Always Shine (2016)

Director: Sophia Takal
Writer(s): Lawrence Michael Levine
Starring: Mackenzie Davis, Caitlin FitzGerald, Lawrence Michael Levine, and Khan Baykal

There were some rumblings about Always Shine when it was making its rounds through the festival circuit, where it seemed to be getting plenty of hype; I had forgotten all about it, and pegged it more as a drama, until it showed up to stream on Shudder, a horror-only streaming service. This once again drew my interest back into the project. One night, the wife and I decided to watch a movie, narrowed it down to two options, still couldn't make a final decision, and let a coin toss decide. Always Shine it was.

This is a bizarre little film that seems to owe almost its entire identity to David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, a fitting irony for a film that is so concerned with identity. But whereas that was made by a master director arguably at the top of its craft, Always Shine was made by someone at the opposite end of the spectrum: a director who has only one other feature-length film to their credit. Oh, and it's a woman. Bet you can't name three female directors not named Kathryn Bigelow! This is the kind of mountain women in the film industry face.

Always Shine begins with Beth performing an audition for a horror movie, during which she is informed that there will be a substantial amount of nudity required for her character. She is hesitant, and it is clear that she is not interested in doing that again (we later learn she has gotten naked in virtually every part she has accepted), but she cannot say “no”, and so she accepts. She is actually like this throughout life, a pushover who is incapable of letting out her true feelings; from this we can gather she's been walked on her entire life.

Next, we are introduced to Anna. She is also auditioning for a role in which she is angry that a mechanic did extra work without asking her first, and now wants to charge her an extra $300. In the film's only clever twist, it turns out this is not an audition after all, but her actually in a car shop yelling at the mechanic. From this, we learn that Anna is fierce and confrontational, the exact opposite of Beth.

So, of course, they are good friends who are planning a weekend getaway. They had fallen out of touch with each other a while back, but want to make amends and regain the relationship they once had. Only, it seems something is aloof right from the outset: both girls are insanely awkward around each other, as if they've never met before. I guess this was just to show the length of time that they'd been out of touch, but it's weird that people that were once so close, can devolve into almost instant strangers just a few years later. I mean, it's awkward to the point that I'm surprised one of them doesn't just decide this outing is a bad idea, and back out.

Anyway, through a series of instances, we can tell that Anna is jealous of Beth; herself a struggling actress, she resents Beth for consistently landing roles and getting all the attention from men, and sees her success as a threat. Her hatred continues to reach fever pitch as she learns more and more about her former best friend: Beth resents her because she feels like Anna is a much better actress than her, and actually stalled on giving her agent Anna's portfolio, out of fear that Anna would upstage her. It doesn't take much imagination to figure that Anna will overhear all of this and get angry, which is what happens.

Beth finally decides she's had enough, and chases Anna out into the woods. We never see what happens, but all of a sudden Beth inherits Anna's personality. She cuts and dyes her red hair into blonde, and gets all the attention that she never got before. Anna makes fleeting appearances...or does she? They are quick, almost ghost-like, in which she disappears just as quickly as she arrived. Is it a manifestation of Beth's guilty mind? Or have they really switched personalities?

The entire finale feels ripped out of the David Lynch handbook, complete with deja vu and flashbacks, as the two girls reverse their roles, and the film goes for a dreamlike atmosphere. The events leading up to the end are largely convincing in their gradual intensity, though, thanks mainly to the performances of Mackenzie Davis (as Anna; you may remember her as the nerdy lesbian in the wildly popular Black Mirror episode “San Junipero”) and Caitlin FitzGerald (as Beth), the two best friends. What is less convincing, though, is how they were ever friends to begin with.

This is just an example where too much ambiguity seems to sabotage the results. What starts off as a rather intriguing character study between two friends, abandons reality for its surrealistic ending, and suffers for it. Why be weird when there's no reason to be? A further annoyance is the relationship between the two characters: I mentioned that the actors give it their all, and they really do, but they are let down in the writing department because their characters never feel like more than bitter enemies. Even in the early scenes of them on their way to Big Sur (their destination spot), there is an unspoken tension between them that kind of hinders the rest of the proceedings: If someone is that bizarre from the outset, why would you follow through by voluntary quarantining yourself with them in a beach house somewhere for an entire week? I guess it just goes to show you how complacent Beth is, but it's agonizing for the viewer, who has to watch two annoying characters out-complain one another.

I think director Sonia Takal has a great understanding of pace—it all happens at a believable, perfect clip—but by having everything feel false from the outset doesn't really make us want to invest in any of these characters. They are simply two people who label themselves as friends, but who secretly (to themselves, anyway) feel nothing but deep resentment for the other. The final “twist” into ambiguous dreamlike fantasy atmosphere is rather pointless, and feels artsy for the sake of reviving its--by this point--long-bored audience.

There are a lot of things to like here, just more things to dislike, and that's what makes Almost Shine...well...well-titled in more ways than one.

