A Second Look at High Tension

Warning: Here Be Spoilers

I can think of a thousand things wrong with High Tension and I still stand by my original review but there is something about the way the ending of High Tension sticks in my mind that makes it hard to forget.



Perhaps it was the way the director took a standard image usually associated with happy endings -- in this case, a young girl eagerly turning in the direction of her current object of affection and then reaching out in that direction as if to give her a hug -- and then made it seem -- well -- creepy. The sad part is that I couldn't help sensing that Alex -- the objection of the young girl's affection -- still felt sorry for Marie -- the young girl in the mental hospital. Yet it was fairly obvious that any chance of a serious relationship between the two of them ended when Marie killed Alex's family. And that Alex had ample reason to hate Marie after everything Marie had put her through. Indeed, it could be that Alex's feeling in that final scene was not so much pity but relief that Marie was in a cell and not likely to bother her again.

Yet Marie somehow sensed that Alex was watching her even though she could not see her and turned in her direction with a facial expression that most people reserve for their deities. (Indeed, it did not seem like that much of a coincidence that the way Marie was muttering those words at the beginning of that scene made it almost sound as if Marie was praying.) Alex obviously no longer loved Marie and never did love her in the way that Marie wanted her to. But Marie still loved Alex -- and probably will continue to do so till the day she dies -- even though her violent actions have ended any realistic hope she ever had of ever being loved back.

Some people would consider that last part a happy ending and separated from the rest of the movie, one might even be fooled into thinking that it was. In context, though, it seemed far more scarier than the ending of any conventional final girl thriller.

Thoughts About The Omen (1976)

Mrs. Blaylock seems like such a happy person at the beginning of the 1976 version of The Omen. A trifle sad, perhaps, but still she looks like such a nice person.

So what could possibly happen to make her go from this...

...to this?

For that matter, why don't we ever hear about Mr. Blaylock? Is Mrs. Blaylock a widow? A divorced woman? Did Mr. Blaylock ever exist or was he just a figment of Mrs. Blaylock's imagination?

At the very least, Mrs. Blaylock seems to be a far better nanny than her immediate predecessor...

Apart from the whole "killing people to protect the Antichrist" thing.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Even More Zombies

Hey, it's an allegory about Brexit. No, it's a horror film. No, it's a comedy. No, it's...

Well, that was the problem with the 2016 movie, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It didn't know what it was.

Ironically, if this film were to be released today, its climax would be seen as a metaphor for Brexit. Of course, that still would not improve the plot -- which seemed deliberately designed to frustrate both Jane Austen fans and action flick aficionados -- but it would probably give the critics something to talk about.

Apart from that, I was glad that this movie gave me another chance to see actor Matt Smith of Doctor Who fame, even if he seemed to be one of the few cast members who had any idea what type of movie this was supposed to be. For that matter, I was glad to see actress Lena Headey though I did feel a bit sorry that her character was so wasted. Apart from posing for a portrait that seemed inspired by a nineteenth century version of S. M. Stirling's Draka novels, she really didn't have a whole lot to do in this flick apart from teasing the audience with the possibility that the whole thing might not turn out to be an unwatchable mess after all.

As it was, the only thing that really intrigued me about the rest of the movie was ironically the very last scene. As much as I hate to admit it, there was a part of me that wanted to know what happened next -- a thing I found quite odd because up until then, I didn't really care that much what happened.

Oh, well. Any sequel that was longer than ten minutes would have been a waste of time, anyway.

Los Ricos También Mueren aka The Rich Also Die

I must admit that I liked this movie far better when it was called The Most Dangerous Game. After all, the original Richard Connell short story by that name still manages to grip me in a way that its more recent remakes do not. Anyway, if you are going to dedicate a whole movie to the idea of people hunting people, why not call it The Most Dangerous Game?

Of course, writer/director James DeMonaco is not just interested in borrowing a gimmick from an old short story. He is out to make some serious social commentary -- which might explain why the working title for this movie was actually Vigilandia, a rather cool title which implies a similarity to the word Gringolandia, a not too flattering synonym for the USA which is rarely found outside of Frida Kahlo biographies. Unfortunately, it is a cooler title than the movie deserves which might be why the powers that be chose to change its name to the current title -- The Purge -- which sounds like the name of a documentary about Soviet Russia. Of course, a more accurate title might be Look at All the Scary White People, if not Stuff Scary White People Do. But the producers of this movie are not interested in accuracy or even believability, and it shows.

