WNUF Halloween Special (2013)

Director: Chris LaMartina (with commercials directed by James Branscome, Shawn Jones, Scott Maccubbin, Lonnie Martin, Matthew Menter, and Andy Schoeb)
Writer(s): LaMartina, Jimmy George, Pat Storck, and Michael Joseph Moran, based on a story by LaMartina, George, and Jamie Nash.
Starring: Paul Fahrenkopf, Aaron Henkin, Nicolette le Faye, and Leanna Chamish

There are few homages as exhausting and painstakingly recreated as Chris LaMartina's WNUF Halloween Special. Billed as a “spoof” of found footage horror films, it is instead a loving parody of '80s newscasts and commercials, all of which were shot on tape, and authentically faded (by making copies in the VCR; there are no digital effects) to resemble the same video quality of an old VHS tape.

This entire tape is purportedly a Halloween special that first aired on fictional broadcast station WNUF back on October 31st, 1987—in actuality, it is a film shot in 2013 on a mixture of VHS, SVHS, and DVCAM tape stocks, and then “bootlegged” three or four times in a VCR, thus reducing its quality even further. As both a child of the '80s, and someone who still has a VHS collection and a VCR, I can vouch for the uncanny accuracy of the project as a whole—it's clearly a labor of love by all involved.

The film's focus is on news reporter Frank Stewart, and his live journey into the Webber House, a long-abandoned home where Donald Webber murdered his own mom and dad with an ax twenty years prior. Due to the grisly nature of the killing, it has sat empty ever since, though there are many rumors swirling around that the house is haunted. The purpose of Frank's visit is to find out, once and for all, if there are some angry spirits still living inside...what he plans on doing to them if he finds them depends entirely on what outlandish thing he can think of that will get the most ratings.

But anyone expecting to get right down to the story will have to wait a little while: we start off with the WNUF TV28 Evening News, with (costume-clad) anchors Gavin Gordon and Deborah Merritt, as they run through Halloween-themed topics, local events, and even the weather, all while telling corny seasonal jokes. Richard Cutting and Leanna Chamish, who play the anchors, are perfect in both the looks, and delivery departments, adding yet another layer of believability to the whole affair.

In between each segment come the commercials, and they become a mainstay throughout this whole thing. I must say, though, that the commercial breaks eventually overrun the project; it is obvious that more time and consideration went into crafting these than anything else. There are twice as many commercials in this, than there would be in a legitimate news program from the same period, and so the actual segments are given no time to gain any steam before we cut away to more commercials. That's not to say that they get old, or drop in quality as it goes on, but just that it would have been nice if more time was spent on the actual story, which is a no-frills, bare bones affair.

Once we get through the newscast and make it to the actual special, it also moves on at a glacial pace, attempting to gain as many viewers and as much interest as possible. Reporter Frank Stewart stands outside the house, along with a live audience, and recites facts about the building (including the murders). He asks a couple audience participation questions, and after several minutes (and commercial interruptions), introduces all of his assistants: Louis and Claire Berger, two paranormal investigators (who are helped by Shadow, their black cat); Father Joseph Matheson, a Catholic priest; and his producer, Veronica Stanze, who is in the production van outside of the house, and can call for help if things get too intense.

It doesn't take long before they start hearing strange noises. Is it the ghost of the victims, haunting the site of their murders? Or perhaps their son, returning to the scene of the crime to add to his notoriety in front of a live camera crew? The death scenes are too hastily done to be impactful, and none of the noises are scary, especially since these moments have to stop-start over and over again because of the damn commercials. Unfortunately, this means the actual Halloween program—the whole point of the entire movie—is also the least engaging, thanks in large part to its rushed feel.

Whether or not you'll like WNUF really does kind of depend on your affinity for the movies, and video formats, of yesteryear. Anyone born in the mid-to-late '90s will probably be bored witless by the story, while the brilliance of the commercials will be completely lost on them. That brilliance only goes so far, though, as the film's over-reliance on them becomes more annoying as the minutes wear on, and as the tension of the titular event is (supposed to be) mounting. Given the right crowd, this could be a great “party movie” for an '80s themed party, and it definitely has the potential to be a cult film, especially if VHS makes a comeback (as all vintage things seem to do: see, audio cassettes). It's a one-note film that performs its one-note with admirable fervor and dedication, but what's missing is too substantial to make this anything more than a curiosity piece.

RATING: 6/10

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Trick 'r Treat (2007)

Director: Michael Dougherty
Writer(s): Dougherty
Starring: Anna Paquin, Brian Cox, and Dylan Baker

Horror movie enthusiasts are a depressing bunch—this is something I can both say, and verify, because I am one of them. Many of us seem to want to like things so bad, that we heap praise on things that aren’t deserving of it. I mean, let’s be real here: There are movies in every genre that are terrible, but horror movies seem to be an afterthought to most studios, who merely churn them out to gain a few bucks, without putting any thought into the final product.

We are certainly entitled to better, but in general we must settle for the dozen or so movies every year that defy the low expectations of the genre, and deliver us something worth getting excited about; that rare movie that is filled with terror, that doesn’t assume its audience is comprised completely of idiots, and that actually provides some thoughts and originality of its own.

Trick ‘r Treat is such a movie that has been garnering a lot of attention from both critics and audiences alike. It is an anthology movie, in which all of the stories are cleverly connected, a la Pulp Fiction, and take place within the span of a single Halloween night. Reviewers have largely been quick to lavish praise on it, with many declaring it to be a new Halloween classic.

But all of this is ignoring the simple fact that Trick ‘r Treat is a terrible film. It’s every bit as boring, poorly written, and suspenseless as any number of the horror films released annually are. Just like Tarantino, writer/director Michael Dougherty borrows, steals, and rips off numerous tropes and ideas from any number of other horror efforts, and slaps them all together in the hopes that something will stick. But where Tarantino can mask his plagiarism with an excess of style, Dougherty’s end vision is stunningly bland, instead blending in with the very movies he was hoping to distance himself from.

The first tale concerns a nerdy high school principal’s nasty extracurricular activities. This one is supposed to be infused with a steady streak of black comedy throughout, but like much of the script, the “humor” is lifeless and unfunny while even the basic premise has been done to death. In the second, Anna Paquin (yes, THAT Anna Paquin) plays a virgin who’s basically looking for anyone to take her virginity. Or is she? This one features a painfully typical twist that admittedly gives way to a slightly less typical one; even that is ruined with an over-reliance on computer effects that look tacky.

In the third, we have a group of high school-ish kids playing a prank on a nerdy girl, the most thoroughly original horror movie idea of all time. Then, in an equally inspired twist, their pranks end up actually coming true! In the finale, an old man is attacked by a small person wearing a burlap sack over his head, a recurring character who appears in all of the stories.

Ironically, the best thing this whole mess has going for it is the whole Pulp Fiction rip-off thingy I mentioned earlier. While it’s true Dougherty doesn’t quite have the flashy style of his influencer down, the way he commands the chronological events is the one area where he is worthy of Tarantino; minor events in one story become major parts of their own story later on, and characters seamlessly fluctuate in and out of multiple plots. He really makes the time jumps look and feel effortless, and certainly deserves credit in that regard.

Unfortunately, he manages to ruin just about every other potential positive the movie has going for it—he even decides to unmask its creepy main character toward the end (the kid with the burlap sack) to unintentionally hilarious results (think Pumpkinhead meets ET and you’re about spot-on). Even the humor, which he tries to inject throughout, falls flat way more often than not; I cringed way more often than I actually laughed, with the total ratio (of times cringed:actual laughs) somewhere around 10:1.

By the end, all I could think about was how sorry I felt for Anna Paquin; if her career has fallen this far, she should really think about immediate retirement.

RECAP: The chronological time jumps (i.e. Pulp Fiction) are really well done, the only category where I can honestly say Trick ‘r Treat succeeds (actually, come to think of it, the acting is also pretty well above-average for this type of film). The writing is terrible, there are no scares and very little suspense to speak of, and the comedy falls embarrassingly flat close to 100 percent of the time. Mercifully, it’s rather short, but still feels about 82 minutes too long.

RATING: 2/10

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Zombie (1979)

Director: Lucio Fulci
Writer(s): Elisa Briganti (and an uncredited Dardano Sacchetti, who asked for his name to be removed following the death of his father shortly before the film's release)
Starring: Tisa Farrow, Ian McCullough, Richard Johnson, Al Cliver, and Auretta Gay

I am usually of the mindset that a movie cannot truly be considered “good” unless it excels in several different technical categories. I mean, really that’s just common sense; a movie with great cinematography but poor everything else should not be rated highly, nor should a movie with a solid soundtrack and little else to offer. The truly great works of art, at least in the film world, are ones where everything comes together to deliver a mesmerizing all-around experience, one that can delight your audio/visual senses in equal measures.

