Honestly, any year when I don’t have to cheat to get a horror movie starting with X is a good year. So I’m not going to have anything to with it’s alternate title, The Beast of X Moor.
X Moor is based on a true story, for a certain definition of “true”; it uses as its basis the urban legend of a great cat resembling a panther or puma sighted in the Exmoor region of southwest England. The bulk of the sightings referenced on that page are from the 1980s, but let’s not let that get in the way of our movie.
Upon learning of a £25,000 reward for proof of the Beast’s existence, Georgia (Melia Kreiling) convinces her boyfriend Matt (Nick Blood) to “borrow” some fancy equipment from his job to get some footage of the elusive kitty. They’ll be aided in this by professional hunter Fox (Mark Bonnar), who seems to feel that catching the creature is a very personal challenge. Perhaps too personal.
After a couple of violent encounters with local hooligans, our documentarians set up their network of motion-controlled night vision cameras and the control center in their central camp, only to discover a dead body – in fact, several dead bodies – and their survival on this expedition is suddenly in question.
There is a plot twist in X Moor I did not see coming, so I’m going to keep mum about it. The story developing from that is itself full of twists and turns, not all of them logical or deserved. It’s fairly well done, and although as a whole the flick just didn’t gel for me, I recognize there are other folks out there that will enjoy it. It might be also be appreciated that although it seems to be setting up a found footage movie, it’s not that at all.
The first thing you’re going to ask is, “Is this an Amicus Film?” Which is fair, since the name Milton Subotsky is right there in the credits. But no, at this point Amicus’ grave wasn’t even cold yet, after The People That Time Forgot. Subotsky relocated to Canada, and tried to get the ol’ anthology (“portmanteau”, if you want to get fancy) mojo workin’ again with this and The Monster Club. That didn’t work out so well, alas.
Our two big stars for the framing device are Ray Milland (yay!) and Peter Cushing (double yay!). Cushing is a very high-strung writer (his previous books were on flying saucers and ESP), who has made his way to Milland’s house with a thick binder. He’s Cushing’s publisher, you see, and he’s doubtful about the new book. Cushing responds that he has proof going back years that cats are horrible monsters that actually control the world.
Most of us who live with cats will shrug “well, duh”, but we already bought the ticket so let’s see what Peter has to say.
In 1912 London, a rich old matron (Joan Greenwood, rather wasted here but still managing to steal the show) dictates her new will, cutting out her wastrel nephew (Simon Williams) and leaving her vast estate to her multiple cats. Our snoopy maid (Susan Penhaligon) however, is also the lover of that nephew, and they hatch a plan to steal the old lady’s copy of the will. When she surprises the maid during the theft, there’s an employer murder, bringing down the wrath of all those kitties. I liked this story better when it was called Eye of the Cat and starred Michael Sarrazin, but that movie didn’t have the murderer trapped in a pantry for days, living on cat food, or the gruesome discovery that the hungry cats figured out the old lady was made of meat (Joan Greenwood, ladies and gentlemen – even dead, still upstaging everybody).
Oh, that’s never a good sign.
Then, in 1975 Quebec, the Blakes (Alexandra Stewart and Donald Pilon) take in their young niece Lucy (Katrina Holden Bronson) when her parents die in a car wreck. She brings with her dead mommy’s black cat, Wellington. Mrs. Blake doesn’t particularly like this, and she definitely hates the cat. Their daughter, Angela (Chloe Franks) is a nasty little shit who proceeds to make Lucy’s life hell. Mom finally steals Wellington away to have it euthanized, and burns Lucy’s mother’s book on black magic. Not all of them, though, and the euthanasia doesn’t take, and Angela is about to be in a lot of trouble.
Lastly, in 1936 Hollywood, a tragedy happens on the set of Valentine De’ath (Donald Pleasance)’s latest horror movie, when somehow the Poe-inspired pendulum over his co-star – his wife Madeliene (Catherine Bégin) – turns out to be quite real. Luckily for the desperate producer (John Vernon sporting a really weird accent), Madeliene’s stand-in Edina (Samantha Eggar) is willing to step into the role. As I’m sure you’ve figured out, Edina is Valentine’s mistress, the accident was murder, and Madeliene’s cat is going to be tossed out as soon as possible. Just to make sure you know Valentine is a cad, the cat has kittens and he drowns them. Well, that doesn’t go over well at all, and not only does the wily cat evade every trap Valentine sets out for it, it starts engineering on-set accidents to avenge its mistress.
