Dracula is doing Dracula stuff so Dr. Seward stakes him in his vampire basement lair, turning the Count into a dead bat. Soon after, Frankenstein moves in, finds the bat, and revives Dracula with blood. Frankenstein seems to hope to somehow parlay his new vampire toys into his ultimate goal, a perfect being, which probably thrills the Monster to no end. After the Monster tries to kill Seward, the injured doctor is nursed back to health by gypsies. Complicating matters is the fact that Seward and Frankenstein are both idiots and didn’t check any of the other coffins in the basement so there is a rogue vampire lady running around.
The gypsy fortuneteller tells Seward that he will be the one to conquer the bad guys right after the wolfman comes to help. The wolfman is actually of little help, but Frankenstein decides fuck this noise and stakes Dracula again (this time reducing him to a skeleton, which just shows you can’t trust Seward with anything), kills the Monster with electricity (is this even possible?), and then vanishes from the movie so Seward can come in with his torchbearing gypsies to find that all the work has been done the end.
The Wolfman sees the synopsis above and wonders “Who writes this crap?”
It would be tempting to call Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein a fever dream of a movie, but in fact it feels like a movie of a fever dream experienced by a sick child after watching a Halloween marathon of classic Universal horror movies. It has that nonsensical flow – especially the inclusion of a werewolf just because. Howard Vernon’s Dracula always has the same expression, which is as unnerving as it is absurd. Count Dracula as Halloween mask.
I have spent my adult life simply waving off Jess Franco movies, and welp, here I am, trying to deal with his work in a more accepting manner. There is no denying that he knows where to put his camera and how to use stuff like camera dollies and the like. It has been put forward that the first act of the movie is largely dialogue-free and could have easily been a tribute to silent horror movies. Then Franco gets his hand on the zoom lens and all my good intentions get enraged all over again.
I’m going to try Franco again in a few letters, and maybe I’ll finally see what other critics I respect seem to see in the guy. This time, I do have to say I was never tempted to just shut it off, which is progress of a sort.
Dracula (Paul Naschy) moves into a deserted castle and immediately starts making vampires. He is aided in this by by a carriage-load of young hotties suddenly stranded by an accident and the death of their driver. Vampire stuff ensues.
Count Dracula’s Great Love is a quite unusual vampire story; although the setup above points toward a typical Hammer-style gothic tale, it quickly unwinds into novel territory. Great Love‘s central conceit is that Dracula’s immortality is not based on eternal life, but instead on a cycle of reincarnation, with the Count living and dying over and over again until a virgin falls in love with him for himself.
Also, she gotta take a knife to the neck.
One of our hotties falls for him but, alas, she is no virgin. There is another, however, who fits the bill, and that is where things start getting really weird. There is a subplot about reviving Dracula’s daughter, even to the point of kidnapping a local girl and sacrificing her to revive said daughter, but his Great Love doesn’t like that, so he abandons it. Sorry, local virgin!
Eventually, Dracula has killed all the other vampires in his employ and the virgin still won’t give in, so Dracula stakes himself to start the cycle all over again and the virgin is sorry, boo hoo hoo.
“Your coffins are right this way. ROOMS! Rooms. I meant rooms.”
Snarky recaps aside, this is held up as a high point for Naschy as an actor and Spanish horror in particular. Those are both true, and it has to be admitted, this most unusual twist on the mythology was refreshing, and certainly worthwhile.
Which reminds me, one of these days I’ve got to watch Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows before the DVD rots in its case.
So it’s 15 years since those three intrepid student filmmakers went into the woods and disappeared, but now a memory card has been found in those woods and the hectic surviving footage seems to take place in that strange deserted house in the end of that movie. Heather’s brother James (James Allen McCune) thinks he caught a glimpse of Heather in that footage, so off we go to the woods again, with James’ friend Lisa (Callie Hernandez), who is making a documentary about James’ search, and two cannon fodder friends (Corbin Reid and Brandon Scott)
Perhaps you thought “Now wait a minute” about James’ hope of finding Heather after fifteen years. Hold that thought, you’re going to be needing it again.
I hope you got it laminated so it doesn’t wear out.
They meet with the couple who found the memory card (Wes Robinson and Valerie Curry), who insist on going with them. Say goodbye, everybody!