But Lucio Fulci’s Zombie is one of the few films I’ve seen that shatters that whole ideal; come to think of it, it is the kind of film that shatters the whole idea of “critique” altogether. It is an ugly film in many ways, with visuals that revel in drab colors and a storyline that focuses on a poverty-stricken island where the villagers are being killed off by a mysterious plague…one that also happens to bring the dead back to life. It gets much use out of an old, grungy church-turned-hospital, which is slowly filling up with dying and diseased villagers, the only sounds that of dozens of flies hovering around the victims. Just seeing the setting enough is almost nauseating, the griminess of the locales adding a sense of scope and urgency, while also working as a direct contradiction to the (mostly) clean, (apparently) sterile hospitals that we often take for granted in the United States.

It doesn’t do much right, at least not in the way of what we would normally think of as “technical standards”: the acting, which is kind of hard to take at face value thanks to the dubbing, seems mediocre at generous best; the cinematography is straightforward but rarely anything more than average; the story gives the illusion that it was thrown together solely as a shaky foundation for which to throw in as much gore and bloodshed as possible, which probably isn’t just an illusion.

And that discardable plot starts off with an abandoned boat surfacing in New York. When the Coast Guard goes to investigate, they find more than they bargained for: a zombie, who attacks and kills one of the men, before getting shot off the ship by the other. A newspaper catches wind of this, and assigns a reporter, Peter West (played by Ian McCullough), to start following this story. The reporter catches a young woman, Anne Bowles (Tisa Farrow, sister of Mia, who retired from acting in the ‘80s to be a nurse in Vermont), as she is being interrogated by police; it would seem that the boat belonged to her father, whom she hadn’t seen or heard from in months.

So Peter and Anne team up to find out what happened to her father, who last she heard, was going to a small Caribbean island called Matul. They happen to catch two American tourists, Brian Hull (Al Cliver) and Susan Barrett (Auretta Gay), just before they depart on a two-month tour of the islands (based on a tip from a taxi driver, who apparently knows everything that is happening in his city at any given moment), and talk them into allowing them to tag along.

As is standard in these films, it turns out the island is so small that it doesn’t appear on any maps, but they manage to find it anyway. Also standard is that Susan and Brian just plan on dropping off Peter and Amy, then continuing on their own way, but are forced to join them when the boat is damaged. Couldn’t see that one coming! It is around this time that we are treated to one of the film’s most (in)famous scenes, in which an underwater zombie squares off against a bloodthirsty shark. It’s poorly edited and comes off as rather clumsy, but it still works, simply because there hasn’t been anything like it in the annals of cinema (so noteworthy is this scene that Microsoft used it in a television advertisement for one of their tablets).

They meet up with Dr. Menard (Richard Johnson, who was an actor, along with Ian McCulloch, at the Royal Shakespeare Company in the early ‘60s, where the two first met), a doctor who is trying to figure out what is causing the dead on the island to rise. It turns out that the doctor had worked with Anne’s father, who eventually passed away from the island’s disease. There we go…the whole main mystery of the movie is solved, which now allows the film to focus entirely on zombie grue and gore!

And the gore is exactly what Zombie gets very, very right, which shouldn’t be too unexpected given the fact those have always been a Fulci standard. But what elevates them into another stratosphere is just how amazing a vast majority of the effects look even today: the infamous “eye scene” is agonizing in its gradual build-up, but just when we think it’s going to cut away, it does the unthinkable, by getting in even closer to show us every little graphic detail. It was a stomach-churning sequence in 1979, and it’s a stomach-churning sequence now; that it has lost none of its power to shock is a huge compliment almost forty years later.

Ditto that for the slow-motion jugular bite, in which blood flows in slow motion after a woman has her neck bit by a zombie. As usual, Fulci sets the camera in tight, even as the zombie is tearing the flesh away, like he’s daring us to find fault in the effect, and while a second shot a second later does reveal a mass of slightly-miscolored skin (which is clearly the added fake flesh used to pull off the effect), the initial bite is painfully realistic.

Credit for these shots goes to Giannetto de Rossi, who was an effects artist for predominantly Italian films in the ‘60s and ‘70s, with a filmography that alternates between exploitation fare (Emanuelle in America), Westerns (Once Upon a Time in America), and even work with a cinema great (on Fellini’s Casanova, as makeup artist to Donald Sutherland). Eventually, he had a relatively brief career in Hollywood, working with fellow Italian Carlo Rambaldi (who would go on to design the alien heads in Ridley Scott’s Alien) on David Lynch’s Dune, covering the makeup effects for Dragonheart, partnering with Sylvester Stallone for Rambo III and Daylight, and designing the mask for The Man in the Iron Mask.

De Rossi actually pulled double-duty here, as he was also the makeup effects artist—again, this is another area where Zombie shines. The zombies featured here are, quite simply put, some of the greatest ever committed to film. What makes them even more memorable is the amazing attention-to-detail paid to the length of decomposition, something that we would expect would mainly fall on the shoulders of de Rossi himself. The film features both a mysterious disease wiping out members of a village and causing them to return from the dead almost immediately, as well as long-dead Spanish Conquistadors rising from their centuries-long slumber. Realistically, the freshly-dead mainly utilize the actors’ real skin, with some gruesome blood or skin effects to show us that they are zombies; the Conquistadors, on the other hand, are completely made up to look like walking, mummified skeletons. Would it have really made a difference if de Rossi used similar templates for both kinds of zombies? Absolutely not. Nevertheless, it’s an inspired decision that allows de Rossi to show off the breadth of his ridiculous skills as makeup artist.

I would be doing the film a great disservice to not mention the famous score by Fabio Frizzi and Giorgio Casco. Even though the brunt of it can be reduced to just three main cues (the “theme”, a Caribbean-style number, and one utilizing tribal drums), it still somehow manages to be versatile. For example, the main theme is used (for the thousandth time) during the characters’ final showdown at the end, with some of the action timed to the music; when paired with the images, the music actually sounds heroic, and becomes the perfect background accompaniment to their “last stand”. It is also used when the Spanish Conquistadors slowly rise out of their graves, also to strong effect. It became so popular, that Frizzi clearly used it as an inspiration for his own theme to City of the Living Dead, also directed by Fulci.

Zombie is a film that doesn’t really have much to offer its viewer, besides a great soundtrack and excellent special effects, which would normally relegate it to the sea of mediocrity. Yet under Fulci’s direction, the effects are handled with such care and conviction that they don’t just become the focus of the movie, they become the movie itself; everything else takes a backseat to the mayhem. And when those effects not only hold up today, but also manage to put our modern overreliance on obviously-fake computer-generated trickery to shame, then you have that rare gore film that functions both as a throwback to film’s glory days, as well as a shining example of a forty-year-old film that still holds the power to shock and disgust.

RATING: 7/10

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Bay of Blood (1971)

Director: Mario Bava
Writer(s): Bava, Filippo Ottoni, and Giuseppe Zaccariello, from a story by Franco Barberi and Dardano Sacchetti
Starring: Claudine Auger, Luigi Pistilli, Claudio Camaso, and Anna Maria Rosati

Why is this movie better known as Bay of Blood, and not Twitch of the Death Nerve, one of its many alternate titles, and one of the best horror movie names in cinema history? Image Entertainment's 2001 DVD version is the only major release to use that title, but the DVD itself, which is long out-of-print, was maligned for its terrible sound quality (an issue that continues to be a problem, though subsequent releases have gradually improved upon it.)

The lackluster Bay of Blood moniker insists it's nothing more than a tired slasher cliché, a notion that couldn't be further from the truth, if only for two specific reasons: 1.) it's the film that arguably laid the groundwork for the American slasher film, and 2.) it's better than almost all of them that would follow. While the 45 years since its release has eroded away some of the effectiveness of Bay of Blood's gore effects, the focus on its story (as thin as it is), along with director Mario Bava's fiendishly inventive cinematography and unforecasted death scenes, still makes this riveting, required viewing, even today.

The plot is threadbare, but somehow more advanced than most films of its ilk: Countess Federica is an old, wheelchair-bound woman, who owns a large amount of valuable bayfront property. As the film opens, she is sullenly wheeling through her bedroom, stopping only to stare sorrowfully out her rainy window, before she is confronted by an unseen killer, who wraps a rope around her neck, and kicks her wheelchair out from under her, leaving her to asphyxiate under her own weight. The camera pans up, revealing the killer, an older mustachioed man who takes off his gloves, and leaves a suicide note explaining that she can't take it any more. He is about to move the corpse, when he himself is dispatched, stabbed several times by a different unseen killer.

With this one scene, we can tell we are watching a master of his craft once again reinventing the wheel: Director Mario Bava is said to have “invented” the Italian giallo, with films like The Evil Eye (aka The Girl Who Knew Too Much) and Blood and Black Lace. With Bay of Blood, he not only created the American slasher, but has somehow managed to avoid the future cliches that would plague the slasher, while simultaneously leaving enough of them intact to leave DNA evidence all over the subgenre. We have nude women skinny-dipping, and having sex before getting killed; there's a random car full of partying young adults that merely show up with the sole purpose of adding to the body count; there are graphic, violent deaths that would later become a staple of horror cinema; all of the common things we have come to expect from watching horror franchises like Friday the 13th, and the Halloween series, is here in full force (Friday the 13th Part II even went so far as to directly lift two deaths from this film).