Back at the framing device, I’m sure you can figure out how things shake out. Cushing is murdered by a mob of cats on his way home, and Milland burns his book while giving his cat nice dish of milk. The end.
Most of Subotsky’s anthology movies had four or even five stories, and cutting them down to three isn’t justified by the stories, which get so padded out that your wristwatch arm will get lots of exercise as you check how much time is left. The only story that doesn’t have this problem is the third one, where everybody – especially Donald Pleasance – seems to be having a lot of fun. Sure, Bram Stoker should have gotten a writer’s credit because it rather shamelessly rips off “The Squaw”, but, we take our entertainment where we may. I pondered if my reaction to The Uncanny was due to its close proximity to the more feral and kinetic Tears of Kali, but no… this one creaks in the wrong places. Oh, it’s a fair use of 90 minutes, the actors and game and uniformly good, but some patience will definitely be called for.
This is going to be a tough one to write. There’s a number of reasons for that. The most pragmatic is that my keyboard is screwing up (I do indeed pound the hell out of my keyboards).
Less pragmatic is that writer/director James Gunn was fired off Marvel movies for tweets he made in his youth (Too bad you weren’t running for a Supreme Court slot, huh, James). And dammit, I lovedGuardians of the Galaxy. That does put some of the things in this movie in a unfavorable light.
Downright personal is the fact that I’m really tired of this subgenre. Watching Cute Little Buggers on basically a dare was a big mistake.
So.
A meteor falls near a sleepy little deer season-lovin’ town. In short order we will meet local policeman Bill (Nathan Fillion), competent but easy-going, and his longtime crush Starla (Elizabeth Banks), who is unfortunately married to the possessive Grant (Michael Rooker). After Starla’s not in the mood that night, Grant heads out in a huff to get drunk and runs into Brenda (Brenda James), an old acquaintance who professes her hots for him. They head out to the woods, but Grant gets cold feet and breaks off with Brenda – just in time to find that meteor, and a trail of slime leading from it, to a sluglike creature that wastes no time in infecting Grant.
Movies like this live and die on bringing something new to the party, and in this case it’s that the slugs inhabiting Grant (and later a lot more of the cast) burrow up to the brain and are capable of acting like their host for a time. So Infected Grant has Starla thinking he’s become a nicer guy, giving him enough time to meet back up with Brenda and turn her into a human slug incubator. By this time Grant is starting to exhibit some physical changes, murderous tendencies, and it’s not long before Bill is leading an armed posse to find this creature that used to be Grant and the missing Brenda. Too late, as it turns out, as she explodes in a shower of slugs and suddenly actual uninfected humans in the town are outnumbered.
“There’s somethin’ wrong with me.”
The slugs also have a hive mind – now thoroughly entangled with Grant’s mind, so every slug-zombie in town is hunting for Starla, because Grant wants her back. Add to this mix a teenage girl, Kylie (Tanya Saulnier), who got a slug halfway down her throat and half a Vulcan mindmeld before she managed to pull it out and killed it with a curling iron, so there’s someone on the team who knows how the slugs operate. After that, you just need a halfway novel way to kill the main creature and stop the invasion, and Slither does that.
Nathan Fillion could do stuff like this in his sleep, but thankfully the man’s always awake and giving 110%. Elizabeth Banks has an odd role to play here, and I’m not sure the script did her any real favors, but by God she’s game. And anybody who watched this movie that didn’t realize that Michael Rooker is a far more versatile actor than folks had credited, they were not paying attention.
So why didn’t I like the flick? We’ve been here before, back when I watched I Married a Witch. Is it fatigue? Just in a bad mood that night? Is it because – just to bring back that Supreme Court reference – there’s a scene where Gregg Henry (playing the worst mayor ever) has a temper tantrum after most of the cast is turned into zombies because there is no Mr. Pibb and I watched this the day after Kavanaugh’s famous meltdown?
Most likely the fatigue – as I said, I’ve seen a lot of these movies. But this one is well-made, and aims to be an alien-invasion movie for fans of alien-invasion movies, with plentiful easter eggs in the background and an eye toward entertaining. You can still feel Gunn’s days with Troma hanging on here and there, the source of those troubling Tweets (which were really kinda expected when he was working for Edgelord Central), but overall, it’s a good, entertaining flick with a solid fanbase. It doesn’t require my appreciation, and that’s fine.
Except for that “oh no the monster’s not quite dead yet” post-credit scene. That can go straight to hell.