“Goodbye, everybody!”
James’ main objective is to find this mysterious house, which has eluded search parties and other investigators. It is fifteen years later, so we have new tech, like trail cameras and a drone to help.
None of these are going to help (as you surmised).
Now, I like found footage movies – when they work, I find them very involving. Director Adam Wingard works the new tech angle for all its worth, and even adds a bit to the lore by having the Witch fuck around with time as well as space. This also seems to be the year for filmmakers punching my claustrophobia in the head and taking its lunch money, the bastards. But still, Blair Witch is going to make you use that phrase “Now wait a minute” so many times that honestly, that should have been the subtitle.
Though I admit Blair Witch: Now Wait a Minute would have been a hard sell.
This one gave me more difficulty than I generally expect with a consonant that isn’t Q or X.
Original plan was to watch the Empire flick Ghost Town, but had no luck finding my copy in the stacks. Turned up another one I’d never heard of, The Grey Knight, which turns out to be a re-titling of The Killing Box, a fairly interesting Civil War tale concerning voodoo and undead soldiers… though not interesting enough to make it past the halfway point. I still haven’t watched this now-ancient copy of Graveyard Shift, mainly because I find Stephen King adaptations – particularly in that era – hit or miss with a very large percentage landing in the miss box.
So, back to another movie I watched when I was wasn’t writing about them:
Grave Robbers (1989)
Sorry, but I don’t need an “L” movie. Not yet, anyway.
Let’s start with our standard renegade priest (Agustin Bernal) trying to birth the Antichrist by magical (and not-so-magical) means and getting caught by his fellow priests and stretched on the rack. This guy was the Church Executioner and the local Archbishop decides to play the irony card by burying the offending executioner’s axe deep in his chest. But, as is the way with these movies starting in bygone days, this means the priest will curse the Archbishop, saying that one day someone will pull the axe from his chest and then he’ll birth the Antichrist using one of the Archbishop’s descendants. As one does.
Skip to the modern day of 1989, where the Archbishop’s grand-grand-whatever is now the Police Captain (still Fernando Almada, though), who has a beautiful daughter, Olivia (Edna Bolkan), which you just know is going to be significant later.
But never mind that, we’re going to spend the next half hour with a group of teenage hooligans (led by Ernesto Laguardia and Erika Buenfil, who seems to be somewhat psychic) who are trying to strike it rich by, you guessed it, grave robbing. Their psychic leads them to a grave that conceals an entrance to an old catacomb housing a very familiar rack and lots of corpses who were interred with lots of gold and jewelry.
There’s also a heavy slab inscribed with Latin that doubtless says DO NOT OPEN THIS YOU IDIOTS, but our hooligans do not speak Latin, so they open it, find a corpse with an ornate battleax in its chest, so let’s take the axe too, eh? Resulting in a massive storm, both in the catacomb and on the surface.
And, oh, yeah, the corpse of the Executioner getting up and making with the killing spree.
If the plot sounds creaky and a bit generic, well it is, but welcome to the larger body of horror movies in general. A lot of these are like comfort food to the horror fan – the satisfying taste of the familiar along with the hopeful anticipation of something exotic and original in the execution to justify its existence (and the time being spent watching it). Too often, that justification is not found – when it does, though, it is cherished.
Grave Robbers plays like an 80s slasher for most of its running time, but it’s also five years after the first Nightmare on Elm Street, so the Executioner has magical powers, most obviously when he uses a floating dagger and a wind machine to threaten a local priest and a totally outrageous and gory method used to retrieve the amulet necessary for the Antichrist ritual, a kill scene that should rank with Johnny Depp’s in the aforementioned Nightmare.
It makes you wonder why the Executioner even bothers with the Jason Voorhees stuff. but then it’s also cheaper to shoot stuff with an axe that’s had a face-shaped hole cut in its blade than a shot involving a fake human chest and lots of entrails.
As ever, it doesn’t pay to take too close a look at our comfort food. Just enjoy the tension and the gore.