But it's not necessarily what's here, but what's missing that makes Bay of Blood such a fascinating 84 minutes: the deaths are rarely foreshadowed with tacky soundtrack cues, meaning they are often sudden, and shocking; Bava foregoes the typical atmosphere by having a majority of the action take place during the day; and there isn't a single masked killer, but rather a series of killers, all trying to off the competition to become rightful heir to “the bay”. There's even a baffling “twist” ending that manages to be both moronic, and fitting, paving the way for a startlingly upbeat final theme song.

Speaking of themes, the soundtrack was composed by prolific Italian composer Stelvio Cipriani who hits on some fantastic themes here, while avoiding the cliches of most similar releases: The cue leading to the opening murder is jarringly beautiful, foreshadowing none of the dark events to come; likewise, some of the violent aftermaths of the murders feature orchestral sections that work in direct contrast to the violence, making them more haunting than they should be. There is, of course, the camp typical of Italian horror soundtracks (there always seems to be at least one cheesy track in all of them), but none of them feel out of place; at its best, it's an outstanding score, while in lesser moments, it's merely a good one.

Following the intro, we meet the bizarre residents living in “the bay”, who all either stand to gain or lose something from the sudden death of the Countess: There's Simon, a man who lives off the creatures he catches in the bay, and who may be hiding a family secret; Frank Venture, a real estate agent who notices the demand such property could fetch; his secretary/lover Laura, who feels abandoned by his sudden leaving for the bay; Paolo, an entomologist who spends his days catching bugs and torturing them in the name of science; and his wife, Anna, who puts too much of her stock in Tarot cards and mysticism. Rounding out the cast of would-be killers is Renata, the estranged daughter of the mustachioed man killed in the opening scene, and her husband, Albert; the two of them arrive later to claim the bay for themselves, where they find—like everyone else—that it won't be that easy.

Then there are the four teenagers who show up and make everything even more difficult. They break into Ventura's empty cottage to steal liquor and party, but soon find out that they are victims of circumstance, when they are killed simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. These deaths, which occur in rapid fashion, are probably the most memorable kills contained herein; a couple also stand as being some of my favorite deaths in any movie. The buildup is also fantastic, with one of the teenagers running from a killer that only she can see, while tribal drums set up a frantic tension missing from the rest of the film; it proves that, when inspired, there was nothing that Bava couldn't do.

I'm not sure that I would consider Bay of Blood to be even in the top 5 things Bava ever did—it lacks depth and often becomes repetitive--but it's easily one of my favorite slasher movies. I've stated before that I get bored of the same ol' stuff all the time, so the sight of masked killers stalking oversexed teenagers for 90 minutes gets incredibly old. That's partly where the ingenuity of Bay of Blood lies—it kills its teens in under five minutes—somehow making a four-decade old film one of the more interesting subversions on the very subgenre that it helped to create.

RATING: 7.5/10

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Dead End (2003)

Director: Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa
Writer(s): Andrea and Canepa
Starring: Ray Wise, Lin Shaye, Mick Cain, and Alexandra Holden

One of the fundamental drawbacks to our current state of media technology is also its biggest upside: that anyone can create, edit, and release anything that they want, at any given time. The Internet has opened the doors to allow anyone the opportunity to garner attention doing the things that they love, and that has especially held true in the film industry: on YouTube alone, there are 300 hours of video uploaded every single minute. If that's the case on just one site (granted, a pretty big site), then it's probably true that in that same time frame across the whole of the Internet, there is a lifetime's worth of videos added; pretty mind-boggling stuff. And in that media sea, it's an unfortunate reality that a lot of junk is going to rise to the top, just as a lot of great content will sink to the bottom.

The same goes for movies. In the past, it was mainly only legit studios that were able to peddle their content to the masses, but now anyone with a camera and a computer can download editing software and become an independent studio. That means for every inexplicable thing that catches on (Sharknado and its as-of-now three sequels rise immediately to mind), there are films like Dead End that fall through the cracks.

Now let's get one thing straight, right off the bat here: Dead End has plenty of fundamental flaws. The ending, which would have probably been shocking thirteen years ago when it debuted, is limp and predictable, especially as the trip wears on. It relies way too much on attempted humor, and most of it comes in the form of Richard, a sarcastic and annoying teenaged know-it-all, whose presence very quickly wears thin. (Why do otherwise serious movies always feel the need to lighten tension with stupid jokes...isn't an unbearable tension kind of the point?)

But what Dead End does well is what makes it a far more powerful film than it has any right to be. Shot for a meager $900,000 Dead End starts off in overly familiar territory, to the point that I almost immediately regretted giving it a shot. But then it breaks off down its own path and, in doing so, becomes quite an engaging little film, full of creepy moments and carried along by startlingly solid performances.

Frank and Laura Harrington are on their way to Laura's grandmother's house for Christmas Eve. They are joined by their children: smart-alecky teenager Richard (who is clearly played by a man in his twenties; in this case, 25-year-old Mick Cain), and daughter Marion, who is also accompanied by her boyfriend, Brad Miller. Frank has taken the exact same path to Laura's mother's house for the last twenty years, but this time decides to go a different route. In what could perhaps be an ominous sign, he falls asleep at the wheel and very nearly avoids crashing into an oncoming car, but this is just the beginning of their weird trip: Road signs mention places that don't exist, exits seem to be few and far between, and the family starts turning on each other.

But these problems become minor when Frank notices the “woman in white”, a young-ish woman carrying a baby that appears from time to time. And whenever she makes an appearance, bad things start happening. Will the family make it to granny's house in one piece, or will they all end up in the creepy black hearse that keeps following them around like a vulture, as if it knows something that they don't...

The premise is sparse, and almost stupidly so. But the writing/directing team of Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa manage to demonstrate a serious knack for getting under the audiences' skin by sticking to the “minimalist's horror model”, made popular by films like The Blair Witch Project: by keeping most of the gruesome moments offscreen, it forces our own minds to fill in the blanks. This is a tactic used by many low-budget horror films out of absolute necessity, and is why most of them are more effective than big budget counterparts—once the monster is shown, chances are it will be scary to some, but not to all. By allowing the audience to visualize the outcome themselves, it can be “personalized” to each person's mind, as it's human nature to imagine the most gruesome outcome imaginable. It's a wonder more horror films don't latch on to this well-known horror tip.

Aside from Richard and Brad, who rely on hackneyed character traits (Richard the sarcastic teenager who hates the world, and Brad the cool and confident stoner-jock), Andrea and Canepa up the ante with the rest of the characters, delivering well-rounded people who are each harboring dark secrets that will come out during the course of the night. Some of the reveals are rather sudden and ineffectual, but kudos must be given to Ray Wise (perhaps best remembered as Leland Palmer in both the old “Twin Peaks”, and reprising his role in the future “Twin Peaks”) and Lin Shaye, who are absolutely astounding as the parents. Each one is required to run through a wide range of emotions, getting more and more tense as the situation becomes increasingly dire, and they pull it off admirably. I didn't feel like the switches in mood were always justified, or felt realistic, but those complaints fall more on the directors; in terms of doing their jobs, they both go above and beyond, lending credibility to a film that easily could have faltered without it. Through them, there are moments of heartbreak and sadness that are legitimately poignant, when they just as easily could have gone the other way.

The filmmaking tandem do break a little of their own minimalism rules by throwing in a tacky ending that insinuates a continuing cycle of death, while revealing a little too much about the mysterious hearse that stalked them that night. The night scenes with it are eerie and dreamlike, but seeing it the way we do at the end undoes a great deal of the unexplained mystery, taking it from supernatural, to plain and ordinary in just a few short seconds of screen time. There's also a post-ending ending during the end credits that goes for one more emotional gut punch...I honestly found the idea of it quite impactful, but the delivery (thanks to two clearly inexperienced actors) leaves much to be desired.

Somehow, this movie has grossed over $70 million in DVD sales, which is kind of odd, considering I don't know a single person that has ever heard of it; on those grounds it seems incorrect to refer to it as “underrated”. Either way, Dead End is the perfect antithesis of most Hollywood movies, favoring rich characterization and an element of mystery over the computerized “in-your-face” style of most California tripe, and also remains a compelling example of effective low-budget storytelling.

