son and separated from his wife (Kay Lenz). He’s suffering from writer’s block trying to finish his book, One Man’s Story: A Personal Account of the Vietnam War. With his agent on his back, and unresolved conflicts simmering in his subconscious, he’s guilt-ridden and close to a nervous breakdown. So what happened in Vietnam, making it difficult for him to write or get on with his life? The answer lurks in the house he inherits after his eccentric aunt hangs herself. The house is also where his son disappeared from the center of the swimming pool years before.

Unlike the current trendy taste for horror being darker, queasier, and ichor-drenched, Mac Ahlberg, who did the cinematography for Re-animator and From Beyond, uses a lighter hand here and bathes the house’s oddball rooms in cheery colors, giving them an apple pie atmosphere until the clock strikes midnight, when Cobb’s nightmares really do come out of the closet in the form of the War Demon: a fused amalgam of napalmed bodies.

Something not quite right about the house is hinted at early when the grocery delivery kid enters, hears odd noises coming from upstairs, and goes to investigate. We follow him through the house, seeing the quaint furnishings and old-fashioned rooms bathed in sunlight. Wait a minute. Those Night Gallery-esque paintings on the walls, painted by Cobb’s Aunt, don’t quite match the decor. She’s a bit of an oddball, apparently, judging by those paintings. She could also do a mean
Grand Mama from the Addams Family for Halloween by the look of her, too.

With her departure comes Cobb’s arrival to the place he last saw his son. The police never bought Cobb’s bizarre explanation of how his son disappeared. Should we? Is Cobb suffering from delusions, or is there something abnormal about the house? If you’ve read William Hope Hodgson’s House on the Borderland, you already know the answer. The first night his Aunt pays him a visit to warn him about how the house likes to play tricks on people. But is it really her or the house playing tricks? It’s not merely haunted, it’s possessed; and it stands on the crossroads to the mundane and supernatural worlds.

The following morning he meets his pesky neighbor, Harold (George Wendt from TV’s Cheers). Harold recognizes him, chats about his books, and finds it difficult to stay. He brings over the brewskies, begins to worry about Cobb’s mental health, and calls Cobb’s wife out of concern. There’s one especially traumatizing event buried among the others plaguing Cobb, and it’s not his missing son. Working it out involves dressing in army fatigues and readying lights and cameras to confront the War Demon. And more grotesqueries put in appearances to bedevil Cobb, even sharp lawn and garden tools take aim in his
direction, escalating his daymare encounters.

The foam and polyurethane nightmares created by James Cummins are similar to his comically designed monsters in The Boneyard, but here they’re an advantage: they meld an off-beat, playful, gruesomeness to match Cobb’s mood and the electric-koolaid-acid-trip tone of the movie. In one surreal encounter, Cobb tries to bury a headless, but still moving, purple Morlock-looking monster in his backyard, only to be interrupted by yet another neighbor taking an uninvited dip in his swimming pool. She ingratiates herself while he quietly steps on the monster’s dismembered hand before it can grab her bare ankle. He finally gets rid of her and hacks up the monster, burying the pieces to the tune of Linda Ronstadt’s You’re No Good.

She shows up later that night with her son in tow, begging him to babysit. He declines the offer until he discovers the pesky purple monster’s hand is back and holding fast to the boy’s shirt. Is he hallucinating? She hurries to her date and he eventually manages to flush the 5-fingered-terror down the toilet. Damned if I would sit on that bowl again. Ever.

Another misadventure begins when troll-like creatures snatch the boy up the chimney. Trying to get a handle on all these bizarre happenings, Cobb coerces Harold into joining him in a midnight romp with the War Demon. Harold, naturally, isn’t much help, and Cobb gets sucked into the closet and back in time to when he was in Vietnam. It’s there we learn the reason for Cobb’s flashbacks as he confronts Big Ben, played by six foot, nine-inch Richard Moll (TV’s Night Court).

But what does Cobb’s missing son have to do with all this?

It takes a journey through the bathroom medicine cabinet to find out. In a Lovecraftian-esque encounter with a stop-motion winged nightmare and other nasties, Cobb must fight for answers and to save himself from guilt and an EC Comics-looking dead Big Ben who is out for his blood.

