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E: The Earth Dies Screaming (1964)

Well, great title, if nothing else.

After an impressive (low-budget) opening sequence of trains, planes and automobiles crashing because their drivers are apparently dead at the wheel, we meet Jeff Nolan (Willard Parker) driving about the English countryside, which is littered with corpses. After appropriating a shortwave radio from an empty shop, he sets up in a small inn. Two more survivors, Taggart (Dennis Price) and Peggy (Virginia Field) show up, then a couple assumed dead but just drunk, Edgar and Violet (Thorley Walters and Vanda Goodsell).

Jeff theorizes that there’s been some sort of gas attack – he’s a test pilot who was on a high-altitude flight with oxygen assist, Peggy was in a hospital in an oxygen tent, Edgar and Violet were at an office party and sleeping it off in a sealed bio lab. The question of who would have done such a thing is answered – kind of – when two robots walk through the village, seemingly unconcerned about the survivors. Until Violet, assuming they’re Air Force personnel, interrupts their stroll and we find out the robots can kill with a touch.

Publicity photo? Or community theater production of The Mousetrap?

Two more people show up, Mel and Lorna (David Spenser and Anna Palk), a young couple trying to get to Liverpool so Lorna can have her baby. Taggart bitches about the burden of adding a pregnant woman to their group, but Nolan answers “They may have just become the most important people on the planet.”

That’s your setup, and there really isn’t much more to it. There is a lot of theorizing and planning, until it’s revealed that the robots can resurrect any dead bodies they wish as shambling slave units. This induces our survivors to abandon their cozy little inn and start on their planned exodus, only to have the birth of Lorna’s baby bring everything to a halt. Nolan finally figures out that the strange transmission that’s on all frequencies is somehow guiding the robots, and he and Mel have to track down the local radio station that’s being used for transmission, and blow it up (just in the nick of time, of course).

The photo you always saw in Famous Monsters and thought, “Wow, this movie looks cool!”

The Earth Dies Screaming runs a typical b-picture 62 minutes, but still has trouble filling that time. Almost all the fantastic elements – the walking, white-eyed corpses, the robots suddenly deciding to do something about the survivors – are in the last quarter of the movie. A more even distribution of these elements would have resulted in at least a halfway decent Outer Limits episode.

A lot of that is typical of low-budget filmmaking. Talk is cheap, action costs money. There are a lot of unanswered questions in The Earth Dies Screaming – not the least of which is who is still manning the power generation plants of Britain – and some of those points actually do improve the movie, giving the viewer’s brain something to fasten on. Who are the invaders? Are the robots merely the troops, or are these aliens truly a race of robots? Who the hell is Taggart, how did he survive (“That’s not important.”), and why is he so good with a gun and picking locks? (I think he’s James Bond gone feral, but that’s just me)

Director Terence Fisher is one of my favorites in the Brit horror field; besides numerous iconic Hammer films, he’s also responsible for underappreciated indies like Island of Terror and Island of the Burning Damned. It’s largely due to his talent that this over-talkative under-active movie has any hope of keeping our interest at all; a mostly painless way to waste an hour, and not much more.

But The Earth Dies Screaming on Amazon

October 10, 2016
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: hubrisween, terrence fisher, the earth dies screaming . Author: drfreex . Comments: 3 Comments

D: Daybreakers (2009)

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Back in the murky depths of two years ago, I finally watched the Spierig Brothers’ first feature, Undead, finding it pretty unique and satisfying among zombie apocalypse movies. It had taken me ten years to get to it (despite very good word of mouth) because I was sick of zombie movies when it came out, and didn’t watch any for ten years, not even the good ones. Once I watched Undead, I wondered, where the hell have these guys been since? only to find out they had made and released their second feature, another movie I had given a pass: Daybreakers, because it was a vampire movie. And before I was sick of zombie movies, I was sick of vampire movies.

Suddenly I was interested in watching Daybreakers.

The movie takes place ten years in the future; a plague has swept over the world, resulting in widespread vampirism, much like I Am Legend, except the vampires remain quite intelligent and the world adapts to the new monstrous normal. Life takes place at night, cities have a system of “Subwalk” tunnels so vampires can get around during the day. As the movie opens, we find that only 5% of the world population is still human, and that’s a problem when those humans are the only food source.

Ted Dalton (Ethan Hawke) is a Chief Hematologist for a global pharmaceutical company run by Sam O’Neill. Dalton, himself a very reluctant vampire, is desperately searching for a blood substitute – officially, the world will run out of blood by the end of the month. Unofficially, Dalton sympathizes with the humans, and a chance encounter puts him in league with a group of other rebellious vampires and free humans still seeking a cure, headed by Audrey (Australian star Claudia Karvan) and the enigmatic Elvis (Willem Dafoe), a vampire who has accidentally managed to cure himself.

Additional pressure is brought to bear by another unfortunate side-effect of the vampire disease; the vamps who are deprived of human blood begin to regress and mutate into savage, bat-like creatures called Subsiders, and their numbers are increasing as the blood supply dwindles. Dalton has to find a way to duplicate the extraordinary event that caused Elvis’ reversion to human, and then somehow convince the vampires to stop being immortal and rejoin the ranks of humanity.