RATING: 5/10

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Burial Ground (1981)

Director: Andrea Bianchi
Writer(s): Piero Regnoli
Starring: Karin Well, Gianluigi Chirizzi, Simone Mattioli, and Peter Bark

I saw Burial Ground (aka Burial Ground: The Nights of Terror) once as a teenager, and was immediately enthralled by its complete lack of plot, which felt exactly like the kinds of films I was attempting to write in school right around that time. I was never much into the time required to fully flesh out characters, and so my scripts would usually require the action to start well before the tenth page, or else I would quickly lose interest in it (I actually lost interest in just about all of them regardless...out of dozens of attempts, I only finished two or three, and they are awful by today's standards). Sure enough, here we are treated to a brief (five minutes or so) introduction that ever-so-vaguely hints at a cause for the ensuing zombie outbreak, another five minutes (or so) featuring characters meeting in a villa, and then the rest of the movie is survivors vs. zombies in an all-out zombie apocalypse.

I kind of have to give it some credit for that, because once the zombies start rising, the film never slows down or eases up on the survivors, who all tend to stand around until the last possible moment before fleeing from the oncoming hordes. Unfortunately, that's about all I can give it, because, while it manages to be entertaining for long stretches (unintentionally, of course, but “entertaining” nonetheless), there's very little talent on either side of the camera.

It clearly takes its queue from the sudden international success of Lucio Fulci's Zombie (which, in turn, took its queue from the sudden international success of George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead). I've not made it a secret that I greatly admire Fulci's film--while still acknowledging it has more than its fair share of flaws—but what makes Fulci's vision work are the stupendous special effects. Sure, its characters are sublimely stupid, and unforgivably so, with the writers often having their characters stand “paralyzed with fear”, conveniently giving the incredibly-slow corpses time to shamble over and finish them off, but it worked because the make-up effects are still impressive to this day, while the gore effects just may be some of the best ever put to film.

Burial Ground is what would have happened had Fulci been a complete Z-grade director, with large chunks of screentime dedicated to lingering closeups of poorly made-up zombies slowly inching their way toward hapless victims, ear-piercing high-pitched synths often providing the sole musical backdrop for attack scenes (sounds made even more unbearable when seen in a theater, which I had the fortune of doing for the second viewing upon which this review is based). It has the feeling of a production that was shot and edited over the course of a single weekend, with only a day allotted for the atrocious English dubbing. The make-up effects, I suppose, are acceptable, but some of the zombies do look more humorous than scary, which offers up even more unintentional laughs. Meanwhile, the gore effects leave a lot to be desired, though many just consist of watching zombies tear out the insides of hapless victims, before gorging on their organs. It's appropriately disgusting, but the other effects are rare, generally weak and surprisingly tame.

The film would probably have slipped into complete cinematic limbo were it not for the random inclusion of a small child who is sexually obsessed with his mother. Played by 25-year-old Peter Bark, “Michael”, as he is known in the movie, has become a character of legend, with his likeness bearing T-shirts and other merchandise, even to this day. It shouldn't need to be said, but every sequence between Michael and his mother manages to be supremely uncomfortable, whether he's getting jealous as he watches her kiss his father (?), or attempting to feel her up as he makes out with her (?!); the infamous “climactic” scene between the two just may be one of the most nauseating scenes in movie history. (He does mostly redeem himself with one scene. Early on in the film, before the zombies attack, he grabs a random piece of cloth sitting on the floor, sniffs it, makes a weird face, shambles over to his mother, hands the cloth to her, and says, "Mother, this cloth smells of death!" I'd be lying if I didn't admit this is one of my favorite movie quotes of any film ever made.)

This is the kind of movie that will only appeal to a certain clique, and I cannot say that I am firmly entrenched within such a group. Sure, it has enough moments to keep you awake, but none of it could even remotely be classified as “gripping” or “suspenseful”. It's just an extreme cinematic cash grab, quickly written and shot so as to capitalize on the then-newfound explosion of the Italian zombie subgenre; seeing it in a theater only seems to heighten the amateurishness on display (while also magnifying the impact of the ridiculousness of it all). I have always admired it for its brazen lack of anything resembling a coherent story, but unfortunately when every other facet of the film suffers in a similar fashion, and the high point involves a weird-looking midget with a mommy fetish, there just isn't much there to recommend.

RATING: 3.5/10

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Train to Busan (2016)

Director: Sang-ho Yeon
Writer(s): Yeon
Starring: Yoo Gong, Soo-an Kim, Yu-mi Jun, and Dong-seok Ma

There are some movies that start off so ingeniously and unique that you just know they're going to be good; Yeon Sang-ho's Train to Busan is such a film. A man driving an urgent package to an urgent destination drops his phone and, while attempting to retrieve it, hits something in the middle of the road. It's a deer. He surveys the damage to the front of his truck, and looks a little upset, but the package is too important to care about anything else. He gets back in his car and drives off.