Will Cobb find his son and stop the nightmare? Or will Big Ben finally get the payback he’s been looking for all these years? Don’t let the second and third story sequels fool you; they don’t continue the storyline started in House. It begins and ends here, although House II extends the weirdness. House is one of those 1980s B-Movies that still vibrantly remains a quirky excursion into horror-comedy. It has top-notch actors, fast pacing, and classic stop-motion and polyurethane monsters to sell its off-beat, dry humor terrors.

This is one house you should rent.

Night Watch (2004)

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 Zombos Says: Very Good

I’m happy to say Night Watch is not a clunker. Instead, it is a whirlwind of special effects, odd characters, and a story that definitely puts Russian horror on the genre map.   While the filmed story is different from the book it is based on in some important respectes, the movie is still an entertainingly fast-paced and strong first entry in the Night   Watch trilogy.

The director, Timor Bekmambetov, did the movie for Russian audiences, which explains the more melodramatic and flowery-mouth approach to mis-en-scene and dialog. But it’s these Russian nuances, composed alongside the standard but well-executed horror trappings we all know and love—CGI and gore effects—that give this film’s quirky, good versus evil, story a fun and very watchable spin for any discerning horror fan.

It opens with a battle between the forces of good and evil (like in Lord of the Rings and Thor)—here it’s the light and the dark squaring off—as they each fight for foothold on a narrow bridge. Both soon realize they are equally matched and neither can win. So a truce of sorts has them divvying mankind’s fate into having Light rule by day, and Dark rule by night.

Jump ahead a few millenniums and we’re in Moscow, where Anton (Konstantin Khabenskiy), our soon to be strong-willed but hapless hero, pays a visit to a witch, hoping to keep his girlfriend from having someone else’s child. Bad move on his part as it brings him into direct contact with Night Watch, the forces of Light.

In short order the witch is subdued, suddenly and chaotically, for engaging in witchy kinds of things, and Anton, caught in the middle, discovers he’s a seer and a Light Other—which means a good guy, sort of. The Dark Others are vampires and other nasty things that go bump in the night, and the Light Others are shape-shifters and magic wielders, who try to constrain the Dark Others from doing harm. It’s been this way for centuries: both sides fighting each other to maintain balance. For those of you who work in a corporate office, just substitute “managers” for Dark Others, and your workmates for Light Others, and you’ll understand the whole concept perfectly.

From the opening salvo with Anton, the witch, and the Light’s shapeshifters, it’s a wild ride. Anton’s entry into the light and dark world will leave your head swirling, but stay with it and all will be revealed in time. Night Watch is a kinetic movie of visualizations first, done in fast cut actions, speeded-up and slowed-down, and herky-jerky scenes spliced with CGI. Short pauses for explanation flitter by before plunging you into yet another whirlwind of chaotic visualizations, which for a limited budget are skillfully done.

Much of the special effects are devoted to the Gloom: the twilight state where the natural and supernatural worlds converge. Director and co-writer Timur Bekmambetov heralds its onset by swirling mosquitoes, which he says remind him of vampires, but, unlike the novel, he does not focus on the Gloom much.

One fast and furious scene in an old Russian barbershop has Anton fighting a vampire who pops in and out of the Gloom to attack him, otherwise remaining invisible. The bloody and gorific fight is a special effects treat that ends with a snap, crackle, and pop.

Other memorable touches include a yellow maintenance truck (think Ectomobile from Ghostbusters), recognizable to Russian audiences as a very slow moving vehicle, but is made fun of in the movie by adding rocket jets to have it speeding madly through the Moscow streets.

And then there’s the owl, a stuffed bird brought to life to help protect Anton, now that he’s gone and killed a vampire. The Dark Forces will not forgive him for that. No sooner does the owl follow him home then it turns into Olga (Galina Tyunina), a sorceress, in a flurry of feathers and goo (looking like the Chinese fast-food MSG variation of goo). Being forced into owl shape was her punishment, but for what is not explained. Since the owl can stand for either good or evil in Russian folktales, we can’t be sure what type of past Olga had, or which side she’s really on.

Did I forget to mention the Vortex of Damnation Curse? Aside from Anton’s issues with vampires, there’s this cursed woman who’s about to bring down the apocalypse (and she’s not even a zombie!) so the forces of Light and Dark can battle again. Considering they were at a standstill a millennium or two ago, I’m not sure why they want to bother.