Thus the director spends more than a few minutes establishing that the nice neighborhood that male lead character James Sandin and his family live in is also a multiracial neighborhood, only to pile on a ton of stuff about scary black people later on in the film. He tries to establish one group of villains as the scariest folk since the Super Posse that pursued the title characters of the 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, only to have them dispatched with surprising ease. And of course, he devotes the entirety of the movie to an implied message about the evils of wealth without one real glimpse of what life is like in the poor neighborhoods.

For what it is worth, the movie does manage to come up with some creepy images. Then again if one aims at a camera at a bunch of mask-wearing individuals carrying knives and guns, one would have to be a pretty bad cameraman not to capture any creepy images.

Besides, there is something shamelessly self-congratulatory about this movie which makes it hard to dismiss as just another B-movie with intellectual delusions of grandeur. Most people who have told me horror stories about their fellow men don't live in rich neighborhoods but in poor neighborhoods. Yet most American horror movies about home invasions inevitably focus on the rich so-and-so who doesn't deserve such a fate -- and not the poor so-and-so who encounters far worse trouble with little help from society. And although DeMonaco attempts to subvert this theme by making Sandin a rich salesman for security devices who ultimately witnesses the failure of the very devices which have previously proven to be his bread and butter, he shows as little interest in the fate of the poorer people with whom he supposedly identifies as his movie's villains do. The only difference, of course, is that the villains are more honest about it.

When Bud and Lou Met Frankie

If Equinox is the definite example of an old-fashioned horror movie that just did not age well, then the 1948 film Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is an example of the exact opposite. Indeed, I watched it just the other night and found myself laughing as much with the movie that night as I did when I first saw it as a little kid. Of course, one might argue that A&CMF is not really a horror movie but rather a horror comedy. Then again I can think of some horror comedies that have not aged well either and the chances are you can too.

Anyway, the secret to A&CMF's success lies in the fact that its makers were smart enough to play to their cast's strengths and not their weaknesses. The horror actors did not try to tell jokes or do pratfalls and the comedians did not try to look menacing or act scary. Of course, that approach seems obvious to most modern-day movie-goers but then the history of Hollywood is littered with cinematic failures whose flaws seem equally obvious in retrospect.

In any event, A&CMF was the first of the several films in which Bud Abbott and Lou Costello met monsters from the Universal movie lot and it is still the best -- and I'm not just saying that because this was the first Abbott and Costello movie I ever saw. I would like to say the same thing about a lot of Abbott and Costello movies I have seen but I just can't.

The movie begins with an eerie animated sequence which shows the Frankenstein Monster knocking on a tomb which contains the skeletons of Abbott and Costello -- who, of course, run away at the sight of him. From then on, it proceeds to introduce the various supernatural entities that will be appearing in the film. Even when the movie changes over to live-action sequences, it does not hesitate to set a mood and it keeps returning to that mood over and over again. Along the way, an easily scared deliveryman named Wilbur (played by Lou Costello) keeps running into Count Dracula, the Frankenstein Monster -- AKA Frankie -- and the Wolfman -- AKA Lawrence Talbot -- while driving his fellow deliveryman Chick (played by Bud Abbott, natch) crazy with the way he keeps acquiring the attention of two women -- a mysterious European brunette named Sandra Mornay and a blonde American woman named Joan Raymond. (I'm not sure why Wilbur and Chick never get last names in this movie but I suspect the writers thought the younger audience members would already be confused enough by the fact that Abbott and Costello were not playing characters named Bud and Lou. At least, I remember experiencing such confusion the first time I saw this film -- but maybe that was just me. And as I noted above, this was the first Abbott and Costello movie I had ever seen.)

