31 Days of Horror: Days 24 – 25 – Scream (1996) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

I usually like Wes Craven’s movies, but when I think of my favorite American horror directors, his name never even makes the long list.  I like his 70’s classics “The Last House on the Left” (1972) and “The Hills Have Eyes” (1977), but they’re so gritty and disturbing that they can be hard to watch (this is particularly true of the former).  Although I’ve never disliked the other movies he’s known for—“A Nightmare on Elm Street” and “Scream”—I’ve never really been fans of them either.  When I saw “Nightmare” for the first time as a kid, it scared me so badly I had to sleep with a light on for several months, but when I watch it as an adult I’m always annoyed by the ridiculous ending.  My problems with “Scream” have less to do with the movie itself than with all the terrible imitations it inspired, mostly notably the “I Know What You Did List Summer” series.  I decided, however, to revisit both movies this month, and I enjoyed them much more than I ever did in the past.       

I started with “Scream,” in which high school students are murdered by a ghost-faced killer who taunts his victims with horror trivia questions. When it was released in the mid-90’s, it revived the slasher subgenre and gave new life to the horror genre in general.  Craven pokes fun at the conventions of the slasher film while also working within them to create a movie that’s self-reflexive without taking itself too seriously.  “Scream” is filled with references and allusions to other horror movies, and in one scene, Craven mocks himself by having a character say that her life is starting to sound like something from a bad “Wes Carpenter” movie.  It remains enjoyable through multiple viewings because although the identity of the killer is no longer a mystery, it’s still entertaining to watch the clever ways Craven keeps this identity hidden until the end.  When I watched “Scream” in the past, I always wanted it to be something it’s not: a true 80’s style slasher.  This time, I accepted it on its own terms and had a lot of fun counting the number of allusions I recognized.     

In “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” Freddy Krueger, a man with burned skin, a red and green sweater, and a glove with knived fingers, terrorizes the teenagers of Elm Street in their dreams.  They soon learn that if he kills them in their dreams they’ll really be dead.  This is one of the most terrifying concepts for a horror movie I’ve ever encountered, and for the most part, it’s well executed.  The murder scenes are gruesome, particularly the first one, in which a guy watches helplessly as the bloody pulp that used to be his girlfriend thrashes around under the sheets as Freddy rips her to shreds in her dream.  My favorite scene is when the main character Nancy falls asleep in class and in her dream sees a body bag containing the bloody corpse of her dead friend walking down the hall.  She follows and then has her first experience with Freddy.  In the past, I was always bothered by the ending.  It adds a certain silliness to “Nightmare” that prevents it from being the gritty horror movie it deserves to be.  I didn’t particularly like it this time either, but I can accept what Craven was meaning to do.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen any of the “Nightmare” sequels, with which Craven had little involvement, but I remember them being pretty bad.  He retained more creative control of the “Scream” franchise, and the fact that they are all pretty good (even if the most horrifying thing about “Scream 4” is Courtney Cox’s botoxed face) is evidence that Craven has managed to stay relevant, unlike many of the horror directors who started making movies back when he did.

31 Days of Horror: Days 21 – 23 – “From Beyond” (1986)

I watched the latest episode of “The Walking Dead” on Day 21 and the final presidential debate on Day 22, so I didn’t have time for horror movies on these days.  On Day 23, I watched Stuart Gordon’s “From Beyond,” a very entertaining mad scientist creature feature.

Mad scientists Dr. Pretorius and Dr. Tillinghast have built a device known as the Resonator that stimulates the brain’s pineal gland and thus enables anyone within range to see creatures that exist beyond our perceptible reality.  The only problem is that the Resonator gives the creatures the same ability and when they see the two scientists for the first time one bites the side of Tillinghast’s face and another eats Pretorius’s head.  Tillinghast is blamed for Pretorius’s murder and locked in an insane asylum, but Dr. McMichaels, the psychiatrist treating him, believes his story and wants to learn more about the Resonator.  She has him released under her supervision, and she and Tillinghast rebuild the device.  Creatures appear, including a mutated Pretorius, and things quickly get out of hand.

Gordon, best known for the mad-scientist classic “Re-Animator” (1985), does creature features and mad scientist movies better than anyone currently working in horror, and  in “From Beyond” he was clearly reveling in his appreciation for both subgenres.  Part of what makes this movie so enjoyable is the interplay among the three mad scientists.  Tillinghast, played by Jeffrey Combs also of “Re-Animator” fame, is the least mad of the three, and throughout the movie he struggles to restrain the mutated Pretorius and prevent McMichaels from descending even further into madness as she becomes more and more obsessed with the Resonator.  The other reason to watch “From Beyond” is the creatures.  They start off as small wormlike beings that seem to swim through the air, but as the movie progresses they get much larger.  At one point, Tillinghast has to be pulled from the mouth of a giant worm, leaving him bald and scarred.