I had originally watched this after a viewing of director Ruben Galindo Jr’s first movie, Cemetery of Terror, and its a big jump in quality and coherence (small wonder, it’s his fourth). Cemetery was fine, if a bit scattered and a little too dependent on things playing out in real time to pad its length, none of which is evident in Grave Robbers. The compression of time still feels a bit out of whack, because this all seems to be happening in the longest night in creation, but hey, horror movie. I do appreciate the very genuine local flavor Galindo injects into the stories. These flicks obviously and unapologetically take place in Mexico, in the cusp between rural and urban areas. That’s enough of a lure for this particular gringo, especially one who spent much of his youth in heavily Latino communities.
Other extraordinary things: Police Captains have extraordinary leeway in doing their jobs, as he decides his department needs an Uzi, so he gets one; Olivia has the longest bout of hysteria in movie history (though holy shit does she have reason). And, there’s that little oddity, that story hiccup that sticks in my craw with movies like Night of the Lepus and I Drink Your Blood – at the final fadeout, our two lead grave robbers are safe, sound and in possession of the gold they stole, which kicked off the events of the movie that killed all their friends and at least six others. This is supposed to be a heartwarming ending.
Yeah, nobody ever said horror movies were fair, either.
Much brouhaha and a family emergency that had me travelling during my usual writing time. Everything turned out okay, but it is not a little alarming how something like that has a ripple effect that affects everything at my age. Younger me would have powered through and claimed everything was normal, but that’s not remotely true. The new strategy is to realize that I’ll get to it eventually….and then attempt to power through it.
Still waiting for that wisdom of age to settle in.
From Beyond the Grave (1974)
Why yes, this was the last of the movies I watched when pretending I was going to do Hubrisween in a timely manner and then did not power through the writing. How nice of you to remember.
I really like the Amicus anthology movies, just like I always had a soft spot for short story anthologies. What’s not to like? There is a special joy for me in a story that takes just as long as it needs to tell itself, and no more, which is where some anthology movies (and feature-length adaptations of short stories) fail. But that’s a complaint for another time.
Given how much I love these movies – I never passed up an opportunity to catch them back when local TV stations ran movies instead of informercials, or those special late-night marathons at college-town theaters where they’d schedule four of them at Midnight on Halloween or Friday the 13th. But lately I’ve begun to realize just how many of them I had not seen. They never seemed to show up on TV, despite being rated PG in release. Or crop up in those marathons. Who knows what arcane licensing restrictions were involved?
One of the missing ones was The Uncanny, which unfortunately ran into the story-stretching problem, but I also recall it cropping up on CBS’ late night movie one evening. I don’t recall ever seeing From Beyond the Grave on broadcast TV.
As is the way of these anthologies, the framing device is a curiosity shop called “Temptations Ltd.” presided over by none other than Peter Cushing, as a bit of a doddering, slightly scattered old man. There are four stories, each linked to a specific item from the store, and the ruination brought upon the customer by the various ways in which they cheat Cushing to get their items.
In the first tale, David Warner browbeats Cushing into selling him an antique mirror, claiming that it’s an obvious reproduction (it’s not, as Warner well knows), only to find out after an ill-advised séance there is a killer trapped within it that has the power to make Warner kill young ladies for their blood to unleash him from the shiny prison.
In the second, a salaryman (Ian Bannen) with an unhappy home life encounters Donald Pleasence on the street, selling shoelaces and matches as many ex-servicemen were forced to do. Bannen, finding someone who seems to honestly admire him, tries to buy a Distinguished Service Cross from Temptations, Ltd. to impress him, but is stymied by Cushing requiring a certificate to prove that he lost his own. Bannen then simply steals the medal, sealing his fate. Because if you thought that Donald Pleasence (and his daughter, Angela) might have an agenda of their own, well, you’ve seen a few of these movies as well. Kudos to everyone for the denouement not being exactly what I expected, too.
The third story is kicked off by a venal businessman (Ian Carmichael) switching price tags between two snuff boxes to get the silver one he wants for cheap. On the train ride home, he is confronted by the flamboyant Madame Orloff (Margaret Leighton), who informs him that there is an invisible elemental spirit burrowing into his left shoulder, and it’s a nasty one, too. Carmichael pish-tushes these pronouncements until various dreadful things start to happen at home, at which point he is more than happy that Orloff pressed her business card into his hand.