Why this woman is cursed can almost be taken as a joke by American audiences. Why she’s cursed, and why Anton is causing bad things to happen, is due to the bad decisions they made when they had more control over their lives. Since their destiny is intertwined with everyone else’s, one bad decision becomes everyone’s problem. The premise of Night Watch is simple: each person chooses to join the light or the darkness by the decisions they make; and those decisions affect everyone else. In American horror films, people are usually put into situations beyond their control, then they make bad decisions making things worse – often terminally. So instead of a taste of Hamlet in our horror, we prefer hamburger with lots of onions and bloody red ketchup. We don’t savor the bun or its relation to the burger; we just want to eat it.

Night Watch savors the bun with its moral story, and adds a dash of Shakespearean ketchup to provide a unique and colorful tale combining fantasy, horror, and the choices made by all of us that will lead to either the Light or Dark path. The Russian sensibility of horror is summed up best by this dialog between two characters:

“Damn!”

“Careful what you say. Damn is more than just a word.”

The Hills Have Eyes (2006)

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Zombos Says: Very Good

“That was disturbing,” said Zombos as we were leaving the theater after seeing The Hills Have Eyes.

“Yes, the hard horror situations were—”

“No, no, I meant the annoying political barbs,” he interrupted.

“Oh,” I said, “you mean the father being a republican and getting them into the hellish predicament in the first place, and the milquetoast democratic son-in-law who rises to the occasion and unloads a truckload of whoop-ass on the radiation-mutated hill people after being pushed to the edge of sanity? I hardly noticed it.”

“The director is French?” Zombos asked.

“Alexandre Aja? Yes, I believe so.”

“Then that explains it,” he concluded.

“Actually, I think hubris plays a much greater role than politics. The father’s cocksure attitude left him prone to making bad decisions. Oh, right, that does apply to most politicians, doesn’t it?”

“Politics,” we agreed and continued walking.

“It reminded me of Wrong Turn,” I said.

“Yes,” said Zombos, “especially the decrepit, degenerate-owned gas station in the middle of nowhere; and that scene with all those victims’ derelict cars dumped into that huge atomic blast crater. Chilling.”

“The extreme long-shot zoom-outs showing the other huge craters surrounding it are especially effective,” I added. “Great matte work there.”

“What I do not understand is why mutated, inbred, and cannibalistic families in every horror movie are always depicted as more of a solid social unit than the normal, bickering tourist families they prey on,” Zombos pondered.

“Goals,” I replied. “Mutated, inbred, cannibalistic families have fewer goals.”

“I never thought of it that way.” Zombos rubbed his chin.

“Well, they certainly don’t need to worry about jobs, taxes, school, retirement, or the dozens of things that keep normal people awake at night and bickering among themselves. Just finding food is one simple goal that keeps them all working as an insane, but strong, cohesive unit,” I said.

“They sure do eat a lot. The least they could do is cook their food. Revolting.”

“Gore-hounds wouldn’t like that. ‘The redder the better’ is their motto,” I replied.

Zombos stopped walking. “What always amazes me is the sheer dim-wittedness of family and teenagers that are always placed in harm’s way in these movies. You would think after all this time, with all the sordid chaos in the world, they would be better prepared to handle difficult situations and have a little bit of a clue. I mean, here you are traveling in the desert, hundred-plus degree heat, no water, no civilization, and you take the scenic route? And one that a spooky and unbathed
gas station attendant, who obviously does not have much of a social life, tells you to take? In an ’88 Airbus with no air-conditioning?

“Well, at least the detective father carried a few guns with him,” I said. “They shouldn’t have split up though. It’s always convenient to have soon-to-be victims always split up in movies, but that plot expediency is wearing thin.”

“That is another point,” Zombos said. “These mutated, sadistically maniacal families never split up. They always carry out well-orchestrated group attacks on those dim-witted and oh-let-me-go-off-alone family members.”

Zombos was on a roll. I rarely see him this reflective.

“That was quite an horrific scene,” I added, “using the father as a decoy to lure the family out of the trailer, and then attacking that poor girl. Quite a statement about why you shouldn’t wear an iPod to bed, don’t you think?”