This was another very enjoyable 80’s horror movie that I had neglected for far too long.  Watching it reminded me that although Stuart Gordon has continuously made good horror movies since the mid 80’s (“Dagon” (2001) and his episodes for the “Masters of Horror"  (2005, 2007) are the most recent examples), he is underappreciated.  This is probably  because none of his movies have received wide theatrical releases or acquired the cult status of movies like “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” or “Halloween.”  As a result, only  hardcore fans recognize the name Stuart Gordon, whereas people with only a passing interest in the genre are familiar with John Carpenter and maybe Tobe Hooper, despite the fact that no one really cares about their recent work.  There is, however, a cover story about Gordon in the current issue of “Fangoria,” which I hope will inspire new interest in his work.

31 Days of Horror: Day 20 - V/H/S (2012)

I’m not really a fan of the “found footage” technique for horror movies.  Although it’s meant to create hyper-realism, it often has the opposite effect because for  narrative coherence scenes have to be filmed that wouldn’t have been filmed if the footage were really authentic.  This makes the movies seem more artificial and contrived than they would be if they had eschewed the found footage technique and taken a more traditional approach.  Another problem is that they too often feature an annoying character who won’t turn off the damn camera even when his friends are being brutally murdered.

The technique works well in “The Blair Witch Project” (1999) because it makes sense for the camera to be rolling throughout the production of a documentary.  It works even better, however, in “Cannibal Holocaust” (1980), an Italian horror movie about an expedition of anthropologists who are eaten by cannibals while studying a tribe somewhere in the Amazon rainforest.  Their colleagues learn about their fate from the reels of film that they find when they go looking for the missing group.  Only about 30 minutes of “Cannibal Holocaust” consists of found footage, giving it an authenticity that’s often lacking in movies that rely entirely on this technique.

“V/H/S” is both a found footage movie and a horror anthology, and the combination of these two techniques results in five very effective segments, a few of which I found truly horrifying, even though I’m rarely frightened by horror movies anymore.  The found footage technique works because the segments are so short that it’s entirely believable that the events would have been captured on film spontaneously. Each segment was made by a different horror director, and three of them explore unique ways of capturing the footage, avoiding the necessity of having a character holding a video camera at all times.

In “Amateur Night,” the first and best segment, a character wears glasses containing a miniature video camera, so everything he sees is recorded.  He and his friends go out to a bar to pick-up girls and capture the experience on video, but one girl is not what she seems.  “The Sick Thing that Happened to Emily When She was Younger” is the most promising segment but also the most disappointing, for reasons I can’t describe without revealing the ending.  It consists entirely of recorded Skype conversations between a couple who are living apart while the boyfriend attends medical school.  His girlfriend, Emily, keeps hearing strange sounds in her apartment and begins to believe that it’s haunted.  When she hears the sounds at night, she calls her boyfriend, so he can observe via Skype as she investigates.  In one of the most terrifying moments of “V/H/S,” he can only watch in horror as Emily begins to discover what is going on.  Another innovative way of capturing the footage is a nanny-cam imbedded in the mask of a bear costume worn by a character in the last segment, “10/31/98.”  He and his friends enter a house thinking they are going to a Halloween party, but they actually stumble upon what appears to be a ritual sacrifice.  They rescue the victim with surprising results.

The other segments rely on characters with handheld video cameras to record the action.  “Second Honeymoon” is a road trip story in which we quickly learn that someone else is following the couple and attempting to enter their hotel rooms at night.  It features some of the creepiest moments of “V/H/S.”  As its title suggests, “Tuesday the 17^th” is a killer-in-the-woods style slasher, but its villain is very different from Jason Voorhees.

 

My only complaint is with the framing story that tries unsuccessfully to make the five segments fit into a larger narrative.  But the problem with this frame isn’t so much that it fails to unify the narrative—each segment works perfectly well on its own—as it’s just a bad segment.  It, too, relies on found footage, but it lacks the authenticity of the others and feels contrived.  A group of hooligans who like to film themselves committing crimes is hired to break into a guy’s house to steal a video tape.  He turns out to have a large video collection, which includes the five segments of found footage that “V/H/S” comprises.  The character with the camera is the one who finds the segments and seems to be filming them while he watches.  The result is found-footage overkill.  I wish “V/H/S” had either followed the example of “Cannibal Holocaust” or left out the frame altogether.

But aside from this one flaw, I really enjoyed “V/H/S,” and it’s not hard to imagine it becoming a new horror franchise. 

31 Days of Horror: Days 18 and 19 - Bride of Frankenstein (1935) and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1994)

I’ve had four sets of research papers to grade, so I’ve fallen a bit behind with my blogging but fortunately not with my movie watching.  To follow up on last week’s Frankenstein double feature, I watched James Whales deliberately campy “Bride of Frankenstein” on Day 18. Whereas his first Frankenstein film adapts the first half of Mary Shelley’s novel with Frankenstein creating the Creature and the Creature killing a few villagers, “Bride” covers events from the second half and gives more of the Creature’s perspective.  However, both movies are rather loosely connected to the novel, and “Bride” makes one very significant change by adding a second mad scientist, Dr. Pretorious, Frankenstein’s former professor, who has stolen a bit of the fire of the gods himself and created miniature humans.  He coerces Frankenstein into working with him to create a female. 