The world-building in Daybreakers is quite extraordinary and thoughtful; Sam O’Neill says the reason he decided to do the movie was one tiny detail, of business-suited vampires lined up at a Starbucks-style kiosk to get their double shot of blood in an espresso. This sort of thing runs throughout, and is probably the major reason Daybreakers succeeds with me where another post-vampiric apocalypse movie, Stakeland, failed for me – the movie takes me somewhere else, somewhere new for two hours, instead of to a Mad Max movie with monsters. Too, the vampires there were savage beasts, and the vampires in Daybreakers are unquestionably Us, just with yellow contact lenses and longer canines. There is a layer of social commentary here that is also present in the best horror movies (Dawn of the Dead is the one that always springs to mind), and I have absolutely no problem adding Daybreakers to that short list.

Watching the making-of docs on the blu-ray presents a story that almost as good, as the Spierig Brothers take on the five-year process of scoring a budget for such an ambitious movie, and then having their 55 day shooting schedule suddenly shortened to 40 by budget cuts. That they still managed to deliver such an impressive movie in that time is a credit to their ingenuity and mad skills – they still wound up doing at least half of the post-production visual effects themselves (they did them all in Undead). They have since released their third movie, Predestination, based on Robert A. Heinlein’s “All You Zombies” and that is something I look forward to eagerly.

Buy Daybreakers on Amazon
Buy Undead on Amazon

October 9, 2016
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck . Tags: daybreakers, hubrisween, spierig brothers . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

A: Alucarda (1977)

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You should check out cesardg13’s movie posters on Deviant Art.

Juan López Moctezuma is an interesting side-trip in the world of genre filmmaking. A compatriot of Alejandro Jodorowsky in his Mexico City days, he was a producer on Fando y Lys as well as El Topo. Moctezuma is most widely known for three movies made in the 70s – The Mansion of Madness (73) which is loosely based on Poe’s “The Method of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Feather” and was indeed re-titled Dr. Tarr’s Torture Dungeon in the US,’cuz them Poe movies always made serious coin (though audiences expecting gothic horror were not prepared for what is actually pretty dark farce); 1975’s Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary which we’ll be visiting eventually; and this remarkably straightforward, though still weird, occult thriller.

The teenaged, recently orphaned Justine (Susana Kamini) is remanded to the care of the sisters at a convent, where she meets the similarly orphaned Alucarda (Tina Romero), who you know is going to be trouble because she’s the only one who dresses in black. We also know she’s going to be trouble because immediately after her birth, her mother (also played by Romero) was claimed by something dark and scary before the opening titles.

Oh no! It’s Satan!

The friendship between the two girls deepens quickly to a nearly sexual intensity. One day while capering in the woods, they run into a sinister hunchbacked gypsy (Claudio Brook) who offers them enlightenment, even as one of the other gypsies reads Justine’s palm and blanches. Soon after, Justine falls ill and the hunchback appears in the girl’s chamber, making their clothes vanish and signing their souls over to Satan, as one does.

The girls start doing disruptive things like hailing Satan during classes, and things continue to deteriorate until Justine is hanging nude from a St. Andrew’s Cross, being stabbed to find her Witch’s Mark while being exorcised. This scene is interrupted by the local Dr. Oszek (also Claudio Brook), who has no time for such superstitious rubbish. He’s too late to save Justine’s life, but he carries the sobbing Alucarda away to his home, where his blind daughter Daniela (Lili Garza) will keep her company.

A brief pause for my favorite detail – the learned doctor keeps a book in his library entitled Satan so he can sneer at it whenever he pleases.

Oszek returns to the convent to find it in a panic – the nun tending to Justine’s body has mysteriously burned to death and Justine’s body is missing. Soon after Oszek is lead to the chapel by screams, because Father Lázaro (David Silva) is hacking off the head of the dead nun, returned to demonic life. This where the horror movie really kicks into high gear, as Oszek realizes that his book learning is useless against the forces of darkness, and what’s more, he’s put his daughter in mortal danger, because both she and Alucarda have vanished.

The first order of business is to find all these missing girls, of course, and Sister Angélica (Tina French) leads them to the ruins where Alucarda’s mom had her opening scene and the girls liked to hang out and get hallucinations. Angélica also lends another forgetful sister her crucifix, which means when she discovers the naked Justine in a coffin filled with bubbling blood, she’s pretty much doomed.

This leads to a major confrontation in the convent, where all Alucarda has to do is say the name of a devil and somebody else bursts into flames. It all looks pretty bad for anybody not named Alucarda, until the girl’s humanity kicks in when she sees Daniela, who was nice to her, injured by all her wild devil-calling and destruction. The end.

Alucarda has a reputation for being a bit of an undiscovered gem, and that holds true, by and large.There is some wild imagery left over from His Jodo days – the convent’s chapel looks like it grew organically out of the walls of a deep cave grotto, and the nuns’ habits are the farthest you can find from the traditional black-and-white – they’re dressed in odd white fabric with a red wash that is not uniform, making the sisters look like they’re dressed in bloody bandages. Quite striking, and in my experience, unique. This being the Internet, someone will let me know if I’m wrong.

It’s definitely a 70s, movie, though, which means some time spent before you get to the truly weird stuff, though quite a bit of nudity livens up the wait. Should you seek it out? Well, Guillermo del Toro is an admirer of Moctezuma and his films, so let how you feel about one director’s work be your guide as to how you’ll feel about another.

