Tag Archives: Random Number Generator Horror Podcast #9

Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things

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I am really looking forward to when the podcast people watch a few movies in a row that I have already seen. I’m not saying I don’t like watching new things, but I am saying that I’m really trying to reduce the number of podcasts saved to my phone, and they[1] are not making it easy! This was filed under the scare of zombies and the style of bottle episode, which is insider baseball for “takes place all in a single location”. And then they had exactly six movies[2] that fit that bill, so they randomized one more time, to land on Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things, from when horror movies that were not deep and thoughtful were explicitly b-movie rolls, and leaned very hard into that aesthetic. Probably for budgetary reasons?

The deal is this: a group of six college or so theater kids, led by a [seventh?] avant-garde performance artist director, except really all of those descriptors are secret code for “is an absolute asshole”, land in their sailboat on a graveyard island[3] in, I don’t know, the Caribbean maybe? Then they snipe at each other, while the one girl with bugged out eyes whose acting style is to intensely watch everyone else as they snipe at other occasionally declaims oracular doom.

NOTE: Interrupting my flow to warn that I’m not exactly concerned about spoilers in this review.

Which (the oracular doom from before I interrupted my flow, I mean) makes sense in context, when you consider that the asshole director guy’s main goal[4] is to cast a spell with infant blood as the ingredient and Satan as the patron, to raise the dead and take control of them to use as he will. So anyway, the sniping and the spellcasting and the bugged out eyes and a handful of extremely gay jump scares constitute 80 plus percent of the movie.

Later, well, I think you can guess what happens later.

I don’t think absolutely every character gets what they deserve, but boy does the movie attempt to make a case for it. Independently of all that, the ending is kind of bleak, at least if nautical training transcends mere death.

[1] in the fall of 2021, at least
[2] Not counting options such as Night of the Living Dead that they’d already seen.
[3] No idea if this is a real thing, but apparently the idea is, the locals come out and hold funerals here, and it’s used for nothing else, and over time they re-use the same places over and over as decomposition progresses, so the bodies may be buried atop one another layers deep? Seems made up to serve the plot, but what do I know?
[4] aside from exerting his authority over everyone else

Lord of Illusions

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Another podcast movie, because there have been so many in a row I have not seen. The scare was witch, and the style was LA, and so here we are with a noir about male witches and real magic vs illusion “magic” and also good vs evil, by Clive Barker: Lord of Illusions.

It’s time I think to admit I don’t really get Clive Barker. There’s nothing wrong with this movie. It’s great to get to see Scott Bakula in his prime, and I like noirs that have modern[1] settings and sensibilities. But I feel like people get excited when they see Clive Barker’s name attached to something, and meanwhile, I have no clear idea what it is I expect when I see his name. I saw Hellraiser[2], and it was a weird family mystery that had far fewer Cenobites than were advertised to me by pop culture, and then this is a weird almost-family mystery that’s also an almost takedown of pop culture magicians like David Copperfield, plus the whole noir with the maybe but maybe not treacherous femme fatale, and a dude with his head in a spiky box who is the bad guy. I think I even liked it, but I definitely didn’t get it.

The surface level plot made sense from moment to moment, but if there’s an essential Clive Barker-ness, I am just out of the loop, that’s all. Anyway, cool magic show, somewhat incomprehensible final battle, hyper-young Famke Janssen, and best use of the Ten of Swords I’ve ever witnessed. (Plus it was awesome that the mysteriously unrevealed tarot card wasn’t just Death like always.)

Whatever else it was, I’ve talked myself into remembering that it was very stylish, and that’s not nothing.

[1] Look, I get it, the ’90s aren’t modern, I’m just old. But still!
[2] Not reviewed because I saw it on The Last Drive-In, and Joe Bob says so much about a movie that I don’t know where my opinions end and his begin.

The Bad Seed

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Podcast movie, as I try to blow through some of them and reduce my enormous queue of podcasts to listen to. Scare was creepy children, and style was 1950s, and they claim (I think accurately) that The Bad Seed is literally the only movie that fits this intersection. Not least because I think about someone making a movie about a remorseless sociopath child in the 1950s, and honestly I’m stunned that even one such movie was made. It just doesn’t hit the same when you see it made in the ’70s, America had a much lower opinion of itself by then.