“Bride” is lots of fun to watch because it amplifies all the elements that make the first film so enjoyable.  This time, the Creature talks rather than simply grunting.  He makes a friend and learns to enjoy wine and cigars.  Frankenstein and Pretorius use the same tower where Frankenstein gave life to his original creation, but it’s now filled with more gadgets that crackle and pop as Frankenstein adjusts them to imbue life to the Creature’s mate.  The Bride herself is probably the best part of the movie and is yet another horror icon that Whale had a hand in creating.  She shrieks in horror and cowers behind Frankenstein when she sees the male Creature, and her moves are a bit robotic as she is just learning how to work her limps.  Her most recognizable feature, of course, is her conical black hair streaked with a white lightning bolt on each side. 

Continuing with the Frankenstein theme, I watched “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” on Day 19.  This is the most faithful film adaptation of the novel that I’ve seen, but it’s still a bit of a misnomer to call it “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.”  Director Kenneth Branagh makes a significant change to the story by having Victor reanimate his wife, Elizabeth, after the Creature kills her when Victor refuses to make him a mate.  The results are disastrous, of course, and it’s the movie’s clearest example of Victor’s inability to consider the consequences of his actions or fully acknowledge and attempt to correct his own mistakes.  His childishness makes him almost insufferable, but this can’t really be blamed on Branagh as it’s also a major flaw in Shelley’s novel.  I know that Shelley’s novel is a cautionary tale about hubris and we’re not meant to like Victor, but I’d prefer him to be a sinister misanthrope rather than a whiney bitch.

Despite its annoying main character, however, there is plenty to like in Branagh’s take on the Frankenstein story, particularly the creation/birth scenes, which were clearly inspired by Whale’s Frankenstein films.  Victor sets up a lab in the attic of a boarding house and fills it with a variety of gadgets that emit sparks and bolts of electricity.  His exact method for imbuing life to the Creature is never specified, but it relies on a combination of inserting acupuncture needles in key points, stimulating them with electricity from eels, and immersing the Creature’s body in amniotic fluid.  Thanks to the movie’s very believable makeup effects, the Creature looks exactly like his body is a composite of several corpses.  Throughout the movie, he picks out the stitches that were used to sew him together, and the scars they leave behind are especially realistic.

Shelley’s novel has inspired dozens of film adaptations and “Bride” is one of the best.  I can’t say the same about Branagh’s film, but it does contain some very compelling elements that make it well worth watching.   

31 Days of Horror: Days 16 and 17 – Fall of the House of Usher (1928)

I skipped last night to watch the presidential debate, and thankfully, it wasn’t a horror show like the first one.  Tonight’s feature was a French silent film adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher.” I had seen the Usher film starring Vincent Price and thought it was terrible (I can’t remember while), but I had read good things about this one, so I was excited to see it. Unfortunately, it’s a snoozer.

As its title suggests, the Poe story is about the last living members of the Usher family, Roderick and his sister Madeleine, who have isolated themselves inside their crumbling family manor, which is clearly a symbol of the Usher family.  During his visit to the house, one of Roderick’s old friends observes as Madeleine finally succumbs to what seems to be chronic fatigue syndrome, and he and Roderick end up burying her alive.

The 1928 film follows the story’s basic plot but makes Madeleine Roderick’s wife, which is a logical change with the story’s suggestions of incest hinting that Roderick and his sister had been living as if they were husband and wife.  Roderick sits around the house all day painting his wife, and although she appears vigorous in the paintings, she is actually wasting away.  Roderick clearly cares more about the paintings than about his wife, and by painting her he is actually stealing her life force and transferring it to her painted image.  Madeleine, of course, dies, is buried alive, returns, and then the house falls down with the last remaining Ushers inside.

In some ways, horror is perfectly suited for silent film because it places so much emphasis on the visuals.  There’s no place for bad dialogue and convoluted and unnecessary explanations for the horror when all you have to work with are haunting visuals and a few intertitles.  The 1928 “Usher” tries, but for me at least, there’s nothing really horrifying about an emo, goth pussy sitting around his house all day painting his chronically fatigued wife, no matter how ghostly the wife looks or how many close-ups I see of Roderick’s crazed eyes.  I would have been better off with another Hellraiser sequel.        

31 Days of Horror: Day 15 - Frankenstein Double Feature

For tonight’s double feature, I watched the silent “Frankenstein” (1910) produced by Thomas Edison’s film studio and the Universal “Frankenstein” (1931) directed by James Whale and starring Boris Karloff.

The Edison “Frankenstein” is a short film that condenses the basic elements of Mary Shelley’s story into about twelve minutes.  It hasn’t been well-preserved, and the images are very cloudy, but for the most part, this doesn’t detract from the film’s visual effects, which are the reason to watch it.  The birth scene, in particular, is more believable than a lot of the CGI effects that plague movies today.  After mixing various powders into a vat and then closing it safely inside a large cabinet, Frankenstein watches through the viewfinder as goo from the vat slowly transforms into a skeleton that grows skin and gradually forms into a humanoid creature that bursts through the doors of the cabinet.  The blurriness of the film prevents us from getting a clear image of the Creature, but we can see it well enough to know that it looks more like Quasimodo from “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” than any of the more famous images of Frankenstein’s monster.