Buy Alucarda on Amazon

October 6, 2016
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: alucarda, hubrisween, juan lopez moctezuma, satan . Author: drfreex . Comments: 2 Comments

Z: Zombie (1979)

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“When you do an A-Z horror movie challenge, you’re likely going to end up with zombies.”

– Tim Lehnerer, probably

Well, this is about the most blatant personification of that statement, isn’t it? No second word, no number, no nothing. Just: ZOMBIE.

Yeah, I’ll stop you right there, because you’re about to inform poor ignorant me that this actually does have a number, it’s really called Zombie 2 because it was a sequel to Dawn of the Dead which was a big hit in Europe but it was called Zombie there and shouldn’t you know more about horror movies before you try writing about them?

Listen, troll (I would have to reply), if you were paying attention you would know that the movie is called Zombi 2 (no final e) and for some reason Zombies 2 in the international trailers and it was never a sequel to Dawn of the Dead and was, in fact, written several months before Dawn‘s European release but that was some nice low-hanging publicity fruit, wasn’t it, especially since this production company had a better lawyer than Dario Argento, and thus was paved the way for Zombie numbers 3-8 and every other crap Italian zombie film throughout eternity.

So there. Troll.

I saw Zombie in probably semi-ideal circumstances for me, which is to say I saw it on a double bill with Blood Beach at a drive-in on a warm Texas night (Zombie kept cropping up at drive-ins with different dance partners for several years). That was 35 years ago, and it was with some interest I put the Blue Underground blu-ray into the player for a return bout. (Movie Challenges like this are largely about making me watch movies I haven’t seen, but I do make an exception for anything I haven’t seen in 20 years, like The Quatermass Xperiment. Zombie definitely qualified.)

So stop me if you’ve heard this one before: an apparently abandoned sailing ship drifts into New York Harbor, causing all sorts of traffic problems until the harbor patrol boards it and finds a) rotting food, b) a chewed-up hand, c) the fattest zombie you have ever seen. (Guillermo del Toro: “You just know he ate everybody else on the boat.”) After biting out one cop’s throat, Tubby is shot several times and falls into the bay.

These are the circumstances that bring together Anne (Tisa Farrow), the daughter of the owner of that boat, and Peter (Ian McCulloch), a reporter. They have a meet cute while searching the boat under the nose of a police guard, during which Peter finds an undelivered letter from Anne’s father, who is dying of some terrible disease on a Caribbean island called Matool.

Flying to St. Thomas, the only boat they can find to take them to Matool – “a cursed island” – are working vacationers Brian and Susan (Al Cliver and Auretta Gay) who are spending two months sailing the islands and doing underwater photography. This will become significant when Susan goes scuba diving to get the day’s pics within sight of Matool and runs into an underwater zombie, who, in one of the movie’s signature scenes, has a fistfight with a shark, and loses that fist.

(One of the many interesting factoids on the disc’s extras is the Underwater Zombie and “Shark Trainer” is Ramón Bravo, an underwater photographer of no small repute, best known for Tinterero!)

So our four “Americans” make it to Matool but bend their propeller, meaning Brian and Susan can’t dump Anne and Peter there, as was their original intent. They meet up with the island’s physician, Doctor Menard (Richard Johnson) who is not only fighting some sort of plague, but is also trying to find a scientific explanation for the zombies that have been cropping up lately. One of the few island natives that has stayed faithful to the doctor (Dakar) fills us in that a new witch doctor has been getting everybody worked up, and they all gone to the island’s interior to bang on drums and wake the dead.

Which is all the explanation you’re going to get, so just ride with it. That’s okay, we came to see a movie whose poster was some rotten corpse with worms in its eyes and the slogan WE ARE GOING TO EAT YOU, and it has to be admitted that the movie in its last half gets down to that business with gusto.

This is generally pointed to as director Lucio Fulci’s first horror movie (if you don’t count some highly-regarded gialli). His output to this point had been all over the genre map, but this one pretty much locked him into the creepshow stuff for the 80s and 90s. Now what surprised me in this re-visit so many years later is how well-made this movie is. That projector trying to cut through the humid Texas night air and subsequent VHS releases in pan-and-scan did Zombie absolutely no favors. Fulci knows where to put his camera and how to get bang for his comparatively few bucks on the screen, and the blu-ray is an absolute revelation in that regard.

The low budget also necessitates a different look to the zombies, which helps the movie achieve its own identity. A reliance on clay instead of latex actually helps these revenants look like they just clawed their way out of the ground.

I bet you thought I was going to talk about the splinter-through-the-eyeball scene (damage to eyeballs seems a particular motif for Fulci). Everybody talks about the splinter-through-the-eyeball scene. It’s still grueling, even when you know it’s coming, but another factoid dropped was Zombie played in Italy with an intermission, as was the custom, and I had forgotten the splinter-through-the-eyeball happens at the halfway point. Think about that being what you took out into the lobby with you.

They probably didn’t sell much gelato during that intermission.

Another thing which helped immensely with this re-visit: being able to turn on the original Italian language track with English subtitles. Fulci’s movies have had some of the worst English dub tracks I have ever had to endure, and subconsciously that drags down the perceived quality of the movie.