Last year we watched the really good sequel [REC] 2 (and had previously watched the original [REC] back in 2012 before these alphabetized marathons were invented. So it’s quite natural to bring in the third chapter here, and doubtless to ride this train until next year, content to not have to rack my brain or Google for a horror movie starting with R for one more year. As I pointed out yesterday: Yes, I am that lazy.
[Rec]³ begins true to its roots, though with a welcome twist: the opening apes the beginning of a cheesy wedding video, with a song and childhood pictures of the bride and groom. Thankfully we cut from that to the raw footage of the wedding, from two different video cameras – an amateur with his tiny camera and a pro with a steadicam. You’ll be meeting with most of the characters during this segment, but since this is a [Rec] movie, don’t get too attached to any of them. You’re probably safe with the Groom, Koldo (Diego Martin) and the bride, Clara (Leticia Dolera, who is kind of the platonic ideal of the beautiful bride. I mean, wow), though. For the moment.
See? I told you.
So we go through the wedding and the sumptuous reception. One of the uncles isn’t feeling well, The video camera picks up a police car and a couple of guys wearing hazmat suits. Odd. Then that sick uncle gets all bitey and things go straight to hell. Koldo and Clara are separated in the carnage, and the panicking groom demands of the photographer, “Why are you still filming?”, grabs the camera and smashes it to the floor.
There, at 22 minutes, we finally get our opening title. And with the camera smashed, [Rec]³ abandons the found footage format for the rest of the movie.
I’m of two minds about that. First – yeah, okay, it does feel like director Paco Plaza (one of the two co-directors of the preceding flicks) breathes an audible sigh of relief as he starts setting up shots without having to deal with the Rules of the Found Footage Film. The bizarreness of the subgenre is that making a good found footage flick is actually harder than making a regular film. Action and effects sequences have to be laid out and planned with long takes in mind, and if one thing goes wrong… well, movie making is an exercise in Things Going Wrong. This is why there are so many bad found footage movies – people think they’re easy to make. And the first two [Rec] movies are good found footage movies.
From that last sentence, you might think I didn’t like [Rec]³, and up to a point, you’re right. Oh, it’s a good zombie flick – plenty of gore and suspense, the mythology of the series advances somewhat – the attending priest has a theory about fallen angels and finds out the afflicted can be paralyzed by saying Bible verses to them (at least if you’re a clergyman) – but absent the sort of berserk creativity necessary to following the aforementioned Rules of the Found Footage Film, it becomes exactly that: another zombie movie. The trials of Clara and Koldo trying to get back together without dying is compelling, but toward the end of the flick viewing simply became an exercise in yelling things at the screen (these people have a lot invested in dropping weapons).
I swore off zombie movies for a decade, and after only a few years of cautiously watching them, I find myself succumbing to Zombie Fatigue once more. To anybody bitching about being tired of superhero movies, I say unto you, try being tired of zombie movies. There are lots more of those.
But it’s the care that went into [Rec]³ that makes me hold off that particular kill switch for a while (that and the fact that I have at least one more zombie flick to review this Hubrisween). Plaza makes some clever connections to the first movie, letting us know how [Rec]³ fits in with the first two: that sick uncle is a veterinarian, bitten by a dog that was thought to be dead. That’s a bit from the first movie that I had almost forgotten. In a TV in the background of one scene, we see news footage of the police and army outside the building from [Rec] 2. The Marvel fan in me appreciates that sort of callback.
Plaza and Jaume Balagueró co-directed the first two movies, then split up the duties between [Rec]³ and [Rec] 4. So I’ve also got to hold off abandoning zombies movies until I can see what Balagueró pulls off on his own. At least I have a year to build up my resistance again.
If you know me at all, you know that I hate slasher movies. Hate them with the heat of a thousand suns. Hate them with a passion I usually reserve for licorice candy and overlong meetings. I hate hate hate them. Yet here I am watching Pieces, which is the platonic ideal of everything I hate about them. Not for nothing is its tag line “It’s exactly what you think it is!”
Why am I doing this? Because it’s Hubrisween.
The opening is, I admit, pretty effective. “Thirty years ago” a boy is putting together a jigsaw puzzle of a nude woman when he’s discovered by his abusive mother. She starts screeching at him that she’s going to burn all his things, resulting in an axe to her head and the boy sawing her body apart. When the cops finally come, he hides in a closet and says the bad man did it.