The most famous one, of course, appears in Whale’s take on Shelley’s story.  Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster is probably the most iconic image in horror, and although he does look a bit silly lumbering through the countryside, he is pretty horrifying in the darkness of the tower where he was created.  This version of “Frankenstein” completely omits the Creature’s point of view that helps make the novel so complex (we get this in the sequel, “Bride of Frankenstein” (1935)), and concentrates on Frankenstein’s creation of the Creature, and the Creature’s brief reign of terror in the village of Golstadt.  I’ve seen Whale’s “Frankenstein” probably a dozen times, but I always enjoy watching Colin Clive as Frankenstein, especially when the Creature comes to life and he goes into hysterics shouting, “It’s alive!  It’s alive!  It’s alive! Now I know what it feels like to be God!”  He’s utterly convincing as a mad scientist totally consumed by his work.  It had a been a while since I had seen the movie, and I was a bit surprised at how blasphemous it is. 

It’s hard to go wrong with mad-scientist movies, and these two helped establish the formula that horror filmmakers will probably continue reworking for years.    

31 Days of Horror: Days 12 - 14 -- Hellraiser 4 - 6

I opened the box, and I don’t think it’s going to close until I’ve watched all nine “Hellraiser” movies.  Thankfully, the experience has so far involved more pleasure than pain.

I ended my post about the first two Hellraiser sequels by criticizing “Hellraiser 4: Bloodline” (1996) because it begins in space with a robot opening the puzzle box, but it seems I was a bit hasty with my judgment.  As ludicrous as the idea of Pinhead in space sounds, “Bloodline” is actually the best “Hellraiser” sequel I’ve
seen so far.  It traces the history of the puzzle box from its origins in 18^th century Paris, to New York City in 1996, and then to a space station in 2127.  The “Bloodline” of the title refers to Philip L’Merchant, the toymaker who designed the box, and his descendents, who also have connections with the box. 

“Bloodline” is an anthology film consisting of three different segments.  It begins and ends in the space station with Dr. Paul Merchant summoning Pinhead for what he hopes will be his family’s final encounter with the Cenobites.  The future segment serves as a framing story for the other two, the first of which shows Philip L’Merchant designing the box for a magician who uses it to summon a female demon, Angelique.  Two hundred years later, Angelique seeks out John Merchant, an artist who is attempting to create an exhibit based on his ancestor’s sketches for the original puzzle box. Angelique summons Pinhead and together they try to make John create a permanent pathway between our world and hell, so they will no longer be bound by the rules of the box.

Although I can think of several bad horror anthologies—most notably “Creepshow 2”—I sometimes think horror works best in short segments because there’s no time for bullshit. “Bloodline” definitely benefits from this format.  Each segment works well because the Cenobites appear almost immediately, and characters either die or send the demons back to hell before they have a chance to become annoying.  The unifying narrative is the conflict between the Cenobites and the Merchants for control over the gateway to hell, and it moves beyond the box itself to explore the patterns that the box utilizes and the control they have over the Cenobites.  The gore effects are believable without being unduly disturbing and even the space station and robot look real.   

“Hellraiser 5: Inferno” (2000) and “Hellraiser 6: Hellseeker” (2002) are both psychological thrillers that use Pinhead and the puzzle box as vehicles to illustrate the personal hells that their protagonists create for themselves.  In the first case this works well, but the second has very little to do with the puzzle box and seems like a case of Dimension Films attaching an unrelated script to the Hellraiser name as a marketing ploy. 

In “Inferno,” a hardboiled police detective finds the puzzle box at a crime scene.  The detective is corrupt and unfaithful to his wife; he never visits his parents in the nursing home; and he double-crosses his partner.  When he opens the box, the Cenobites begin tormenting him in his ways that remind him of just how low he has sunken.  He hopes to end his suffering by locating a mysterious figure known only as “The Engineer.” Although “Inferno” places less emphasis on the puzzle box and the Cenobites than other movies in the series, it still works well as a Hellraiser movie because it continues to explore the pleasure-pain duality that lies at the heart of the series, and it does so in such way that moves the series in a new direction while staying true to its roots.  The same is not the case with “Hellseeker,” which takes the same approach and applies it to an unfaithful husband whose wife dies in a car wreck.  Pinhead and the other Cenobites appear so briefly that they seem to have been added as an afterthought.

Three more to go before the box will close, but it seems that I’ve gotten the worst out of the way.

31 Days of Horror: Day 11 - Mother of Tears (2007)

Last night’s movie was Dario Argento’s “Mother of Tears,” the third part of his Three Mothers trilogy, about three witches who live in secret locations and use their evil powers to spread darkness and sorrow throughout the world.  The first two films in the trilogy, “Suspira” (1977) and “Inferno” (1980), are two of my favorite horror movies, but I had been avoiding watching “Mother of Tears” because the quality of Argento’s recent work has been uneven at best.  Since he had failed to complete the trilogy in the 80s, I thought it was best left unfinished.  This month seemed like a good time to give it a chance, so I watched it with very low expectations.  It’s not the steaming pile I feared it would be, but overall it’s rather flat, not very good, not very bad, just an ultimately forgettable horror movie.