Ian Ogilvy is the customer who kicks off the last story, buying an ornate carved door that’s languished in the store for a while. That door will cover some shelving he uses for office supplies at his home, and looks quite handsome, too, until he opens it one night and find it now leads into a blue gothic nightmare of a room, which he explores in bewilderment until something starts turning the knob on the only other door in the room. He rushes out, slamming his new door behind him. After a quick shot of brandy, he opens it again, only to find his closet once more.
Later, he will explore the room again, finding a journal explaining that the room’s original owner, a sorcerer of some power, created the room to ensure his immortality – the carven door offering a portal to the room when it – and its master – needed feeding. And guess who’s on the menu?
Well, Ogilvy is the one patron who didn’t try to cheat Cushing, so he at least has a fighting chance to not become sorcerer chow. Which is good, because he’s married to Lesley-Anne Down, whom I have a personal stake in not getting hurt.
From Beyond the Grave represented a pleasant surprise for me, and I believe it’s because, unlike a lot of the Amicus anthologies I watched, the stories are not written by Robert Bloch, but the British writer R. Chetwynd-Hayes, which brings a different flavor and some freshness to the approach. All due credit to Bloch – I loved those movies, but a bit of variety is good for you. As far as I know, the only other movie using Chetwynd-Hayes’ work is The Monster Club, which is, yes, yes, another I haven’t seen.
There is always one thing you can count on with these British horror flicks: you are in an irony-free zone. The work is accorded the respect and seriousness it deserves (and all-too-frequently, I admit, even when it doesn’t). And just to do a complete about-face on that last statement, I am especially a fan of the “Elemental” story and its lighter touch carried on the able shoulders of Margaret Leighton, who is a hoot and a half, and her exorcism scene in a highly mobile set with various physical effects almost literally sings. Fantastic, delightful stuff.
Can this be? A movie I actually watched right now instead of back in July, when I was intending to do Hubrisween the “normal” way? (Don’t worry, we’re back to the last of the warm recollections stage next time)
Eyes of Fire was a staple on video store shelves back in the heyday of the 80s, yet I never rented it. I wasn’t very fond of American attempts at folk horror during the time, but in my more tolerant “Golden Years”, I’m going back and sometimes finding some gems. It also helps that Severin included an excellent restoration in its extraordinary “All the Haunts Be Ours” box set, making my viewing so very much easier and pleasant.
We’re in “The American Frontier” in the year 1750, where a French officer (Mike Genovese) is interrogating three English girls who were, bewilderingly, found hundreds of miles from their home. The story will told in flashbacks as the girls remember.
In a rustic little village there is a scandal when a woman, Eloise (Rebecca Stanley), tired of the months-long absences of her trapper husband, has moved in with the new preacher, Will Smythe (Dennis Lipscomb). Smythe already lives with another woman, Leah (Karlene Crockett), a sub-vocal redhead who he claims he rescued from a witch-burning episode. These small pre-Revolution villages being what they are, Smythe is soon rousted from his home and strung up in the smokehouse for blasphemy or something. He is only saved by a) Leah breaking the noose by apparent magic, and b) Smythe’s small but loyal band of followers bursting in with weapons.
Smythe’s followers lock the villagers in the smokehouse and proceed to steal provisions and the town’s ferry for a journey to “a promised land” prophesied by Smythe. Soon afterward, Eloise’s husband Marion (Guy Boyd), a true James Fenimore Cooper type, returns, carves a canoe out of a tree, and starts downstream to find his errant wife and the daughter Fanny (Sally Klein), who is narrating everything.
That ferry, meanwhile, has run afoul of Indians (and are saved, once more, by magic from Leah) and our potential group of Jonestowners have abandoned the boat and set off across land, still hoping for that promised land. About the time they are accosted by some Shawnee and and a nastier band of trappers, Marion catches up with them and helps them out of that spot, but now the whole group is stuck in the middle of Shawnee territory. Luckily, though, they are on the edge of a valley the Shawnee consider taboo, and so they head there, and find some ruined cabins that offer shelter.
Of course, there is a reason the Shawnee don’t go there, and that would be the Demon Witch who holds reign over the woods. So things get considerably worse.