When I logged my re-watch of Zombie on Letterboxd, I knew that I had entered it earlier in my relationship with the site, but it was amusing to see that when I did so, I had rated the movie four stars out of five; I stand by that rating, but I don’t remember holding it in such high regard (due to washed-out projection and VHS dubs). So it is satisfying in that way that you see an old friend for the first time in years, and you say, “You look great!” and mean it.

Buy ZOMBIE on Amazon

October 31, 2015
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap, Uncategorized . Tags: hubrisween, lucio fulci, zombie . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

Y: 30 Days of Night (2007)

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I know what you’re saying. You’re saying “That doesn’t begin with a Y.”

Shut the hell up, I explain.

Do you know how many horror movies start with the letter Y? How many movies, period? Not a whole hell of a lot, that’s how many. I just watched Xtro 3 because the letter X has the same damned problem and I am out for blood. Do not cross me.

The subject was brought up as we were planning this expanded Hubrisween, and the guru Tim Lehnerer came up with the Blank Scrabble Tile rule. There are two possibilities, currently: If you cannot find a movie with a troublesome initial, you can use the letter to either side of it (X and Z, riiiiight); or: you can substitute a title that begins with an actual number.

I’LL TAKE THAT.

So here we are in the tiny city of Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost settlement in America. So northern they go through a night thirty days long, just like in the title. Its population dwindles by two-thirds during that month; not everybody can take that much dark.

This time around, there’s a few problems. Sheriff Eben Oleson’s (Josh Hartnett) estranged wife Stella (Melissa George) misses her plane and is stuck there, for instance. There’s trouble with the phones. There’s also a stranger in town, and it turns out he ‘s trashed the local helicopter. And killed all the sled dogs.

Oh, and there’s a pack of vampires following him.

So what we have here, in a way, is yet another zombie siege film, with the added complication that the undead are intelligent, smart and vicious. Not having to worry about sleeping during daylight hours, the vampires massacre most of the remaining town openly, until we are down to a small band of survivors who keep moving from location to location as their numbers dwindle due to one misadventure or another.

So right there we have one of the major reasons I put off seeing this; if you’ve been here any length of time you know about my ten-year moratorium on zombie movies. What is not as common knowledge is there was a similar moratorium earlier, on vampire movies. Not all of you may be old enough to remember the glut of bloodsucker flicks in the 90s, but it takes quite a few of any sort of movie for me to say “Alright, jeez, enough” and there were quite. A. Few.

That being said: 30 Days of Night has a good concept, and is well-made. The vampires are cool, animalistic yet speaking their own language. There is a third act twist which is unexpected and welcome.

So why don’t I like it?

The aforementioned mixture of zombie and vampire movies, I suspect. The lapses in logic that seem almost inevitable in a horror movie, but are they? Really? (These are some pretty wasteful vampires. Horrific as the slaughter is, why so many at one time, when you have a month ahead of you? Then other survivors keep cropping up as the 30 days wear on, just because we need a complication or a reason for our protagonists to endanger themselves) I wasn’t in the mood for a vampire Diary of Anne Frank (the survivors leave that attic hideout before too long, anyway). I kind of like my horror movies to cash in at the hour and a half mark. This one is close to two hours.

None of these are, in and of themselves, enough to kill a movie for me, and I suspect that had I not seen 30 Days of Night at the very end of a month of watching horror movies, I might have been a little more kindly disposed toward it – but only a little. As it is, I don’t find it terrible, I just don’t find it exceptional enough to excite me in any way. It did all right without my support, though, spawning at least one sequel, so I’ll leave it here with a sort of a shrug. This situation reminds me of Stakeland, which is another movie that should be completely in my wheelhouse, and yet I just don’t care for it. Your mileage may vary, this movie may press all the necessary buttons for you, and that’s cool.

But oh my God am I ready to watch something non-horror related.

Buy 30 Days of Night on Amazon

October 30, 2015
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: 30 days of night, david slade, hubrisween . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

X: Xtro 3: Watch the Skies (1995)

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This is an open call for filmmakers everywhere to make more movies starting with the letter X. The reason why should be clear: here I am watching goddamn Xtro 3.

Back during another A-Z challenge (off-season, as it were), I watched the original Xtro. I didn’t care for it, but it did have some creative ideas that set it apart from other cash-in-on-E.T. movies. Last year I watched Xtro 2, which was remarkable only for the number of movies it managed to rip off. So here we are, this year, with the inevitability of a doomed character trapped in a hidebound franchise, with Xtro 3: Watch the Skies.

The first thing you need to know is that a spaceship crashed on Earth in 1955 in a welter of poor video-generated effects. This was covered up by the government, because that is what they do. This is relayed in a tongue-and-cheek 50s newsreel that wants to be cuter than it is.

“Oh, yeah. These are Marines, all right.”

In the present of 1995, a man meets with a reporter in a low-rent motel, and he tells her the tale that will grind away our next 90 minutes. He is Marine demolitions expert Kirn (Sal Landi), who receives orders from his commander (Robert Culp, who hopefully made his mortgage payment off this) to head up a hand-picked crew that will go to an island 200 miles off the coast to blow up some leftover WWII ordnance so an airfield can be built there. This is fine with Kirn, as he wants to “get out of the classroom”, but he recognizes the “hand-picked crew” from his classes; they are all losers, discipline problems, and “borderline psychos”.