RATING: 7/10

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I Spit on Your Grave (1978)

Director: Meir Zarchi
Writer(s): Zarchi
Starring: Camille Keaton, Eron Tabor, Richard Pace, and Anthony Nichols

Exploitation films have long been a popular subgenre for horror. Peaking in the '70s, but with roots as far back as the '30s, the exploitation films that we have come to love often thrived on blending graphic acts of violence with explicit sexuality; this was a direct result of the MPAA becoming more lax with their ratings, opening the door for these perverted “classics” to infiltrate grindhouse theaters. (Many of the more graphic offerings would also become part of the infamous UK “Video Nasties” list of the early-to-mid '80s, with these movies often subject to obscenity charges; all were subject to cuts, and released in mangled, edited forms if they weren't outright banned.)

Here we have a film widely considered to be the “pinnacle” of the exploitation genre; it is a film so graphic, it still has not been released uncut in the UK, owing that mainly to rape scenes that may just be the most difficult-to-stomach this side of Irreversible. But underneath its disturbing subject matter of rape (which, for the record, should be disturbing no matter how it's handled) lies a powerful pro-woman sentiment that was, and continues to be, unfairly maligned for all the wrong reasons.

Camille Keaton (grand-niece of famous Hollywood actor Buster, and then-wife of writer/director Meir Zarchi) plays Jennifer, a writer from New York City who holes up in an isolated cottage in the small town of Kent, Connecticut to focus on her latest novel. Her arrival catches the attention of Johnny, the manager of the local gas station; she, rather unwisely, reveals a little too much about the location in which she'll be staying. Johnny seems to be taking mental notes, and after she pays for her gas ($5.20 for a fill-up?!) she heads to her cottage.

She places a grocery order with the local general store, and before you know it, mentally-challenged Matthew delivers the goods to her. He seems like a nice enough guy, clearly smitten with the new woman, and the two strike a friendship. But unbeknownst to us, the well-meaning Matthew hangs around with the wrong crowd, and the leader of the four-person “gang” is none other than Johnny, the gas station manager! Soon, the innocent Matthew is telling them what cabin she is in and how beautiful she is, and that captures the attention of the others.

Before long, the men start “flirting” with her, which consists of them riding their speedboat in circles near her while she sits on a hammock on dry land, trying to focus on writing. The men in the speedboat are Stanley and Andy, two ne'er-do-wells who have no job and spend their days hanging out at Johnny's gas station. But living in New York City has no doubt prepared Jennifer for dealing with scum like them, so rather than engage with them, she just disgustedly goes inside.

Unfortunately for her, this is just the beginning of her terror. That night, they make loud noises outside her cottage, then run away when she goes out to investigate. The following day is when her ordeal begins: as she lies sunbathing in a boat, Stanley and Andy approach in their speedboat, attaching a hook to hers, and dragging her to shore. She runs through the woods, desperately trying to escape, but runs right into Johnny. The plan is for Matthew to lose his virginity to her, but when he gets “performance anxiety”, Johnny rapes her instead. When he's done, they let her crawl away; in obvious shock, she travels so slowly that she doesn't even make it home before bumping into her attackers again. This time, Andy proceeds to sodomize her, in a scene that's stomach-churning despite the ridiculousness of Gunter Kleeman's over-the-top performance (he goes about it with such cartoonish veracity that, in real life,he would have twisted his own dick off).

She's allowed to “escape” again, this time making it all the way to her cottage. But just as she starts dialing the police for help, the phone is kicked away from her, and once again she is raped, this time by Matthew (who can't finish with the others watching him), and then penetrated with a bottle by Stanley, who is interrupted by the others for “wasting time” and taking it too far when he attempts to get her to service him orally, and then beats her when she is unwilling, or unable to. The men are about to leave via speedboat, when Johnny suddenly realizes that they can't just let her live, and makes the piss-poor (from his perspective) decision to have Matthew stab her in the heart. He wusses out, instead rubbing some blood from her mouth on the blade, and pretending that he finished the job—no one thinks to double-check the mentally-handicapped man who will say or do anything to fit in.

Over the course of an unspecified number of days, Jennifer slowly recovers from her assault, at least physically, and starts hunting them down one-by-one, killing them in retaliation for their brutal crimes. This was the first moment where I felt the film really went a little overboard into “exploitation” territory, as Jennifer seduces them before killing them, even going so far as to let Matthew lose his virginity to her before hanging him from a noose. This does take the film a couple of notches down in my book, because otherwise it has the feel of a feminist war-cry, and is handled fairly realistically; but the thought that, after just a week or so, that she would be able to take things that far with the men who viciously raped her and left her for dead is both a little offensive, and completely unnecessary.

The other hindrance are the production values, which are clearly next to nil. The voices all sound like they were re-dubbed in a large room, regardless of where the characters actually are on the screen, and the audio levels vary wildly all over the place. Jennifer's kill scenes are well-conceived, but amateurishly executed; that is a slight problem, because the graphic, unflinching details of her rape leave nothing to the imagination. Naturally, you want to see her get her revenge, but the sloppiness of the execution leaves a lot to be desired, and leads to a rather intense letdown.

Still, I applaud the film on the grounds that it feels, at least to me, like a pro-feminist film. The male characters are all vile miscreants who, eventually, all get what they deserve. There's even a scene where one of them tries justifying his actions to her, by blaming her for looking so hot and sexy; blaming the victim is always a key bulletpoint of rape culture, and feels included here as an example of such. The rape scenes are brutal and honest, with the unflinching camera capturing every agonizing detail. Many exploitation films seem to get off by inflicting harm on its main characters, but this one clearly sympathizes with Jennifer. Rapes happen all the time, especially in this current culture where rape claims are treated like minor crimes and rarely investigated to their full potential, and as tough-to-stomach as this film is, they can be infinitely worse in real life. A film like this almost feels like the perfect launching point to start a meaningful discussion about rape, but the unfortunate reality is that, because of its reputation as an “ultimate exploitation film”, it stands a better chance of playing to drunk kids at college frat parties, who will be cheering the men on as they commit their vile acts.

Certainly it has divided critics, with probably the most notable review coming from Roger Ebert, who gave it zero stars (for the record, the same Roger Ebert who praised Last House on the Left, an infinitely more unpleasant and amateurish mess, with three-and-a-half stars). Many others have blasted it for its blatant misogyny, and have denied the film's feminist overtones (with Luke Thompson stupidly stating, “Defenders of the film have argued that it's actually pro-woman, due to the fact that the female lead wins in the end, which is sort of like saying that cockfights are pro-rooster because there's always one left standing.” This is the same man, mind you, who praised Species II as: “Pure exploitation of breasts, blood, and beasts, often without digital enhancement. Absolutely freakin' brilliant!” as if his only criteria for grading such a film is whether or not it gives him a sustainable erection.) Forget all of that, and go in with your own open mind. There are some things about it that will inevitably let you down, but for all of the white noise and overhype that surrounds it on both sides, this might be one of the most devastating accounts of rape ever committed to film.

OVERALL: 6/10

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I Drink Your Blood (1970)

Director: David E. Durston
Writer(s): Durston
Starring: Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury, Jadin Wong, Rhonda Fultz, Riley Mills, and Lynn Lowry

I hated David E. Durston's I Drink Your Blood the first time I saw it; I was in my late teens, if I recall correctly, and purchased it, sight unseen, on VHS from some online rarities site. Obviously, this was before the days where downloading a movie was just a few clicks away. I had heard rumors of its insane violence—supposedly it was the first film to be rated “X” solely for graphic violence—and, being an insatiable gorehound, couldn't get my paws on it quick enough. After I saw it, all I remember was the feeling of intense disappointment; there wasn't much blood and the story wasn't nearly as cool as I thought it would be. But that was then.

Flash-forward to the present day. I've grown up quite a bit, and while I still enjoy some good movie violence, my tastes have also evolved to include many other styles and genres. So when I saw that a movie streaming service that I subscribed to was offering this as part of their library, I made a date with myself to review it, and to see if time had tamed my opinion of it. If anything, I hate it even more now.

I Drink Your Blood is the kind of film where the only compliment you can give it, is that it has moments of competence, but even these are few and far between. The story itself—that a band of hippies brutalize a family, who retaliate by serving them meat pies injected with rabies—is a thing of simple brilliance. How in the world can you screw that up? Somehow, writer/director David E. Durston (who would end his directing career less than a decade later with two gay porns) manages with alarming gusto: never have 84 minutes felt so agonizingly long, and never have so many ideas amounted to so little.

More fascinating than the movie itself is the life of lead Bhaskar Roy Chowdhury, who was born in India in February, 1930. He was pushed into boxing by his father, but after getting pummeled during a fight (in which he broke his nose and lost both of his front teeth), he hung up the gloves for good, and focused on his true love: dance. He ended up mastering four different styles of Indian dance, and after migrating to the U.S. to accept a role in a Hollywood adaptation of Marco Polo, eventually opened his own dance studio here, where he taught his students free of charge. (In a tragic twist, he would later become paralyzed after falling 36 feet during a practice in 1977, and would spend the rest of his life confined to a wheelchair.)

