Tag Archives: horror

Prince of Darkness

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My horror movie podcast I mentioned watched a gory Satan movie, which meant in this case a John Carpenter movie I don’t think I ever knew had existed, Prince of Darkness. See, Father Loomis finds a dead priest from the previously secret Brotherhood of Sleep, about whom even the Vatican knows nothing, and who has had a secret basement under a church (in LA? They probably never say it’s LA, but it looks very LAish, despite the incongruity of the remainder of my sentence) for the last 2000 years or so, containing a book full of dozens of ancient languages with prophecies and anachronistic mathematical equations, and also an enormous glass cylinder full of swirling green light[1].

So naturally he calls upon a theoretical physicist to gather an elite crew of scientists and grad students to hang out for the weekend to figure out what’s going on, only there’s an implausible relationship between A.J. Simon[2] and a redhead with a truly terrible haircut, an unlikely all-day astronomical phenomenon, and a gathering swarm of homeless people led by Alice Cooper, all getting in the way.

I have to say, this movie starts weird. The credits went on forever, while Father Loomis investigated the dead priest’s possessions, Victor Wong (the uncle from Big Trouble in Little China) ominously explained to what should not have been a freshman survey course that the physical world is not what they think it is (because of how subatomic particles behave, I think?), and A.J. stalked or (if I’m being generous) pined for the redhead. But even after the credits finally ended, the “we’re not done with the opening credits yet” synth music soundtrack kept on throbbing for fully 30 minutes before Carpenter finally decided that we were finished with the setup phase and ready to find out what was going on, or at least he was tired of listening to all of the grad students and scientists and theologians and ancient language experts ask each other what was going on.

Then a lot of things happened for the rest of the movie that I will not spoil, except to say that if you told me this movie inspired the guy with the crazy hair on Ancient Aliens, I would not be the least bit surprised.

Maybe Carpenter’s weakest film, and yet it had a certain charm.[3] Recommended mainly if you want to see him give work to people you’ve seen in his films before, or if you want to hear probably the greatest Christianity origin story you will ever hear.

[1] The basement, not the book.
[2] Will anyone understand this antediluvian reference? Doubtful!
[3] No pun, even though I understand that the only reason the movie exists is he’d just read a bunch of books on theoretical physics and wanted to make a movie about them.

Scream VI

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The Scream movies have always been extremely meta. So by the time you’ve gotten to the sequel of the reboot sequel (requel, apparently?), well, there’s no way to be surprised at just how far up its own ass the movie, nay, the franchise, has crawled. Which, I hasten to clarify, is not necessarily a bad thing. I, for example, am still not allergic to the tightening gyre of Gen-X self-reflection, nor will I judge harshly any movie that stabs quite so many people quite so many times.

There’s just one problem with Scream VI, which I must unfortunately put underneath the spoiler tag.

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Braindead

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That horror discussion podcast by the people who make Welcome to Night Vale watched Dead Alive, an early Peter Jackson film that I’d never seen, and so here we are.

Honestly, I have very little to say. Except for the fact that Army of Darkness came out a year later, I would say this movie was heavily influenced by that one. …but it is probably fair to say it was influenced by Evil Dead 2, so, kind of the same thing in some ways. I was also thinking that the precipitating scene on Skull Island was funny, in that they used the King Kong island name for their insufficiently spooky setting to catch a monkey with a zombie disease amidst cliched natives. But no, Jackson is on record for loving King Kong well enough to make its second remake, so, that actually tracks.

I could probably go on, but really what this reads as is a movie made by someone without a lot of budget[1] but with a lot of love for schlock cinema. It certainly doesn’t have the polish of The Frighteners, is nowhere near the seriousness of Heavenly Creatures, and doesn’t have the budget that the Tolkien-based movies spent on fireworks alone. But you can still see the talent underlying it all. And bravo on whoever saw that talent in prospect rather than retrospect and gave him more money for the next thing he made. It worked out pretty well.

Oh, um, other than forward and backward looking influences, I’ve said nothing. It’s basically a horror movie that aspires to be a romantic comedy, except the hero’s mother keeps getting in the way. …I had intended to say more, but, no, that really sums it up.