In the earlier films, two of the mothers were located and killed, the Mother of Sighs in Freiberg, Germany (“Suspiria”) and the Mother of Darkness in New York (“Inferno”).  The Mother of Tears lives in Rome, and when a researcher at an art museum reads aloud an Aramaic passage from a cloak that was recently unearthed on the grounds of an old church, the Third Mother and her minions appear to kill her and take the cloak.  Sarah, a friend and colleague of the murdered researcher, witnesses the murder, and then flees to safety.  When the police are unable to find the killers, Sarah begins searching for them on her own. 

Meanwhile, the Mother of Tears has begun to unleash her evil on Rome, summoning witches from around the world to come spread darkness throughout the city.  Aware that Sarah has learned that the Mother of Tears is active in Rome, the witches want to kill her.  Sarah’s search leads her to an old bookstore where she meets a woman who was a student of Sarah’s mother.  Sarah never knew much about her parents, who died when she was very young.  She learns that her mother was actually a powerful white witch who died fighting the Mother of Sighs.  She then realizes that the voice she has been hearing in her head must be her mother explaining to Sarah how to use her own powers.  When Sarah listens to this voice, she is able to make herself invisible to her pursuers.  She eventually meets an alchemist who gives her more information about the Three Mothers and helps her find the Mother of Tears’ secret home in Rome. 

   

“Mother of Tears” works fairly well as a supernatural detective story.  For an Argento movie, the narrative is surprisingly cohesive.  Although “Inferno” is the second part of the trilogy, it doesn’t really continue the narrative so much as it builds upon the themes presented in “Suspiria.”  By contrast, Argento directly connects “Mother of Tears” with the first two parts of the trilogy, particularly “Suspiria,” and thus gives the trilogy a more unified story.  Through Sarah’s research, he also makes interesting connections between the Three Mothers and other triads, for example the Graces and the Furies.  At times, his portrayal of the chaos that engulfs Rome is very effective, for example, when a woman lovingly lifts her baby from a stroller and is then compelled by the dark magic to drop it from a bridge and when an old priest says he has received more requests for exorcisms in the past week than in his entire career.  

However, I would gladly trade the movie’s tighter plot for more of the visual flair of Argento’s best work.  Conspicuously absent are the elaborate set piece murders for which he is so well known.  Instead, we get one dull chase scene through a bookstore in Rome’s train station and an even duller one through a train.  Sarah is pursued by a Japanese witch who looks likes a ComicCon attendee in an anime costume.  In fact, most of the witches look like high school girls in cheesy Halloween costumes.  More cheesiness comes from the scenes when Sarah communicates with the spirit of her dead mother.

Although it’s not terrible, “Mother of Tears” is a clear example of how much the quality of Argento’s work has declined since the 1980s.  I would rather he had left the trilogy unfinished.      

31 Days of Horror: Day 10 - Hellraiser 2 and 3

I enjoyed “Hellraiser” so much last night that I decided to make tonight a double feature of “Hellraiser” sequels:  “Hellbound: Hellraiser 2” (1988) and “Hellraiser 3: Hell on Earth” (1992).  With nine movies in the series to date, I expected the earliest ones at least to be watchable, and I was only partially disappointed.

In “Hellbound,” Dr. Channard, a psychiatrist with a long interest in the Cenobites, learns about the events that unfolded in the first movie, acquires the bloody mattress containing the remains of Julia, whose body was ripped apart by the Cenobites, and brings her back to life.  Of course, initially she is a bloody mass of bone and tissue just as Frank was when she resurrected him, but Dr. Channard quickly remedies this by providing fresh bodies for her to feast upon.  He also just happens to be treating a young girl named Tiffany who doesn’t speak a word but is an expert in solving puzzle boxes.  He uses her to summon the Cenobites. 

Meanwhile, Kirsty, the daughter of Larry, Frank’s brother, who also died in the first film, receives a call for help that she believes comes from her father:  “Help me!  I’m in hell.”  Answering the call, she, too, seeks out the Cenobites.  This time, however, when the box is opened, the characters are transported to their own personal hells.  The different hells are linked, and Kirsty and Tiffany find each other and collaborate in the search for Kirsty’s father.

In some ways, “Hellbound” is more watchable than the original “Hellbraiser,” not because it’s a better movie, but because it’s less disturbing.  It places more emphasis on the sympathetic characters, Kirsty and Tiffany, there’s not as much gore, and the gore effects it does have aren’t as realistic.  The movie is also much more ambitious.  The horror of “Hellraiser” was confined mostly to a single room, and this was very effective because it made the movie a bit claustrophobic, and the horrors seem inescapable.  The elaborate and somewhat cheesy sets in “Hellbound” detract from the bodily horror by drawing too much attention to themselves.  The movie also suffers from an origin story of the Cenobites that tries to humanize them.  How could anyone think it’s a good idea to make the demons in a horror movie a bit sympathetic?  Despite these flaws, however, it’s not bad as far as sequels go.          