Of course, this being a horror comedy, both women turn out to have ulterior motives for courting Wilbur. Ms. Raymond wants to use Wilbur to help solve an insurance case involving missing exhibits from a local wax museum while Ms. Mornay wants to use Wilbur for more nefarious purposes. Everything comes together on a dark but not so stormy night when Chick discovers the hard way that Wilbur was not fibbing about seeing monsters and then -- Well, you can probably appreciate what happens next much better if you see the actual movie.

For what it is worth, author Jeff Rovin once wrote a literary sequel to this movie called Return of the Wolf Man but unfortunately, it is out of print right now and almost impossible to find unless you're one of those people who can afford to spend a king's random on a paperback book. It would be nice to to say that I saw this book in my local library, but alas, I am not yet that lucky.

But, hey, in the meantime, we'll always have Bud and Lou. Not to mention a classic movie cameo at the film's finale -- if, indeed, "cameo" is the right word to use for a role in which a famous actor never actually appears on film yet utters a memorable line of dialogue. Confused? Well, that just means you haven't seen the movie yet. Shame on you!

But if you have already seen the movie, please feel free to consider that scene a classic example of cinematic torch passing -- a scene in which the torch passes from old school horror actors like Bela Lugosi to newer school horror actors like a certain gentleman from Missouri who "appears" in the above-mentioned "cameo." And if you still have no idea whom I'm talking about, that's okay. I do not remember knowing much about the actor in question the first time I saw this movie and yet I still enjoyed it.

Beware the Equinox!



The 1970 film Equinox can best be described as one of those low-budget horror films that works a lot better when you are ten than when you are twenty -- and even then, you can't help watching it as an adult and wondering, "What was I thinking when I saw this as a kid?"

It does have a memorable last scene. But whether it is memorable in a good way is yet another matter altogether.

For that matter, the opening sequence involving a car with no driver seemed pretty memorable to me when I first saw this movie -- but that probably says more about my inexperience with horror movies back then than it does the craftsmanship of the movie's director.

If I had to pick the saddest thing about this movie, it is that it featured a brief appearance by the famous horror writer Fritz Leiber -- who was not at his best here and who really deserved a better showcase for his acting than this movie. If I had to pick the best thing about this flick, it is that it probably inspired director Sam Raimi's first horror movie The Evil Dead -- though I somehow doubt that Mr. Raimi will ever acknowledge that.

Anyway, I remember liking it when I first saw it at a very young age. But why I liked it? I have no idea. Perhaps it was the Claymation sequences that impressed me. Or all the references to demons. The movie did tend to work better when it focused on the nonhuman characters than when it focused on the human characters -- though there was one kissing sequence involving a demonic being who looked human that seemed to my adult eyes to be more laughable than scary.

I suspect that some of the animated sequences haunted my dreams for many nights after I first saw the movie but I somehow doubt that I would be affected the same way if I saw it for the first time today. And I for one would like to think that is a good thing. Right?

Be Still, My Once-Beating Heart!

Perhaps we should consider the 2013 movie Warm Bodies the official #NotAllZombies movie -- a long-needed cinematic reminder that not all zombies are necessarily evil flesh-eaters out to destroy the human race. Just some of them.

And how do you tell the difference between the good zombies and the bad zombies? Not screenwriter Jonathan Levine's problem. After all, just because a few zombies devour your relatives doesn't give you the right to wax all judgmental. Next thing you know, you'll be passing judgment on serial killers and arsonists and all sorts of evil-doers who are just victims of the human condition. Shame on you!

Anyway, this movie in particular was all about a teen-aged zombie who devoured a girl's boyfriend. After said zombie ate the boyfriend's brain, he absorbed his memories and decided that he (the zombie) was really in love with her. Granted, there were quite a few obstacles to overcome before he could convince her that he was really a nice guy. After all, people tend to be so prejudiced against people who devour their loved ones. But in the end, the power of true love -- and a few lucky breaks -- won out. Which was a good thing for the zombie's would-be love interest. Just imagine if something had gone wrong and the teen-aged zombie had not been able to overcome his tendency towards anthropophagy. Wouldn't that have made for an awkward time at the wedding reception?

A Spoiler-Free Guide to The Uninvited

It is a movie.

Oh, rats! I just gave away the whole plot.