[1] And most of it spent on building WETA[2] so they could do a little stop motion animation, with all the funds left over going to several industrial barrels full of gore.
[2] I have no idea when WETA happened, so don’t quote me on this timeline in wikipedia or anything.

The Mortuary Collection

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Sometimes movies are extremely basic, but in a good way, so you have fun, which in turn makes it almost a bad way after all, because at least if it weren’t fun you’d have something negative to say instead of practically nothing at all. Enter The Mortuary Collection, in which Clancy Brown runs a, you know, mortuary, while wearing what seemed to me to be an unnecessary amount of old guy makeup. He looked 60 when he was 20, and if he still only looks 60 now, how old does a mortician need to look?

Anyway, this blonde girl shows up in response to the help wanted sign right after a child’s funeral, and they discuss her qualifications for the job, which for some reason means he starts telling implausible morality plays about the ways denizens of the town of Raven’s Hollow (where the mortuary resides) have died. Which is to say: anthology movie! …if the title didn’t give that away already, I mean.

The stories themselves were decent if mostly predictable, and the wrapper story was pretty good as well, even if the ending was a bit inexplicable. Also, exploding penis, which is not a thing you see every day.

30 Days of Night

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Here’s another movie I watched for podcast purposes. I’m in like August of 2020 right now on all my podcasts, and you can see how this is going to be a problem for me. Also, though, it’s not perfectly fair to say I watched 30 Days of Night. See, it was on last week[1] while I was working, and this usually works out fine for me, subtitle movies excepted. Do I miss some fine plot points of my TV shows and random horror movies on shudder? Sure, maybe! But I know what’s going on, and if I don’t I run things back and rewatch and pay closer attention for a while. No problem! Or if I realize that haha no it’s actually that complex, I watch it while not at work instead.

But this time… I just could not bring myself to care. Like, I thought I knew what was up. Northern Alaska, dead of winter[2], axial tilt means no sunrise for, let’s say, thirty days? All of which equals vampires! And so there’s this initial rush of people dying, and you have survivors, and it was all making sense, until at some point I realized that it was already halfway through the month even thought I thought it was still the first, er, night. Calendar night. You know. And maybe if I’d gone back then it would have been okay, but I figured no problem at least now I know how things are going, but then time kept jumping[3], and I kept not caring enough about the characters to try to keep up, and finally at the end, well, it was a perfectly cromulent ending I guess and ultimately I still really don’t care that I maybe probably don’t actually know what happened in the movie?

So, uh… meh.

[1] two weeks ago? I bet you can already tell where this is going based on that uncertainty alone.
[2] a) get it? b) good boardgame tho
[3] This is based on a graphic novel [series?] that I’ve never read before, and I wonder if this was the source of the time jumps. (Or alternately maybe there were not any particular time jumps, and I was just paying even worse attention than I assume.)

Black Sheep (2006)

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You know how sometimes the plot of a movie goes in so many different directions that you can tell the person (or more likely “people”, and probably in serial rather than parallel) had no idea what they were doing, and just kept throwing anything and everything at the wall to see what would stick, with the result that basically nothing sticks and the movie makes no sense whatsoever?

Apparently, in New Zealand, you can do that and it all weaves back together and every part of it makes sense. …well, okay, no, that is an exaggeration at best. But enough of it comes together and what remains is funny enough that you can ignore the plot holes. Well, also arguably I should not generalize to everything they make, but at least for Black Sheep, it’s all true.

It’s like this: two brothers, unalike dignity, in fair Aotearoa, where we lay our scene, from ancient grudge break to new mutiny, where ovine blood makes civil hands unclean[1]. …but I suppose I should say more. See, the grudge between them is over the murder of Henry’s sheep and also, due to the gory shock and unrelated timing of the event, over Henry’s subsequent ovinophobia. Unfortunately, the day fifteen years later that Henry shows up to finally wash his hands of the relationship (and the massive sheep farm that he owns a 50% share of) is the day his brother has set aside to reveal his new breed of sheep upon the world.

This is unfortunate because the disgraced geneticist that has assisted him with a unique (or, depending upon your perspective, distressingly common) form of animal husbandry has also been performing her own experiments in what I choose to believe was a method of keep meat fresh for the longest period possible. If you guessed “zombie sheep that are still alive even after being dressed and hung on meathooks, but also one of the experimental animals escaped and spread the, er, modification to the herds at large”, then, well, I really painted an evocative picture in the first place, and go me! Or you’re an uncommonly good guesser.