“Biting off the head of that little defenseless parakeet, too,” Zombos added, shaking his head. “For shame. I did find that Test Village 3-B to be a horrific setpiece also.”

“You mean when the son-in-law goes through the mining tunnel and finds the mock-up town filled with mannequins? Yes, the mise-en-scene is well executed. His confrontation with the mutated maniacal family members is fast-paced and exciting. His baseball bat against an axe? I think I rather have the axe.”

“The big-brained fellow singing the national anthem was a wicked touch.” Zombos clapped his hands together. “Oh, now I get it, baseball bat and national anthem. Subtle.”

Zombos started walking, then stopped again. “That scene with the children was more horrific than anything else in the movie,” he said.

“Yes,” I replied, “in the midst of all that carnage and insanity, to have a hideously deformed child innocently ask you to play with her and her equally disturbing playmate… it was a masterful, almost poetic touch. I dread to think what snacks she’s been having. No Fig Newtons or Oreos in that place.”

“Definitely not,” Zombos agreed. “I wonder how much longer we can watch such movies.

“Why is that,” I asked.

“It seems every hard horror movie relies on the same basic characterizations and script devices to sustain an often repeated storyline; and let us not forget the gore factor: that needs to keep escalating to provide shock value to those ever more jaded gore-hounds out there. Most of the elements in this movie, given that the direction and scripting is above average, still use the same old hash. Can redundant art sustain itself?”

“I’d say that most horror-heads just want to be scared, or shocked. Take the sequelization-antic ending. It’s a cheap cliché ending that destroys the movie’s triumphant moment, just to imply it ain’t over so wait for the next movie.”

“Yes,” Zombos agreed. “But I hope the sequel is worth it.”

Vacancy 2007
Horrible Room Service

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Zombos Says: Very Good

Norman Bates’ mom would have approved of the Pinewood Motel. Nestled off the Interstate—way off—it’s the ideal place to get away from it all, and have it all put you away: permanently. The noisy late night room service and decrepit amenities are simply to die for, too.

Vacancy is a refreshingly gory-free excursion into terror with classy, mood-setting Bernard Herrmanesque music, a stylish opening credit sequence, and Hitchcockian tension-building suspense with ordinary people caught in extraordinary circumstances, and incompetent police not prepared for what actually goes on at the quiet motel.

Amy and David are the two ordinary people whose failing relationship is in need of some serious bonding. There’s nothing like a bunch of psychos trying to kill you to work out the kinks in a rocky marriage and bring you closer together; at least if you can’t live together, you might as well die together.

The barbs start flying when Amy wakes up to find they’re lost on an empty, winding road; David’s shortcut to nowhere. Empty except for that cute little raccoon in the middle of it—hey Dave, watch out! The car skids off the road and breaks something in the process, forcing them to stop at the creepy, desolate, gas-station-stuck-in-time that appears in many horror movies these days.

The attendant pops up, all smiles and giggles—at two in the morning—and gladly helps them out as he pops the hood, does something, then sends them on their merry way with confusing directions to get back on the Interstate and a lit sparkler. Now maybe I’m just naturally paranoid, but I would never trust any overly nice gas station attendant who refuses to be paid and insists on giving you a lit sparkler near flammable gas tanks at two in the morning.

No sooner do they get going when the car breaks down again, forcing them back to the gas station. The attendant is gone now, but say, there’s that nice Bates, oops, sorry—Pinewood Motel over yonder. Better rent a room for the night and worry about the car in the morning after a good night’s sleep, right?

The screaming and crying they hear when they enter the registration office should have clued them in right away, but David, intent on hitting that annoying bell on the desk, isn’t swayed. Mason, the motel manager, pops his head out to see who it is. He quips about boring nights when they mention the ominous sounds, and he goes back into the office to turn whatever he’s watching off.

When you finally get a good look at Mason, you realize he’s stuck in time, too. Seventies, I’d say. He’s an oily type of creepy, and there’s something sinister behind those beady little eyes of his and that snake-like tilt of the head. He insists on giving them the guest suite that has hot and cold running cockroaches, stiff bed linen that could fold itself, and a wonderful mix of banged up video tapes filled with lots of screaming, pleading people being horribly killed by Michael Myers wannabes. This is some guest suite.