But the slow tracking shot back to the deer, along with the ominous swell to the soundtrack, tell us that something is not right. The animal is still, blood surrounding its body, just as we would expect. Then, it starts to twitch, then violently—and ever so awkwardly—jumps to its feet, the camera lingering closely on its face at which point what we already knew is explicitly verified: this deer might be moving, but it's not alive.

It's really quite an in-your-face open that sets you up for the “anything goes” world that you will be inhabiting for two hours. But there's also an ugly side to Train to Busan, one that's in direct contrast to the popcorn atmosphere that the film is trying to achieve. And it, too, is foreshadowed right from the outset.

In the very next scene we are introduced to Seok Woo, a businessman for a large corporation who seems deeply involved in his work. As it turns out, he is, to the point that he has to ask a coworker what to get his daughter for her birthday...after being reminded that tomorrow is, in fact, her birthday. Not surprisingly, we later learn, that selfish attitude is the main reason behind his impending divorce. Nothing in this movie can be that simple, though, so naturally, there's some collateral damage in this situation: their young daughter, who also happens to be celebrating her birthday the following day. And, of course, her only wish is for Seok to take her to Busan, to see her soon-to-be-estranged mother. Seok, ever the businessman, tries to use the “I'm too busy” excuse, but finally caves in to his daughter's request.

And that, even more than the occasionally amazing action scenes, becomes the film's trademark: It's all covered in a cloying saccharine coating, where every event feels like little more than a reason to beat us over the head with more emotion. Yes, we already get the strained relationship between father and child, because it's instantly made evident in several of the opening scenes. We already get that the child, who cannot be more than ten years old, is innocent, and sweet, and pure, and merely a victim of her father's workaholism. Yet the movie still rubs our noses in just how angelic the daughter is, even at the common sense cost of safety: After his father, a high-ranking executive, is tipped off about a route to avoid that would lead to guaranteed quarantine, she tries rushing off to tell everyone else. But when she is stopped, her father informing her that it's every man for himself in this scenario (a sad, but hard, truth), she accuses him of being selfish. Sure, stupid kid, it's only a good decision if you agree with it, even if your stupidity leads to the deaths of everyone around you, right? It's a movie that so desperately wants us to take it seriously, that it's impossible to feel anything but utter annoyance, especially as the painful outpouring of emotions continues to be a story device until the very end.

Now, don't take this rant the wrong way: there are movies that have successfully pulled off the difficult combination of emotion and horror. The Orphanage is a phenomenal example; it scared and moved me almost in equal measure. Even B-movies can do it: Trollhunter is unexpected proof of that, a film that had the audacity to “humanize” its monsters, something Hollywood would never have the guts to do. But the problem is the way Busan tries going about it: in the most formulaic, mundane ways imaginable. Each “heart-tugging” scene feels like it was ripped out of a Hallmark channel film, and with the same amount of conviction as you will find in those, which are themselves, tired retreads of one another.

Then there are the group of survivors, which are completely generic in mind and action. We already have “indifferent businessman who will change his ways and become a hero”, and “completely angelic little girl” covered, but there's also “popular cheerleader/athlete combo”, “rough-around-the-edges man who turns out to have a heart of gold”, his wife, who ticks the box marked “pregnant”, “homeless man who turns out to be okay after all”, etc., etc., etc. Bringing the groan-inducing cast of characters to completion is the “whiny rich man who will survive at all costs”; he also doubles as the film's central living villain, as if the overwhelming hordes of the undead aren't enough. It all becomes too much, and it eventually comes falling down under the weight of its own half-assed (though admittedly ambitious) ideas.

The title pretty much sums up the plot, in which a zombie outbreak befalls a train, leading the dwindling number of survivors to stay alive as long as possible against the growing hordes of the undead. That's it. And within this context, there are certainly some fantastic action sequences that show director Sang-ho Yeon can be a force to be reckoned with....no matter how much of a seasoned horror or action film fan you are, there's virtually guaranteed to be at least one scene that will drop your jaw to the floor. Along those same lines, I can't chastise him for lack of ambition, and many of the special effects are very well done. And the zombie movements, as well as their intense desperation to kill, are some of the best I've ever seen in a zombie movie, period.

It just becomes a problem when you're more dreading the obligatory banter between scenes, than you are looking forward to the action. And the longer that went on, the more I found myself disappointed with many of the “fight” sequences, which are largely bloodless (or only lightly bloodied), and in which it becomes clear just who the screenplay is favoring at any given time. If tired predictability is your favorite trait in a horror film, then you will have a great time riding this train; it's just an English-language audio track away from a multi-million dollar run at the multiplexes.