How he ended up in this role is completely beyond me: he plays a non-dancing Satanic cult leader who somehow holds sway over six followers, who believe that he is the direct descendant of the Devil. One of them, curiously, is a Chinese woman who wears a traditional dress and rarely speaks: the others are Rollo, a black man; super-white boy Andy (played by Tyde Kierney, whose Hollywood career peaked in the '90s with some small roles in big movies); Shelley, a tough guy whose cockiness irks Horace; Molly, a permanently-horny woman who really serves no purpose until later; an unnamed pregnant hippie who is carrying Horace's child; and Carrie, a mute woman played by Lynn Lowry (of Shivers fame...or infamy).

One night, Horace and his followers are taking part in a Satanic ritual, unaware that Andy's girlfriend, Sylvia, is watching them from afar. The pregnant hippie notices her, and two men from the group give chase, catching up to her and brutalizing her. The next morning, she staggers out of the woods and back into town; from the looks of things, she has been raped and beaten. Mildred Nash, the town baker, sees her and, along with Sylvia's annoying younger brother, Pete, they take her to Sylvia's grandfather's house, where he swears revenge.

Hearing that they took up residence in an abandoned hotel, grandpa, known as Doc Banner, pays the Satanists a visit with a shotgun. But the senile old man does not play the advantage well—his gun is taken away in the simplest overpowering in film history (he literally gets so close to Horace, that Horace grabs it, seemingly without gramps even noticing); he is then beaten, given LSD, and after annoying Pete comes by looking for his grandpa, released.

Pete is pissed, so now HE grabs the shotgun looking for vengeance, but only happens upon a rabid dog, whom he shoots and kills. This gives him an alternate idea: get some tainted blood from the dead dog, inject it into meat pies, and then serve them to the hippie Satanists. But things do not go well, and before you know it the town is overrun with infected construction workers (because a rabid Molly slept with them all) and hippies who will stop at nothing to kill the living!

Pardon me for making it sound good, because it's terrible. By the time they are even fed the rabies, we're well past the halfway mark, and it still takes another ten or fifteen minutes of screentime for them to be completely overtaken. Once the disease sets in, it feels like an uncontrolled mess: the hippies attack anyone they see, including each other, and the supposedly “gruesome” attacks are almost completely bloodless. The whole thing moves along at a snail's clip, ensuring that the brilliant story is as unengaging as physically possible, while the violence is so tame, that, aside from maybe two scenes, I can almost guarantee it was tame back in 1970.

The only scenes that are still shocking are scenes undeserving of attention: unsimulated scenes of animal cruelty, in which a chicken has its throat slit, a dog is shot (this is more than likely simulated, but still disturbing), some rats are killed (kills happen offscreen, but a couple ripped-up corpses are shown), and a goat's corpse is dragged around during the chaotic finale. I don't mean to sound like a prude, but there about as many justifiable reasons for killing an animal onscreen as there are for killing a human. The cinematic world is based entirely on illusion and trickery—actors play other people inside a setting that often pretends to be an entirely different place than it is—so then why is it that some directors get off on the slaughter of innocent animals? And I don't give a shit what their fates were going to be, or how much use of the corpse the cast and crew used afterwards—they are moot points. I don't care to see it, and it's something that needn't be shot or shown.

Moving on from that public service announcement, even worse than the acting is the story, in which Andy defects from the group, and immediately rekindles his romance with Sylvia, who....you know, WAS JUST RAPED BECAUSE OF HIM. I'm not one to tell rape and trauma survivors how they should act, but the thought of a woman who was sexually assaulted not three days before, openly willing to continue a sexual relationship with the man who invited her to a Satanic ritual, isn't just in poor taste—it's flat-out disgusting. Between that, and the character of Molly, who has sex with a group of construction workers (mostly implied and off screen), I Drink Your Blood gives off a disgusting, misogynistic vibe in which women are nothing more than objects to be used solely for the delight of men. I understand that's probably more a sign of the freewheeling, drug-soaked time period--and I get that mindset is still disturbingly prevalent today--but it was a little discomforting, to say the least.

Its sole saving grace, besides the fact that the photographer actually knew how to frame scenes, is the soundtrack, which is a cacophonous, completely amelodic mess of repetitive, high-pitched noises that somehow works. This movie is neither intense, nor scary, but it's through no fault of the music—it's very simple, yet in the company of a much better movie, it would have been considered a masterpiece. Or maybe it actually sucks, yet the movie was so much worse it makes it look good in comparison—either way, I found it to be the strongest link in a movie completely bereft of anything worthwhile.

This is nothing more than a juvenile, amateurish mess of hippie cinema, filled with bad acting, despicable characters (and I don't just mean the bad ones), unjustifiable scenes of authentic animal cruelty, and a pace so slow that it could put a giraffe to sleep. For serious lovers of grindhouse cinema only.

RATING: 1.5/10

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Cube (1997)

Director: Vincenzo Natali
Writer(s): Natali, André Bijelic, and Graeme Manson
Starring: Nicole de Boer, David Hewlett, Maurice Dean Wint, and Nicky Guadagni

I saw my first trailer for Cube preceding another movie I was watching way back in the days of VHS. It always looked interesting to me, but became one of those movies that I kept putting off for some reason or another, until I just kind of forgot all about it. Upon re-stumbling on it just the other day, I made sure that wouldn't happen again, and made immediate plans to sit down and watch it.

I don't know how this possibly happened, considering I physically watched the trailer numerous times, but I was always under the impression that this was a foreign film. There's just something about its minimalistic plot that suggests something more subtle than the general in-your-face attitude of most Hollywood features, with the entirety of its story taking place within the confines of several shifting rooms, each one 14' x 14'. Visual effects are kept to a minimum (a good thing, considering they have the appearance of old computer game cutscenes), the violence is restrained, and it places its focus on the characters themselves, rather than the situation they find themselves in—in other words, it's the antithesis of the American film (I guess technically it is a “foreign” film, having been shot in Canada; it played theatrically at just 16 screens nationwide).

Bizarre setting aside, the skeleton of Cube's story is pretty familiar stuff: Five complete strangers awaken to find themselves trapped inside the mysterious box, with no memories of who abducted them, or how they got there. As an interesting aside, all of the characters are named after prisons: There's Quentin, the rough-and-tumble “leader” who is a cop; Leaven, a young nerdy college girl; Holloway, a middle-aged female doctor; Rennes, an arrogant escape artist that has broken out of several prisons; and Worth, a suicidal man with no immediately-obvious talents.

Eventually, they deduce that they are trapped in one large cube, that is 26 rooms across, and a whopping 17,576 rooms total. So getting out is just a matter of finding the proper route through a maze, right? Well, of course it wouldn't be that easy: some of the rooms are booby-trapped in various ways that mean instant death for those that blindly wander in, such as motion sensors that activate metal grids capable of slicing through bone, or electrochemical sensors that can detect body heat—that second type they find out the hard way, when Rennes jumps into a room and is sprayed in the face with acid. That's not a good look.

Gradually, it becomes apparent that each of them are there to serve a specific purpose. Quentin, being the authority figure, is a natural born leader capable of keeping his cool under pressure; Leaven is a mathematical wizard, who discovers the secret to the numerical “codes” that label each room; Worth is an architect who was commissioned to build the cube's outer shell, unaware of the horrors they planned to fill it with; and Holloway...well she's best suited to take care of a surprise sixth visitor: mentally-handicapped Kazan, whom most of the others see as little more than a hassle.

As the story gradually starts to reveal itself in layers, it also reveals just how unimaginative it really is. All of them think the others are against them, and are certain that one of them knows more than they are letting on. Paranoia is a natural thought process that everyone goes through at one point or another, and it would certainly manifest itself in a room full of complete strangers stuck in a foreign...cube. But the acting does nothing to further the illusion of realism; nor does the writing, which sticks to pretty standard formulas, refusing to dig any deeper into the individual plights of each character. One character does turn out to be a bad guy, but his true nature is revealed early on with an evil look that comes out of nowhere, along with ominous musical accompaniment that nudges us to acknowledge it...in other words, there are no unforeseen twists, and once the coolness of the idea wears off, so does its grip.

That being said, I have a soft spot for low budget films, where filmmakers often have to find creative solutions, and Cube is almost a masterpiece in budget-cutting simplicity. The entire film was shot in the same 14' x 14' space, with only the backgrounds changing: different colored wall panels give the illusion of shooting in several different individual cubes. A separate half-set was also designed for scenes that take place in the short “hallways” between rooms. The door latches that open each cube was also made out of materials found in any hardware store. That none of these things are noticeable is a pretty impressive technical achievement in and of itself, and while the digital effects are pretty dated, their infrequent use doesn't do much damage.

Despite its growing appeal, Cube is a surprisingly formulaic mess that is helped along by some inventive visual tricks and clear talent from director and co-writer Vincenzo Natali (who sounds like he should be running an Italian eatery instead). But it slowly becomes apparent that the cube is the only interesting idea in the entire film, and once the intrigue of that wears off—and it will wear off—it's nothing more than a straightforward character study about characters that just aren't interesting enough to study in the first place.

