31 Days of Horror 2015: The Mummy and Bad Milo

8. The Mummy (1959)

I'm always bored by Universal Studios' "The Mummy" (1932), but the Hammer Studios version is much better. It's the same basic story of British archaeologists finding a lost Egyptian tomb and unwittingly awakening a mummy who follows them back to London.  One advantage the Hammer version has is Peter Cushing. It also benefits from a stronger, more agile mummy who bursts through doors and windows and throws people around when they get in his way. Better mummy makeup and a climatic chase scene through a swamp add to the entertainment. If you like the idea of mummy movies but can't stay awake through the Universal classic and can't stomach the modern versions, check out Hammer's "The Mummy."

9. Bad Milo (2013)

"Bad Milo" is a good example of the limitations of Netflix rating system, which uses stars to show your expected rating rather than the average of the ratings submitted by other viewers. My expected rating for "Bad Milo" was only 2 1/2 stars out of 5, but if Netflix knew how much I love the the movies of Frank Henenlotter, it would have been a 5. Throughout the 80s and early 90s, Henenlotter made several very entertaining, tongue-in-cheek horror movies which are best described as body horror creature features. The best is "Basket Case" (1982), in which two siamese twins take revenge on the doctors who separated them and attempted to kill Belial, the malformed twin who is a little more than a blob with a face and arms. His brother Duane carries him around in a basket. Both sequels are also very entertaining. The tagline for the third gives you a good idea of what to expect: "It's time to get a bigger basket."

Jacob Vaughn, the director of "Bad Milo", was clearly inspired by Henenlotter, and I'm glad to see that someone is carrying on the tradition. Milo is a stress-induced stomach polyp that develops into a small creature that looks a bit like a human baby with sharp teeth. Milo lives inside a man named Duncan, and when anyone causes Duncan stress, Milo exits through his asshole and kills them. He then crawls back inside through the same hole. Vaughn takes full advantage of his story's many opportunities for toilet humor, but he also avoids taking the jokes so far that the eclipse his horror story. This is a trap that catches most horror comedies, and the reason why I usually lose interest less than half way through. ("What We Do in the Shadows" (2014) is a recent example.)

31 Days of Horror 2015: Werewolves

6. Ginger Snaps (2000)

John Landis's "An American Werewolf in London" (1981) ruined werewolf movies for me years ago. It was the first werewolf movie I ever saw, and it towers so far above other werewolf movies, not to mention most other horror movies, that they almost always leave me disappointed. It would be a bit like seeing Iron Maiden open for King Diamond and Motorhead. Both are excellent bands, but nothing compares to a live Maiden show.

When I watch "The Wolf Man" (1941), which is often cited as a classic of the subgenre, I just want Lon Chaney, Jr. to stop whining and for the movie to end. I like "The Howling" (1981) but for whatever reason, it's just not very memorable, and although the sequels are terrible, "An American Werewolf in Paris" (1997), makes them look good. (Here's a cinema axiom: If Julie Delpy is in it, it sucks, and yes, this applies to the Richard Linklater movies, too. In fact, here's another cinema axiom: If Richard Linklater made it, it sucks.) "Silver Bullet" (1985) is actually very good, and Dog Soldiers" (2002) isn't bad.

However, the only werewolf movie that even approaches the level of "An American Werewolf in London" is "Ginger Snaps." Like Landis before him, director John Fawcett presents the werewolf as a victim of her condition. However, he goes further by using the werewolf myth to explore the horror of puberty. Ginger's period starts the day after she is bitten by a werewolf, and the onset of puberty is linked with lycanthropy.

Werewolf movies often unfold as if the highpoint is the transformation scene, and it's almost always disappointing because it's never as good as the one in "An American Werewolf in London." Fawcett avoids this scene altogether, and takes the much more interesting approach of having Ginger transform gradually. This enables him to show her vacillation between resisting and accepting her body's changes.

"Ginger Snaps" is an excellent horror movie. It reminds us that although the werewolf myth offers rich source material, movies based on the myth work well only when they elicit the right amount of sympathy and horror for their werewolf characters.