The Weariness of the Mean

Ah, 1993. The same year that The X-Files debuted on TV and proved that there was a market for smart, witty science fiction and horror on the small screen. Unfortunately, it was the same year that saw the release of Leprechaun, a movie that would prove there was still a market for astonishingly dumb horror movies on the big screen.

It would be nice to say that Leprechaun was not as bad as the above poster suggests, and that it was in actuality one of those undiscovered horror classics that was never fully appreciated by the critics of its day. But no, I saw it more than a decade after its release and it was still as stupid as the day it was conceived. If anything, the film itself is even worse than the above poster suggests. The film seems to begrudge its audience any bit of humor that might have made its premise bearable. Even the inevitable reference to Lucky Charms cereal -- which, of course, includes a leprechaun on the cover of its boxes -- goes over as flat as a set of whitewall tires in Carrie Underwood territory. As if that were not enough, the film's title character (played by Warwick Davis) is just plain unlikable. Apart from a few quaint poems recited near the beginning of the film, the Davis character is generally directed to act so mean and nasty that even director Wes Craven of Nightmare on Elm Street fame would find his antics a bit excessive.

The movie is best known today for the feature film debut of American actress Jennifer Aniston, who is best known as the former star of the NBC comedy series Friends. The most charitable thing that can be said about Ms. Aniston's performance is that it is not as memorably awful as a lot of lines given to Mr. Davis. Indeed, this is one of those movies where it seems better for an actor or actress to be merely forgettable than memorable for all the wrong reasons.

Anyway, the story, as slight as it is, revolves around a leprechaun who is tricked out of his pot of gold by a mere human and who swears vengeance on whoever stole it from him. The leprechaun ends up trapped in a crate that has been sealed by the magic of a four-leaf clover. After a decade, the house where the crate has been placed is rented by an unsuspecting family and the leprechaun is inadvertently released by a mentally disabled friend of the family. As if that is not enough, said friend stumbles upon the leprechaun's pot of gold and accidentally swallows a piece of the treasure while biting into it. There is also an unbearably mawkish bit concerning said friend but that is a relatively minor complaint compared to what happens later in the film.

Eventually the leprechaun finds out his pot of gold is missing. Immediately, all Celtic hell breaks loose. The leprechaun ends up killing a lot of people and of course, almost every one who gets killed gets killed in the cruelest way possible. People try to kill the leprechaun but of course, every attempt to kill him fails until the very last, and even then the film makers can't resist leaving room for a sequel.

In any event, this movie eventually produced five sequels, most of which are rumored to be even worse than the first movie. But that seems to be the way with horror film sequels; few of them are rarely ever better than the original. And when you consider how often the original is a bad film to begin with, that is saying a lot. One might even suspect that there was a curse involved. But alas, the only pot of gold to be found inevitably belongs to the people who make these crummy movies.

Beware the Angel Atop John Constantine's Tree

I will always have a fond feeling for the 2005 thriller Constantine if for no other reason that it was the movie that introduced me to Tilda Swinton and made me realize what a great actress she could be, even in a potentially silly role. Her triumph seems even greater when you consider the fact that the character she plays in this movie -- that of the angel Gabriel (or at least an angel called Gabriel) -- was originally created as a male character -- and yet Ms. Swinton does not balk at playing the character as if it were a man even though she is, of course, a woman. And, as a result, she is very easily the most watchable thing in this movie.



Alas, the rest of the film is not that perfect, and poor Keanu Reeves seems especially miscast as the cynical title character. Granted, it's not all Reeves' fault that his performance is less than satisfying. After all, the character that he plays -- freelance detective John Constantine -- was originally created by English comic book writer Alan Moore to be a mysterious Englishman who investigated the supernatural and looked like the English singer Sting. He originally made guest appearances in the DC/Vertigo comic book series Swamp Thing but eventually became popular enough to earn his own title called Hellblazer. Basically, the character is about as English as John Steed or Doctor Who so it always seemed silly to "re-imagine" him as an American character. But that is what Hollywood did. (And judging from the recent Elementary series, Americans are still reinventing British pop culture icons as Yanks. ¡Qué lástima!)