If you need any early indicators as to attention to detail in Pieces – though this prologue takes place circa 1952, the mother is yelling at her homicidal child to get a “plastic bag” to burn his porn stash in, and they have a touch tone phone.
In the present of 1982, on your typical fake college campus, a girl riding a skateboard crashes through a huge mirror, and this all it takes for our now grown axe-wielding kid to start putting together his blood-stained jigsaw puzzle and assembling a woman of his own from the chainsawed-off body parts of nubile young co-eds in various stages of undress (that this is the trigger is never expressly alluded to in the movie).
Director Juan Piquer Simón delivers a movie that is almost more giallo than slasher – the preponderance of red herrings (you just know Paul Smith is not the killer, no matter how ham-handedly the movie tries to make you think he is), the utter uselessness of the cops (Christopher George and Lynda Day George), and because of that uselessness, the solution to the killings lies with an outside investigator, in this case student Kendall (Ian Sera). The only thing that keeps it from being a giallo is it lacks that genre’s devotion to artistry, to finding beauty in the worst places. What it does have is nothing that will quell accusations of misogyny in either genre – the murder scenes are drawn out, graphic, and exclusively female. Possibly the most remarkable thing about Pieces is the ending, when Simón reasons that most slasher movies have a shock ending that comes out of left field… “but what if mine came all the way from the parking lot?” It’s that outre.
“I’m not THAT worthless!”
How bad are the cops? The decision is made to keep the murders quiet to avoid a panic, which allows the killer to act with impunity, multiplying his potential number of unguarded, unaware victims. How you manage to cover up a girl getting decapitated with a chainsaw in broad daylight is quite beyond me, though. The fact that Christopher George is the detective in charge caused me to assume this movie was Italian, not Spanish, for many years.
As Joe Bob Briggs pointed out in his Last Drive-In marathon, Pieces is a picture of what Simón thinks college in America is like: non-stop sex, right down to a water bed in the training room (was this ever a thing? I mean, just look at me, I’ve never seen the inside of a training room). Well, at least it gives Lynda a chance to really go for that Oscar nom:
And, oh please, let’s not forget this (and somebody owes Goblin some money):
But, alas, one bit of glorious over-acting and a surprise cameo by Bruce Le does not move me to suddenly overcome my hatred of these things. The best I can say is that it’s undeniably trash, but at least it’s fairly well-made trash.
Let’s get one thing straight, right off the bat. The Offspring is the title used for this movie’s initial U.S. theatrical and video release. Thereafter it was known by its original title, From A Whisper to A Scream, which does not begin with an O, so the hell with that.
We open with a dream sequence of a woman getting out of the bath, getting into a formal gown, and then embracing a handsome man in a tuxedo (we know it’s a dream because the guy enters in a welter of fog). The woman is shocked awake because she is strapped to a gurney, and is about to be executed by lethal injection for a series of murders.
But wait a minute. The woman is Martine Beswick. The Warden is Lawrence Tierney. And the attending reporter is Susan Tyrell.
What is going on here?
Tyrell goes to visit Martine’s uncle, Vincent Price, who lives in your typical haunted house – in fact she has to enter through a narrow hall reminiscent of Tales from the Crypt, just minus the razor blades. Price is the Librarian of Oldfield, Tennessee, a town he claims warps its inhabitants and makes them do evil things… like his niece. And to prove it to the dubious Tyrell, he tells her some stories from the history of Oldfield.
Yes, this is an anthology movie. Didn’t they tell you that at the box office?
Oh, look, it’s dream scene #2.
The first story is fairly modern. Clu Gulager is Stanley Burnside, an aging, mild-mannered clerk at a trucking company who is obsessed with Grace (Megan MacFarland), a secretary there. He finally gets up the gumption to ask her for a date, he confesses her love for her, but he’s too weird and pathetic for her, so he strangles her, as one does. He also sneaks into the funeral home for his fantasy one-night stand with her. Nine months later, something crawls out of her grave and goes looking for Stanley.
The necrophilia angle is bad enough, but the creep factor is heightened by the Tennessee Williams overlay that Stanley cares for his sister, who had rheumatic fever so he has to give her ice water baths every night. This part gets really weird until Stanley decides to murder her, too.
…aaand there’s dream scene #3.