7. Werewolf of London (1935)

I never understand why "The Wolf Man" (1941) is always considered the classic Universal werewolf movie, not only because it's not very good, but also because "Werewolf of London" is so much better. "The Wolf Man" fails because its werewolf is neither sympathetic nor horrifying. He's just annoying, and he looks ridiculous. The werewolf in "Werewolf of London" isn't sympathetic or horrifying either, but he at least looks cool. The make up and transformation scenes are very effective.

However, the more important factor in the movie's success is that it's just weird. It throws in a bit of mad science, as the werewolf is also a botanist who is cultivating a flower that blooms only by moonlight. His collection of plants includes one that eats mice, and inside his laboratory is a monitor that shows who's outside. (Remember, this was 1935!) To make things even more interesting, "Werewolf of London" actually features two werewolves, and they fight over a plant that provides a temporary cure for their condition.

This one doesn't explore the full potential of the werewolf myth like "An American Werewolf in London" and "Ginger Snaps," but it takes a unique approach, and no matter how many times I watch it, it remains fascinating.

7.5. Unfriended (2015)

This is an hour and a half of college students in a video chat. I don't know what we were thinking when we tried watching this piece of shit. It's worse than it sounds, and we only lasted thirty minutes. It did cause me to pause for a few minutes to wonder if college students like it, which of course made me ask, will this end up being one of many experiences to come when I'll hate a movie because I'm too old to get it? Was my response to this movie akin to my grandmother complaining that she's discriminated against because she doesn't have an email address? If so, fuck it. No amount of annoying horror movies for younger people can take my "Texas Chain Saw Massacre" away from me.

31 Days of Horror 2015: Bloodfreak

5. Bloodfreak (1972)

I've been a fan of bizarre movies for at least twenty years, but because I'm too young to have experienced the drive-in in its heyday, until recently, most of my experiences with cinematic oddities were on the small screen. I have many fond memories of watching classics like "Basket Case," "Reptilicus," and "El Santo vs. Dracula and the Wolfman" on home video with a small group of friends, and I expect to create many more. However, there's also something special about sitting in a room full of strangers, staring at a movie screen, and witnessing a serial killer with the head of a turkey hacking up his victims and drinking their blood.

I was able to have this experience thanks to the local independent theater, the Nickelodeon, and its series "First Friday Lowbrow Cinema Explosion." This month's movie was "Bloodfreak," and to call it "bizarre" is a bit like calling Donald Trump "unscrupulous." The depth of weirdness almost defies description. I'll only add that in addition to featuring a turkey-headed killer, it's also a morality tale intended to persuade its audience to forsake sex and drugs and turn to God.

31 Days of Horror 2015: Cannibals

3. The Green Inferno (2015)

I'm not a fan of Eli Roth. I liked "Cabin Fever," but he tried my patience with "Hostel," and "Hemlock Grove" is just laughable. However, his latest movie, "The Green Inferno," made in the tradition of 1980s Italian cannibal movies like "Cannibal Holocaust" and "Cannibal Ferox," gets everything right. Few outside the small subset of horror fans familiar with the Italian cannibal genre will appreciate it, but for those of us who know the names Ruggero Deodato and Umberto Lenzi, "The Green Inferno" is a rare treat. It takes all the essential elements of the genre and updates them for 2015.

Italian cannibal movies typically follow a group of American filmmakers who travel to the Amazon to document an isolated tribe that ends up eating them. In Roth's update, the characters are a group of American college students who travel to the jungle in Peru and chain themselves to trees to stop loggers and save an isolated tribe that lives in the path of the bulldozers. They document the event with their mobile phones and broadcast live streams through the Internet. They stop the loggers, but the small plane flying them out of the jungle crashes, and they are soon captured and eaten by the tribe they were trying to protect.