Anyway, Moore himself was supposed to be quite disappointed in the movie version and I can not blame him. A lot of silly stuff occurs in this movie and the filmmaker makes little attempt to apply the logic one would expect from a mere comic book. Actress Rachel Weisz is wasted playing two twins who get caught up in a supernatural conspiracy that only Constantine -- natch -- can uncover. There is even a guest appearance by the Devil -- not just a devil but the Devil -- though to be fair, that proves to be one of the more interesting subplots in the movie.

All in all, one can see why the Hollywood powers that be never felt compelled to make a sequel to this flick. And yet of all the comic book movies based on Alan Moore's work, this is the one to which I most often return. Perhaps because Ms. Swinton makes such a divine villain (no pun intended) that she alone is almost worth the price of a video rental.

Fangs for Nothing

After not just one but two Dark Shadows movies plus an attempt at a syndicated television reboot, one could argue that the old Dan Curtis Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows was long overdue for a less serious approach if for no other reason that yet another serious attempt did not seem likely to succeed. And yet there was something so pathetic about the humor in the recent Tim Burton movie version of the classic program that I can not help but wonder why he bothered.

Part of the problem is that both Burton and his humble scribe Seth Grahame-Smith seemed to think that no one other than them had ever tried to find any humor in the vampire movie genre. As far as they were concerned, movies like The Fearless Vampire Killers and Love at First Bite never existed. Neither did Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. And, of course, TV shows like Buffy and Angel were unthinkable as far as Burton and Grahame-Smith were concerned.

Nor were Burton and Grahame-Smith especially prone to raising the bar in regard to said humor. For example, Grahame-Smith's idea of wittily satirizing the 1970s -- the decade in which the movie's vampiric protagonist Barnabas Collins awoke -- seemed to consist of heroically ridiculing the same things comedy shows in the 1970s poked fun at way back then -- the only difference between then and now being that, instead of giving us the wit of a M.A.S.H. or an All in the Family, the screenwriter gave us repetitive bad jokes about Love Story and the Carpenters. The movie even managed to make the same hippie culture that inspired Taxi's Reverend Jim character and Doonesbury's Zonker Harris seem unfunny -- though admittedly there have been a lot of bad hippie jokes since 1979.

If the movie had any point to make with such humor, such gags could easily be forgiven but it did not. Indeed, the whole film seemed to be rather purposeless. Was it about family? Not really. The contrast between the 1970s and the 2010s? Not really. Burton and Grahame-Smith had a chance to go that route early in the movie but instead they chose to include more jokes about bad songs and fast food restaurants. There was one nifty visual sequence in which Burton used a series of portraits to show the various incarnations of an exceptionally long-lived character but that alone was not enough to save this movie. And please don't get me started on the movie's various plot twists.

Even the romantic triangle that was at the heart of the original Dark Shadows (the one that involved Barnabas, his bride-to-be Josette, and his would-be lover/servant/witch Angelique) proved less than satisfying. On one hand, Burton and Grahame-Smith did a good job of summing up the back story of Barnabas Collins in an efficient manner. On the other hand, they seemed at a loss as to what to do with it when the scene switched to the modern day. And Grahame-Smith's decision to play Angelique's side of the triangle for laughes did not help matters.

In short, Dark Shadows tried to be a comedy, a romance and a horror movie all at once, only to fail at all three. I guess it was a good thing that Burton was less ambitious or the movie would have been even more terrible. Or at least longer.

It Was Never Just About the Mall

It begins with the sight of a red shag carpet wall. And then we see a young blonde woman leaning against the wall while she sleeps. But her slumber is not peaceful. It becomes obvious to even the least observant viewer that she is having a bad dream and when she finally gets woken up, it becomes obvious why she is having them.

The place she awakens to is a TV news studio. The woman's name is Francine Parker and she is part of the crew that works there. Currently the crew is trying to film a talk show in which the latest guest is a doctor talking about the latest epidemic. However, the epidemic in question is not AIDS or swine flu. It's zombism and it seems obvious to the casual observer that the doctor's society isn't exactly controlling this epidemic very well. The whole station is in chaos with the doctor being heckled by some of the very people filming him and the station manager preferring to send out false information about rescue stations rather than risk bad ratings. People are already starting to abandon the TV station and when Francine's boyfriend Stephen comes by and suggests a similar plan, she does not need much persuasion before she too agrees to abandon her post and head for the hills. After all, society is falling apart all around her. So why should she stay? Why not take off and seek sanctuary from the growing zombie plague?