RATING: 4.5/10

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Pieces (1982)

Director: Juan Piquer Simón
Writer(s): Dick Randall and Joe D'Amato
Starring: Christopher George, Lynda Day George, Frank Braña, and Edmund Purdom

Usually, critiquing a movie is a pretty straightforward process: you watch it, you formulate a solid opinion one way or another, and then you sit down to try to put those thoughts into review form. After all, there are really only three possibilities: it's either good, it's bad, or it's neutral. That's what I always believed, anyway, until I stumbled on the insane mess that is Pieces, which feels like it was directed by three different people, all with varying levels of competence ranging from “mild”, to “none.”

There have, and always will be, movies that are “so bad they're good”, but Pieces exists on an entirely different plane from most of the others. This is because it alternates rapidly and wildly between disparate emotions with freewheeling, reckless abandon. Take the intro, for instance. A young boy is putting together a puzzle of a nude woman when his mother, who is clearly the controlling type, busts in and catches him. She is livid, and takes things a little too far by swearing she will kill him if she ever sees him doing something like this again. She orders him to grab a plastic bag, which she is planning on using to burn the puzzle, but he has other ideas and instead returns with an axe, which he uses to kill her. But it's obvious this isn't just an innocent, ordinary kid...he is clearly a sociopath in the making; next thing you know, he's using a saw to hack her body into little pieces.

The next shot is the child calmly putting the puzzle back together again, which is now soaked in blood. So, too, is the rest of the room. He hears sirens, sees the police entering the building, and then hides in the closet, pretending to act scared when the cops find him there. We can surmise from the ensuing discussion that he is regarded only as a witness to a horrifying slaying, and that he is never considered a suspect. The opening is a little cheesy, but it's still pretty powerful stuff that shows what director Juan Piquer Simon is capable of, although the rest of his filmography seems to disagree.

Now we flash-forward forty years later, to an unidentified college campus, where young female students are being picked off one-by-one by a masked man wielding a chainsaw. Lt. Bracken (Christopher George) and Sgt. Holden (Frank Brana) are quick to arrive on campus to start their investigation, but their department seems to be rather underfunded, and unable to spare anyone else to help them out. Showing off its giallo inspirations, the two officers randomly enlist the help of a student at the school, Kendall, who is cleared as a suspect early on and all-too-eager to lend a hand.

It also shows off its crazy side, by having a famous tennis star, who happens to be a cop to earn money when she is not playing in tournaments, go undercover at the school to try to bait the killer. Just try to ignore the fact that she's about twenty years past the killer's target age, making her a lousy decoy; thankfully, only about five people seem to go to this school, so the plan actually makes better sense than it normally would. Oh yeah, and despite her being a professional tennis player, the actress that played her clearly had no idea how to actually play, yet that didn't stop the filmmakers from including scenes from a match against one of her students (according to the director, they had to hire a tennis coach to teach them how to at least lob the ball to give the appearance that they know what they're doing; between their sloppiness and the lousy editing, it's still all too evident). What is the meaning of any of this?

But that's part of its charm, because unlike a lot of “so bad they're good” movies, Pieces never takes itself too seriously, which leads to some earnestly funny scenes. The problem is, there are so many plot holes and poorly-written moments that it occasionally feels like we're laughing at things we shouldn't be laughing at. And that's a good chunk of what makes this mess work as well as it does: I can't recall another film that somehow manages to blur the line between “good” or “bad” so effectively. In many “bad” movies, the filmmakers involved are usually earnest in their intentions, and just have the misfortune of not having the talent (or the time, or the budget, etc.) to live up to their ambition. With Pieces, it's nearly impossible to tell what scenes were actually played for laughs, and which ones get them accidentally, but none of it seems to matter because you get the feeling that the filmmakers didn't seem to care. Again, whether they didn't care about the film, or merely what the audience thought about it is yet another point that gets blurred. Case-in-point: It contains a sequence that has immediately shot near the top of my list of “Most Pointless Scenes in Cinema History”; but unlike the “pancake” scene in Cabin Fever (which occupies the #1 slot), which is an idiotically “comical” scene in a film that was otherwise serious, this one actually manages to be hilarious, in an odd, off-the-wall kind of way. I won't reveal what it is, but even in a film this bizarre, you probably won't have a problem picking it out.

Technically, Pieces is adept at what it does, though it is never astonishing. The soundtrack (who is credited only to “Cam”, though it is the work of no less than three separate artists) is mostly repetitive and average, at least during the kill scenes, which don't add much in the tension department. The gore mostly comes in the form of aftermath shots, that are admittedly pretty grisly and disturbing given the film's obscure, but probably minimal, budget. However, those expecting some “live” blood, or graphic kill scenes will be largely disappointed. It's photographed competently enough, though not as interestingly as one would expect having been clearly inspired by earlier Italian slashers (known as giallo films).

I have to confess that I liked Pieces, but I am also aware that many people will not. I have always had a soft spot for films that don't cater to audience expectations, and this is certainly one that marches to the beat of its own drum, no matter how idiotic or ill-advised it may be. But in this world of watered-down, mass-produced bullshit being paraded around as “entertainment”, it is sadly refreshing to find a film that only plays to its own interests, rather than the wants of its audience.

RATING: 6/10

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Nightmare City (1980)

Director: Umberto Lenzi
Writer(s): Antonio Cesare Corti, Luis María Delgado, Piero Regnoli
Starring: Hugo Stiglitz, Laura Trotter, Maria Rosaria Omaggio, and Francisco Rabal

Aaaah, the Italian zombie movie. On the one hand, it has provided us some classics, such as Lucio Fulci’s 1979 epic, simply and appropriately titled Zombie, and on the other, it has given us some abominations, like Umberto Lenzi’s Nightmare City. This is a film so inept, that it goes beyond the entertaining kind of bad, and instead becomes a masochistic exercise of unbearable proportions—and of course, I am talking about for the viewer.

Fulci’s zombie exercise worked because, although the plot was threadbare, and the writing atrocious, it was obvious that time and care went into something on the production; of course, I would be referring to the effects, both in the gore, and the make-up department. Very rarely are either of those anything less than astonishing, and that’s even comparing them to modern films, who have mastered the art of computer-generated blood but will never master the spirit of the “real” thing.

Lenzi’s film does not work, because the whole film looks like it was written and shot in one of those 72-hour filmmaking competitions, where contestants have three days to write, shoot, and edit a movie. The “zombies”, which I guess for technicality’s sake, are actually “mutants” (though billed as zombies in all film-related literature) simply look as if they’ve had mud smashed onto their faces, while a vast majority of the kill scenes simply consist of poorly edited attacks—a zombie will apparently stab (more on this later) a victim in the chest, with the camera set up behind the victim, the camera will cut to a shot in front of the victim, and all of a sudden the person’s face is covered in blood.

As with many Italian horror films period, this one is only loosely plotted: An airplane lands on a runway in an unmarked European city. After it becomes apparent there is no one in the cockpit, police are called to the scene to investigate. A reporter, Dean, is on hand to interview a scientist about a radioactive accident that is all over the news. He brings his cameraman with him to investigate this mysterious plane, in the meantime. Finally, the doors open, and out step the mud-faced radioactive mutant-zombies. What makes these undead creatures even more interesting than the normal brain-dead shamblers we’ve seen in so many previous movies, is that not only can these run, but they also seem to retain similar brain capacity compared to when they were alive. This spells trouble for survivors, because these mutant-corpses can shoot guns, swing axes, and stab with knives—so basically, they’re just radioactive supermen described as zombies in an attempt to appeal to the masses.

Anyway, Dean is so horrified by what he sees, that he runs to the nearest television station and interrupts a terrible live dance routine to try to warn people about the impending attack. Surprisingly, television station owners don’t take kindly to people interrupting their shows to ramble on about gun-toting zombies, and so his speech is cut off, and he is kicked out of the station. Down but not out, he instead narrows his focus; instead of trying to warn everyone in the city, he sets his sights on just warning his wife, Anna, who works at a nearby hospital.

After they escape the hospital (which is under attack), the rest of the movie consists of the couple on the run against seemingly insurmountable odds, interspersed with random footage of large groups of people being killed by the mutant beasts. That might sound like a formula that could work, but given the uncoordinated “fight” and kill scenes, it all just comes off as an improvised, rushed mess. Even the Dean and Anna scenes are largely uneventful, with Dean briskly walking away from a threat of danger that never feels urgent.

It doesn’t help matters that Dean is the kind of character who is always so calm and collected, that he can’t be bothered to run, even when the situation dictates it. His face also seems to be used only when absolutely necessary, meaning he frequently looks blank and lifeless in the face of dangerous situations, and this is the guy that we’re supposed to be rooting for. There’s also something that annoys me about his wiry facial hair that I can’t quite put my finger on…it looks like it was glued on, or something. Everything about him screams the opposite of “tough lead character in a mutant-zombie film”; “librarian” would be more the character that springs to mind.