It wouldn't be a cannibal movie if it didn't revel in sadistic gore, but "The Green Inferno" also satirizes wealthy college students with simplistic ideas about solving the world's problems. Moreover, because the gruesome acts committed by everyone involved--the natives, the loggers, their guards, and the college students-- it also suggests that there's a savage lurking in all of us. If this is a sign of where Roth's career is heading, then I excited to see what he'll do next.

4. Cannibal Holocaust (1980)

It had been several years since I'd seen an Italian cannibal movie, and while watching "The Green Inferno," I 

realized it was time to revisit Ruggero Deodato's "Cannibal Holocaust." It's a better movie than I remembered and also more gruesome. The words "disturbing" and "fucked up" are used to describe horror movies so often that that they have become meaningless, but they apply here. The warning label about "extreme violence" is not a gimmick.

  

"Cannibal Holocaust" is sometimes called the first "found footage" film, and more than half of the movie consists of footage filmed by an American documentary crew who were eaten by their subjects. As you watch the footage, you realize that they got what they deserved. The flesh eating scenes are very gory and often hard to watch, particularly the scene in which a man's penis is cut off. However, it's not the gore that makes the film so disturbing; it's the behavior of the film crew as they cruelly slaughter animals, and harass, rape, and kill the members of the isolated tribe they discover. The "civilized" Americans are much more savage than the "primitive" natives. It left me feeling a bit sick, and it'll be another several years before I watch this one again.

31 Days of Horror 2015: It Begins

I didn't even come close to watching 31 horror movies last October, and I gave up on the blog after only a few posts. This October is going to be busy, and I probably won't make it through 31 horror movies this year either, so I'm approaching this year's month of horror a bit differently. Rather than focusing exclusively on horror movies, it will be filled with horror events, which means lots of horror movies, but also the Halloween party and Ghost and Danzig concerts. I'll count each movie as an event, and that gives me a realistic chance of enjoying 31 horror events this October.

1. "Kill Baby, Kill" (1966)

Kids in Italian horror movies are either insufferable or terrifying. For an example of the former, subject yourself to the first ten minutes of Lucio Fulci's "Manhattan Baby," in which an annoying little shit calls his sister a "lousy lesbian." Mario Bava's "Kill Baby, Kill" is the best example of the latter. The terrifying child is the ghost of a little girl who chases her ball through the streets of an isolated village. Residents who see her end up dead with coins in their hearts.

Sometimes referred to as the "grandfather of Italian horror," Bava made several very effective gothic horror movies and is often credited as creating the "giallo," a distinctively Italian subgenre that combines elements of thrillers and slasher films. Bava is one of my favorite directors, but my attempts to get Vicki excited about him have been mixed. I'm happy to report that she likes this one as much as I do.

2. "The Prowler" (1981)

For casual horror watchers, slasher movies begin and end with "Halloween" and "Friday the 13th," but those of us who dig deeper quickly learn that there are dozens of lesser-known gems, and Joseph Zito's "The Prowler" is one of the best. Its brutal killer is a man in camouflage fatigues who stalks a graduation dance. His arsenal includes a pitchfork and a serrated knife that he uses in inventive ways.

31 Days of Horror 2014: Days 7 - 12

31 Days of Horror 2014: Days 7 - 12

7. Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter (1974)

During a key scene in this Hammer production, Captain Kronos says this about his assistant, “What he doesn't know about vampires could fit in a flea's codpiece.” This quote tells you all you need to know about “Captain Kronos,” but I'm going to tell you more anyway because I can't stop thinking about this very entertaining mix of gothic horror and spaghetti Western. Castles and vampires are really the only gothic horror elements, and almost everything else seems to have been borrowed from “Django.” Kronos is a former soldier who became a vampire hunter after his family was killed by vampires who drain their victims' youth rather than their blood. Kronos uses a sword rather than guns, but scenes such as the bar fight which ends with Kronos standing in the middle of a pile of bodies ensure that its western soul shines through. At times “Captain Kronos” is a bit campy and the fights are badly in need of a choreographer, but it never ceases to entertain and is a good reminder of why Hammer films can be so enjoyable.