You might immediately suspect that all these soldiers might as well have EXPENDABLE stamped on their dogtags, and you will proven right when the guy in charge of the operations shows up, a beret-bedecked spook named Fetterman (Andrew Divoff), who tells the crew that there was also an internment camp there, so any documents they might find are classified and should be taken directly to him.

“Did the check clear? Okay, you got 30 more minutes.”

You are now going Hmmmm enough that you might as well be humming a happy song culled from other movies you have seen. One detonated bomb uncovers a concrete structure. In the course of the movie, we will find out that this is where the gummint brought the spaceship, and the two aliens inside. They vivisected one alien in full view of the other, and the remaining alien got pissed off, broke out, and proceeded to slaughter everybody. The authorities had to wait until it went back into the ship and poured concrete around it to trap it. Or so the one wild man who’s been on the island for 40 years tells in a moment of lucidity.

Well, now that one stoned soldier blew a hole in the structure, the alien is loose again, and quite possibly insane, as it seems to want to constantly re-enact the vivisection of its (presumed) mate on whoever is unlucky enough to be around.

Once the spook splits with the boat after the spaceship is uncovered, our crew has to survive the alien, then the bombing run that the spook sends to kill them, and then the kill team the spook himself leads to off any survivors. Trouble is, the spook doesn’t really know about the alien…

This all sounds like a pretty good movie, and it’s certainly better than Xtro 2. It almost succeeds in forging its own identity, but then director Harry Bromley Davenport (who directed all three of these) still has to go to the rip-off well again. The Alien can camouflage itself like the Predator. And a healthy dose of exposition is delivered by an Alien Autopsy style film reel kept by that survivor (luckily, he also kept the movie projector in good working order).

“Is the movie over yet?” “No.” “Please shoot me.”

So much of Xtro 3 is poorly thought out or executed that you feel bad about it constantly shooting itself in the foot. Was the alien also trapped in the concrete, or just the ship? I can accept the characters being confused on that point, but that concrete structure is large and square – an explosion big enough to uncover it would do more than blow a hole in a corner. And accepting that our two Marines just didn’t notice a square bunker in a bunch of rock outcroppings is a bit much to handle, even if one of them is supposedly stoned to the gills.

Sequences that should be nerve-wracking are hampered by insane logic whose only purpose is to draw out the running time. And yes, this is another instance of my constantly tracking the time remaining as I watched. Even the Alien is given to the same fitful treatment; there are times it looks remarkably alive, and menacing; most of the time however, it looks and moves exactly like the puppet it is.

As I said: it is at least better than Xtro 2, but that was a bar set so low, it was resting on the ground.

Buy Xtro 3 on Amazon

October 29, 2015
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: harry bromley-davenport, hubrisween, xtro 3 . Author: drfreex . Comments: 3 Comments

W: The Walking Dead (1936)

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I have in my possession one of those two-disc, four-movie sets, imaginatively entitled Karloff & Lugosi Horror Classics. The movies are actually anything but, but the set has served me well over the years; last Hubrisween, there was Zombies on Broadway. A mere 17 days ago, Frankenstein 1970. Back in the murkier depths of the archives, there was You’ll Find Out, which in retrospect, though I had problems with it, was the high point of the set thus far. Then I watched The Walking Dead with dreadfully low expectations, and to my surprise found an underappreciated gem.

You have no idea how rare that truly is.

Warner Brothers was having incredible success with their gangster movies at this point, so it’s little surprise that The Walking Dead opens just like one – crusading judge Shaw (Joe King) convicts a racketeer, despite all the anonymous threats he’s been receiving. The other racketeers meet to decide what to do; killing this judicious killjoy is the obvious course of action, but they need a fall guy, and down-on-his-luck ex-con pianist John Elman, convicted (perhaps unjustly) by Shaw years ago for manslaughter, seems ripe for that role.

The fact that Elman is played by Boris Karloff means the gangsters have just doomed themselves, of course.

Interspersed with this is the laboratory of Dr Beaumont (future Santa Claus Edmund Gwenn), who has kept a human heart beating in a jar for two weeks. His two lovebird assistants, Nancy and Jimmy (Marguerite Churchill and Warren Hull) head out on a date, which is where our two storylines will intersect.

The gangster’s plot relies on their house hit man, Trigger (Joe Sawyer) to pose as a detective who hires the desperate Elman to watch Judge Shaw’s house; Nancy and Jimmy see the hoods deposit Shaw’s dead body in Elman’s car, and get threatened with death if they don’t keep their mouths shut.

The head of the racketeers, the crooked lawyer Nolan (Ricardo Cortez) acts as Elman’s defense, insuring his conviction and date with the electric chair. Nancy’s conscience finally wins out over her fear of death, and she tells Beaumont what they saw that fatal night. Nolan manages to draw everything out just long enough that the phone call from the governor arrives too late to save Elman’s life. Beaumont insists on delaying the autopsy and claims Elman’s body,

This has gone from noirish gangster flick to horror movie with fine efficiency, and here is where The Walking Dead actually begins to distinguish itself. Beaumont will, of course, bring Elman back to life, but the process as shown is fairly unique. There is the usual folderol with electricity, but we’ve already seen (and are now shown again) a pretty accurate model of the Lindbergh Heart Pump, a device that could keep organs functioning apart from the body (Yes, that Lindbergh). Then Karloff is set on a sort of teeterboard, which rocks his body back and forth, and the commentary track by film historian Greg Mank points out this is based on the fairly contemporaneous work by Dr. Robert Cornish, who apparently revived a dog five minutes after its death. Jank goes on to relate that the dog lived for another eight hours, but seemed to suffer a sort of waking nightmare, constantly whining and barking. My research doesn’t support that, but my research was done pretty quickly, and besides – that does support what comes after in the movie.