Imagine a 1950s family. You know the type. Father is a colonel in the army (probably) and went off to fight the Nazis, but that was a while ago, and now it’s all white picket fences. Mother has just the loveliest drink service that she rolls around the house to entertain people. Daughter is blonde-with-pigtails and practicing the piano on the regular, when she isn’t winning every prize at her private school.

Well. Almost every prize.

Before you know it, the little boy who won the penmanship medal is drowned off the dock at the town’s lake, the medal is missing, and wasn’t Rhoda acting ever so peculiarly toward him earlier that day? Alas, father is off to Washington for work for a month, and mother is left to deal with her simmering suspicions, her psychology-obsessed landlady, just the creepiest handyman ever, and the increasingly inebriated mother of the dead boy, by herself.

The acting initially came off as “1950s”, which, fair enough, but after a while it was stranger than that, with so many random monologues, but then I remembered this was based on a play, and I’m sure with the script lifted directly from the play. Aside from the question of what actually happened on the dock, the movie mostly concerns itself with examining the question of nature vs nurture, with every character coming down firmly on the side of nurture, and the title taking the opposite position.

Honestly, it’s pretty good, if you can tolerate 1950s acting. As with when I started this review, I really am quite surprised it ever got made, though. I know the ’50s were not the rose garden of American perfection that certain political parties would have me believe they were, but I really didn’t know 1950s America was aware of this fact.

But also: stay after the credits for actress on actress spanking. That is to say: not the characters, definitely the actors. 70 years ago certainly was A Time!

Noroi

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Podcast movie! The scare was demons, and the style was found footage, and the movie was Noroi: The Curse.

Found footage can be silly. Why are these people recording everything? Why, having seen the things they are recording, do they not make different choices instead of just continuing to record? How did they get so good at filming things? This latter clearly doesn’t always apply. Sometimes, they lean into the “bad camera operator” angle. Sometimes, and thankfully this is one of those, they lean into the professional angle. Sometimes, both.[1]

So anyway, there’s this documentary filmmaker in Japan, and he catches wind of some strange goings on at a local apartment complex. I forget the instigating incident. But something weird happens with a little boy staring out of a window, and some inexplicable sounds on his footage, and he starts pulling on threads. A psychic girl here, a tinfoil clad conspiracy theorist there, dead pigeons everywhere you look, and before you know it there’s a mysterious name, a drowned village, and everyone involved in the documentary are dropping like flies.

Ah, you are saying, why didn’t he just quit? I don’t disagree, but I never felt like he made an inexplicable choice until the last ten minutes of the film, so, not too bad as such things go. Anyway, I’m surprised I missed this one. It was 2005, right around the time the whole J-horror thing got so big that their movies were being remade in Hollywood constantly for a year or two. And yet, not a clue it existed[2]. Which is a pity, as it hangs together very well and is pretty scary. Recommended.

[1] I’m looking at you, Blair Witch Project.
[2] haha oops. 2005 is when the documentary was made. This came out in 2017. No wonder I never heard of it, it’s new!

Videodrome

Horror podcast time. The scare was society, and the style was sexy / erotic. So naturally, they landed on David Cronenberg. I… if I’m being honest, I ought to rewatch the last 20 minutes of Videodrome, because everything happened so fast after he was given the gun that I don’t think I actually know what transpired. But also, I kind of don’t want to watch it again? So…

The Onion once wrote a man on the street interview piece during the 2000 election in which one of the interviewees indicated that Bush vs Gore was choice he made every weekend on Cinemax. That guy would have felt very comfortable watching Toronto’s CivicTV, the channel you take to bed with you. Channel 83 is programmed by a shockingly young James Woods, who is always on the hunt for the newest way to keep his audience satisfied. (Mostly with, you guessed it, either bush or gore.)

In addition to scouring the earth for the latest and lowest brow, he also advocates for his programming on local talk shows, explaining that he is not causing society to worsen, but rather giving people an outlet for their pre-existing base desires so they don’t enact them in reality. Which is honestly not far afield of the discussions that were happening a few years earlier in Eyes of Laura Mars, nor for that matter discussions that continue to happen today. At least, he briefly advocates that position before pivoting to hitting on fellow panelist and radio call-in show host Blondie[1]. Before you know it, he’s showing her the pirate broadcast out of Pittsburgh that he recently acquired, of people being plotlessly tortured and killed, but, you know, fake. Really. Definitely not a broadcast of actual harm and murders. Who could do something like that?