With nothing playing on the TV, David shuffles through those videos and pops one into the player. As Amy tells him to tune it down, he slowly recognizes the “set” in the tape looks awfully like their guest suite. Bingo! Vacancy now shifts into gear and the hairs stand on the back of your neck just as his do.

The fight to stay alive begins, and while Vacancy is not a blockbuster, it does have its share of shocks and nerve-wracking mayhem to make it all worthwhile. No wimpy victim-fodder here, either. Even as Amy and David panic and bicker and scramble to find a way out of their dire situation, they suck it up and work on staying alive. Horror film victims that actually don’t want to be victims is another refreshing change of pace from the usual hurry up and slowly die fare inundating us these days, don’t you think?

Ironically, as they struggle to find a way out of their terminal accommodations, they invariably find themselves scrambling back into them, again and again. They can’t run and they really can’t hide for long. Will they survive? And who can they trust? Who is involved in the deadly room service that goes on at the Pinewood Motel?

An interesting twist has David and Amy alternately take the lead in saving their necks, and director Nimrod Antal goes against horror movie type by playing with our expectations toward the end as the small body count goes higher.

Vacancy is an entertaining homicidal psycho-buddies along the “road less traveled by” scenario often used in horror. What helps it stand out are the performances by, Frank Whaley, Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale, that provide tense moments of terror, anguish and momentary triumph in a straigtforward and suspenseful mix of classic horror elements.

And I like rooting for the would-be victims: payback can be such an entertaining b*tch after all.

Alone with Her (2006)

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Meet Doug. Full-time profession: stalker.

In Alone with Her, a film by Eric Nicholas, we get to know just about everything there is to know about Doug. It isn’t pretty, but we do get to realize that Doug is a loser; a loser in relationships, a loser in his approach to life, a loser that, simply put, has nothing better to do than to keep trying at creating artificial relationships with women to boost his superficial ego.

That’s where Amy comes in. She’s just coming off a failed relationship so she’s vulnerable. Just the kind of woman Doug likes: someone he can fabricate a fantasy world of ‘Doug the Magnificent’ around. Maybe shes the one who will buy his fantasy world of perfection, maybe not, but in Alone with Her, we get to watch every sordid detail of Doug’s relentless infatuation with Amy, and how he manipulates her to believe he’s a nice guy; a guy that has lots in common with her. But that’s only because he’s bugged her home and her life, and he’s there every single minute, watching and listening.

We first see Doug as he truly is: a camera stuck surreptitiously in a black bag. He doesn’t go anywhere without it. He sees through it, feels through it, even hunts vulnerable and lonely woman through it. In fact, his whole point of view is always through the camera’s lens, and Nicholas films most of the story that way. We watch Doug through a camera lens as he watches Amy through his camera lens.

He first glimpses Amy in the park as she’s watching lovers get it on. She starts crying. One failed relationship worn on a sleeve to go, please, and that’s the hook for Doug. He’s a sucker for stuff like that. A brief trip to the electronic surveillance store and Doug’s next stop is Amy’s apartment. He rigs it with cameras and microphones to pick up every conversation, every bathroom break, and every personal nuance of Amy’s lonely life.

Through his camera and intrusion into Amy’s life, we’re forced to see and hear Amy as he does. But there’s no voyeuristic pleasure in this because Nicholas also forces us to see and hear Doug as he contrives ‘chance’ meetings with her at the local coffee or spends alone time with her in her bedroom—through a small monitor that he watches constantly. In one chilling moment, Doug puts his head down to sleep as Amy, on the monitor, puts her head down on her pillow to sleep; an indication that he has no life without play-acting himself into believing she matters to him. And when she pleasures herself with the handle of a hairbrush, he’s there pleasuring himself, too, but through the monitor: the epitome of safe sex.

We begin to see the breakable side of Doug when Amy gets a phone call from Matt. Doug hates competition, and anything or anyone that would get in the way of his twisted, fabricated relationship with Amy. More and more, Doug ingratiates himself into Amy’s life. She’s an art student, so he plays that up and helps her with her website. She likes this music or that movie, and amazingly, he likes this music or that movie, too. “Funny how much we have in common,” they say, but it’s not funny at all.