The post-execution Elman (now with a sinister shock of white hair) shambles about in a near-catatonic state, except when he is near a piano – he remembers how to play one very well. He recognizes the District Attorney (who suspects how Elman was railroaded), but does not regard him as an enemy; on the other hand, he also recognizes Nolan and knows he is an enemy – though he does not remember why. Beaumont chalks this up to an inoperable blood clot in the brain, although, just to help the audience along, he mentions Elman sometimes acts like “the tool of some supernatural force.” (Fine scientist you are, Beaumont!)

Though he may be right about the supernatural force, as Elman begins improbably tracking down the criminals responsible for his execution, often appearing almost miraculously, when least expected. This is another distinguishing characteristic of the movie: we are primed to expect Elman to exact some sweet, painful justice on these bad guys, but in every case, all he does is slowly advance on them, asking “Why did you kill me?” and it’s their own blind, guilty panic that undoes them. The triggerman trips over a table and shoots himself. One runs in front of a speeding locomotive. One has a heart attack and for good measure, falls out a window.

In each instance, Elman seems shocked and saddened by the outcome. Karloff should have patented his ability to shift from frightening to pathetic to sympathetic in the same scene.

There are other factors that elevate The Walking Dead above the norm. Beaumont’s conquering of death actually makes headlines around the world, counter to every other mad scientist we’ve seen (and provides another reason why the bad guys can’t just kill Elman again). When Nolan manages to get himself named Elman’s legal guardian, Beaumont prepares to operate on the blood clot, which he knows will kill Elman – this time, permanently – but also might finally unlock Elman’s memory so he can tell Beaumont what he really wants to know – what happens at the moment of death? That’s a plot thread I feel could have been given more time (as it was in the much later Brainstorm), but there’s little room for it in this movie’s slim 65 minutes.

So The Walking Dead was an extremely welcome surprise, subverting damn near all my expectations (well, except for Karloff being excellent. That goes without saying). A clue might have been offered to me when I noticed the director was Michael Curtiz, whose name you might recognize from other little pictures like Casablanca and The Adventures of Robin Hood. He was no stranger to horror movies, either, as he also directed the original, excellent Dr. X. Apparently a stern taskmaster and more than a bit of a dick, his movies are often incredible, solid entertainment, and I’m now more than a little sorry that he and one of my favorite actors didn’t get together more often.

Speaking of Dr. X, it is more than a little telling that The Return of Dr. X, which we covered last week, started as a Karloff period piece but eventually devolved into a far stupider version of this movie, down to the shock of white hair and the weakened arm of the title character. Who would notice? they figured.

No trailer this time, but here’s Beaumont and the DA holding a piano recital to guilt trip the racketeers, which at least proves that somebody had read Hamlet:

Buy The Walking Dead on Amazon

October 28, 2015
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck . Tags: boris karloff, hubrisween, michael curtiz, the walking dead . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

V: Vampire vs Vampire (1989)

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I always like to slip a Hong Kong horror movie into these proceedings, but rarely do they match up with a space in the alphabet that needs filling. But lookie here, there’s a disc I’ve owned for a number of years but never watched, and it starts with a V: Vampire vs Vampire. Don’t bother looking for it on Amazon.

This is not as I expected, the fourth movie in the Mr. Vampire series, though it carries over a ton of characters from the first movie. If you haven’t seen Mr. Vampire, that is something you need to remedy, and soon. Lam Ching-ying is The One-Eyebrow Priest, a Taoist master who always has to intervene when supernatural creatures start causing trouble. He has two comical apprentices, the elder of which is again the criminally under-rated Chin Siu-ho; the younger (and usually stupider) is played by a variety of actors, this time it’s Liu Fong. The first Mr. Vampire sequel added another character to the household, a Little Vampire who’s not evil like your typical hopping vampire. But like I said, this isn’t a Mr. Vampire movie.

Except it is.

It’s complicated.

After taking care of a nasty Palm Tree Spirit, Lam is called upon by the village elders to figure out what’s wrong with their water supply. Turns out there’s too many bats in it (literally) so Lam does a complex fung shui ritual to find a better place to dig a well. All very well (ha!) and good, except a flock of bats moves the marker so the crew will dig in the wrong place.

There’s also a ruined Catholic church nearby, which a group of sisters is working to re-open. Another stock character in the Mr. Vampire company, the local Captain, wants his men to burn down the place because he thinks the bats are coming from there; Lam intercedes, and he and the Mother Superior (Maria Cordero) find the skeleton of one of the original priests who built the church, supposedly vanishing after sending word that he and his companion were battling demons. As this skeleton apparently died by shoving a cross into its own heart, Lam deduces the demons were defeated, and bravely, too. Unfortunately neither he or the Mother look up, because the ceiling is covered by bats.