8. Drag Me to Hell (2009)

I wanted to watch “Captain Kronos” again, but Vicki persuaded me to watch this welcome return to horror from Sam Raimi about a loan officer who is cursed by a Roma woman after she refuses to grant the woman a third extension on her mortgage. Its mix of gore and slapstick comedy place it in the same vein of horror as the Evil Dead films for which Raimi is famous, but “Drag Me to Hell” is much more restrained, and unlike the Dead films never veers annoyingly into Three Stooges territory, resulting in a much better movie.

9. Haxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages (1922)

As its subtitle suggests, this silent film is a documentary of witchcraft featuring commentary on paintings and ancient texts delivered through intertitles and reenactments of witches doing their evil deeds and being punished for them. The reenactments feature several hilarious scenes of demons churning butter. They also taught me that witches literally kissed the devil's ass and gained the ability to fly from special ointment they rubbed on each others' backs. It also raises the point that although it's easy to criticize the witch hunters of the past, their continue in the present; they just take different forms.

10. The Omen (1976)

This one's supposed to be a horror classic, but the past few times I've watched it, I've wondered why. It plays as a serious horror movie, but it has too many ridiculous moments to be taken seriously and not enough to be any fun. Plenty of my favorite horror movies make little sense (“Suspiria” is exhibit A), but they work because they embrace the irrationality of the nightmarish worlds they create. “The Omen” wants me to believe both that it's a serious drama and that a jackal showed up at a hospital and gave birth to Satan's child. Despite these complaints, it is worth watching at least once just for the performance of Patrick Troughton (the Second Doctor) as the crazy priest who keeps telling Gregory Peck's character to accept Christ and “Drink His blood! Eat His flesh!”

11. The Changeling (1980)

This gem should be much better known than “The Omen," but I'd never seen it until this month. It's about a musician's attempts to uncover the mystery of the hidden room he discovers in a large old house he's renting. The most notable item in the room is a wooden wheel chair that once belonged to a child, and the film uses the eeriness of this object to great effect. “The Changeling” is one of the best ghost movies I've ever seen.

12. The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976)

This has been the biggest disappointment of the month for me. Everything about this one suggested it had the potential to rival “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” as one of the most disturbing horror movies ever made: the title, the cover featuring a man's burlap-sack covered face, the fact that it was made in the 70s, and the documentary-style realism of the opening scene. Sadly, it quickly devolves into camp.

31 Days of Horror 2014: Days 1 - 6

31 Days of Horror 2014: Days 1-6

This year's 31 Days of Horror got off to a rough start with four snoozers in a row, but Tod Browning's “Freaks” helped us get the month of horror back on track.

1. The Cat and the Canary (1927)

Silent horror movies are often eerie in ways that talkies can never be, so we like to include at least a few silent films in the month of horror. This one tried hard to put us both to sleep. It starts out promising with a rich old man (the canary) on his death bed and his family (the cats) waiting for him to die, so they can claim their inheritance.  But when he dies, a clause in his will makes them wait twenty more years.. Twenty years later, the family members gather at his old, dark house at midnight for the reading of the will and learn that his entire estate will become the property of his most distant relative if she can pass a psychiatric exam the next morning. He gains revenge from beyond the grave by provoking the rest of the family into spending the night in the house with the heiress attempting to drive her insane.

Although interesting as the precursor to later movies like “The House on Haunted Hill” (1959) and “The Haunting” (1963), which also place their characters in an large, spooky house for the night, “The Cat and the Canary” loses its appeal after the first half hour. It has a few interesting visual effects and stylized inter titles that add atmosphere, but the attempts to drive the heiress crazy quickly become tiresome. It would probably have worked better if it had been compressed into a tighter plot cutting about half an hour from its 90-minute running time.

2. Pontypool (2008)

We came across this French-Canadian turd while browsing horror movies available to stream through Netflix. It uses the narrative device of telling the story almost entirely inside a radio station. This works well for a while as unconfirmed reports of attacks by zombie-like creatures keep trickling in as the station's producer tries to keep her new morning talk show host from making the reports public until they receive official reports from the police. The fact that they receive none becomes part of the story. It all starts to stink when we learn that the zombies are created by infected English words and that the best defense is to speak only in French.