Thus begins director George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, a movie released in 1978 that has been often interpreted as being little more than an empty-headed horror film with pretensions to social commentary. As far as most critics are concerned, Dawn of the Dead begins and ends with the abandoned shopping mall that Francine, Stephen and two other characters end up occupying partway through the movie. And to be fair, the movie's somewhat heavyhanded comparisons between mall shoppers and zombies do tend to prove the critics' point -- especially if you choose to ignore the rest of the movie.

But George Romero's Dawn of the Dead is not just about shopping malls; it is about society. American society. And the brief glimpses it gives at the beginning of the film of the America surrounding the mall are as scary and intriguing as anything that takes place within the mall itself. In this bizarre world which looks so similar to our own, inner city apartment dwellers fight over the right to retain the bodies of their dead neighbors and loved ones, a racist cop feels free to use the chaos of a SWAT raid to conduct his own private war against minorities, and rural folk treat the whole zombie epidemic as little more than an excuse for a hunting party.

When Francine and Stephen leave the city in a stolen TV news helicopter, they are in the company of two SWAT team members named Peter and Roger and are not inclined to trust anyone else. A simple request for cigarettes from a fellow refugee goes ignored and a simple stop for fuel almost proves to be the death of them.

Tension grows within the group. Stephen's lousy marksmanship nearly proves to be the death of one group member and by the time the group comes to the abandoned shopping mall mentioned up above, the group members are quite eager to use it for a temporary resting place. Then they discover the abundance of consumer goods that are available in the mall and Roger and Peter decide to take to help themselves to some free goodies. However, the mall is crawling with zombies and the quartet has to work together to both get rid of the zombies and avoid getting killed in the process. Then things get even more complicated when they discover that one group member -- Francine, of course -- is pregnant.

Even when the gang finally achieves a victory over the mall zombies, there is an air of sadness to said event. Romero films the final view of the dead mall zombies not so much as an act of triumph but as an act of tragedy. Realistically, there was perhaps no way the humans and the zombies could have co-existed in the same mall, but the quartet is nevertheless reminded all too often that they are not just killing zombies but also killing former human beings.

In any event, the relief said victory gives them from the zombie epidemic proves to be only temporary. One group member succumbs to a bite he received during the battle against the zombies and news programs from the outside world become increasingly rare. Pretty soon the television and the radio are only broadcasting static. Francine and Stephen fight over an attempted marriage proposal and life seems very bleak indeed. Then a band of fellow humans discovers the mall and the quartet-turned-trio is forced to face an enemy that is even worse than the zombies...

It would be easy to concentrate just on the blood and guts that are frequently displayed in the last ten minutes of the movie and just see the flick as a simple-minded horror flick. But it seems obvious that Romero didn't want it to be seen just that way. After all, it is no accident that the film begins not in the shopping mall or in the helicopter but in the TV station. The story starts with one character, moves on to another and then yet another until we are back to the character we started with. The movie gives us ample glimpses of a society in chaos with no signs that things are likely to get better.

The last scene in the film appears to be one of triumph. The helicopter takes off with the surviving members of the quartet and the zombies are left behind to take over the shopping mall. However, it is pointed out that the helicopter is low on fuel. And that the zombies outside the mall are still far more numerous than the humans.

Thus the ending seems both hopeful and grim. Yes, the survivors have accomplished their escape from the mall. But where do they go next? And how will they manage to get there?

Mercifully, Romero never shows us the answers to these questions.

A Turn for the Curse

Time is not always kind to old movies and time has a tendency to be especially unkind to old horror movies. Perhaps this is because horror movie fans inevitably grow up and seek different thrills than the ones they experienced in youth. More often, it is because the things that scare one generation don't always scare the next to the same degree.

Thus I have always been amused by those rare horror movies that have actually managed to grow more respectable with age. The Hammer films, for example, were rarely popular with critics when they first came out and as recently as the 1970s, it was popular for old school horror critics to blame the House of Hammer for the decline and fall of the old-fashioned horror film. Yet judging from most film critics nowadays, one would never imagine there was a time when the Hammer films were less than respectable.