Writer/director Avery Crounse is an award-winning photographer in his own right, and the images shown in Eyes of Fire certainly prove that – there are many sequences where you just find yourself thinking, “Damn, that’s pretty.” And the story, simple as it is, is fairly solid; some will complain of its slow pace, but the fact that Crounse and his cohorts made a very good period piece on next-to-no-money is a magic trick of its own. Some of the imagery is of necessity simple, but still striking: the trees bearing the human faces of the Demon Witch’s victims, and their mud-soaked bodies when she summons them to attack the cabins. There are times when things get downright psychedelic.
Present-day viewers are also likely to point out the story’s remarkable similarity to 2015’s The Witch, but as I said, it’s a simple story. Simple as the folklore it invokes.
There is an original cut of the film, Crying Blue Sky on the set’s disc, which has a half-hour that was trimmed out for (I presume) nervous suits. Time pressures keep me from checking it out at this time, but I should watch it to see if any of my unanswered questions are answered. I mean, Leah is quite obviously a witch, and the subject is never truly broached, even though much of the story’s time is spent on her realization that she and the Demon Witch are headed for a showdown, and she must somehow prepare while still trying to protect her friends – the young girls who are telling the tale to the French officer.
Chances are that my gorehound younger 80s self might have actually appreciated this movie, but I’m glad I instead experienced it these days, when I watch these movies more to determine how well the filmmakers delivered their vision to the screen. Avery Crounse did so very well on this, his first feature, that I would like very much to track down his other two movies, The Invisible Kid and Cries of Silence aka Sister Island, which is likely the highest recommendation I could offer any movie.
Five minutes later: Great, just what I needed. More movies to watch. Grumble gripe bitch complain
I admit that I don’t hate the holiday itself, but for some reason the forces of fate keep making the run up to Christmas horrible for me. This year its workplace drama and, of course, the Arctic Blast coming through these parts in a couple of days. Houston, indeed, much of Texas, is not good about such things. I fully expect to lose power again, and people will die again, and Ted Cruz is probably already in Cancun. So bah and humbug and all that.
This was the second of the movies I watched I watched and never wrote about. The Letterboxd film diary says I watched it on August 28th. It made enough of an impression that I might only have to skip through my copy for some details, but just barely, and probably only because I knew I was going to be writing about it, no, really.
The movie opens with a body being wheeled into a hospital morgue. No sooner is the gurney placed in a refrigerated room and the light turned out than there is a animalistic growl and the body in the bag starts convulsing. Later we’ll see a dazed man (Jeremy Childs) walking through hospital corridors, shivering. He finds an empty bed, covers himself with a blanket, and passes out.
Next we’ll meet Dr. Daniel Forrester (Shane Carruth, yes, that Shane Carruth, Primer and Upstream ColorShane Carruth), a psychiatrist at that very same hospital who is having some problems of his own. After this mystery catatonic man – who we will learn is named Michael Clark – is discovered in the hospital bed, Forrester bends the rules yet again to get him put in the psych ward under his care. Clark snaps out of his catatonia but remembers nothing, so Forrester begins the process of trying to regain his memories.
Our last proactive cast member is Edward Graham (Bill Feeheely), an investigator with the Medical Examiner’s office. He finds the initial stage of his investigation into Clark’s apparent suicide is a bit hindered by the fact that the body disappeared from the morgue. He continues on, heading toward the scene of death, and finding a motel room covered in blood and a bathtub filled with same. Draining it yields the kitchen knife Clark used to slash his wrists (photos will show Clark did it the right way) – and a mysterious spiral cut into the bathtub’s floor. A similar spiral-shaped weal was on the corpse’s back.
Forrester tries hypnosis on Clark, who can still remember nothing, except that he did die.
” I died, and I came back, it wasn’t the first time. I can’t kill it, it came back with me in the fire. It wanted into this world, it’s inside of me now. It comes back at night, moves around inside of me. I kept cutting cutting until I was dead.”
Graham has backtracked Clark’s timeline to that aforementioned fire, which almost completely consumed the house. Continuing to the home of Clark’s parents, he (and we) find out that the fire killed his wife, but somehow spared Clark and their two children. The parents took them in and Clark’s mental state declined precipitously, until he ran away in the middle of the night, leaving his children behind. Clark’s room at this house has the traditional wall of newspaper clippings about unexplained mass deaths throughout history, and an engraving from an old book, with the caption “I am the Mouth of Death, none are beyond my reach”, which is also the suicide note Clark left behind, although Clark appended “Forgive me.”