3. Night Creatures (1962)

Originally released under the title “Captain Clegg,” this Hammer production stars Peter Cushing as a notorious pirate (Clegg) hiding out from his many enemies in a seaside village, where he disguises himself as a parson. The village also happens to be haunted by marsh phantoms, glowing skeletons on skeleton horses who terrorize the villagers at night. It starts off promising with the phantoms chasing a terrified man through the swamp, but after the initial amusement of seeing Cushing as the parson passes, nothing else interesting happens until the marsh phantoms reappear in the film's last five minutes.

4. Evil of Frankenstein (1964)

Over the past few years, I've become a big fan of horror movies produced by the British studio Hammer (if you don't know about Hammer, the Wikipedia article Hammer Film Productions provides a good introduction), and I'm edging closer to having seen all of them. 31 Days of Horror is always a great opportunity to watch a few more. Peter Cushing plays the mad doctor in six of the Hammer Frankenstein films, and “Evil of Frankenstein” was the only one I hadn't seen. Although I appreciate Colin Clive's manic Henry Frankenstein in the Universal films and love Jeffrey Combs over-the-top portrayal of Herbert West in the Re-Animator series, Cushing's Frankenstein is my favorite cinematic mad scientist. He's cold, calculating, purely rational, and never lets squeamishness about removing organs from the recently departed or even killing for parts stop him from doing what's necessary to complete his experiments.

The opening scene with Frankenstein's assistant stealing a body from a wake while the dearly departed's young daughter watches in horror gave me high expectations. It then devolves into a dull hybrid of “Frankenstein meets the Wolfman” (a lesser Universal film from 1943 that still manages to be fairly entertaining) and “The Captain of Dr. Caligari.” From the former film, “Evil of Frankenstein” borrows the story of Frankenstein finding his original creation frozen in a block of ice. He then enlists a carnival hypnotist to help him communicate with the awakened creature, but the hypnotist has his own ideas, and like Dr. Caligari, uses his power over the creature to have him commit crimes. This sounds like a winning combo, but the result is just a bunch of running around as Frankenstein tries to break the spell the hypnotist has over his creation. (For a much more effective merging of the Frankenstein and Caligari myths, see Jess Franco's “The Awful Dr. Orloff.) Although “The Evil of Frankenstein” is not quite as bad as “Frankenstein Created Woman,” by far the worst of Hammer's Cushing Frankenstein films, it's close.

5. Freaks (1932)

After four duds, we had to get this year's month of horror back on track with a classic: Tod Browning's “Freaks.” Set in a circus with a cast consisting almost entirely of actual circus freaks, “Freaks” is easily one of the most bizarre horror films of the 1930s. The plot revolves around the attempts of a trapeze artist to steal the large inheritance of a little person named Hans. But Browning is clearly more interested in showing off the talents of the circus performers, and this is what makes the movie so fascinating. Its scenes of the “half-boy” walking around effortlessly using only his arms, a woman with no legs eating dinner and drinking wine using only her feet, and a man with no arms or legs rolling a cigarette using only his face, are the closest most of is in the earlier twenty-first century will ever come to a freakshow. Browning has been both praised for his sympathetic portrayals of the freaks and criticized for exploiting them. The interviews with circus freaks included on the DVD release indicate that rather than feeling exploited by Browning and the like, they were happy to get the work. As one of them puts it, how else is a man with no arms or legs supposed to make a decent living?

6. Monster House (2006)

This animated movie about two boys investigating the neighborhood haunted house is always enjoyable because it takes me back to my own childhood when my friends and I performed our own paranormal investigations. The main difference, of course, is that the house in the movie actually turns out to be haunted. It also happens to take place on Halloween and illustrates the struggle that boys face in accepting that they are outgrowing trick-or-treating.