The next story goes back to the 1950s, when Jessie (Terry Kiser) rips off the wrong local crooks and gets shot in the back while running away. He manages to get to a boat and push himself into the swamp, a poor excuse for an escape being better than none. He wakes up in the cabin of Felder Evans (Harry Caesar) a long time recluse who’s frankly glad to have some company for a change. Felder nurses Jessie back to health, but Jessie, being a scumbag, goes through his things and discovers that Felder is, in fact, over 200 years old. It must be the strange chanting he does at night, and the weird potion he drinks. Jessie means to have that potion, and is willing to kill for it. And you know, that sort of thing never ends up well.
We now go back to the 1930s, and, I kid you not, Lovecraft’s Traveling Amusements, where in the freak show Ron (Steven Arden) obligingly chews broken glass, steel nuts and razor blades for the yokels. One of these yokels is Amarrillis (Didi Lanier)(and I wonder if that name isn’t a nod to Price’s wife in The Comedy of Terrors), a young lady who has fallen hard for Ron, and vice versa. But with a name like Lovecraft’s, you know something ain’t right with that carnival, and its owner, Rosalind Cash, has a hold over each of her performers. Most of them are hiding from the law, but the hold goes… deeper. And when Ron decides to leave the carnival anyway, things are going to get… bloody.
This segment, incidentally has Angelo Rossitto in his final role as a barker.
The last story goes back to the Civil War, where four Union soldiers, led by Cameron Mitchell, wander separated from their unit. They come upon three Confederate soldiers, who they slaughter (well, C.J. Cox doesn’t slaughter, he’s the nice Union soldier), only to find out in the papers the rebels were carrying that the war is over. Pike doesn’t like his fellows’ plan to continue a-killin’ and a-rapin’, and decides to go back home. For which Mitchell shoots him in the back.
The three head over to some town called Oldfield they deem “ripe for the pickin!” only to be knocked ass over teakettle by some land mines. When they come to, they are the prisoners of the remaining inhabitants of the town after the two armies clashed there: children. And given that one of Mitchell’s men tries to threaten the leader of the kids and gets knifed in the balls for his trouble, you can bet our villains are in for a bad time.
This is the most gleefully sadistic of the four stories (though the previous three certainly haven’t held back in the violence department). Mitchell will make his escape by killing the most trusting of the children, and on his way out sees the assembled kids playing a ghastly game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey, using his men’s body parts. His escape is cut off by the not-quite-dead-yet Cox, who puts a bayonet through Mitchell’s leg just to make sure he gets caught again. So Mitchell is taken to finally meet the master of the town, The Magistrate – and that is not something you want to meet.
From that grisly origin, Price says, Oldfield grew to the pit of evil it is today corrupting its inhabitants. “How do you stay away from it?” asks Tyrell. “How do you know that I did?” asks Price. These two have a surprise or two left for each other.
Now, you notice I haven’t used a whole lot of character names in the above synopsis. The stories themselves are pretty much the expected EC Comics bad-people-getting-what-they deserve outrageousness, though, it has to be admitted, with a little extra dimension than those ever attempted. No, the truly amazing thing is THAT CAST, and how the hell did Jeff Burr, who had one previous movie to his resume (the low- budget Civil War drama Divided We Fall) get that cast?
The one clue is provided by the IMDb entry, that he simply walked up to Vincent Price and asked him. Price was impressed by his confidence and agreed – though apparently he later disowned it and claimed it was misrepresented to him. That seems a bit odd coming from the guy who was in the Dr. Phibes movies and Theater of Blood, but perhaps it’s because the gore in Offspring is not campy – it is seriously disturbing and goes for the throat.
Our character actors go for the gusto in all cases – Clu Gulager in particular decides to own his bizarre character. Susan Tyrell is sadly wasted, and it looks like she knew it. She tries a southern accent for approximately two lines, and then drops it. Price’s accent is similarly spotty, but he remembers to do it more often than not.
The Offspring is a better-than-average horror movie, elevated by its cast and a generous dose of nastiness. Burr became known largely as a director of horror movie sequels: Stepfather II, Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, Pumpkinhead II, Puppet Master 4 and 5. I’ve… seen none of those, actually. But Burr shows a steady hand at the horror stuff, and hopefully he got better.
Did I mention that besides the framing story, the first and second stories start with dream scenes?
I had a friend who was one of those grey market vendors, who made his living selling VHS dupes of out-of-print movies (he’s out of the biz now, ditching the whole enterprise a couple of years before torrenting made it superfluous). For years, though, this movie was his best seller; given a VHS release once, and then vanishing from sight. So I was glad to finally watch the damn thing, and find out what the shouting was all about.
Spoiler alert: boobies.
