Review: Brain Dead

What a cast in this movie. Bud Cort! George Kennedy! The guy who wanted to take Data apart in TNG: "Measure of a Man"! The fast food cashier from Falling Down! One of the pirate buddies from Pirates of the Caribbean! And according to IMDb, Kyle Gass played one of the anaesthetists, though I didn't spot him.

And our leads? The oft-confused Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton. This movie's actually a helpful mnemonic for those of you who have trouble remembering which is which: who'd make a better head-in-the-clouds neurologist vs. who'd make a better corporate shark?

Pullman is the neurologist, Rex, whose livelihood is threatened by shady goings-on involving his old college buddy turned plutocrat, Jim (Paxton). Soon, Rex's very sanity is on the line; he begins to experience hallucinations after agreeing to perform experimental brain surgery on a company drone (Cort) who knows too much.

Review: Castle Freak

Director Stuart Gordon wants frequent collaborator Jeffrey Combs to play Edgar Allan Poe in a biopic for which they are currently raising funds. Castle Freak, a film they did together in the '90s, would actually feel very Poe-esque were it not for the typical gore-flick misogyny.

It's still an engaging, sorta creepy haunted-castle kind of movie. It features a solid story, overall avoidance of the most tired horror cliches, and a memorable antagonist. I just wish it had dispensed with the bad taste.

Review: Warlock III: The End of Innocence

The third Warlock film damn nearly could not be more different from the first two. Warlock and Warlock: The Armageddon were both rollicking rides through a wacky world of time travel, coin-eating, visits to Amish country, purposeless murders, lamewad druids, mystic tomes, magic stones, and salt assault. The direct-to-video Warlock III: The End of Innocence is by contrast as conventional a horror film as you could hope for, a youths-in-a-creepy-house story we've seen countless times. Yet it's also mildly scary on several occasions, unlike its predecessors.

Review: Pontypool

(Note: this review is as spoiler-free as I could make it. Which is to say, it hints at spoilers.)

Many indie horror films end up being more horror and less indie; they aspire, not to artistic profundity or hipster cred, but to scares, gore, and frequently, reliable genre tropes. Indie zombie movie Pontypool is largely the inverse of that.

I have mixed feelings about indie movies; even those I've liked, I've often found slightly irritating. And initially, I wasn't even going to do a full review for Pontypool because its ending bugged me so much. Upon further reflection, however, much of the first hour-plus was engaging and effective enough that I changed my mind. Its indie-ness is less overwhelming than it could have been, resulting in a watchable and quite different movie, which is a rare enough combination to merit attention by itself. It helps that, despite its miniscule budget, Pontypool is occasionally scary, and in a distinctive way.

Spend enough time in a nursing home or a psych ward, and there's a good chance you'll encounter some individuals exhibiting the same behavioral oddity that distinguishes Pontypool's zombies from others. Thus, despite its concept being even less plausible than that of more typical zombie narratives, its brand of scare works—and is likely to feel even more unsettling than most zombie movies to those of us who've seen people do this.

Review: Leviathan (1989)

1989's Leviathan borrows so much from Alien, The Thing, and similar futurey-horror blockbusters of its age that if you've seen a couple of them, you can safely skip Leviathan, because it adds pretty much nothing to your personal catalogue of filmwatching experiences—except possibly the ability to link Daniel Stern directly with Richard Crenna for Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon purposes. But then, I just told you that, so you don't have to see it after all…unless your rules variant requires you to have actually seen the movies you reference, which, wow man, let me into THAT game.

Review: Warlock: The Armageddon

Challenge: Make a Warlock sequel that's simultaneously more boring and more batshit than its predecessor.

It may seem impossible, but that's the impressive feat achieved by Warlock: The Armageddon. A predictable and unoriginal story accompanies ludicrous setpieces and greatly amped-up gore, but those aren't the only ways in which this sequel differs from Warlock. In fact, if they'd cast someone else as their warlock, you'd barely be able to tell that these two movies take place in the same universe at all—no direct reference whatsoever is made to the events of Warlock, and the only slight hint about those events is the fact that the Warlock seems to know a little bit about late-20th-century materialism and motor vehicle operation.

Review: The Cabin in the Woods

(Warning: major spoilers ahead. If you were interested enough to get this far, and you haven't seen it, go see it now. It's on Netflix Instant.)

What do we mean when we talk about "sacrifice"? And what do I mean when I say "we"? "We" could be modern Western media-savvy types—Joss Whedon's usual audience. "We" could be modern Americans.

"We" could also be all of humanity, but in rewatching The Cabin in the Woods, I began to think in terms of premodern versus modern peoples (to use very broad categories). For premodern peoples, sacrifice means abject terror before dark forces you can't control, and feebly offering blood in the hope of placating those forces, under the assumption that they want blood, since they're obviously dark and all—what with their plagues and floods and pyroclastic flows.

For modern Americans, perhaps modern peoples generally, sacrifice means soldiers, firemen, and cops. What if both meanings of sacrifice are the same? What if the dark forces to whom we now sacrifice our young (mostly) men are war, random fiery destruction, and man's inhumanity to man, respectively? And was there an early version of this script where one of the cabin visitors was a veteran of a recent war?