The thing is, there’s so much more to it than just that, and most of it chuckleworthy. Also, there are multiple instances of unnecessary to the story rabbit dismemberment. I wonder if it’s lingering resentment over Night of the Lepus? But whatever, the point is, the movie is mostly good, mostly funny, and has more subplots than you can shake a pointed stick at.

[1] There’s no reason for this, and yet here we are.

Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice

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This is much more what I was looking for out of a horror movie about murderous youths in Nebraska. Please don’t misunderstand me to be saying that Children of the Corn II was good. Honestly, it was almost certainly worse than the original. But it was worse with flair. And by flair I mean a couple of gallons of blood, a pile of creative kills, and a plot that doesn’t make a lick of sense.

Here’s how little sense the plot makes. They added in some hallucinogenic corn mold that children are especially susceptible to, just so their plot could have an explanation for why it makes so little sense! And then they still went back to the “but also there really is something that Walks Behind the Rows,” just as though they hadn’t written themselves out of that corner.

There’s an estranged father / teenaged son subplot that never quite coheres, there’s a killer combine harvester vehicle machine of some kind, there’s an indigenous professor, there’s less nudity than I would expect for a movie from 1992 that was as sex-laden as this one tried to be, there’s an old woman doomsayer[2], and there’s a group of murderous children, because of course there is. It’s even nominally the same group of murderous children, for the most part, since although 8 years have passed in real life, maybe that many days had passed according to the laws of direct horror movie sequels.

Did you know that not counting remakes, there are at least four more of these movies that got made at some point or another? And probably more than that! Truly, it’s a rich and varied world of cinema. …anyway, this podcast had better be worth it.

[1] Now there’s a tagline that is of its specific moment.
[2] Actually, this is noteworthy! The elderly doomsayer that everybody ignores until the body count spirals out of control is almost always a man.

Children of the Corn (1984)

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I’m not actually convinced I’ve never seen Children of the Corn before. But if I have, it made little enough impression on me that today’s viewing may as well have been the first. The funny thing is, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to watch it at all, but its sequel[1] wasn’t available on any streaming services, and the first one was, so, there you go.

What I think would have made this a much better movie is if there had been no prologue. Like, keep all the same footage and use it later in flashback. But if you start off with Linda Hamilton and some guy named Burt[3] driving down a country road in Nebraska, and they hit a kid who it turns out had his throat slit before they ever hit him, and there are menacing “watcher” camera angles, and the audience has to figure out what’s going on along with them? That’s a pressure cooker!

That small but major correction is almost everything the movie really needs. Okay, some of the final act special effects are terrible, but it’s basically 40 years old, so, forgiven. Creepy kids menacing you with farm implements in the middle of nowhere, that covers basically everything my suburban adulthood needs to be scared.

Well, one additional correction, maybe less small, is that outside of the flashback sequence, almost nobody dies, and I feel like this should have been a bloodbath. Probably if they had gone the “what is even happening?” pressure cooker route, this would bother me less. But, they didn’t, and it turns out this is just not a very good movie when over half of it is teenagers chasing Burt and/or Linda Hamilton around an empty small town downtown district, while the pacing of the plot makes it impossible to believe either of them is in any real danger, most of the time.

Still, though, it does make me wonder if it was possible, as late as the early ’80s, for a town to just disappear and nobody noticed. Now: zero percent chance. But then… like, I mostly still don’t buy it, especially when they threw in the shot of the 900-something population sign. But if it was less than 200, and basically everyone who cared about anyone who lived in the town currently lived in the town with them, I guess it’s a possibility?

In conclusion, small towns from my childhood are weird.

[1] which I plan to watch because a podcast I want to listen to will treat me as though I don’t care about spoilers[2]
[2] There’s a certain inherent irony to this explanation, I know.
[3] Now there’s a name that’s fallen out of favor.

Fairy Tale

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I know my reading slowed down when I had a kid. What I did not know is how dramatically my reading would slow down[1] with two kids. Nevertheless, it took me three months to read Fairy Tale, and yes, Stephen King books can be long, but they’re not “three months” long. And this wasn’t even one of the really really long ones from the ’80s.