In the opening scene, a peasant girl is kidnapped by the usual evil black carriage and taken to Castle Karnstein. Her blood is used to resurrect the dried-out corpse of what we will come to know as the infamous Carmilla (Yutte Stensgaard). The guy doing the officiating is Count Karnstein, played by Mike Raven, with a cameo of Christopher Lee’s eyes.
But never mind that, wandering nobleman and author Richard LeStrange (Michael Johnson) has arrived in the village, doing research for his next book on witchcraft, vampires and black magic. Told of the Karnstein legacy, LeStrange visits the seemingly abandoned castle, only to find himself stalked by three be-caped ladies. Ho ho, though, it’s only three girls from the nearby Miss Simpson’s Finishing School, on a field trip led by their headmaster, Giles Barton (Ralph Bates). LeStrange is introduced to Miss Simpson (Helen Christie) and the rest of the girls, just as a new student arrives – Carmilla, once again using the Mircalla alias. LeStrange is instantly smitten.
(LeStrange isn’t the only one, as we are treated to some lesbian-tinged toplessness and skinny-dipping that night at the school)
Things rapidly get complicated from there. A serving girl at the inn is found dead, two bite marks on her throat. LeStrange meets the new English instructor for Simpson’s school, tricks him into going to Vienna instead, and gets his job just to be near Mircalla. Mircalla’s skinny-dipping girlfriend Susan Pelley (Pippa Steele) vanishes (we know she’s been exsanguinated and dropped down the well). Giles Barton, knowing Mircalla’s true identity (the study of local noble families is his personal obsession), offers himself to her, hoping to become a vampire and worshipping her forever. Mircalla, though, only likes girls and turns him down. His dead body is found on the outskirts of the school the next day.
Miss Simpson has gone into full cover-up mode, refusing to call in the authorities about the missing girl, and grateful that Mircalla’s personal doctor (whom we recognize as the driver of that black coach) certifies that Barton died of a heart attack. LeStrange goes through Barton’s library, and discovers Mircalla’s secret. He, too, confesses his love to Mircalla, and begins to put that only-likes-girls thing to the test (he wins). Meantime, the school’s dance teacher (Suzanna Leigh) has notified the cops and Susan’s father (David Healy), who is American and having none of this shit.
It ends as all such gothic romances must, in a burning castle with Carmilla dead again, and LeStrange’s heart broken. The end.
After the success of The Vampire Lovers, Hammer felt they’d finally found a new vein to tap with Ireland’s other favorite author of vampire stories, Sheridan Le Fanu. The Karnsteins would crop up again in Twins of Evil and the next year’s Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter, but never really recaptured the popularity of their Dracula series. It didn’t help that Lust for a Vampire had a troubled production.
Jimmy Sangster replaced Terrence Fisher in the director’s chair at very short notice. Also rushed into his role was Ralph Bates – Peter Cushing was to play Giles Barton, but bowed out due to the serious illness of his wife. Bates hates this role and this movie, and most people hate him for not being Peter Cushing, but really – he’s fine. There was a reason he was Hammer’s utility player at this point. What really kills the movie is the lack of Ingrid Pitt as Carmilla – she turned it down because she thought the script was lousy (she ain’t wrong). (also, there’s no Michael Ripper, so I don’t feel it can rightly be called a Hammer film) Overall, it’s pretty emblematic of Hammer’s rudderless direction in the 70s, when they found that everybody was doing the voluptuous horror bit, and the obvious thing to do was free those bosoms from their constricting bustiers and peasant blouses. A prime example, I think, of scarcity giving a movie a panache of quality it did not warrant (see also The Incubus).
First of all, don’t strain yourself looking for this scene.
I was supposed to do Krampus here. That seemed like a good idea nearly a year ago when I came up with this list. Obviously, I wasn’t thinking straight. I tend to fall into fits of apoplectic rage when stores start putting up Christmas supplies in late August. I did not foresee that the same thing would happen when I tried to watch an Xmas monster movie for my favorite month of the year.
So. Killing Spree. Written and directed by Tim Ritter, who crap cineastes will recognize as the man behind Truth or Dare: A Critical Madness. This will become obvious as the movie progresses, but that’s not a bad thing.
Tom (Asbestos Felt) is a mechanic for a small struggling airline. Pay cuts have become the order of the day, so there’s a severe money crunch on, not aided by the fact that Tom refuses to let his wife Leeza (Courtney Lercara) go back to work. His state of mind is outlined when his best friend, the pilot Ben (Raymond Carbone) comes over for dinner and announces he has a girlfriend who is only 20 years old; not only is Tom extremely put out by this, but he suspects Ben is trying to make time with Leeza, and throws his old friend out in a rage. He tells Leeza afterwards that his first wife left him, and if Leeza did that, he would go insane.
