Tag Archives: Random Number Generator Horror Podcast #9

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.

Raw (2016)

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)

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 from outside 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

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.