RATING: 5/10

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The Lure (2015)

Director: Agnieszka Smoczynska
Writer(s): Robert Bolesto
Starring: Marta Mazurek, Michalina Olszanska, Kinga Preis, and Andrzej Konopka

“Silver” and “Gold” are two attractive sister mermaids who survive by luring men into the waters with their beautiful singing voices, then killing and eating them. Actually, the “technical” term for such a creature is a siren; these mystical beings have existed in literature for probably about as long as bodies of water have existed in nature. But Agnieszka Smoczynska's The Lure isn't focused so much on the killings as it is focused on...dance music? Well, in case you weren't already aware, this sentence alone should give you enough clues to deduce that this is not an American film. And it's all the better for it.

When the film opens, Silver and Gold are about to kill the two male members of a musical group, when the piercing scream from the lone female member prevents them from following through. Curiously, the family decides to “adopt” the mermaids, bringing them to the Warsaw nightclub where they perform every night as the “Fig and Dates”. Their job is pretty simple: dance, sing, and strip to the music to entertain the clientele; for the big finish, they get into a big glass cup filled with water, their fish tails out for the whole world to see.

And that is one of the most refreshing aspects of The Lure: the girls' status as mermaids is never kept a secret. Oftentimes in films like this, the girls have to keep their true identity hidden, for fear of being “outed”; in this world, no one is frightened or disgusted by their mermaid appearance. In fact, all are quite thrilled by the sight of these two beautiful sea maidens. Also interesting is that there are no “villains” to speak of, no people who are determined to profit off their exploitation, or who are looking to harm them in any way; the girls are willing, eager participants in everything they do. Imagine that: female characters who are free to control themselves and their own destiny? What kind of world is this?

Instead, the movie is more focused on their relationships, both with each other, but also with those in the new world around them. Gold is more interested in luring men to their doom, chewing out their throats before feasting on their hearts. Silver, on the other hand, is smitten with the bassist of the “Fig and Dates”, and wants to pursue a relationship with him. In an homage to The Little Mermaid, she is given the chance to trade in her tail for human legs, at the expense of losing her voice. Not to be outdone, The Lure takes this idea one step further: If he kisses her but marries another, she has until daybreak the following day to eat him, or else she will turn into sea foam...quite literally.

So this makes for an interesting web of side stories, many of which are never really expanded upon to their full potential. There's the relationship between Gold and Silver over their “creative differences”; Silver's relationship with the bassist, who seems to be as grossed out by her as he is fascinated; the mermaids' relationship with their “adoptive family”, especially as the body count starts to rise. Then there's the cop that seems to witness Gold murdering an innocent man, sings a song about it, and then is completely forgotten. Watching it, one gets the feeling that writer Robert Bolesto suffers from a severe case of ADD. But at the very least, you can call The Lure many things, but "boring" is not one of them.

The leads are both fantastic, but I must confess to being completely smitten with Michalina Olszanska as Gold. She is a beautiful actress on her own, but the seductive looks she gives men as she attempts to entangle them in her murderous web—let's just say it's not a stretch to believe that she could lure a man to his death. It will be interesting to see the trajectory of her career, because she has the looks, and the talent to become an international star. Marta Mazurek reminds one of a younger Nikki Cox, and has the perfect look of innocence that lends credibility to her turn as the one looking for love.

Smoczynska's film is soaked in bright colors and neon lighting, and there's a freewheeling attitude that permeates almost every frame. It is unafraid to take chances, and does so with often reckless abandon, which leads to some severe unevenness. It's never boring, but it's not always as fun as it seems to think it is. The musical numbers are mostly bland and unmemorable (though a couple, including an upbeat number during a punk show, are fantastic), and the kill scenes are both relatively rare and ungraphic; if you were sold on the movie because you thought the focus would be on the murders, then you would do best to completely avoid it. Likewise if you are interested in the studio's synopsis, which is: “Two mermaid sisters become caught in a love triangle when they fall for the same man,” then you should probably avoid it as well, because that never happens.

I guess that just goes to show you just how difficult it is to categorize The Lure. If you like mermaids (or sirens) as my wife does (and myself by extension; her intense enthusiasm for the trailer is what heightened my own interest in it), then you should give this one a chance. If you like musicals, it's hit-or-miss for you, and ditto that if you're here for the horror aspects. It works best for audiences that go in looking to be assaulted with a freewheeling carelessness, and don't mind hitting quite a few bumps along the way.

RATING: 7/10

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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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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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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 Dead Next Door (1989)

Director: J.R. Bookwalter
Writer: Bookwalter
Starring: Pete Ferry, Bogdan Pecic, Michael Grossi, and Jolie Jackunas

For whatever reason, J.R. Bookwalter's The Dead Next Door was a mild obsession for me when I was still in high school, and that was before I'd ever even seen it. All I remember was that I was going through a zombie-movie phase (this was back in the late 90s or early 2000s, a few years before Hollywood got hold of the undead and ruined them forever), and would constantly visit the official website in my ninth grade keyboarding class. I honestly don't even remember how I initially heard about it, but I was a wannabe amateur filmmaker at the time, and so it wouldn't surprise me if I took to it because of its humble origins, as well as its ties to my home state.