Yeah, that’s kinda your plot right there.
See that red light? That means he’s NUTS!!!!
After a truly bizarre nightmare sequence concerning Ben and Leeza (and I mean quite unexpectedly bizarre, the first inclination you get that this is not going to be your typical direct to VHS gore flick), Tom finds a black notebook that details sexy dalliances with delivery men, TV repair men, the lawn guy and the like. So naturally Tom begins to do away with them in a variety of bloody, rococo fashions, some of them quite nasty. The standouts involve a chainsaw in the basement (just to make sure, a length of intestine is pulled out and plugged into a light socket to electrocute the victim), some machete blades attached to a ceiling fan, and a lawnmower, which just proved to me that Ritter read the same underground horror comic books as me while growing up.
Like I said, this is not your typical direct to video excuse for a movie – after he’s racked up an impressive body count, and feels it’s finally time to properly punish Leeza – his victims rise from the grave to exact vengeance, giving rise to a lot of extremely dark comedy. And oh yeah, Tom finds out that the entries in that notebook were rough drafts for stories Leeza was writing for her favorite magazine, Romping Romances – which she just sold for 1500 bucks so Tom wouldn’t have to get a second job.
Which doesn’t help with all the zombies banging at the door, of course.
“Hi there! They spent dang near all the money on me!”
This is Ritter’s fourth movie, made directly after Truth or Dare, which I watched earlier in the year. ToD was made when he only 19 years, and I was actually quite impressed with it. Ritter was pretty sure where he wanted to place his camera, his pacing was good, even if the logic was often very suspect.
“Very suspect logic” will cover Killing Spree, too, but then it’s basically an EC Comics story stretched to feature length, and the stretching can be verrrrry tedious early on (for instance, being told the story of why Tom’s co-worker is called “Stewmaster”. Answer: He is really good at making stew). But there is another thing carried over from the first Truth or Dare that I liked, and that’s the fact that Ritter likes to show the disintegration of his main character’s sanity, not gloss over it in a scene or two. That speaks of a level of care in the filmmaker that goes beyond your typical gore flick. And when Tom does lose it, it has to be admitted that Asbestos Felt absolutely goes for it. Ritter obviously told him to go over the top, and then announced that the top was somewhere in the orbit of Jupiter.
That’s Raymond Carbone there, who may impress you as the dollar store version of Jerry Orbach, but he’s really good in this (and he was the detective in Truth or Dare). In fact, Ritter does very well in the actor category for this movie.
We won’t talk about that fairly lamentable severed head. There are much better FX to be had later.
The clip above and the gory trailer below (just in case you needed to see that head scene again) may not change your mind about DTV horror movies from the late 80s, but this one actually is a cut above (as it were). Some care is evident in the execution, and when I hit play, I wasn’t expecting to find a movie with so much… well, “heart” isn’t the appropriate phrase, let’s say moxie. A movie with this much moxie.
You know, this was supposed to be my “I” entry last year, but I decided to watch I, Frankenstein instead, mainly so I could get it posted before everybody forgot that I, Frankenstein even existed.
By the time I finished finally watching The Incubus, I really wished I had just watched I, Frankenstein all over again.
John Cassavetes is Sam Cordell, a surgeon who has recently moved to Galen Village, a small New England town, with his teenage daughter Jenny (Erin Nobel). Seems he’s the only doctor, as he’s going to wind up being medical examiner and resident Quincy. Something is violently raping women and murdering men; the first victim, Mandy (Mitch Martin) will be the only survivor, and then only because Cordell performs an emergency hysterectomy to remove her ruptured uterus.
“We can’t close the town! It’s the 4th of July!”