I know, I know, these movies are often terrible and, to an extent, that’s their appeal. But as I said earlier, there has to be a line between “enjoyable bad”, and “just plain bad bad”, and this one tends to fit snugly in the latter category. It’s very rarely humorous, whether intentionally or not, and the kill scenes are largely thrown-together; as is everything else. Even Stelvio Cipriani’s score feels out-of-place, and he’s usually pretty reliable: it might be a pretty decent score, just not for this film. It’s not scary, it’s not adrenaline-pumping…it’s just a rather slow slog that never amounts to much. I guess in this regard, it might have more in common with the film than one would think.

RECAP: Nightmare City is that worst kind of horror film: one that’s so plainly godawful that it’s not even entertaining in a bad kinda way. The kill scenes are poorly-staged and terribly-edited, while the gore scenes are cheap and hokey. Makeup effects consist only of smearing mud on people’s faces, apparently, so even those are pure hokum. Even Stelvio Cipriani’s score feels like it was just thrown in randomly, and his music is usually pretty close to a sure thing. I really want to end this on a positive note, but I’m seriously struggling to even come up with a positive that I can justify. This movie does have a following, so fans of this kind of movie might like it, but I’m definitely not among its champions.

OVERALL RATING: 1.5/10

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The Green Inferno (2013)

Director: Eli Roth
Writer(s): Roth, and Guillermo Amoedo
Starring: Lorenza Izzo, Ariel Levy, Aaron Burns, and Daryl Sabara

I'm going to admit that I had read some discouraging things about Eli Roth's The Green Inferno, and they did not prepare me for a positive experience (the most discouraging thing, I think, being the name "Eli Roth" behind it). They also didn't prepare me for just how ugly this finished film is. But then again, what should anyone have expected from a film that was finished in 2013, and then resigned to sitting on a shelf for two years?

Lorenza Izzo plays Justine, a college student who listens to a lecture about genital mutilation in one of her classes, and is then motivated to make a difference in the world. Well, actually her motivations are kind of mixed: She has the hots for an activist leader named Alejandro, which leads her to accept an invitation to join his group. During the first meeting, she makes a joke that offends Alejandro, and is immediately ordered to leave. One would think this would be the end of things, but Jonah, another member, goes to apologize on Alejandro's behalf and smooths things over.

Alejandro's group is going overseas to protest deforestation of the Amazon, and of course Justine thinks it's a great idea to join them, having literally met the leader just a few days prior, when he chewed her head off for telling a joke. Her roommate, Kaycee, mercifully decides to stay at home because she thinks the trip is too dangerous. It's merciful because Sky Ferreira, who plays Kaycee, is absolutely godawful as an actress—her entire “chops” consist of painting her face with a permanent scowl, and disgustedly reciting her lines, which come out with zero conviction. Not that anyone else in the cast is Oscar-worthy, but all of them at least rise above Ferreira's nonexistent standards.

The group boards a small plane, with the trip largely funded by Carlos, a shady drug-dealer. This whole operations seems completely legit so far, so Justine has absolutely no reason to question her decisions about rushing into this whole affair. The plane is small, but it gets them safely to where they need to go; they take boats the rest of the way to their destination.

The group (I'm not going to name anyone else because all of them serve ignorant, stereotypical functions, i.e. the fat guy in love with Justine, the funny guy, the woman threatened by Justine's presence, etc. and all of them die anyway) dress up like the corporate workers, and chain themselves to trees. This catches the attention of a militia, who go to remove them from the premises—a tough task, given that they are locked up—while the protesters film every second. Poor Justine must have missed the week where they went over how to close a lock, because as she tries to shut it, one of the men removes her from the tree, and threatens to blow her head off. He probably would have gone through with it had he not been reminded of all the cameras around. Faced with the fact his murder would be livestreamed to thousands of people, he relents, and instead all of them are put on a plane back home (after Carlos pays them off).

I'm not sure if Eli Roth is unsure of how the world works, or if he's attempting to mock it, but within the few minutes it takes for them to get put on the plane, their live video has not only gone viral, but they successfully stopped the loggers from ruining the forest. So let that be a lesson to you kids: All it takes to make a difference in today's society is a group of ten like-minded people, a video recorder, and ten minutes.

Anyhoo, one of the engines malfunction, and the plane goes down. Carlos and a couple of others-- including the co-pilot, who is decapitated--die during the crash; the rest are all uninjured, finding themselves in a section of the Amazon that they are not familiar with. Within mere minutes, all of them are either killed or captured by an indigenous tribe that does not appreciate them encroaching on their territory, no matter how unplanned it might have been. They are kept like animals in a wood cage, before being summoned, one-by-one, to the tribe leader, who decides their fates. Some get tired of waiting and try to escape, with expected results. And that's pretty much it.

I don't know if the issue is more Eli Roth's directing or writing incompetence, but Green Inferno is a mess from the beginning. The characters are entirely unlikable, if only for the reason we've seen them in dozens of movies, dozens of times. There's no attempt to even rationalize something as simple as why they're fighting for the causes they fight for—they're simply doing it because it is a convenient way for them to get stuck in the Amazon. It suffers from outright laziness, too: there's no point to any of this, besides watching cardboard characters meet graphic ends. This is the kind of movie for which I could give zero stars to and have no qualms over; in fact, it's the kind of film for which that rating is reserved for.

And yet, I can't. Everything is just so poorly planned and executed that The Green Inferno manages to be a special kind of entertaining, at least in parts. Part of the fun is debating as to whether or not Eli Roth is actually as stupid as he makes himself appear to be by making this film: any scene that doesn't involve graphic gore is treated with a complete lack of interest or concern. I get that this is a throwback to Italian Cannibal films like Cannibal Holocaust, but whereas that one at least had the creativity to pre-date the “found footage” horror subgenre by twenty years, and supposedly has some pointed things to say about the media (or not, depending on who you ask), The Green Inferno is just lowest-common-denominator garbage for indiscriminate horror fans.

Take the scene, for instance, where a female character dies. The group gets the idea to shove a bag of weed down her throat, so that when the villagers cook her body, they will inevitably get high. That Roth apparently thought this was even remotely a valid idea speaks to the ridiculousness of the entire premise; the fact that it works, with cooking vapors getting all 200 villagers completely stoned to the point of keeling over, shows that marijuana is another thing that Eli Roth doesn't quite understand.

At the very least, it gets one thing right: The blood is done entirely via practical effects, and are appropriately stomach-churning. It also pulls no punches: eyes are removed, limbs are hacked off, arrows penetrate necks, throats are slit, and CGI spiders start to eat a man, and then promptly disappear. In the case of all but the latter, they are impressively done, with what I would consider to be an “NC-17” level of spraying blood, if the MPAA was serious about using that rating for anything other than quick flashes of flaccid weiners, or graphic scenes of couples doing things that come naturally from within human nature.

But for all its incredible violence, it somehow doesn't have the guts to stray from the well-trodden horror formula: There's the last-minute reprieve of the main character from a grisly fate (a foreshadowing from one of the film's first scenes), and even the assisted escape by a small member of the tribe. It's formulaic shlock that undermine's Roth's apparent need to be considered an “edgy” director; by the end, the most shocking thing about The Green Inferno isn't the blood and guts, but rather the formulas that he is too afraid to subvert.

RATING: 1.5/10

TRAILER

Body Snatchers (1993)

Director: Abel Ferrara
Writer(s): Stuart Gordon, Dennis Paoli, and Nicholas St. John, from a screen story by Raymond Cistheri and Larry Cohen, and a novel by Jack Finney
Starring: Gabrielle Anwar, Meg Tilly, Terry Kinney, and Billy Wirth

I have to confess that I have not seen either of the other “body snatcher” films (both of which go by the name Invasion of the Body Snatchers, rather than this abbreviated title): the 1956 original, or the 1978 remake. From what I understand, that actually makes me the target demographic for Abel Ferrara’s “modern update”, which is a term that generally means the special effects are updated, while everything else just goes to shit. In this case, that assumption would be accurate.

Marti Malone is a teenage girl, and also the unnecessary narrator of the story. She is traveling with her family to an army base in Alabama, because her father, Steve, works for the EPA, and has been sent there to run tests on the water system. Along with Steve and Marti, we have Andy, Marti’s young brother, and Carol, the required “hated stepmother” stereotype. The trip gets off to a pretty ominous start when, in the restroom of a gas station along the way, a man dressed in military fatigues holds Marti at knifepoint, and warns her that “they attack you when you’re sleeping”, to paraphrase. She screams and tells her parents about the incident, but of course the soldier is miraculously gone by the time they get there.