But Doug’s emotional instability can’t stand Matt’s attentions for Amy, so Doug swabs her bed linen with something nasty. One itchy night later, her skin is covered with red blotches, and she tells Matt to cool his heels while she recovers. At this point you also realize that he’s an old pro at this sort of thing. The hairs on the back of your neck should be standing up by now.

Then there’s Amy’s friend Jen, who starts upsetting the delicate balance of Doug’s plans when she becomes suspicious of him. Guys too good to be true usually aren’t that good. During a get-together with Amy, Jen and Doug, he just can’t deal with not having Amy all to himself and begins losing his superficial composure. He breaks down in the bathroom and fakes a phone call to get him out of the apartment.

Doug begins to resort to more interventions to bring him and Amy closer together. He gets her paintings sold, but we aren’t quite sure who actually bought them. He rushes to her side when she steps on broken glass in the dark. He neatly takes care of Jen when she begins to confront him about his past.

Doug the social-nebbish, the electronic felon, the camera creep who needs to fabricate his whole life around a fictitious relationship, is really a monster in disguise. This monster-side of him begins to show itself more and more, and roars to life just when he has the chance at a real emotional connection with Amy instead of one of his contrived events.

Nicholas, who directed and wrote the story, moves his camera, and Doug’s, in a straightforward manner. Occasionally resorting to monochrome tints as Doug’s point of view surveillance shows Amy or Doug himself, Nicholas eschews the sensational and directs the unsettling events in the story with pragmatism. Colin Hanks plays Doug in a low-key, fatalistic way, presenting a depressingly realistic portrayal of this human monster who can’t handle uncertainty or spontaneity in his life.

This low-budget thriller is low-key, but that makes it all the more realistic; and truly horrifying because of it.

Movie Review: See No Evil (2006)
The Eyes Have It

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Zombos Says: Good 

I finally made it to a theater to see See No Evil. Unfortunately, this theater was almost as dirty and decrepit as the old Blackwell Hotel in the film. It smelled, and not with that wonderful smell of buttered popcorn. It was a challenge finding a seat that did not look like it was used in one of Hostel’s guest rooms. I hate sitting on stains of unknown origin (hey, what a catchy script title! Stains of Unknown Origin). So much for that special movie-going experience. I was determined to not let my surroundings influence my viewing of the film too much.

It seems ‘dirty’ and ‘decrepit’ in horror movies are becoming dirtier and more decrepit. When the police enter Jacob Goodnight’s (Glenn Jacobs) home it is the typical horror movie home for psycho, axe-wielder types: smoky, dark, and with bloody streaks across the walls. A girl’s screams forces them to move in without backup. They might as well have carried their own body bags to save time. The scene is brutal, gory, and ends badly for them.

A few years later we meet a group of so-old-it’s-new-again-styled delinquents from the County Detention Center; Sal Mineo and James Dean would have been proud. Each tough-to-be-cool kid is introduced with a text description pop-up onscreen describing his or her crime against society, like this was a video game and we were going to choose a character to play. I’ll take the computer hacker delinquent for 500 life-points. I like computers and computer hacker types usually last the longest in body count films like this.

As each body bag delinquent steps on the bus, along with the police officer who had firsthand experience (really, no pun intended here if you see the film) with Goodnight, I imagined them in order of elimination. I am getting rather good at this sort of thing, but I must admit the director Gregory Dark, and writer Dan Madigan, did manage to add a few twists to fool me. The bus stops at the old Blackwell Hotel, which is appropriately horror-movie-dirty-and-decrepit, so much so, I wondered why a handful of young delinquents are brought in for cleaning up what is obviously a professional hazmat team’s cleanup job.

The hotel’s rooms and hallways are gloomy and saturated in grimy browns, blacks, and assorted soiled colors. Roaches impudently crawl all around and rats defiantly wiggle their tails underfoot. There is garbage and stains of unknown origin everywhere; on the floors, the walls, the furniture, the bedding. The delinquents make themselves right at home, defiantly romping on those icky bedding and crawling mattresses as if they were fresh linen, and indiscriminately sitting on everything. I shifted uneasily in my seat, wondering what I was sitting on.

