Tag Archives: Random Number Generator Horror Podcast #9

Nochnoy Dozor

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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

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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

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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.

Raw (2016)

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This week’s movie from Summer 2021 of the podcast was honestly kind of a spoiler as the scare and I forget what as the style, because man I’m bad at this. The downside of talking about Raw is that I’m going to have to jump into those spoilers, because it’s that kind of movie. But not yet!

So there’s this vegetarian chick from a vegetarian veterinarian family, and it’s almost time to go to vet school! But also, vet school is really weird. Source: the movie, but it apparently involves getting hazed by upperclassmen and even professors? Like, the whole incoming class gets Carried, and hell, probably with actual pig blood, why not? They sure have access to some! Plus weird all night mandatory raves and closet makeouts. It’s honestly a lot more like a mixed-gender fraternity than a professional medical school for animals. Er, about animals.

But the thing is, one of the hazings is to eat a pickled rabbit kidney. And kind of like being introduced to the new religious viewpoints (or political viewpoints, or sexual awakenings) that college brings to many people, it just stands to reason that if you give a confirmed lifelong vegetarian a hunk of meat, they’re gonna go all out with it, you know?

Spoilers below.

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Village of the Damned (1960)

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I haven’t even gotten to the end of the previous episode yet, to find out how we got to this movie, although I plan to provide an update in the footnote[1]. But it turns out even though I knew like 35-45% of the story, I had never actually seen Village of the Damned. And to be fair, I probably would have told you I knew more like 75% of the story, before I saw it.

It shares an astounding amount of DNA with WandaVision. See, there’s this village that’s cut off from the outside world, and before you know it, some magical children are the most important thing happening. If you leave out the witch and the android, it’s practically identical? Okay, but seriously, there’s this village where everyone falls asleep, including people who get too close. After they just as mysteriously wake up, bam, wait a couple months and it turns out all the ladies in town are pregnant. Even the ones whose husbands had been at sea for a year, or who were quite adamant about being virgins.

Then, all the kids are creepy blond/es with glowing eyes who grow up too fast and know too much, and have other probably not magical after all properties that it would be a spoiler to mention, and basically it’s a race to analyze whether this is about the recent Nazi menace, or Cold War paranoia, or fear of the incoming generation, or what other underlying existential terror the writers and directors were grappling with.

The glowing eyed menacing stare part is pretty great, until you realize any time it’s happening, it’s a freeze frame. Even with that, though, I liked it. You can tell why it’s a seminal classic of the “evil children” horror subgenre.

[1] It turns out to have been style British, and scare Altered. I understand why they tried to stay away from werewolves, but at the same time, I’m not convinced the children nor the village were altered in any meaningful way. Oh well. Still a pretty great movie!

Incident at Raven’s Gate

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Now, here’s a movie where even talking about the random rolls used to get to it would be a spoiler. Well, okay. the style die was “Australasian”, it’s only the monster die that would be a spoiler. Still, though, it would be, and Incident at Raven’s Gate was good enough that I don’t want to spoil it, so.

The movie starts with a burned out shell of a house being investigated, and then dumps back to five days earlier, where we meet the players: a super uptight sheep farmer (maybe?), his bored younger plant-growing wife, his fuck-up younger brother on parole, some annoying twerp barflies, the hot lady bartender, and the local cop who is obsessed with her. Add the drought-stricken central Australian landscape as a pressure cooker, and a mysterious outside force to push the button I guess?, and then watch the players progress from point A to the burned out farmhouse point B, with occasional flashforward interludes to the investigators.

There are twists and turns, some predictable, some not, but it’s mostly a study of characters in crisis, and I very much dug it.

Godmonster of Indian Flats

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There were actually several episodes in a row of my horror podcast that covered movies I had already seen, which was a nice change of pace. But then they got (via the scare being “animal” and the theme being “Western”) to a movie nobody has ever seen before, Godmonster of Indian Flats. This is one of those movies that has two plots that have nothing to do with each other, and the payoff is in seeing how everything comes together in a thunderous crescendo.[1]

In the first story, some kid is awkwardly introduced to a town near Reno called “The Comstock”, a goldmine boom and then bust and then historically recreated town that might even be real for all I know, so he can get beat up and then rescued by a scientist and then exposed to some weird mutant sheep embryo, so we can follow the sci-fi horror portion of the movie. The second, and far weightier by volume, story is about a conspicuously black dude who represents a mining magnate who wants to buy up parts of the town and reopen the mines, in direct opposition to the “this place is a historical recreation now” ethos the mayor(?) is espousing.

The first story proceeds with lots of science talk mostly and very little plot or character advancement of any kind. The second story is an increasingly (but subtly) racist game of cat and mouse between the buyer and the town, where nothing is as it seems if you’re the buyer character, but also everything is exactly as it seems if you’re the person watching the movie. (Which, by the way, you should not be. Big mistake.)

The climax of the second story kicks off the actual start of the first story, but then it quickly fizzles out after a big lassoing demonstration, and now we’re at the thunderous crescendo where everything comes together, and it… well, it’s not fair to say it fizzles out again, because nothing this inexplicable is a fizzle. Basically, the big reveal about what’s really been going on in the first story happens, and then people react to it in ways that first make sense, and then make no sense at all, and then I cannot even figure out what is supposed to be happening, and the whole time the movie’s villain is laughing maniacally and monologuing about how inevitable his (ie, capitalism’s) victory is and always was, and then there’s an explosion, and then the movie ends, bad guys firmly victorious and good guys in total disarray.

I just don’t even know.

Also, if it seems like I basically forgot to talk about the mutant sheep monster that was the whole reason I saw this? If it seems like that to you, reading, imagine how it seemed to me, watching, when the movie also basically forgot this seemingly integral plot element.