Review: Warlock

Warlock is a cheesy-ass 1989 fantasy/horror flick with a story so dopey that it makes the movie more fun than it has any right to be, largely because you're never sure what's coming next.

To encapsulate the experience: a warlock is about to be executed in Boston in 1691, but while confronting a vengeful witch-hunter, the warlock summons evil powers and (apparently inadvertently) teleports both of them to 1988 Los Angeles. It seems the forces of darkness can be budget-conscious too.

So upon arrival, the warlock is thrown into a house that just happens to contain one of the three pieces of the Grand Grimoire, an evil book with earth-shattering powers. The warlock proceeds to kill the homeowner just for the sake of accessorizing, then acquires the pages and ventures off to complete the book. But the witch-hunter is hot on his trail, thanks to a vaguely Hellraiser-esque warlock-compass contraption.

Review: Room 237

Evidently the product of one too many dormitory pot parties, Room 237 purports to expose hidden meanings in Stanley Kubrick's The Shining by intercutting audio from interviews with "experts" alongside a few diagrams and (mainly) footage from assorted films by Kubrick and others. (MST fans should be on the lookout for Urbano Barberini, a.k.a. Tarl Cabot, in one occasionally re-used shot.) While I can honestly say I've never seen a movie quite like this, that's far from a compliment.

What I have seen are a few of the wall-of-text, black-background Shining analysis websites that Room 237 mentions, and even these virtual watering holes for crackpots are more persuasive than just about anything presented in this film. Room 237 runs the gamut from the Native American motif (intentional, and therefore not hidden) to Danny imagining literally everything (if so, kid's got some serious psychosexual baggage for his age) to supposed subliminal minotaurs (I guess if you have astigmatism, maybe) to the Holocaust (which everything can be about if you try hard enough) to the Kubrick-faked-the-moon-landing theory (can we PLEASE be done with that now). Moreover, every interview subject seems to think that an observed (or imagined) connection inherently counts as proof. I haven't seen this much reaching since my last trip to Sam's Club.

Review: The Mist

Based on a Stephen King novella, The Mist is a skillful and gripping monster/horror flick directed by Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption) that you should definitely see if you fall into any of the following categories:

you are familiar with, and enjoy, the "survival horror" genre

you like Stephen King's style (e.g. small town in Maine, every minor character is known by name to every other minor character, families in crisis due to monsters, etc.)

…and especially if

you like a really great fuck-you ending.

I've mentioned the fuck-you ending on this blog before. The fuck-you ending is the wonderful device whereby the filmmakers craft the story such that the audience thinks "Well, they can't POSSIBLY end the movie THAT way," and then they go ahead and do it. Drag Me to Hell had a very apt fuck-you ending in which a major character, well, justifies the movie's title.

Review: Seven Below

Some years ago I watched the late-era Val Kilmer movie Spartan because I'd always been a fan of Kilmer but I'd seen some online scuttlebutt to the effect of "Hey, hurr hurr, how 'bout that washed-up loser Val Kilmer, huh? Look at these complete shit movies he's makin' now," so after I finished Spartan, I thought, "Well, okay, that wasn't GREAT, but it was far from complete shit, and Kilmer was pretty darn good in it; so, Internet haters? What the hell?"

Well, this. This the hell.

The infinitesimal-budget horror flick Seven Below (or 7 Below, as it's known on Netflix Instant, not that I'm advising you to look for it) involves a group of tourists heading into the wilderness of Minnesota but winding up "trapped" by "dangerous" weather in a creepy old house full of booze and ghosts and bad acting. I give it credit for having a cast of characters not comprised entirely of oversexed high-school kids, but the cast we do get nevertheless fails to be interesting. At least they fit in well with the similarly uninteresting story, music, direction, dialogue…

Review: Hellraiser: Bloodline

Well, I said I wasn't gonna watch any more Hellraisers. So what are we doing here exactly? What strange appeal do these adequate-at-best movies have that keeps me (and presumably enough audiences to justify eight sequels) coming back? Is it the hint of a vaster and more mysterious mythology than what we see in the first three movies? Is it the hunch that these villains have not yet attained the heights of scariness that they're capable of?

If either of the above are the answer, then I'm definitely done after the abysmal Hellraiser: Bloodline, the fourth installment in the franchise. Really, in my case, I think what's kept me vaguely curious enough to make it this far is the non-Cenobite cast members. I watched Hell on Earth for Terry Farrell, and learned a short time ago that Bloodlines has Adam Scott (Ben on Parks and Recreation and the Defiant's helmsman in Star Trek: First Contact). As it turns out, he dies quickly, but not before getting a few slightly entertaining scenes.

Review: Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue

If you're a horror film buff, you should probably see the documentary Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue, but mainly because it's a fun historical review of American horror cinema, and not for any especially profound genre insights. You'll see clips from a few titles you might not be familiar with, and you'll enjoy the convention-panel-like ruminations of legends like John Carpenter and George Romero, discussing their work in the context of their personal lives and their perceptions of American history.