The naked-girl-in-shower-scene sets up the terror. The smackdown begins with Goodnight whipping out his old axe and hook. Glenn Jacobs’ performance experience in the WWF pays off well here. There is a nifty effect used when he’s close to attack; flies buzz around his head. Why they do that is eventually revealed. It reminded me of Candyman with his bees.

All through the mayhem, black and white flashbacks show us Goodnight’s unhappy upbringing indicating how his sordid fondness for eye-plucking and eye-pickling became a hobby. I dare you to watch and not involuntarily close your own eyes during these scenes. The slaughter to action pace is hectic and over the top with gory detail. Terminal insult and injury occurs when one unlucky girl pleads with Goodnight to let her go when she’s dangling from a high window. He does. The long fall through a skylight hurts, but it is the hungry homeless dog she petted earlier that bites the hand, and just about everything else.

The dwindling survivors wind up in the typical horror-movie-den-of-slaughter, otherwise known as Goodnight’s apartment, where dead bodies, parts of bodies, and lots of eyes in jars and ichor cry out for maid service. There are more flashbacks as he tries to communicate with his caged victim: his psychotically religious mother kept him in a cage so his communication skills are lacking. The room bells are tied to various beds throughout the hotel, tinkling when anyone gets an inkling, if you catch my drift. He leaves his trapped victim when the tinkling sends him off to find the culprits, and a crashing scene involving a two-way mirror, his ominous silhouette, and lots of broken glass sends everyone running again. The hunt is on and the survivors fight back. A plot twist I didn’t see coming leads to just deserts.

While the film may be a derivative romp in a deserted hotel with a bunch of smart-ass delinquents and a psychotic—get your fingers out of my eyes!—brick wall of a killer, it does have its horrific moments. The acting, including Glenn Jacobs’ turn as the murder machine, is good, and all in all, the film is worth seeing at a cleaner theater or on DVD. Just keep the Handi-Wipes close by.

Movie Review: The Descent (2005)

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Zombos Says: Excellent

“Dude,” said Mr. Blackbird. His illuminated plumage blinded me. It pulsated in kaleidoscopic colors that shot out rays of reds, greens and blues.

“What,” I said. My vision was hazy and my voice sounded dull, like I was talking under water.

“Dude,” he repeated, and said something else, but I couldn’t make it out.

It sounded like tweeting. What a funny blackbird. With red human lips it kept repeating something, but it sounded like tweet, tweet, tweet. His pinky finger—wow, crazy, the bird’s got a little white hand at the tip of his wing—had a little gold ring. What was that he was repeating? Door of indigo and blues across the street, across my way. What was that? You want me to knock a rap in ones, threes and twos, with these knuckles of mine. On that door of indigo and blues?

“DUDE! Wake up!”

I shot awake. “What happened?” I looked up at Pete, my movie-mate. He was bending down looking at me. The last thing I remember was sitting in the theater watching The Descent.

I had asked him to tag along because I hate cave films. I hate caves. I hate tight places that remotely look like caves, and the whole damn idea about squeezing your ass through narrow cracks in rock walls that I couldn’t even fit my wee-willy through is stupid and insane.

“Man, what the hell happened to you?” he said. “You started screaming and jumped out of your seat. You ran to the concession stand screaming “don’t eat the Milk Duds, it’s people! Milk Duds is people!” You scared the crap out of me. Crazy bastard.” Pete looked at his watch. “Great, man. Just ‘effin great. Just when it was gettin’ good, too. Look, the next show is in a half-hour. With you or without you, I’m seeing the ‘effin movie.”

With his help I managed to sit through the entire film. It wasn’t easy. I kept closing my eyes, but what I did see was white knuckle-busting horror that took it’s time to build, then whumps you over the head until you can’t take it anymore. Sam McCurdy’s cinematography is spot-on, and walks a fine line between darkness and light, as electric and flare lights feebly illuminate the glistening cave walls. He tosses in reds and greens, too, to create an alien landscape that heightens the terror and claustrophobic atmosphere.

In 2004’s Creep, Christopher Smith trapped a woman in the London Underground so she could discover, and struggle to escape from, a crazed monstrosity in Creep. In 2005, Neil Marshall trapped six women in a cave so they could discover a lot of crazed monstrosities they needed to escape from.