The well being dug in the wrong place uncovers a decaying body, also with a cross in its heart, but this cross has a ruby embedded in it, which the Captain must have to satisfy his equally venal fiancée. This causes him to swap bodies on the pyre which Lam insists upon, so he can have time to saw the jewel off. The cross is finally removed, which as we all know, is how vampires come back to life in movies like this.

This is going to set up a mighty pitched battle at the end, as Lam discovers that all his Taoist tricks do not much affect a European vampire, and things become pretty uncertain, but highly kinetic.

This was Lam Ching-ying’s first time as film director (though he had been action director for numerous movies), and he doesn’t try to do anything too extraordinary, but as usual, the action sequences are top-notch. Again, if you’ve seen any of the Mr. Vampire movies, you know what I’m talking about: Lam’s dance-like, confident approach to magic looks real and is quite convincing. The fact that, if magicdoesn’t work, he can kick you seven ways to Sunday is a good back-up plan. There are at least two plot lines that are not resolved when the movie ends, but hey – welcome to Hong Kong cinema. The Big Bad Guy is vanquished, what more do you want?

Another staple of the Mr. Vampire movies (of which this is not one) involves the old-fashioned priest coming up against modern, Western ideas and failing to understand them to some comic effect. This time out it’s the nuns of the convent trying to save the Priest’s soul when all he’s trying to do is conceal the fact they interrupted his bath and he’s not wearing any pants. In 1993 there would be a much better exploration if this sort of cultural clash with Exorcist Master, which is basically The One-Eyebrow Priest versus Dracula. At the end Lam and the Chinese Catholic priest he’s been knocking heads with the entire picture realize they have to combine the spiritual powers of East and West to defeat the King of the Vampires, and it’s pretty damned cool.

Anyway, I’ve long been a fan of Lam Ching-ying. He probably chafed at being typecast by his most famous movie, but man, was he ever good at playing that role. He elevated several movies simply by his dignified presence, even mean-spirited drivel like Skin Stripperess. He succumbed to liver cancer in 1997, and the world became a much less magical place.

YouTube has not recognized the brilliance of Lam Ching-ying yet, so we’ll just have to be satisfied with this tribute video by Lily Wang:

October 27, 2015
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: hubrisween, lam ching-ying, vampire vs vampire . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

U: Under the Skin (2013)

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It’s actually rather rare I get to do a movie so recent for Hubrisween, though that’s likely more a matter of personal taste than actual happenstance. The fact that I’m calling a two year-old movie “recent” is telling, some people are likely thinking.

Then, perhaps Under the Skin isn’t of such recent vintage after all – it’s said it took director Jonathan Glazer ten years to get it made. And then, once it was made, nobody seemed to like it. Dipping a toe into User Reviews and message boards is a whole lot like falling into a Gamer Gate discussion or something equally rancid. There are people who like this movie, but they’re not the ones who are driven to spout off about it; they’re the ones in the corner pondering and staring into space.

Scarlett Johansson is The Female (watch the extras and you’ll find out the crew named her Laura). The Female is some sort of alien being imitating a human woman. Driving about chilly Glasgow in a van, she picks up men, takes them to a deserted house for some sex, but instead they find themselves in some sideways dimension where they are consumed.

That is a B-movie concept right there, and you can be sure that Fred Olen Ray has used it at least once or twice; what is different here is the way in which the story is told. Under the Skin has maybe 100 lines of dialogue (if that many) in its hour and forty-eight minutes. This is purely visual storytelling, using some astonishingly sneaky technology. The reason the van the Female uses for stalking is so large is because it has eight cameras concealed in it and a recording studio in the back. The Female’s interactions with men is quite real, many of them not realizing they were in a movie until Glazer told them.

The Female is quite good at mimicry, it seems, but her observation of and traveling among humans begins to wear upon her, to infect her. Upon the seduction of a man afflicted with neurofibromatosis (Adam Pearson, and that ain’t makeup), she has a most un-alien crisis of conscience, frees him from the death dimension, and goes on her own voyage of self-discovery, ditching the van and wandering at random. She will find that humans are capable of great kindness. She will also find that some humans are just as capable of predation as she, perhaps even moreso.

It’s feels hard to judge Johansson’s performance here, which is why I tend to think it’s great. The bits with human interaction stand so starkly against the Alien parts – unreadable, unknowable. The hardest thing for an actor to do is to present a totally blank slate that the audience can pour itself into. She does this, then gives us a conflicted blank slate. It’s at least as tough a nut to crack as the movie that contains it.

What infects The Female is empathy, something neither she nor her handler, The Bad Man (Jeremy McWilliams) possesses. It is something that cannot be afforded in their line of work, whatever the ultimate purpose of that may be. And that will bring us to the probable reason of why so many seem to hate this movie: there is never a breath of explanation in it, anywhere, as to why they are seeking out men who can vanish without a trace (whatever the reason is, their demise is pretty horrific and apparently not very speedy). Under the Skin requires engagement from the viewer, to the level that the viewer has to connect and devote themself to the whys and wherefores of what is happening. The only other movie I can think of to compare it to is Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, which is similarly divisive to its audience. Under the Skin‘s narrative is much more straightforward, at least. At its heart, it is what it is like to be human, and that turns out to be complicated. As complicated as the taste of chocolate cake, it turns out.

It’s a puzzler, so I did something I rarely do; I looked at the comments. I would have had better luck asking for the opinion of the local cesspool.