This is especially true when it’s compared to “Hell on Earth.”  The less said about this one the better, so I’ll be brief.  Pinhead, the main Cenobite, is embedded in a marble column decorated with demonic sculptures.  Promising him untold pleasures of the flesh, Pinhead enlists the help of a night club owner to free him from the column, so he can unleash hell on earth.  In an effort to stop him, the soul of the man Pinhead used to be, before opening the puzzle box and being transformed into a Cenobite, contacts Joey, a journalist who is researching a story on the puzzle box, and explains how she can stop Pinhead.

There’s little trace of the visceral horror that makes the original movie so disturbing.  Most of “Hell on Earth” is wasted showing Joey traveling around New York City conducting research.  When the Cenobites finally appear, they chase her through the streets of the city, looking utterly ridiculous.  A good example of the depths to which “Hell on Earth” sinks is the CD-player Cenobite that ejects CDs from his stomach and throws them into the faces of his victims.  The ending features a struggle between Pinhead and his former self that again left me wondering how a series that started with such promise was entrusted to such incompetents.

 

A general rule of horror series is that with each sequel they get progressively worse.  It’s hard to imagine “Hellraiser” sinking much lower and being able to sustain six more sequels.  I am, however, watching the beginning of “Hellraiser 4: Bloodlines” (1996) as I write this, and it’s immediately clear that the execs at Miramax found someone with a greater imagination for shittiness than me to mess this one up:  it starts in space with a robot opening the puzzle box.

31 Days of Horror: Day 9 - Hellraiser (1987)

An important question I had before watching “Hellraiser”: which monster cereal will go better with it, Booberry or Frankenberry?  So far, the choice has been easy.  If it involves the supernatural, Booberry; if it features mad science, Frankenberry.  But what about a movie that revolves around a puzzle box that summons pale-skinned humanoids with multiple body piercings and mutilations?  Not an easy question, so I had a bowl of each.

Before tonight, it had probably been around ten years since I had seen “Hellraiser,” and it was much more disturbing than I remembered.  It’s the gory tale of what happens when Frank Cotton, seeking to test the limits of pleasure and pain, acquires a puzzle box that summons beings known as Cenobites who oblige by providing him with the extremes of both.  But the pain clearly outweighs the pleasure as his experience ends with hooks piercing his skin and ripping his body apart.  He’s later resurrected when his brother cuts his hand while moving into the family home where Frank died.  Blood from the wound seeps into the floorboards and revives the remaining bits of Frank that were left when the Cenobites destroyed his body.  When they find out that he has escaped them by returning to life, they come looking for him.

“Hellraiser” is disturbing both in its subject matter and its gore effects.  Frank is joined in his depravity by Julia, his brother’s wife, who is drawn to Frank’s hedonism and has an affair with him.  When she learns that he has returned from the dead, she aids in his recovery by seducing men and luring them to the house, beating them to death with a hammer, and leaving their corpses for Frank to eat.  As he regrows tissue, Frank is a gooey, slimy, bloody, mass of bone, nerves, and muscle.  Scenes filled with hooks piercing skin and then ripping it apart are enough to make even seasoned veterans of gory horror cringe.  Horror doesn't get much more visceral than this.

 

        

31 Days of Horror: Day 8 - Bela Lugosi Double Feature

Before tonight, I was one movie behind, so I made it a double feature of two Edgar Allan Poe adaptations starring Bela Lugosi:  “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1932) and “The Black Cat” (1934).  Neither shares much besides its title with the story that inspired it.  The former reworks the basic elements of the Poe story into a much more entertaining tale involving a mad scientist while the latter takes only the black cat from the original tale and uses it as one of many bizarre elements in a convoluted revenge story. 

In director Robert Florey’s movie, the dead bodies in the Rue Morgue are the products of failed experiments conducted by Dr. Mirakle (Lugosi), who, like Dr. Caligari, has a day job as a carnival showman.  Mirakle’s exhibit features an ape named Erik whose language Mirakle claims to understand and translate for the audience.  He provides a clue to his real work as a mad scientist when he begins talking about evolution and tells his audience he will prove that men and apes share a common ancestor by mixing Erik’s blood with a man’s.       

Poe’s “Rue Morgue” is an engaging detective story ruined by a ridiculous ending revealing that an ape was responsible for the murders; director Robert Florey’s movie is ridiculous from beginning to end, so there’s no reason to complain when a man in a cheesy ape suit makes his appearance.  Florey attempts a bit of early cinematic magic when he alternates close-ups of a monkey and wide shots of the man in the suit.  It’s very unlikely that they ever fooled audiences, but it’s a lot of fun to watch them try.  A final chase scene featuring the ape running over rooftops while an angry mob looks on below is particularly entertaining.