King wrote a short story a few years back (or maybe a novella) about a kid and an old man and how the kid taught the old man how to use smartphones. Later it got spooky, but that was the core of it, the relationship between the child and the old man and the back and forth of what we have to teach each other. The first half of Fairy Tale feels like an expansion of that short story. And when you get right down to it, the second half also feels like an expansion of my somewhat dismissive “later it got spooky”.

I guess what I’m saying is, yes, King has written better stories about relationships between people, and yes he’s written better Lovecraft pastiches, and yes he’s written better fantasy novels, and… okay, no, he probably has not written a better book about a dog, even if I choked up reading the last page of Cujo aloud to my dad. But none of that is the point.

The point is, the man has not missed a step in 50 years, as far as his ability to make you care about his characters and, more than that, the worlds he creates. I still itch to know what’s going down in Castle Rock these days. I wonder if Salem’s Lot ever got reinhabited. I notice quietly that it’s been 27 years since the last time people started dying in Derry. I wonder how Roland is doing. And that spark is here. I want to see what happens when Charlie Reade decides that maybe it’s time to buy himself a jackhammer.

Best work or not, it’s still really good work. That’s all.

[1] Or arguably, it slowed down because in addition to alternating with comics, I was reading another[2] book. I can see a case to be made for that as the cause.
[2] and lately, two other

Rosemary’s Baby

So we’ve, uh, fallen behind on this movie you’ve never seen that matches a theme each week website challenge thing. Week six, where last we left off in October, was something from their top 250 horror films, as rated by site users I guess? Anyway, I had seen the top five, and six and seven weren’t available for streaming, but number eight was Rosemary’s Baby, one of those classics where you more or less already know what happens because of cultural osmosis of so many subsequent references and homages, but you never know what’s actually going to happen, you know?

The jam is this: Rosemary and her financially successful but critically failed actor husband move into an old apartment building in Manhattan, one of those places where you already cannot believe how enormous the place is[1] even before you learn that it was at some point in the [recent?] past split in half from the apartment currently housing the elderly and somewhat kooky childless neighbors. Also, they (Rosemary and her husband) want to have kids.

The thing is, you know what’s going to happen next. I knew what was going to happen next. Everyone knows! My daughter knows, and she was born this year. It’s like Rosebud, you just… know. But at the same time, it was fun to pretend I didn’t know how it was going to turn out.[2] The things I found out along the way were things I didn’t know, but probably should have.[3] And at least one thing I found out but probably shouldn’t have known, which is I’m guessing this may be the first movie that did the trope where you solve the anagram that clues you in about whatever evil thing is going on by digging out a copy of Scrabble and just fiddling with the tiles. So add that to the list of countless tropes this movie has generated.

All in all: it’s very definitely a snapshot of a different time, but it’s mostly timeless, and also it’s mostly or entirely good. I understand why it is the eighth most well-regarded horror movie on this one movie website, is what I’m saying. Solid acting, solid script, solid atmosphere, exquisite final ten minutes. Would watch for the first time all over again.

[1] But at least it’s not like Friends where, how do they afford this? Because of the financially successful acting career and all, although also one of the Friends apartments would fit in the living room of this place, so
[2] And okay, I didn’t, not exactly.
[3] The next footnote is spoilers about things I found out.[4] So don’t read it if you care about spoilers for a 55 year old movie.
[4] Like, I didn’t know she had the world’s worst husband, who among other many sub-par qualities had as his go-to excuse for something that was, uh, pretty bad, his go-to excuse for it was “I went ahead and had sex with you even though you had passed out [after eating a drugged dessert that I insisted you eat even though because I knew it was drugged].” (Like, he didn’t spousal rape her, but he claimed he did, because the alternative was worse. …although I guess they don’t sound as close together in badness in 1968 as they do now? But credit where it’s due, even in 1968 she was all “that wasn’t cool, bro” about it before shrugging and giving up instead of not being concerned in the first place, like I expected in the moment. And I didn’t know, but absolutely should have, that when she went to a medical professional for help, he would immediately betray her. And I didn’t know that the relationship with her husband would play as so loveless and mechanical, which I at least believe was on purpose? There are things in the last scenes of the movie that make me think so.