“It’s so long! Nothing happens!” Dude. avoid Tarkovsky. In fact, give up on World Cinema in general.

“I’d rather be watching a wall.” A wall is what you deserve.

“It’s boring!” You’re not paying attention.

“Scarlett Johansson has a fat ass!” That is what you took away from this movie? Go fuck yourself, which is likely the only prospect you have.

It’s obvious, I guess, that I liked it far more than I originally thought as the final credits roll, that I would be driven to actual anger by Idiots on the Interwebs, Incorporated. I’m still haunted by it days later, that it pricked so many responses deep inside me. It has completely – and you will have to forgive me – gotten under my skin.

Buy Under the Skin on Amazon

October 26, 2015
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck . Tags: hubrisween, jonathan glazer, scarlett johannson, under the skin . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

T: Tourist Trap (1978)

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This is one of those movies whose fate leaves you scratching your head, and wondering about the whys and wherefores of culture. There are several things that contribute to Tourist Trap‘s longevity, chief among them a very positive review by Stephen King in Danse Macabre, and a PG rating, insuring it could be run on TV with little or no trimming.

There are two groups of young’uns on the road for mumble mumble something or other. They’re in two cars, so when the lead car has a blow-out, Woody (Keith McDermott) rolls the flat spare to the nearest gas station, leaving Eileen (Robin Sherwood) behind. The second car, driven by Jerry (Jon von Ness) and carrying Molly (Jocelyn Jones) and Becky (Tanya Roberts, very early in her career) catches up to her, she climbs aboard, and they head down the road to look for Woody.

Woody has found a gas station, but it is deserted. Except for a self-locking back room with cackling mannequins and objects that fling themselves willy-nilly at him. The capper is the pipe that nails him to the door. This is a superb opening sequence, and it scarred a lot of young kids during matinees.

Our surviving youngsters manage to miss that abandoned gas station and instead find themselves at the all-but-abandoned Slausen’s Lost Oasis and Wild West Museum, where their car mysteriously ceases to function. Who should show up but Slausen himself (played by Chuck Connors), who lets the ladies stay in the museum while he and Jerry try to fix the car. Oh, but don’t go out to the house in back – Davey lives there.

So of course, one by one, they go out to the house in back. Where Davey undeniably is, with a small army of creepy mannequins that Davey can apparently control with some sort of Carrie White telekinesis. Davey (Slausen will explain it’s his brother) also wears a mask that makes him look like one of the mannequins. Or that’s the intent, anyway – I think it makes him look like Jay Leno. Given that the movie is almost 40 years old – and that it really doesn’t conceal the twist all that well – Davey and Slausen are the same person, and he is, to put it bluntly, insane, and our party is going to get whittled down to the Final Girl over the course of the flick.

What Tourist Trap has going for it is some novelty and some of the creepiest damn mannequins ever assembled for a movie. The scenes with them are beautifully realized and nightmarish; when the movie breaks away from them so another of the teenagers can get killed, that stuff – which, admittedly, is the stuff that most of the movie goers paid money to see – seems grafted on, like we dropped in on another movie set. The kills are fairly bloodless, including the most famous one, where Davey murders yet another traveler caught at the gas station (Dawn Jeffory) by layering plaster on her face until she suffocates (though he assures us she dies of fright) still doesn’t breach the PG limit.

So there is the likely basis for Tourist Trap‘s failure at the box office. It was a PG oddity floating in a sea of R-rated dead teenager movies. The setup is strictly Texas Chainsaw Massacre without the Hitchhiker – hell, the kids are driving a Volkswagen Thing instead of a VW van. No gore, no nudity – there are chances for both, but they go unfulfilled. What remains is more dark fable than slasher movie, a tale of obsessive madness that gradually includes the audience (as well as Final Girl) in the delusion. Real people become mixed in with the mannequins, until it is impossible to tell which is which, or who is insane.

This is not what the audiences were looking for at the time.

If you’re only familiar with Chuck Connors from The Rifleman re-runs, and not some of his other film work, like, say, The Big Country, you might be surprised to find him here (which is why it’s great casting). He finds the top and goes over it several times, but there are also times he is deliciously subtle. There is one scene toward the end when he goes from slobbering madman to sorrowful confession that actually had me thinking holy crap that was some really good acting. The cast is uniformly good, sometimes better than the material actually deserves.

Writer/director David Schmoeller is better known for the Puppet Master series that arguably kept Full Moon Pictures’ doors open for years. Tourist Trap may not be able to tell if it really wants to be Chainsaw or Carrie or Psycho, but it is a pretty solid piece of Halloween creepiness. Those mannequins, man. Urrrrrrrr

Buy Tourist Trap at Amazon

(Note that I am linking to the DVD, not the blu-ray, which reportedly is missing five minutes and has a dreadful framerate)

October 25, 2015
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: chuck connors, david schmoeller, full moon pictures, hubrisween, tourist trap . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

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E: The Earth Dies Screaming (1964)

D: Daybreakers (2009)

A: Alucarda (1977)

Z: Zombie (1979)

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Y: 30 Days of Night (2007)

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X: Xtro 3: Watch the Skies (1995)

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W: The Walking Dead (1936)

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V: Vampire vs Vampire (1989)

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U: Under the Skin (2013)

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T: Tourist Trap (1978)

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