The rest of the trip goes without occurrence, and they arrive at the military base a short while later. While everyone else is helping to put things away, Marti goes for a little stroll—and ends up trespassing in a restricted area. She is about to turn around and go home when up rolls Jenn Platt in a fancy car. The two have never met, but true-to-movie form Jenn orders Marti into the car, she complies, and now they are automatically friends. We learn that Jenn is the daughter of the base commander, and so she can basically run around with impunity.

Andy, meanwhile, gets the feeling that something is wrong, after all of the other kids at the base fingerpaint the exact same picture during daycare. He attempts to run away from the base, but is picked up by young, attractive Tim (that will come in handy soon), a chopper pilot (that will come in handy later) who returns him to his home, and catches the eye of Marti. Things don’t get any better for that poor kid, when that night, he has the misfortune of witnessing his mother decompose right before his eyes, while a “replacement” steps out of the closet. This is how the “body snatchers” work: As the random man in the gas station bathroom told Marti, they wait until the victim is sleeping, then slip long tentacles into every facial orifice they can. That data seems to be transmitted to a pod, which then replicates an exact human clone after a few minutes, which then hatches. And once the replica is complete, the old body basically “deflates” away. The “body snatchers” are imperceptible from their human counterparts, except for one telling difference: they cannot show emotion.

This leads me to a pretty dumb flaw in the movie’s logic: in order to trick them, all you have to do is not show emotion. That’s it. You would think that such an advanced species—one that can completely create a perfect replica of a human being in just a few short minutes—would give the replicas the ability to sense whether or not someone is an actual real human, or one just suppressing their feelings, but they can’t. Then again, many zombie movies feature humans that merely have to shamble and “act dead” in order to blend in, so it must merely make an easy writing device.

I think we can all tell what’s going to happen from here: the “disease” quickly spreads, and it’s up to the remaining survivors to put a stop to it. Of course, we know Tim doesn’t die because he’s the only one that can operate a chopper, and Marti doesn’t die simply because she’s the main female lead, and they never seem to die. Other than that, I won’t reveal the many twists and turns, just in case you actually plan on sitting through this.

There are some effective ideas and sequences at play here, which prevent this from being a complete waste of time. The inhuman screams of the clones, used to alert others when humans are nearby, is actually pretty chilling. It loses its impact the more often it gets used, but the first time is especially creepy. And even though I complained about the ease with which the replicas can be fooled, I did kind of like the way they attempt to figure out who is human, by saying something incredibly mean or sad and waiting for a reaction. The way they prey on human emotion in this regard is pretty unique. The updated effects are pretty good, too, though a lot of the themes (and ideas) were put to much better use in the underrated The Hidden. The cast is also largely above average, with Forest Whitaker, in a small role as Major Collins, and Terry Kinney as the father, Steve Malone, in my opinion the best of the bunch.

The reality that a major Hollywood remake is braindead certainly comes as no shock, but what is surprising is the name attached to it: Abel Ferrara. I’ve not seen a whole lot of his filmography, but he has long been known as a director who pulls no punches (reportedly, his own wife walked out of a screening of his incredibly violent gangster epic King of New York, along with about forty others). In Ms. 45 he tells the tale of a woman who is raped twice in one day, and gets her revenge by seducing men and then shooting them to death, while The Addiction draws parallels between vampirism and drug addiction. This isn’t a man who generally takes the easy way out, so it was shocking to see that he made such a predictable, largely soulless picture.

But then again, maybe it doesn’t come as much of a surprise after all: we all need a paycheck, and I’m sure this provided Mr. Ferrara the artistic freedom to make his next few pictures. If that was his motivation, then I guess I can’t really fault him for that.

RECAP: It’s nowhere near great, but it’s short, and has enough cool effects, creepy scenes, and good acting to make it a decent timewaster. I’ve not seen the two previous adaptations of Jack Finney’s novel, both of which went under the longer title Invasion of the Body Snatchers, so I can’t compare this to either of them, but standing on its own merits, it’s a pretty predictable cash grab that serves as yet another curiosity in director Abel Ferrara’s abrasive filmography.

RATING: 5/10

TRAILER

Dead of Night (1945)

Directors:
Alberto Cavalcanti ... (segments "Christmas Party", "The Ventriloquist's Dummy") (as Cavalcanti)
Charles Crichton ... (segment "Golfing Story")
Basil Dearden ... (segments "Hearse Driver", "Linking Narrative")
Robert Hamer ... (segment "The Haunted Mirror")

Writers: John Baines & Angus MacPhail, from an original story by H.G. Wells, E.F. Benson, John Baines, and MacPhail. Additional dialogue by T.E.B. Clarke.

Starring: Mervyn Johns, Roland Culver, Mary Merrall, Googie Withers, Frederick Valk, Anthony Baird, and Sally Ann Howes

Dead of Night is a British horror anthology from the ‘40s, and while it isn’t the first such film, it’s widely considered one of the greatest. What really piqued my interest was its inclusion in several “scariest movies of all time” lists, where it usually ended up ranking high; if there is a more surefire way to get me to want to see a movie, I’m not aware of it. I’m always looking for that rare movie to frighten me; I figure it has an even greater chance if it’s a smaller, more obscure movie, rather than one where all the secrets have been divulged to me before I even see it (i.e. The Exorcist, The Shining, etc.)

The set-up for Dead of Night is rather smart, especially for a film of its time: rather than falling back on the more typical set-up of merely having a set of people tell stories, the main story serves as a framing device, which links all of the tales together. It’s a pretty fascinating way for everything to unfold, and ensures there’s not an ounce of wasted film time…every moment is part of a full narrative that features a resolution, with the ending bringing everything we have seen together with a kind of cool effectiveness.

It all begins with Walter Craig, an architect, arriving at a farmhouse. He is there hoping to get some work, but right from the outset something is terribly wrong. Even though he has never met any of the six other people gathered in the house, he already knows who they are. He even knows there will be a seventh person arriving, a brunette woman, who will make a comment about how she is broke, an event that comes true.

His eerie premonition inspires other guests to describe their eeriest, unexplained moments. After each story, Dr. Van Straaten, a part of the group, attempts to analyze their stories, and put to rest their confusion by explaining away the mystery using science, circa 1945. But even he has a story that defies all logic…

The stories range from just a couple of minutes long, to around twenty minutes, or so, with the final tale seeming to take the longest amount of time, aside from the main story (I didn’t time them, so it’s pure speculation on my part). In the first, as told by Hugh Grainger, a man has an eerie premonition of a mysterious hearse driver; in the second, as told by young’n Sally O’Hara, a girl playing hide and seek at a Christmas party stumbles upon a young crying child that none of her friends are familiar with; the third finds a woman surprising her husband with a mirror, only to find that it may be cursed from a previous owner; the fourth, which is the only one that doesn’t involve a character from the farmhouse, is a tale told about two golfers, and close friends, who settle their feud over a woman with a round of golf; and the fifth, and perhaps most well-known of the bunch, finds a ventriloquist who might be controlled by his own dummy.

The quality of each piece varies wildly, with the golfing story focusing more on humor, and feeling totally out of place here (especially considering it doesn’t feature any of the characters in it; it’s merely an account of a story told by someone who heard about it). There’s also the small little problem that none of them are even remotely scary, though the ventriloquist’s tale does manage some effective eeriness that’s sorely missing from the rest. It doesn’t help that the narratives in here have been copied so many times (either as a direct result from this film, or just from literature in general) that all of them are predictable, pretty much right from the onset.

The end of the main story, and framing device, should have been painfully obvious to me (and will be to some), but I thought it did a good job of tying everything together. I also have to give some major props to the ending of the ventriloquist piece, which clearly had a direct influence on the ending of the “Drop of Water” sequence in Mario Bava’s Black Sabbath, which in my opinion is far and away the best horror anthology film ever made, and one of the best horror films of all time, period. Somehow, I missed this connection the first time I saw this, but all the pieces are obviously there.

I also feel the need to give the film a little extra credit for helping to kickstart the anthology film. Many others that followed owe their inspiration to Dead of Night in one way or another, and the use of a framing device to tie all of the separate stories together was a nice little touch. Unfortunately, time has not been kind to the individual stories, leaving Dead of Night to be a rather dull sludge overall.

RECAP: It’s technically well made, and was probably a lot more effective in the ‘40s, but time has not been kind to Dead of Night, which is a collection of six mostly horror-themed tales (aside from the lighthearted and misplaced “golfer story”) and all enveloped by the main story, which ties everything together. Frequently cited as one of the scariest movies of all time (appearing on Martin Scorsese’s list of such films, no less), I thought it was rather dull and meandering, with many of the stories utterly predictable and straightforward. It does have a solid ending, though upon inflection it should have been pretty obvious the whole way. But its main endearing quality, at least as far as I’m concerned, is for visually influencing the classic segment “Drop of Water” in Black Sabbath, Mario Bava’s infinitely better horror anthology that would be made almost exactly twenty years later.

RATING: 4.5/10

OLD MAN FROM TCM TALKS ABOUT DEAD OF NIGHT

(Cannot find a single trailer for this movie.)