Anyway, she’s so into it that she wants to be a contestant[2], and heads off to Pennsylvania in search of Romero or whoever is putting the thing out into the world. When she never returns, James Woods goes down a rabbit hole trying to find out who is responsible for Videodrome (the name of the pirate broadcast his hacker intercepted, you see), what its purpose is, where Blondie ended up, really all of that. And suddenly shit gets weird. I’m talking pulsing videocassettes, involuntary body mods, and a climax so hallucinatory that I legitimately have no idea what happened.

No, that’s not true. Cronenberg is what happened.

[1] The band, not the comic strip
[2] It is unclear to me where the idea that this was open casting came from

Eyes of Laura Mars

Another podcast movie, this time with a scare that is not really technology, but a style that is most definitely New York City. Eyes of Laura Mars is not a giallo. For one thing, it is zero percent Italian. But it’s not not a giallo either, if you take my drift. There is definitely shared and/or stolen DNA.

Laura Mars[1] is a fashion photographer who has entered her “coffee table book of staged murder photos” artistic phase, but since it’s 1978 that’s not entirely a thing yet, and therefore she is drumming up a lot of controversy around how she’s causing people to be desensitized to violence, and okay, sure, there really is nothing new under the sun is there?

Anyhow, the twist is that she suddenly starts observing the murders of people who are professionally close to her, through the eyes of the murderer. Soon the cops are involved, albeit more because of the murders than because of her weird psychic connection to the killer. And before you know it there are more dead half-naked models (among other victims) than you can shake an icepick at. Is the killer her loser ex-husband? Her creepy limo driver? Her gay but the movie never openly admits it agent?

Actually, that was the weirdest thing about the flick. Because as soon as you know Brad Dourif is in the movie, you also know he’s the killer. To be clear, this is not a spoiler, I’m not saying if he actually is or not. I’m just saying that, as a savvy viewer of horror films over the past five decades, there’s no question in your mind about whether he’s the killer, which makes for a very strange viewing experience of what is nominally meant to be a mystery in which nearly any of the still living characters should be a suspect.

Am I making sense here? I’m pretty sure I’m making sense.

In conclusion: it’s not bad! It’s definitely not good, it is I daresay pretty damned silly. But it’s not bad. Well, except for one piece of unnecessary prejudice that would be a pretty big spoiler to reveal, but alas for the way certain mental health issues are treated as low hanging fruit. And, oh, one other thing: this was written by John Carpenter, which is notable in that I’ve never seen him write for a different director or probably a different composer than himself before. Weird.

[1] To the best of my knowledge, not Veronica’s mother

Hereditary

Because I have not been hiding under a rock, I’ve known about Hereditary since 2018, maybe 2017. But it always seemed a little bit too much, so I held off, and held off, and kept holding off, and finally it took on a life of its own I guess? But, because I sort of have been hiding under a rock, I also managed to avoid virtually all information about the movie, and thus came into it essentially unspoiled, excepting only genre, really.

I would recommend this, as a great deal of the fun was in trying to unravel just what precisely was going on, with really only the title as a potential clue. On the downside, this means I kind of shouldn’t say much. So, the first thing that happens is grandma dies. Then we learn about the difficult dynamics in the family surrounding grandma. Then, one of the more shocking and disturbing <spoilers> I personally have ever seen occurs. Then, shit gets weird.

In addition to being compelling from beginning to end, I need to give a shout out to the sound design people, who did a masterful job. Also, the special effects surrounding zooming in on a miniature and it seamlessly becoming a real life room? Top notch. And, okay, going to put the spoiler behind a cut, because I really need to talk about this and, after all, most people in the world have seen it by now.

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Nochnoy Dozor

This week’s podcast movie was a) vampires and b) a bitchin’ soundtrack. I think I will agree that Night Watch hits both of these marks, even if the soundtrack isn’t quite what I expected it to be. The movie is based on a series of six books, which I almost want to read. The premise is that there’s been a precarious balance between the forces of good and evil, portrayed as the Night Watch (the good guys who guard against evil) and the Day Watch (bad guys who guard against good). Because maintaining the balance is important, since all out war was going to just destroy everything, as per the prologue to the movie.