       

I’ve seen several film adaptations of “The Black Cat,” and Edgar G. Ulmer’s is by far the strangest.  Lugosi plays Dr. Werdegrast, a Hungarian soldier who was left to die in the Great War by an Austrian named Engineer Poelzig.  Poelzig, played by Boris Karloff, later built a house on the ruins of the fort where he left Werdegrast.  Werdegrast survived but spent 15 years in prison, and after his release, he seeks out Poelzig to take his revenge.  He also believes that Poelzig killed his wife.  He goes to Poelzig’s house pretending to be visiting his old friend and learns that Poelzig has become a satanic priest and has preserved the bodies of several women, including his wife Karen, through unholy rites.  On his first night in the house, Werdegrast tries to kill Poelzig, but he suffers from a severe phobia of cats, and when a black cat crosses his path, he runs out of the room in fear.  They agree to resolve their differences through more civilized means after Poelzig’s other guests have left, but Poelzig plans to involve them all in a satanic ritual the next night.  All of this happens in just over an hour.

 

As you can probably guess, the movie is a barely comprehensible mess.  I know nothing about its history, but I’m guessing it goes something like this.  Universal had half of two scripts; one was the beginning of a revenge tale and the other was the end of a story about a satanic priest.  Lugosi and Karloff had both signed on to do a movie of “The Black Cat,” but there was no script.  The two half scripts were cobbled together, Werdegrast was given a fear of cats to justify using the title, Lugosi and Karloff were told Universal had a script, the cameras were ready to roll, and the world was better for it.  No early American horror film begins to approach the weirdness of “The Black Cat,” and it’s an utter joy to watch because just as it seems the plot can’t get any stranger or more convoluted, a new layer unfolds, a secret room in the house is revealed, or a preserved body appears.

Tonight's double feature has me eager for more, and the only things stopping me from watching the other three movies in the Bela Lugosi Collection are that it's 4:00 a.m. and I still have papers to grade before class tomorrow.

 

31 Days of Horror: Days 6 and 7

I missed day six because my girlfriend, Vicki, and I watched several episodes of “The Walking Dead,” which is horror, but this blog series is about horror movies not TV shows.  This put me two movies behind, so tonight I had a double feature:  “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1919) and “The Awful Dr. Orlof” (1964), which make a nice combination, since “Orlof” was heavily influenced by “Caligari.” 

One of the first horror movies ever made and my favorite silent movie, “Caligari” tells the story of a murdering hypnotist posing as a carnival showman.  Dr. Caligari’s “cabinet,” which looks more like a coffin, contains a somnambulist, or sleepwalker, named Cesare, whom Caligari claims has slept day and night all 23 years of his life and can tell the future.  Dr. Caligari exhibits his cabinet at a fair in the town of Holsten Wall, and soon after his show begins, people start dying in the night, victims of Caligari, through Cesare, whom he sends to kill them.

What makes this movie so interesting is not its story, but the way it looks.  An iconic example of German expressionist film, “Caligari” uses sets in which everything is off kilter and out of proportion:  all the lines in the movie are jagged, including windowsills and door frames; buildings lean precariously; some rooms are much too small for their inhabitants; chairs have backs several times the size of their seats; and the town clerk sits in a chair that stands so tall his feet dangle several inches from the ground.  All of this creates the impression that the visuals are the product of deranged mind, and this is clearly the point, but it’s an open question whose madness these images externalize:  Caligari’s or the asylum patient who narrates the story?

It’s difficult to overstate the influence of “Caligari,” but for obvious examples, see Tim Burton’s entire filmography.  It had been several years since I had seen “Caligari,” and I’d forgotten how much fun it is to watch.  At times, it’s like watching a cartoon with live action characters.  If you’ve never seen a silent movie, there’s not a better place to start.

“The Awful Dr. Orlof” is an early work of Spanish director Jesus “Jess” Franco, who has made close to 200 movies.  The handful I’ve seen are all entertaining, but many are almost unwatchable.  He worked in every imaginable subgenre of horror, but  I prefer his mad scientist movies.  He made several good ones, including “The Diabolical Dr. Z” and “The Rites of Frankenstein,” and “Orlof” is probably the best.

With the help of his assistant, Morpho, Dr. Orlof abducts and murders women to use in experiments hoping to find a way to repair his daughter’s disfigured face.  He woos the women with drinks and a diamond necklace containing a tracking device that Morpho later uses to find them.  “Orlof” draws on several horror classics, most notably “Caligari,” “Frankenstein,” and “Dracula.”  Morpho is a combination of the monsters from all three, and Orloff is both Dr. Caligari and Victor Frankenstein.  He broke Morpho out of prison, altered his mind through brain surgery and thus placed him directly under his control.  When Morpho abducts the women for Orloff, he kills them by biting their necks.

With their willingness to abandon narrative coherence in favor of elaborate set pieces, European horror movies often do a better job of capturing the irrationality, surrealism, and illogic of true horror than American horror movies.  I’m not suggesting that American horror movies lack plot holes, but even when they reach the point of no return, they tend to keep trying to follow the plot.  European horror movies have no problem disregarding it completely in the interest unsettling their viewers.  At their worst, this makes them completely incomprehensible, and Franco was guiltier than most.  But this was less of a problem in the 1960s than it was later on.  Orlof benefits immensely from a lack of concern with narrative logic as its best scenes are elaborate chase sequences through a castle and a villa that make little sense from a purely narrative perspective but succeed brilliantly in horrifying viewers. 