The Dead Next Door was produced over the span of four years (also the timeframe it took for Peter Jackson to make Bad Taste) in Akron, OH, which is about two hours northeast of Columbus, the state capital and also the city in which I was born. It is known as one of the most expensive home movies ever made, a title it received because it was shot on Super 8 cameras, which were strictly consumer-grade, with director Bookwalter estimating that the total budget was a whopping $125,000 (a high figure, no doubt, but also kind of misleading, as it was raised in small increments over that entire span, so he never had more than a few thousand to work with at any given time). But what it lacked in financial resources, it made up for in sheer ambition: the film features an incredible 1,500 Ohio residents playing the part of zombies. That's pretty epic for what amounts to little more than an amateur film.

It also has some pretty great special effects, but the two footnotes to this claim are: 1.) it also features some terrible special effects, and 2.) a majority of the better ones are used up within the first thirty minutes, meaning there's a dwindling amount of reasons to keep watching as the minute count goes up. However, it's still amazing to see what Bookwalter was able to do with such a subpar video format, as well as very limited resources—some of the effects, especially the neck bites, still look impressive even today, and were pulled off by a special effects team with no notable names (at least none that I recognize).

Well when you're working with a shortage of resources, there has to be a trade-off somewhere; in other words, for every area that excels, chances are there will be more that suffer. In the case of The Dead Next Door, it's everything else. I had always had fond memories of this movie (which I bought on VHS when it was released) thanks to the copious amounts of bloodshed, and vaguely remembered the acting was bad, but I didn't remember just how shoddy all the other areas are: the story is rambling and pointless, biting off more than it can chew; “bad” doesn't even begin to describe the performances, which were worse than I remember, and range from terrible to positively atrocious; and no time or effort went into developing any of the film's many characters—even most of their names are simply plucked from the last names of popular horror film directors (Raimi, Commander Carpenter...you get the point).

I do feel kinda crass rating this on the same level as a polished feature; it's like trying an immature 12-year-old as an adult for a crime that he didn't even commit. But a bad movie is a bad movie no matter how it looks, or how epic the production might have been, or how ambitious the original idea was; and let's be honest here, The Dead Next Door is a godawful film. When blood isn't spurting, when the movie actually starts to believe that the story it's presenting us is one that's actually worth presenting, it's almost terminally-boring. Seen through these eyes—that even if the budget was tripled, or quadrupled, it still more than likely would have sucked—certainly makes me feel like less of an ass.

If this were a straightforward zombie film, where most of the budget was spent on the blood and gore effects (all of the “actors” worked for a deferred salary) we might have been on to something; for the first thirty-or-so minutes, that's essentially what we get, as members of the local “Zombie Squad” drive around, and attempt to thwart zombie attacks on the living. The leader of the gang is Raimi (Sam, the real-life namesake and director of the Evil Dead trilogy, was also the film's main financier, using his compensation for Evil Dead 2 to fund this one), who is supposed to be a no-nonsense tough guy, though his acting makes it hard to tell for sure. The other “ground members” are Mercer, Kuller, and Richards—during a routine call, Richards ends up getting bit, and so the crew is suddenly down to three.

There are other members of the squad: the scientists that are hard at work trying to figure out a way to kill the zombies. See, the undead here are rather unique in that: a.) they can run, and b.) they are impossible to kill. Now, “unique” here is used as a synonym for “uncommon”, because, like many facets of the film, it's an idea lifted directly out of another zombie feature: in this case, Return of the Living Dead. Still, it's a fascinating decision that gives Bookwalter and Co. the opportunity to try some pretty advanced effects; as I alluded to earlier, they don't always look convincing, but got to give them some points for trying. So the scientists, lead by Dr. Moulson, finally create a serum that speeds up the zombies' decomposition process, thus effectively killing them within a couple of hours.

Now here's where things really start to go a little overboard: Mercer is bitten and is used as a test subject for the new serum by Moulson. The problem is, Mercer isn't quite dead yet, so instead of decomposing him, it turns him into some sort of vengeance-seeking super-zombie; he can't run like the rest, but he can speak. This is a decision that once again bears problems for the production, because his voice is so low that it's often impossible to decipher his words, at least without cranking up the volume, which we never bothered to do. On top of this, there is a cult, lead by a Reverend Jones, who believes that the zombie invasion is God's will, and they will stop at nothing to put a stop to those, like the Zombie Squad, who are attempting to get rid of them. Even within this convoluted framework (another thing to keep in mind: all of this has to play out within a scant 78-minute duration), there are other subplots, like the paternity of one of the cultists, and frequent mention of a Dr. Bo, who created the zombie virus for reasons unknown, before being killed by his very creations.