I think you all know where this is all headed, and the fun is going to be had in getting there. Clark is going to beg Forrester to kill him again, because when he tried to do it himself, “I just made it stronger.” Clark is trying to hold back the Mouth of Death, but will lose control enough times to get some people in the ward killed. Clark’s actual identity will be determined, and his father will show up at the hospital demanding his release. Graham won’t get there in time to stop it, either, and all we can do is watch the tragedy take its course.
The Dead Center is not a bad movie, by any definition of that word. It is competently made, well-shot, and very well acted. I truly love it when methodic investigation slowly uncovers what is going on in any story, and when it’s in service of a horror story, I am ecstatic. It delivers on that aspect.
You may looking at the plot synopsis and thinking, this is a whole bunch of people talking in rooms, isn’t it? Sounds abysmally low budget and yes, you would be correct. It doesn’t look low-budget though, and it looks like most of the money was spent in the final act (where, according to Sam Fuller rules, it should have been), where a panic-stricken Forrester is running through a twilit neighborhood full of houses with the front door ripped off its hinges, full of fresh corpses harvested by the Mouth of Death.
There are several of The Mouth’s kill scenes in the ward where there were more explicit versions filmed, but writer/director Billy Senese felt that went against the “grounded approach” he wanted to take to the story. Unfortunately, that is likely where Senese will lose quite a bit of his audience, who look for such visceral thrills, and will just add to the complaints of low budgetry.
But it’s not a bad movie, not at all, especially if you’re kind of into lo-fi horror.
So this week we have a problem that will crop up again next week and more: Back when I was serious about participating in Hubrisween in 2022, I watched a few of those movies. Canaries, for example, I watched on July 9, according to Letterboxd. Did I write about it then? No, for reasons already discussed. Do I have time currently to dig it back up and re-watch it? Again, no. So this will likely be a pretty bare-boned post. At the very least, Canaries was memorable enough to allow this. Honestly, going through my Film Diary, there were several instances of I watched this? I don’t recall that at all.
So what we have here is a bunch of time-hopping aliens, who keep leaving behind corpses in areas, not to mention times, they do not belong. There’s a Department of Defense spook who’s chasing them around, but the only clue as to where they might appear next is a photo of a New Years Eve party that hasn’t happened yet.
Say that three times fast.
Which brings us to the Welsh community of Lower Cwmtwrch, where a DJ recently fired from his London station is hosting a New Years party (ooh, convenient!) in the hopes of impressing a rich bloke enough to finance a nightclub venture. Trouble is, his friends couldn’t scare up many people to attend the party, there’s a massive rain storm, and, oh yeah, an alien invasion.
As the DoD guy tells us, that’s not rain – it’s a device used by the aliens to create footsoldiers. The corpses they’ve been leaving behind were failures, as the rain kept killing them. It wasn’t until they abducted a fishing boat’s crew that they found their yellow slickers protected their victims long enough for the necessary mutation to take hold. So there’s a sudden influx of slicker-wearing murderers out and about.
You’re going to be getting a lot of Shaun of the Dead vibes over most of the movie, and that is totally justified. Don’t make the mistake of getting attached to any of the characters (like I did), because they’re going to be whittled down pretty quickly. What elevates Canaries beyond mere imitation is that it also tells the other side of the story; turns out the Depart of Defense made a deal with the aliens, as long as they stayed out of the bounds of America (like, say, Lower Cwmtwrch), but an actual invasion wasn’t supposed to happen, and our DoD guy is faced with losing his men on the ground or his job.
What I can’t fault Canaries for is its attempt at scope. The Defense and conspiracy stuff is what prevents me from dismissing it as a mere Shaun of the Dead rip-off. Its ambitions outstrip its means, but it tries, dammit. I have my doubts that a brief scene was actually shot in Viet Nam, as the credits allege, but hey. What do I know.