[1] I’m actually stealing from my future self here, as it will [I anticipate, at least] be a better metaphor for the thing I’m reading right now.

Communion (1976)

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Horror movies in the ’70s sure had a lot of names. IMDb says the original title was Communion, the title card called it Holy Terror[1], but the search terms and the podcast called it Alice, Sweet Alice. Which is not without its charms, to be sure, although the girl being like 12 or something makes it iffier.

So, there’s this girl Alice, and she’s not not a psychopath. Withdrawn because she’s unhappy with her parents’ divorce is a way to look at it, but most withdrawn kids don’t dress in feature-concealing transparent plastic masks and terrorize basically everyone around them, but especially their kid sisters portrayed by babby Brooke Shieldses. It doesn’t help matters that, rightly or wrongly, Alice perceives that everyone likes her sister in equal measure to how much they apparently dislike her.

Naturally, therefore, babby Brooke Shields winds up dead. And suddenly the movie becomes a giallo, in which the cops and Alice’s absentee father try to solve the mystery of who killed Alice’s sister, and why it was Alice. It was interesting, because I’ve never seen a US ripoff giallo, at least not since I knew enough to recognize one. Also, it was pretty good, and frequently pretty disturbing!

[1] My personal favorite

Jigoku (1960)

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This week’s approximately 4 year-old-podcast movie was Japanese and 1960s, I am pretty sure? The latter is the slight uncertainty. Anyway, Jigoku is… not precisely weird, so much as foreign. So the first thing that happens[1] is a bright young college kid who is marrying the professor’s daughter and in all ways has the perfect future ahead of him, is a passenger in the car of his friend who is basically a total dick at every moment from his first scene to his last, our hero[2] I was saying is in the car with his friend Dickchan when the friend does a hit and run on a Yakuza guy.

Shiro is horrified and guilty and decides to go the the police, only on the way tragedy strikes in the form of a second car wreck for no apparent reason, and now he’s lost pretty much all of his bright future. So he goes home because his mom is sick and on the way out the door, only to discover a nest of small-town vipers, plus the Yakuza dude’s mom and girlfriend want revenge, and about two-thirds of the way through the movie, it goes full Hamlet and basically everyone you’ve seen since the first reel is now in hell and being punished, Japan-style.

So I said foreign earlier, and none of the above is what I mean. What I could not wrap my head around is why Shiro felt so guilty over all the terrible things that happened, basically none of which he had any control over or culpability in, to my Western sensibilities. And then on top of that, was he being punished in hell because of his guilty conscience, or did the movie agree with him that he was in fact terrible and deserving of all the things being promised to him by the omnipresent king of hell narrator guy? (And then there’s the girl in purgatory for the sin(?) of predeceasing her parents. I mean, yes, that’s a horrifying thing for a parent to imagine, but that should not be how the afterlife works.)

These ontological disconnects aside, I think I liked it. The tragic collapse-of-everything setpiece was engrossing, and the 65 years ago practical effects depicting the eight (or possibly sixteen) Japanese hells was a pretty solid dive into a genre with which I have very little experience, until it’s 40 years later and dominated by angry long-haired ghost girls.

I almost signed up for the 7 day free trial of Criterion for this one. They’re going to snag me, someday. I can see it coming, like a slow motion steamroller shot from 3-5 different camera angles.

[1] Not exactly a spoiler, as it’s all pretty much from the first five minutes, but if you want to check out a Criterion channel early Japanese horror flick unspoiled, hit the eject button now, as I don’t plan to be shy with laying things out.
[2] named Shiro, ha

The Howling (1981)

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I’m supposed to remember what the randomizers are that lead into the movie my podcast bids me watch, but I really very don’t. Werewolves and something else. ’80s? Could be that, for sure, but it sounds wrong. Either way, I had somehow never seen The Howling, and so here we are.

I imagine, had I known it was a Joe Dante film, I might have put in more effort.

So there’s a serial killer[1] stalking the streets of Manhattan, and that isn’t the only reason by a long shot that I felt this movie had strong giallo elements, despite being a creature feature. Dee Wallace who you may remember as the mother from Poltergeist a year later[2] is a TV reporter engaged in an implausible sting operation where since he’s been calling her and breathing heavily, they have a connection and she agrees to meet him in an adult arcade[3] on Times Square (probably), where he is promptly shot by police. Well, not I suppose promptly enough, since she is emotionally scarred by the whole ordeal first.

Therefore, she (and her husband) are sent off by Patrick Macnee[4] to one of those peaceful outdoor psychiatric retreats, where she can be regressed through hypnotherapy to remember what happened and ease her burdens, except instead of that her husband is being constantly seduced by a hot brunette while she is being tormented by one or more creepy dudes and meanwhile for no obvious reason her friends back in town are researching werewolves, and before you know it, the moon is out of the bag, if you catch my drift.

The effects were pretty decent, one or two literally animated transformations aside. We really lost something, when CGI came to horror. It’s great for action and sci-fi and whatever genre superhero movies are, but for horror and probably fantasy? Practical effects are just where it’s at.

To be clear, this was not a good movie, and I’m not recommending it or anything. But at the same time: monster movies are cool, you know?

[1] played by the Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager, but I could never see him well enough / in sufficient lack of makeup to recognize, and definitely didn’t by voice
[2] or from not confusing her with Dee Snider because nobody besides me does that
[3] I went to an adult arcade in downtown San Jose in the late ’90s, and it was one of the greatest disappointments of my life to learn that they just meant you could watch movies there, when I was expecting to play porn-themed video games to a bitchin’ ’80s soundtrack.
[4] Best known (to me at least) as Count Iblis in the original Battlestar Galactica show, which meant I immediately distrusted him.