It's all a hodge-podge of half-baked ideas, which is really what does the film in: not enough time is spent focusing on any of the major plot points, meaning the story just feels like an improvised, careless mess. Add this into the myriad of other problems that I have mentioned, and that means large portions of The Dead Next Door are dull. If it would have had the presence of mind to at least lessen its grand visions in one category, it would have been, at the very least, a serviceable film. Unfortunately, sometimes less really is more, and in the case of The Dead Next Door, more is unequivocally infinitesimal.

RATING: 3/10

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Inside (À l'intérieur) (2007)

Director: Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury

Writer(s): Maury and Bustillo, from a scenario by Bustillo
Starring: Alysson Paradis, Jean-Baptiste Tabourin, Claude Lule, and Beatrice Dalle

Inside, like many French horror films, plays out like an anti-thesis of the Hollywood picture. Whereas Hollywood horror consists of dumbing down ideas to cater to increasingly dull audiences, the French are consistently finding new ways to push the envelope. It doesn't always work (Ils springs immediately to mind), but you have to respect them for trying new things, instead of pandering to target demographics.

Inside is the pique of the French Horror New Wave; it is an unrelenting work of pure terror, and one of the greatest horror movies of the last twenty years, if not all time. On the one hand, it's ridiculously, graphically violent (it originally got an NC-17 rating and deserves every bit of it), and on the other, it revels in making the audience uncomfortable with scenes of almost unbearable tension. Yet, unlike so many other films that revel in the red stuff, it's not just out to shock its audience—the underlying story, while simple, manages to squeeze in a couple tender moments, before it starts going off the rails.

Generally speaking, one thing I've noticed is that horror movies with simple stories tend to be the most effective; Inside only heightens that theory. Sarah (Alysson Paradis) is still reeling from the car accident that claimed her husband, Mathieu, but that left her and her unborn child relatively unharmed. Flash forward four months. She is less than 24 hours away from having her child, when a bizarre woman known only as “la femme” (“The Woman”, and brilliantly played by Beatrice Dalle) breaks into her home. She waits until Sarah is asleep, then enters her room, armed with scissors...

And this kickstarts an epic fight between a mother, and the woman that desperately wants her child. This is the entire premise, but co-writers/directors Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury wring every ounce of possible suspense from the set-up...just when you think they've painted themselves into a corner, they find another way to catch you completely by surprise (one moment was so shocking I yelped and jumped at the same time, an incredibly-rare occurrence, then had to turn around and pick my wife's jaw up off the floor). As for the violence, it's plentiful, but it's never meant to be fun: Characters convulse, gasp for air, and cry for their mommy's before dying, and stuff like this only adds to the nauseating atmosphere.

Perhaps most impressive about all of this whole package, at least for the most part, its believability. I mean, obviously this has to stretch creative licensing a little bit for it to work (no neighbors can hear the gunshots in the dead middle of night, yet a police officer sitting outside in a car can?; why do the police never call for backup?; why does Sarah throw away a perfectly good gun in favor of a sharp object?; etc.), but the characters are refreshingly smart overall. There aren't any moments of “let's split up”, and the one time we think “La femme” has all-too-easily fooled two cops, we learn it's just a ruse on their part to try to catch her off-guard. It's sad when having sensible characters feels like a breakthrough, but such is the state of the horror film.

A word of warning that I probably shouldn't even have to waste my breath on: It's probably a good idea NOT to watch this if you are pregnant. My wife and I had seen this before, and I had a hankering to watch it again (it had been a couple years). Since my wife was around seven months pregnant, I assumed she wouldn't want to see it, but she assured me she did—and then spent the whole movie burying her face in her phone, audibly groaning during the brilliant “in the womb” sequences, and declaring afterwards that she will never watch the movie again. And this is coming from someone who quite possibly might revel in onscreen blood and gore even more than I do.

Anyone who has followed this blog for any length of time probably knows by now that I like to seek out movies that are different; that rise above the “status-quo” to show me things that I have never seen before. Movies that push the envelope, and at least attempt to shock, or get some kind of emotional rise out of me. Inside is exactly the kind of movie I'm always searching for, a film that dares you to look at, and stomach, its unending cruelty, then simultaneously dares you to look away. It is not after box office tickets, nor is it catering to teenagers in an attempt to fill multiplexes; at the same time, it's not out merely to shock or disturb. It's what a horror movie should be: a taboo-breaking, discomforting wreck of a film. It's fearless, it's unnerving, but above all it's made incredibly-well and with an abundance of talent, both in front of, and behind the camera, and that is why it's one of the greatest horror films of the past two decades. And probably beyond.

RATING: 9.5/10 

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Society (1989)

Director: Brian Yuzna
Writer(s): Rick Fry and Woody Keith
Starring: Billy Warlock, Devin DeVasquez, Evan Richards, and Ben Meyerson

Society had been on my to-watch list for about as long as I can remember Having enjoyed Return of the Living Dead 3, which he also helmed, as a teenager, I naturally traced his roots back to his one, his debut film. It's known for its ending, featuring a plethora of ooey-gooey special effects that wouldn't feel out of place in a Cronenberg feature, but then, like many other things it eventually just dropped off my radar. That is, until it made an appearance on a streaming service I use, at which point I rounded up my wife and we buckled ourselves in for a wild Friday night ride.