I also have to give kudos to the makers for finding a cost-effective way to create a lot of monsters – yellow slickers, finger extensions and some face makeup, voila! I’m a hard sell on comedy, but it actually made me laugh out loud a few times. Most importantly, after the movie ended, I felt a need to see more of some of the surviving characters. It may not be a great movie, but it is a surprisingly good one.
Especially since one of its alternate titles is Alien Party Crashers, under which, I can assure you, I never would have watched it.
According to my master list, the letter B was going to be represented by The Body Snatcher (1945), because I have a personal tradition that each Hubrisween should include a Boris Karloff movie.
Instead, you’re going to get a movie I actually did watch.
B: Black Friday (2021)
First of all, do you now, or have you ever, worked retail?
Oh, God, I am so sorry.
There was a year or so, back in college, when I worked retail. At a small record store in a small college town. It was eventually obvious that for the sake of myself and the health of the commonweal, that I should not be in a position to interact with the public. Honestly, most people are fine. It’s just that the ones who are not are the ones that stick in your craw, or your memory’s craw, however that works. I’m not even sure what a craw is.
So Black Friday – the day after Thanksgiving (or, as we shall see, the evening of), with ballyhooed bargains, first come, first served, seems engineered by capitalism to provide an excuse for gladiatorial games between consumers, giving rise to horrific spectacle and schadenfreude-laced news stories.
It’s really kind of amazing that it’s taken this long for a horror movie to use it as a backdrop.
So we have a toy store that has a staff trying to gird its loins for the doors to open at 9PM to a waiting line of potential combatants. What they don’t know (but we do, because we saw the movie’s prologue) is the recent spate of meteor showers are not space debris at all, but an invasion of fairly grotesque alien creatures that infect and absorb earthlings – think The Thing except it doesn’t care much for concealment, it goes for the gusto. Soon every shopper is a mutating beastie that wants to either kill or infect (sometimes both) everybody else, and our crew find themselves locked in a store that is not terribly secure and trying to survive the night, with varying degrees of luck (mostly bad) in the process.
First of all: as an alien invasion flick that takes most of its inspiration from the first third of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, it’s pretty good. Second of all, realize it’s a horror comedy, with all that entails. Unfortunately it seems to entail getting our characters from the Stereotype Rolodex, so I hope you asked Santa for some forbearance.
One of our main characters, Chris (Ryan Lee) is a germophobe, which gets really tedious. Ken (Devon Sawa) is a divorced dad and slacker who somehow wound up working in the store for ten years. Marnie (Ivana Barquero) …is a cipher, but it falls to her to be the voice of reason for most of the picture. And so it goes.
Your big marquee values are Bruce Campbell as Jonathan, the store manager, and for the most part manages to not play him as a version of Ash who made it to management, but he does use all the chops he’s been honing over the years to a fine edge, playing a guy who is always in way over his head. Also onboard is Michael Jai White as Archie, a maintenance guy, which means he’s always walking around with a bunch of tools that will come in handy. I mean, he’s Michael Jai White. Does that mean he’s going to be kicking some alien ass? What do you think? (Spoiler, though: not as much as you’d like)
Probably the actual best scene in the movie is when our core of survivors have boarded themselves up in a back room, and Marnie has found a pack of turkey cold cuts, allowing them to have what might be a final Thanksgiving dinner. It’s a scene that actually has some character development – bare as it may be – and felt like a welcome relief after the hectic preliminaries. Then things go to hell all over again.
I like Black Friday well enough – it’s entertaining all the way through, when you’re not rolling your eyes at Chris’ crippling germophobia being played for laughs. The effects are good, but a lot of horror fans are going to complain that they’re not gooey enough or sufficiently gross. It’s likely not going to be part of my regular holiday movie rotation. I could be wrong about that, and it’s certainly worth a look if you’re a fan of any of the actors or horror comedies in general – or especially if you work retail and would like to see some customers worked over with a nail gun.
As a PS, I will also add that the story’s Hot Toy of the Season is Dour Dennis – a plush Teddy Bear with a business shirt and tie, who says things like “I’m so tired” and “I’m not doing very well.” He’s being recalled because he has a tendency to burst into flames. Maybe he’s made by Tesla or something.
Filmmakers, it is pronounced “doer”, not “dower”. You made me yell at my TV and hurt its feelings.