So now everyone who isn’t human and eventually discovers this about themselves gets to choose if they will join light or darkness, and the movie is about one such dude, who got caught up in the Night Watch during a sting operation when he hired a witch to make his wife stop cheating on him; he was the bait for the bad guy witch, you see. And now he’s trying to save a kid from a vampire but also save the world from ending because it turns out there’s a prophecy about a cursed virgin, and… you know what, I could go on for another two paragraphs and never once have to make a lick of sense. The point is, it’s a dark fantasy movie in an extremely Russian way, and I think most of what I liked about it is that it’s something that would never have been made in America.

It’s not that it’s exactly good, and me saying it that way should not be construed as it being exactly bad either. But it’s 100% Grade A different, and in these fallen days, that’s not nothing, you know?

Tales from the Darkside: The Movie

It’s been weeks. I don’t even a little bit remember what the podcast random dice were. Probably one of them was anthology, maybe? Regardless, the movie they watched four years ago and therefore I am watching today is the movie version of Tales from the Darkside, a show I never really watched back in the day. I hope it was better than this movie was, though? Someone called it (the movie I mean) a secret version of Creepshow 3, which never got made for whatever reason, but wow are the Creepshows better.

So, there are four stories. In the first one, a kid gets kidnapped by a witch and has to Scheherazade his way out of getting cooked for a dinner party, but for some reason using the witch’s own book of scary stories, all of which she should have read before? Did not make a lick of sense. This story, via the book, provides the frame for the other three.

Then in the second one, Christian Slater and Steve Buscemi have a Re-Animator relationship sort of, only it’s a mummy and a sister thing instead of dead bodies and a girlfriend thing. It was fine as far as it went, but the twist at the end did not make the slightest bit of sense to me.

In the third, someone adapted a Stephen King story about a hitman assassinating a cat, which truly did have a Creepshow vibe, but without the comic book stills and the crypt keeper, it felt cheesy instead of delightfully over the top. Which is too bad, as it might otherwise have been the best of the bunch.

Finally, in the actual best of the bunch, James Remar plays a starving artist with a dark secret who unexpectedly finds love and success, except for, you know, “dark secret”. The sad thing was when the witch from the connective story even knew it was the best story they told the whole time. Like, you should not admit which child is your favorite, yo. It’s not kosher!

I’m not mad I saw the movie, exactly, but I’m mad it took me this long to see it, as by rights I should have moved on to better stuff long since.

Killer Klowns from Outer Space

Rarely has an episode of my podcast hit the nail so squarely on the head, and rarely has a movie title so succinctly summed up its contents. The scare die was clowns or dolls, and the style die was cheesy. And so I have finally watched[1] Killer Klowns from Outer Space.

This is basically one of those teenage screwball comedies with a recognizable face as the annoyed authority figure and a lot of unrecognizable faces as the various teens getting themselves into screwball situations to annoy the authority figure. Only instead of trying to save the ski lodge from the evil yuppie developer, or trying to keep their frat house from being shut down by the dean, they’re trying to save the town from an alien invasion of clowns with a circus tent spaceship, cotton candy body containers, popcorn guns, and balloon animal minions.

This movie is exactly what it sounds like, exactly as good as it sounds like, and has not only a line of dialogue but also a theme song that name-drops the title. The script was not so much written as it was recorded during a late night dorm room weed session and then just filmed straight from the recording, with no notes, no editing, no rewrites, nothing. Whatever you think of, it’s what they thought of too.

I’m not going to turn around and say it’s good now. I’m not even going to say I’m being unfair.  But I will say that you have to truly admire the dedication to the bit. This is the kind of movie that proudly proclaims, “You think you can make a movie? All you need is a rich dentist and a time machine to get you back to the 1970s or ’80s. Because if we made this, you can too!” (For all I know, you don’t even need the time machine.)

Also, though, the klown kostuming is pretty legit.

[1] How have I not seen this before? I was expecting to be all, “oh yeah,” but nope. First time.