Neil Marshall’s direction and writing tricks you at first. You don’t think it’s a horror film. Hell, the damn thing starts off like an Ingmar Bergman movie. I kept wondering when Max von Sydow would show up and play chess with dusty Death himself.

It opens on a happy note, suddenly takes that away from you, and never lets up until the end. The music is also more elaborate than your typical horror film, and it wisely stays out of the way in the most important parts. And those parts are killer.

Six highly-testosteroned women love to take chances. Their alpha-leader, Juno, pushes the envelope for them. She’s relentless: a go-getter and athlete to the extreme. Interestingly, Marshall has ironically given her the name of the Roman goddess who is the protector of women and marriage. She fails on both counts, and it’s this failure that provides the impetus for the group’s fracture.

So off they go on another adventure, only this time she thinks they should really tackle something big. She doesn’t bother to let the other five know that they’re going to an unexplored cave, and not the one with that all-important guidebook now left in the SUV. Bingo! The cardinal rule of a good horror film is to have potential victims always muck it up by doing downright dangerously stupid things. That includes exploring an unfamiliar cave, not telling anyone about it, and not bringing Twinkies along.

There’s a J-Horror pacing to the film. Marshall takes his time, dwells on their tenuous relationships, their camaraderie, their different personalities, then shakes them all up once they hit the cave and everything goes wrong. Just how strong are they really? And how much do they really know about each other? This is what’s tested in the cave. The cannibalistic, sub-human troglodytes crawling around the cave’s walls are only part of the horror. Yes, a really big part of it, but the reality of being trapped in a cave, where it’s pitch black, damn tight, with no guide book—and you didn’t pack any Twinkies—well my friend, that’s horror done to a masterful level. Turn it up a notch with shaky, can’t-rely-on-you relationships, and that makes matters much worse.

Don’t let me spoil it for you, but the cave scenes are, like their team spirit, all smoke and mirrors, too. That’s right; miniatures, model sets, and blue and green screens are so skillfully used, you’ll be huffing and puffing and gasping for breath without realizing it. You’ll start to feel the theater walls closing in on you when the women start crawling through too-narrow passageways on their bellies. That’s where I lost it the first time. Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place. And when they dangle over a chasm that drops down all the way to China, in the pitch blackness by their fingertips, I’ll bet even money you’ll be kicking the back of someone’s chair and squirming in your theater seat for the tension to end.

But the tension keeps building until they stumble into the cannibalistic crawlers’ equivalent of a McDonald’s. That’s when we find out if they really do know each other or even themselves for that matter. The bloody attack sends them scrambling into different directions in panic.

The struggle for survival is fast and furious, and filled with shocks. In true horror movie fashion, the only well-knit social group turns out to be those disgusting—vegetables? what’s-that?—cave crawlers. The make-up job is horrific and detailed, and the annoying habit they have of slobbering mucousy gobs out of their mouths will—you better hold the buttered popcorn for another movie, that’s all I’m saying. The ticking sound the crawlers use like sonar to find their prey is also unnerving.

In the heat of battle, Juno proves to be the first one to fight back. She’s also the first one to commit another blunder that proves having a lump in your throat is better than a sharp pickax sticking out of it. Her inevitable confrontation with Sarah, amid all this chaos and death, doesn’t improve the situation, either. Why do characters in horror movies always wait until the worst times to picking a fight with each other when the monsters are getting closer?

The filming for The Descent took place in the United Kingdom, with the cave interior scenes filmed on sets built at Pinewood Studios. There are two endings, the UK version or the U.S. Depending on whether you like your horror movies ending on a woo-yay or hell-no, take your pick. Hint: U.S. movie goers apparently like happy endings.

The DVD from Lionsgate Films has lots of extras. There are two audio commentaries, Marshall with the crew and Marshall with the cast, that provide more insight into the making of the film.
Another solo interview with Marshall has him discussing the long and short versions for the ending. He prefers the more downbeat, longer (UK) ending, and goes on to explain why the shorter version is a bit confusing, as it was an editing choice, not an original plot choice. Test-marketing shot up a few more points with the more upbeat shorter ending, so that’s what American audiences saw in the theater.

More extras include a stills gallery, deleted and extended scenes, blooper reel, cast and crew biographies, and a behind the scenes documentary.

The Descent is a scary and shocking horror film that shouldn’t be missed.