This one has been on my list for a long while, jumping up and down from behind my boxes of discs and going “Yoo hoo! Yoo Hoo!” so I’m glad I finally sat down and watched it – there are quite a few others waiting to take its place.
It’s ostensibly a videotape from October 31, 1987 capturing that night’s evening news and the titular special immediately following, complete with commercials for local businesses. Local TV personality Frank Stewart (Paul Fahrenkopf) is going to enter the Webber House, shut up since some axe murders twenty years before. Accompanying him will be husband and wife paranormal investigators the Bergers (Brian St. August and Helenmary Bell) and a Catholic priest (Robert Long II). They intend to hold a “Call-In Seance” in the basement.
With any sort of genre awareness you’re immediately going to leap to comparisons with Ghostwatch, but let me stop you right there. That was done with the full powers of the BBC behind it, and played perfectly straight. This is a movie done by a bunch of guys who decided to make a movie with very little money – which doesn’t mean that it’s a slapdash enterprise, at all.
I’m not sure what it took to find older video cameras so the footage would have the right look, but there is a ton of work evident in the movie just in the ads and graphics. The IMDb states the filmmakers got a lot of stock footage for cheap – maybe a local station cleaning out old tapes or something, because that B-roll of carpet warehouses, petting zoos and video arcades is real period stuff. As for the graphics, I’m almost willing to bet that an ancient Video Toaster was resurrected – I recognize at least one transition from that venerable platform.
They work really hard to capture the moment in 1987 – there are at least two of those damned 1-900 phone call spots, the Satanic Panic is in full swing with a local band of fundamentalist crazies based on the Westboro Baptist Church waging a war on Halloween (their organization is called H.A.R.V.E.S.T., which is never explained, and I’m curious).
And as I said, Ghostwatch was serious, whereas The WNUF Halloween Special is largely not – from the oh-god-shoot-me-now japes of the newscasters to the ads, which never quite play as satire, but it’s there. I particularly like the anti-drug ad sponsored by “Parents Against Partying” and the spots for dreadful syndicated action and sci-fi shows that were the mainstay of independent UHF stations before they all got bought by conglomerates.
Like Ghostwatch, there a flock of looky-loos in various costumes outside the Webber house that Stewart interviews, but as they are Americans, they are all idiots.
There’s another level of self-referential humor in there, too. The IMDb states that:
The commercial for “High Pike Farms”, which is located on “Mundra Drive” is a nod to HACK O’ LANTERN, which starred Hy Pike and was directed by Jag Mundra
The police officer who gives a lengthy lecture on how to not fall into the trap of eating candy bars containing needles “laced with the AIDS virus” (this segment is sped over by whoever’s watching the videotape, thankfully) is named Officer Bookwalter, which seems a nod to low-budget guru J.R. Bookwalter. There are more in the movie, but I’m not chasing all of them down. When I start wondering if “Frank Stewart” is a nod to Fred Mustard Stewart, who wrote The Mephisto Waltz, I also wondering if I am too genre-aware.
Naaaaaaah, probably not.
So I find myself curiously torn by The WNUF Halloween Special. On the one hand, it looks like a fairly lackluster found-footage film. But on the other hand (and it is a large, imposing hand) there is so much work obvious in its making, a deliberate intention to grab the cheesiness of the concept and totally commit to it, that I am truly impressed.
Dracula is doing Dracula stuff so Dr. Seward stakes him in his vampire basement lair, turning the Count into a dead bat. Soon after, Frankenstein moves in, finds the bat, and revives Dracula with blood. Frankenstein seems to hope to somehow parlay his new vampire toys into his ultimate goal, a perfect being, which probably thrills the Monster to no end. After the Monster tries to kill Seward, the injured doctor is nursed back to health by gypsies. Complicating matters is the fact that Seward and Frankenstein are both idiots and didn’t check any of the other coffins in the basement so there is a rogue vampire lady running around.
I have spent my adult life simply waving off Jess Franco movies, and welp, here I am, trying to deal with his work in a more accepting manner. There is no denying that he knows where to put his camera and how to use stuff like camera dollies and the like. It has been put forward that the first act of the movie is largely dialogue-free and could have easily been a tribute to silent horror movies. Then Franco gets his hand on the zoom lens and all my good intentions get enraged all over again.
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