I always thought it was curious that any mention of Society would invariably wind up talking about the effects and not much else, but now I perfectly understand the reasons why: because the rest is just a typical '80s horror film. That probably strikes glee in the hearts of many, but I've personally always found it shortsighted to be loyal to films from a certain time period; I just don't understand the thought process behind it. I guess it's the cheese- and camp-factor that's present in a lot of them, and while that can make a film more enjoyable for obvious reasons, I'd much rather be enjoying a movie the way it was meant to be enjoyed, rather than adding the context of unintentional laughter.

My main qualm with Society is the ridiculousness of its singular, overblown premise, the gist of which can be summed up essentially in a single sentence: that the rich derive pleasures both from reveling in their own excesses, and for reveling in the things that “commoners” are without. And it goes through some rather painstaking lengths to make sure that there are no possible doubts that we, as viewers, could possibly misunderstand that. It's a heavy-handed approach that will probably alienate more viewers than it will inspire, and it certainly lost us.

Billy Warlock (who has since gone on to star in just about every soap opera ever produced for television) plays Bill Whitney, a man who lives in an upper-class home, with his rich upper-class parents, and rich upper-class sister. He feels the effects of his family's wealth in the world around him, like at his high school, where of course he runs around with the popular kids, and is a favorite for election as class president. It's almost as if his wealth has predetermined him to have an easy life, or something!

But Bill just doesn't feel like he belongs in that circle. He feels like he is an outsider, that his family isn't really his family, and that something isn't quite right with the other rich people that are constantly surrounding him. Unfortunately, he just can't quite seem to put his finger on it. Sessions with his therapist, Dr. Cleveland, don't seem to do much in the way of quelling his suspicions, and his paranoia and distrust of everyone around him is slowly magnified, until a family friend, and an ex-boyfriend of his sister, presents him with some clear-cut evidence.

His name is David, but he is known to friends as Blanchard. He functions as the typical “sidekick”, pudgy in appearance and with all the grace of a one-legged swan; since he is a “commoner”, he was forced to break off his relationship with Bill's sister, making him the frequent butt of jokes for the rich. He also felt that something wasn't right, so he set up a microphone to record his sister's “coming out party”, something I had never heard of, but that is apparently a real thing rich families do. He presents the recorded evidence to Bill, who of course is at first outraged that this low-class peasant would spy on his family, but all it takes is a brief listen before he realizes his worst fears have been realized: her “coming out party”, which sounds like something gay and lesbian couples will have in the future after announcing their sexual preference, quickly degrades into a disturbing psychosexual orgy.

Not long after this, and as horror fans are already expecting, poor whistle-blowing Blanchard winds up dead in a mysterious single-car accident. Those pesky rich folk using their considerable powers to make the innocent, and the middle- and lower-class, suffer! Where do they get such nerve? Oh yes, from a society that not only condones their behavior, but seems to actually encourage it. Of course!

Some other stuff happens: Bill has sex with Clarissa, a rich girl that he is starting to like; we meet Clarissa's mother, a large mute woman who has a strange obsession with hair; Bill accepts an invitation from his opponent for class president for a secret meeting, only to discover that he has been killed, too; and Bill spends some time in a mental hospital, which is an obligatory plot-stop in a film where a character is regarded as crazy, just so we understand how crazy everyone around him thinks he is.

And all this sets up the film's finale, in which Bill is held captive in his own home, and forced to watch as Blanchard (who did not die after all) is attacked by the rich, who literally feed off of him, their limbs entering his skin and their bodies intertwining with him in a special effects sequence (by Screaming Mad George) that is impressive both in its scope, and execution. Thankfully, Bill avoids this certain fate by fighting a rich boy, and then getting help from Clarissa, who overcomes her rich lifestyle to realize that she is also developing feelings for Bill. See, who says true love can't cross financial classes?

Society is a tired film, and I can't even recommend it for the effects work, as great as they are, because we had lost pretty much all interest in the film by that point. It's evident that it's striving to be a hallucinogenic, surrealistic nightmare, with dead characters that seem to magically “return to life”, but the atmosphere and images never quite match with its ideology. In the end, it just feels like your standard attack on elitist culture that doesn't bring anything unique or interesting into the fold. It bludgeons us with the same tired cliches of class warfare over and over again, hoping that it's enough to keep viewers entertained until it gives us its grand finale, but it is just a one-dimensional film that flatlines about an hour in, and is dead on arrival by the end.