Of course, part of this might lie in the fact that Hammer Studios were among the last people -- apart from the good people at Roger Corman's American International -- to set horror in the past and make it work. There has been many cinematic attempts to create horror period pieces since Hammer quit making such films but unfortunately, few such films have been as successful as the early Hammer films and indeed, my mind winces at the thought of having to rewatch such works as Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula in a way that it doesn't wince at watching, say, Hammer's Horror of Dracula.

But as good as the 1958 Horror of Dracula is, it would have never come about were it not for the success of the 1957 flick The Curse of Frankenstein. Curse was Hammer's first attempt at remaking the old Universal classic and it was a doozy. It was not necessarily all that perfect on an artistic basis. For example, as much as I admire the way Hammer makeup artists created a look for Christopher Lee's creature which was as convincing as the makeup used for Universal's Frankenstein Monster, it is hard for me to pretend that Lee's portrayal was an improvement on the more sympathetic Boris Karloff version. Indeed, one of the failings of Curse is the way it doesn't even try to portray the Frankenstein Creature as a being worth caring about.

Then again the movie doesn't try to create any sympathy for the monster's creator, either. If the creature is bad, its creator -- Baron Victor Frankenstein (played by Peter Cushing, natch) -- is worse. In order to achieve his ends, the Baron is not above robbing graves, cheating on his own bride-to-be and even murdering innocent people. Even on his wedding night to his cousin Elizabeth (played by the always gorgeous Hazel Court), he can't bring himself to think of anyone else but himself and his creation.

In the end, the Baron finally succeeds in either killing or alienating everyone close to him. And ironically, his own creation comes closer to bringing him to justice than any mere human...

As you might guess, Curse doesn't even pretend to be faithful to the original Mary Shelley novel and given the legal necessity of avoiding any close similarity to the original Universal movie lest Hammer be sued for plagiarism, it's probably just as well. All the same, Curse manages to be more memorable than I expected as well as a fitting beginning to Peter Cushing's long career as a horror movie icon. Come to think of it, Christopher Lee's career since this film has not been too shabby, either.

The Werewolf of Madrid

There’s a great scene toward the end of the 1961 Hammer film The Curse of the Werewolf but unfortunately you have to wade through a lot of scenes of people doing cruel things to other people to get there.

Is it worth to get there?

Well, it depends. The Curse of the Werewolf gives us a young Oliver Reed, a likable narrator, a surprisingly benign Spanish cleric and a novel explanation for lycanthropy. The movie is loosely -- very loosely -- based on Guy Endore’s novel The Werewolf of Paris but unfortunately, the adaptation eschews almost every scene in The Werewolf of Paris worth reading and includes a few I would rather not have revisited.

Hammer deserves credit for attempting to do something more complex than the usual Lawrence Talbot routine but I can not honestly say that this is one of their better movies. The main problem with the plot is that Reed is sympathetic enough as cursed Spanish lycanthrope Leon Corledo that I can not help but wish a happy ending for his character yet an unhappy ending is all but a foregone conclusion. To be fair, the plot does hint at possible alternative endings. For example, Corledo attempts to elope with his girlfriend at one point, only to be stymied by the police. At another point, the cleric hints that Corledo could be sent to a monastery. (An odd solution given the Catholic Church’s traditional attitude towards the supernatural but in the wake of recent events, all too believable.) However, this plan ultimately fails as well.

So is Curse of the Werewolf worth seeing? Not really. Yet there is something about that final scene in which Corledo’s girlfriend, dressed in black, stands alone in a way which suggests Goya’s famous painting of the Black Duchess. Perhaps I am stretching things a bit but then again I do not often see scenes that remind me of Goya paintings in a movie, let alone a Hammer movie. I just wish this one scene had appeared in a better film.

The Not So Old Dark House

It’s one thing to go to bat for a movie like the original 1932 version of The Old Dark House. After all, who doesn’t love Gloria Stuart or Boris Karloff?

But the more “modern” 1963 version directed by William Castle? Perish the thought.