I enjoy every subgenre of horror, and I don’t even try to pick a favorite, but I’m rarely disappointed by a mad scientist movie, so this subgenre clearly ranks near the top.  Tonight’s double feature enabled me to revisit two early classics and enjoy them with a bowl of Frankenberry.        

31 Days of Horror: Days 4 and 5

I didn’t watch a horror movie on day four, but I had a good excuse:  I went to see the metal band Kreator in concert instead.  The show was part of their Phantom Antichrist tour, and they played several songs from the new album, which was the Cabinet’s Metal Album of the Week several weeks ago.  The songs’ dark themes combined with the stage effects that included smoke machines and backdrops with images of zombies and the antichrist from the album cover gave the performance elements of horror.  But it still wasn’t a horror movie, so I’ll have to work in a double feature to make up for this missed day. 

Tonight, I watched “Halloween III: Season of the Witch” (1982), a very odd entry in the “Halloween” franchise that I had been meaning to watch for years.  Although it’s called “Halloween III,” the only connections between this movie and the other Halloween movies are that it was produced by John Carpenter and that he wrote the music, but it’s not the instantly recognizable score from the other movies in the series; he wrote completely new music for this one.  Michael Myers and Laurie Strode aren’t even mentioned although the original “Halloween” is playing on TV screens in one of the movie’s key scenes.  The subtitle is also misleading as there’s no witch in the movie either.  However, when viewed on its own terms, “Season of the Witch” is a very enjoyable horror movie that presents a unique take on the Halloween theme.

 
An Irishman named Conal Cochran is responsible for the horror. He wants to reclaim Halloween from Americans and return it to its European roots.  Cochran complains that Americans have turned it into a night for children to beg for candy, whereas Samhain, from which Halloween was bastardized, was a night of blood and sacrifice when the barrier between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred.  Cochran runs a company known as Silver Shamrock, which specializes in popular Halloween masks.  He has stolen a pillar from Stonehenge and ground particles from this pillar into his masks, giving them special powers.  At 9:00 on Halloween night, a television commercial will activate this secret ingredient killing anyone wearing one of Cochran’s masks.  A week before Halloween, a man discovers Cochran’s plan, but is soon killed by one of his minions.  The man’s daughter and a doctor who tried to save him attempt to stop Cochran.

 
“Season of the Witch” begins with a pixilated computer image of a Jack-o-Lantern, recalling the opening shot of “Halloween,” which slowly zooms in on a real Jack-o-Lantern.  However, I soon stopped thinking of it as a Halloween sequel and realized that it was instead an effort by Carpenter to allow the franchise to move in a much more interesting direction.  Rather than showing Michael Myers stalking his victims yet again, writer/director Tommy Lee Wallace explores the horror of Halloween night from a different perspective.  It left me wishing that Michael Myers had stayed dead in later sequels and that they had continued to examine the many different kinds of horror associated with Halloween. 

31 Days of Horror: Day 3 - Octaman (1971)

 

I’m a sucker for man-in-a-rubber-suit creature features, and tonight “Octaman” reminded me why.

 

The action begins when scientists studying the effects of nuclear contamination on the Amazon discover what they claim are mutated octopuses.  It’s unclear how they know the octopuses are mutated because they look just like rubber octopuses to me.  However, research on a few specimens they take confirms that the octopuses have human cells.  Before long, Octaman comes looking for them. 

As I’m sure you’ve already guessed, he’s part man, part Octopus, and all terror.  He walks on two legs, and smacks people around with his many limbs like an eight-armed professional wrestler, but he prefers squeezing them to death.  He has large red eyes, and several shots from his perspective enable us to experience Octavision.  Surprisingly, the eyes actually move.  Unfortunately, the same isn’t true of his mouth.  It remains perpetually open revealing sharp teeth that never have the opportunity to tear open human flesh. 

Two common complaints I have about creature features are that it takes too long for the creature to appear and when it does I don’t get to see it enough.  Neither of these is a problem in “Octaman.”  He makes his first appearance less than ten minutes into the movie, and we never have to wait more than a few minutes to see him again.  The rubber suit must have consumed most of the movie’s budget, and writer/director Harry Essex ensured it was money well spent. 

A few scenes feature the scientists trying to explain the existence of Octaman, but Essex doesn’t waste much time having characters talk about the creature.  He knows we’d much rather see it lumbering around in pursuit of its prey.  He was also sure to include the obligatory scene of the creature carrying away a woman, albeit clad in jeans and a sweater rather than a bikini.

Like his distant cousin in "The Creature from the Black Lagoon," Octaman falls for the woman and this ultimately leads to his downfall, but not before we're treated to a chase scene in which he outsmarts his pursuers by leading them into a cave and then hiding out in their trailer.  If you have any appreciation at all for creature features, "Octaman" will keep you entertained for an hour and twenty minutes.