The rapes and murders continue, as the local police, as represented by John Ireland, are useless. After Mandy, our rapist starts leaving a prodigious amount of semen behind – analysis can’t identify it except to say it is faster and more aggressive than normal sperm, and red. The County Investigator (Harry Drivas) feels the large quantity of sperm points to a gang of perps, though Cordell isn’t so sure. After all, his daughter’s boyfriend, Tim (Duncan MacIntosh) is having headaches and bad dreams that coincide with the incidents…
Oh, yeah, a similar series of rape/murders happened in the town thirty years ago, which is something you might think is pertinent to any investigation, but noooo, it has to be brought up by local crusading journalist Laura Kinkaid (Kerrie Keane), who, incidentally looks just like Cordell’s last girlfriend, who he may have killed accidentally and oh say also Tim’s creepy aunt Agatha (Helen Hughes) is from a long line of witch hunters and
This movie will give you a headache. It’s based on a novel by Ray Russell, which should be a pretty fair indicator of quality, but that is a hope that will be dashed (yeah, it’s tempting to say that hope will be insert terrible thing that happens in the movie but it doesn’t deserve that much effort). What it does feel like is one of those gaudily-covered horror novels chronicled in Paperbacks From Hell (for all I know, it is) that glutted the market after The Exorcist and The Omen made bank, except those authors, even at their hackiest, had a firmer hand on story and character. This script does nobody any favors (least of all the audience), and John Cassavetes seems genuinely pissed to be forced to say these lines.
The decision was also made to not show the title character until the closing scene of the movie, which is a classic approach (that’s a pretty good monster, though) – but that means we spend a lot of time concentrating of the agony of the victims during the rape. A lot of time. Too much time. Dario Argento would call it excessive.
I also expected a bit more from director John Hough, who had delivered a decent horror flick with The Legend of Hell House, but he can’t get a grip on a slippery, nigh incomprehensible story that loses brain cells the longer it goes on. I have tried to figure out the timeline that is set out in the closing quarter of the movie, and though I like puzzles, I am not adverse to throwing the damn things across the room when they’re missing pieces or just too shabbily constructed to fit together correctly.
In conclusion, the 1966 Esperanto movie Incubus, starring William Shatner, is much scarier and makes more sense.
So back a couple of years ago I reviewed Pupi Avati’s Zeder to close out Hubrisween and I was impressed enough to track down more of his work (so it took me two years. So what).
House opens impressively enough, with a man, strung up with arms overhead, being stabbed to death in slow-motion while we hear some crazed loon babble about the colors in his veins and paint running down his arms, all during the opening credits.
Then we meet Stefano (Lino Cappolicchio) (Avati had a thing for naming his protagonists Stefano), a professional restorationist who has been hired by the mayor (Bob Tonelli) of a small village to restore a fresco in the church. It’s a painting of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, done by a local artist, Buono Legnani, known as “The Painter of Agony” because of his preference for painting and drawing only subjects near death.
Stefano was hired on the recommendation of his old friend, Dr. Mazza (Giuilio Pizzarani), who was researching Legnani. Mazza is always on the cusp of telling Stefano something important about Legnani and the village, but the arrival of someone local will make him nervous and interrupt his tale, until he asks Stefano to meet him at his hotel. Of course, when Stefano arrives, it’s just in time to see Mazza thrown out a window to his death.
In proper giallo style, Stefano investigates the mystery of Legnani himself, despite creepy anonymous phone calls commanding him to leave. He finds an old wire recorder, containing the utterances we heard during the opening. Legnani was obviously more than a little off-kilter, and was aided and abetted in his off-kilterness by his two sisters, who Stefano comes to realize (as more and more of the fresco is revealed) are the models for the two women joyously murdering Saint Sebastian – and an actual murder may have taken place to act as a model for the painting. Legnani reportedly doused himself with kerosene and ran blazing into the woods, his body never found; and Stefano begins to fear that Legnani is not truly dead, and he and his sisters may still be up to no good – and they seem to have some sort of horrible control over the village at large.
The House With Laughing Windows is the most un-giallo giallo you will ever see. Most movies in this genre will keep you occupied with multiple murders, even more red herrings, sex (usually as perverse as possible), or heightened, intense visuals. House has none of these, but does have the doom-laden atmosphere and the independent investigator in way, way over his head. Leave it to Avati to not travel the well-worn road.
The movie is 110 minutes long, too long in my estimation. The final fifteen minutes, though, are suitably nightmarish and horrifying, but it can be a chore to get to them. If you’re, say, a fan of slow burn horror directors like Ty West, this is going to be right up your alley, and you should seek it out. For me, though, it’s more of a case of Okay, now I’ve seen it, and going on to my next horror movie, which will hopefully be more to my liking.
X Moor is based on a true story, for a certain definition of “true”; it uses as its basis the urban legend of a great cat resembling a panther or puma sighted in the Exmoor region of southwest England. The bulk of the sightings referenced on that page are from the 1980s, but let’s not let that get in the way of our movie.