I've never owned a copy of Fangoria, but I enjoyed this documentary on the above basis. Where it lost me was in some of its attempted connections between American history and the trends in American horror films. When those connections seemed legitimate, it was largely because the films in question were so beat-you-over-the-head-with-something-rusty obvious about it—e.g. the '80s consumerism satire The Stuff, whose creator Larry Cohen is among those interviewed (not to mention the wonderfully endearing They Live). When those connections were more strained, you feel like you're watching the audiovisual version of an undergraduate film studies essay, and a fairly insightless one at that.

Review: Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth

Horror films can be fun, or scary, or sometimes both. Really great horror can either focus on one (The Shining) or aspire to both and succeed (Evil Dead II). Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth was trying for scary, to be sure, but the efforts at "fun" were so imbalanced that I remain unsure how much of it was intentional. And while I'd be lying if I said I didn't have any fun during Hellraiser III, the problem was that those moments were clustered largely toward the end, and failed to fully compensate for the earlier tedium.

Like the first movie, Hell on Earth introduces us to a single relatable character (Terry Farrell, Deep Space Nine's Dax, playing a TV reporter) and a broadly unpleasant supporting cast. Most unpleasant of all is the rich nightclub owner J.P. Monroe (Kevin Bernhardt, who my spidey-sense tells me has edited his own Wikipedia page). Monroe acquires a mystical pillar containing Pinhead (Doug Bradley) and one of those puzzle-boxes around which the first two movies revolved. Naturally, they don't stay in the pillar for long (though considerably longer than we viewers might expect/wish). The carnage that eventually ensues surpasses either of the previous films, and the justification for Pinhead's much more active lifestyle here seems to be that, at the end of Hellbound, Pinhead's essence was separated from that of his original human self, WWII officer Eliot Spencer. Thus, without the moderating influence of Spencer, Pinhead's much more Pinheady, I guess.

Review: Hellbound: Hellraiser II

Like many horror sequels, Hellbound: Hellraiser II attempts to up the stakes and the scope of its predecessor. In the attempt, it manages to walk the fine line between "expanding the setting" and "explaining too much." All the same, now that we understand a bit more of what to expect from Cenobites and skinless undead, the scariness is diminished—its vacancy filled with extra gore and weirdness.

Hellbound picks up soon after the events of, and includes several flashbacks to, the first Hellraiser (my review is here). I assume the intent was to make the film comprehensible to those who missed the first one, and indeed, so thorough is the recap that this is one case where I doubt you'd miss much if you went straight to the sequel. It might feel more WTF than it already does, though, and plus you'd miss Andrew Robinson (the dad in the first movie), who doesn't reprise his role here. The only other principal who doesn't return is the boyfriend, but maybe he died in the last movie…I didn't care enough to commit that detail to memory.

Review: Phantasm II

You know how sometimes a movie sort of comes out of nowhere and blows you away with its originality, wit, and unique perspective—e.g. Evil Dead II? When that happens, have you ever wondered (as I often have) what such a film might have looked like if it emerged around the same time, had a similarly unique perspective, but was somehow just…not successful at all?

Phantasm II is an example of the latter.

Horror aficionados of the Fangoria-subscriber variety seem to have a fondness for the Phantasm franchise (of which I have now seen only the first two films). I attribute this fondness mainly to the following:

• The weirdness
• The ball

Review: Hellraiser

I saw Hellraiser for the first time this week. It had long been on my third-tier, "maybe-get-to-it-eventually" movie list, due to its apparent weirdness. But when I learned Andrew Robinson (Garak from DS9, and the killer in the first Dirty Harry) was in it: well, more urgency, naturally. Having seen it, I'm not going to prioritize its sequels much higher than that third tier, but maybe a little—another DS9 alum, Terry Farrell, is in one of them.

I don't think Hellraiser could have come into being without A Nightmare on Elm Street or Friday the 13th. Certainly, it outclasses its forebears in every respect: better acting, stronger mood, freakier freakiness, and one-liners that are both more memorable and more seamlessly integrated into the story. I am already saying "We have such things to show you" in everyday conversation, and "Don't look at me!" has such obvious utility that I've already been using it for years.

Review: The Dunwich Horror

If anyone's made a really good Lovecraft movie, I'm not yet aware of it. It isn't this very '60s Corman flick, which stars an amazingly young Dean Stockwell as the creepy villain and Sandra Dee as the college girl he enthralls for dark purposes.

Through Netflix I saw a far superior, though still not great, retro-silent indie entitled Call of Cthulhu, but this was many years ago and all I remember was that (1) it was kind of slow initially, making a valiant effort to build suspense despite budget and acting limitations and (2) the big reveal of Cthulhu was disappointing. Of course, there's also Re-Animator, but I view it as more in the Evil Dead league than truly Lovecraftian.

If I didn't know better, I would argue that Lovecraft is inherently unfilmable. The terror of the unknown is so foundational to Lovecraft's good stories that movie versions, dependent as they tend to be on visuals, would seem unable to fully succeed at the task of adaptation.