RATING: 4/10

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Kill List (2011)

Director: Ben Wheatley
Writer(s): Wheatley, and Amy Jump
Starring: Neil Maskell, MyAnna Buring, Harry Simpson, and Michael Smiley

I had heard a lot of positive things about Kill List—which ended up being its first red flag. More often than not, critics, who are generally paid to critique more mainstream fare, and I are not anywhere near a common wavelength. I will say as more “extreme” cinema seems to be heading toward approval of the masses, this line seems to be shrinking a little bit, and all the popular critics are watching things they probably would have avoided twenty years ago, but the general critique still stands.

However, that would not have, in and of itself, lead me to postpone a screening of Kill List for as long as I have (a little over a year now, if I recall correctly). No, what really turned me off were the constant comparisons to A Serbian Film, which is one of the most abhorrent pieces of trash I have ever seen (and as of this writing, the only film I’ve ever scored a “zero”). That whole project just feels like two middle school students filming the most vile things they could concoct, simply to gross one another out; only, the end result is childish and laughably bad. Of course, it defends itself by claiming to be a social commentary about how the citizens of Serbia are being treated. But I highly doubt they’re being forced to pay to watch amateurish rubble passing itself off as higher art every day of their lives, so they should at least be thankful for that.

Much to my delight, it only took me a couple of minutes to realize that comparison is completely misguided; Kill List is competently written, and actually contains a story! And what a story it is, as it patiently unfolds: Jay is a hot-tempered loser who hasn’t had a job in eight months. This creates (understandable) friction between him and his wife, Shel, especially since they have a ten-year-old son, Sam.

One night, Jay and Shel invite over Jay’s good friend Gal for an evening of alcohol-induced fun. He brings his shady, creepy girlfriend Fiona with him. The night gets off to an awful start after Jay loses his temper, and storms upstairs; Shel follows him and they have a screaming match so bad, that it’s Gal who has to put their child to bed. But after a few glasses of wine, all returns to normal, with Shel and Jay joking and laughing with Gal and Fiona. Then Fiona does something strange, sneaking away to carve a half-anarchy symbol into the back of their bathroom mirror, then stopping to take some bloodied tissue that Jay used to mop up his blood after cutting himself earlier in the day.

As the night wears on, we find the true reason Jay invited his friend over—they’re hitmen getting back into the field, and they’re about to learn the three people that they have been assigned to kill…and this is where I’ll be dropping my readers off, because from this point on, the more you learn on your own, the better. All I will give you, to entice those with similar bloodlust to my own, is that the murders start off relatively tame, but steadily increase in brutality—this also serves as fair warning to the squeamish.

Director Ben Wheatley proves himself adept at wrenching suspense and tension from monotonous activities: for example, I was getting nervous before Jay and Gal entered the home of an intended victim, my hands clamming up as if I was the one tasked with carrying out the murder. He also succeeds by adding weird little scenes here and there; such as the one where Fiona carves the symbol into the back of the mirror. These scenes tell you that something isn’t quite right, without resorting to cheap scare tactics, and it becomes successful in evoking a near-constant state of dread.

I will admit that, just from hearing comparisons to Serbian Film, and noticing that there were only minor similarities throughout (a broke man who will do almost anything for cash), I knew there had to be a scene that tied everything together—and that is how I deduced exactly what would happen in the ending. It definitely feels a lot less forced here, but it’s still far from the revelation the filmmakers intended. Actually, the whole movie takes kind of a dive in the last fifteen minutes, or so, with a kind of change in tone that many have commented feels like it belongs in an entirely different movie. I didn’t think it was out of place so much as just completely unnecessary—the more I dwelled on it, the less and less I liked it. It certainly doesn’t ruin the movie, nor does it come close, but it definitely lessens the impact that a more “original” shock ending might have had (so does the cute scene that foreshadows the ending; it’s like Wheatley felt the need to include everything he learned in film school, regardless of its effect on the overall movie).

I can definitely lay to rest the notion that this is even anywhere near the same ballpark as A Serbian Film (which is a very, very good thing), but I’ll also be crossing off the idea that this is a great horror film. It’s a pretty good one, and worthy of your time, but it’s done in by a pretty lame ending, and, for a film that seems to want to be so extreme, a startling adherence to straightforward storytelling—with the possible exception of the ending, everything else is pretty predictable and just feels like the plot is moving from point A to point B.

RECAP: It’s not nearly as bad as the comparisons to A Serbian Film (one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen) would lead you to expect; quite the contrary, director Ben Wheatley actually shows some competence in the writing department, slowly building his story up to some truly heinous scenes of violence. Then he decides to run on autopilot, coming up with an ending that not only fails to be as revelatory as he was hoping, but that undoes a lot of the mystery and tension he proved so adept at wringing from his story in the earlier parts. Still, it manages to be fascinating, has some pretty good performances (not to mention the stunningly beautiful MyAnna Buring in a main role), and enough gore to satisfy bloodhounds. Worth a watch, but well short of any sort of classic.

RATING: 6/10

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