Even as a kid, I thought some of the movie’s sight gags were stupid and some of the “special effects” (for example, attempting to pass off a stuffed dog as a wild hyena) worse than stupid. Indeed, it might be argued that William Castle’s The Old Dark House was one of those films you saw as a child which you expected to make more sense when you saw it as a grown-up but never did.

And yet the movie has an odd air about it, the same air you’d expect to find in an eccentric cousin whom no one else in the family liked but who nevertheless always found time to entertain you when no one else would have anything to do with you.

It is not really a very good movie. Apart from an animated sequence created by Charles Addams -- yes, the same Charles Addams whose cartoons inspired the creation of The Addams Family -- there is not much in the first twenty minutes to merit attention and more often than not, the movie’s attempts to be funny come across as more silly than comic.

But then again it has Robert Morley who is always good no matter what type of role he’s stuck in. And Tom Poston -- an actor best known for his roles on Newhart and The Bob Newhart Show -- certainly makes an interesting -- if odd -- choice for the American-born protagonist Tom Penderel. Plus the eccentric music score proves that such scores existed long before Danny Elfman composed his first overture.

But then there is that plot. Tom Penderel is a dull, ordinary American who shares a flat with an eccentric English gambler Jasper Femm. Femm invites Penderel to his family estate to meet his female cousin but he never shows up. Instead, Penderel is introduced to the various members of Femm's family, each one more eccentric than the last.

There is Petiphar who is obsessed with Noah’s ark; Agatha, who is obsessed with knitting; Roderick, who is obsessed with guns, and Casper who is the identical twin of Jasper the gambler. The two female cousins are Cecilia, a seemingly normal young woman, and Morgana, an allegedly man-hungry woman whose impromptu courtship of Penderel seems to smack more of desperation than genuine lust. Then there is Morgana’s imaginatively named father Morgan who is so possessive of Morgana that he continually threatens to beat up any man who even looks in her direction. (And yes, that includes reluctant objects of Morgana’s affection like Tom Penderel.)

No sooner has Penderel met most of the family than they begin dying off. Each time they do, a mysterious voice recites part of an old nursery rhyme involving old English church bells and the flag atop the family mansion is lowered to half-mast by some equally mysterious personage. Since there is no telling where the murderer will strike next, Penderel gets involved with the attempts to track him down, only to run afoul of various surviving family members. It’s not until the end that the true culprit is revealed -- and shortly afterwards, it becomes up to Penderel to save the mansion -- and all the living people still left within it -- from destruction.

So why do I like this movie so much when I know I shouldn’t? Well, like most people, I have a deep fondness for stuff I watched in childhood even when I know it is not good for me. Plus there is that music score I mentioned above and the sheer implausibility of that plot that seems almost breathtaking in its awfulness. At one point, we get a fight scene in the mansion’s cellar which was undoubtedly supposed to be reminiscent of the old silent film comics but instead seems more like an outtake from an old Three Stooges short. On the plus side, poor old uncle Petiphar’s obsession with arks and the end of the world seems like a possible inspiration for the apocalyptically obsessed protagonists of such later -- and better -- films as The Rapture and The Unbelievable Truth -- but I somehow doubt the makers of those films will ever acknowledge that.

Given the promise inherent in the film’s title, I can’t help wishing director William Castle tried a little bit harder in regard to this film. Then again, after seeing other William Castle movies, it seems apparent that comedy was not really Castle’s strong point. Just as one would never ask Busby Berkeley to direct a horror movie or Woody Allen to direct a Busby Berkeley-type musical, so must one reluctantly concede the fact that Castle was not much of a comedy director. Except when he was not trying to be.

Inversion of the Body Snatchers

Apparently the scariest thing Kevin Williamson ever encountered in high school was a naked teenage girl. Moreover, it was obviously a white teenage girl because apparently there was not much race-mixing at the place where Williamson went to school.

Okay, none of that is necessarily true, but if you wish to do a quick penny-ante analysis of Willamson based solely on his screenplay for the 1998 sci-fi film The Faculty, it’s tempting to come to that conclusion. Of course, it wasn’t Williamson who came up with the original story for The Faculty; that dubious credit goes to two others fellows named David Wechter and Bruce Kimmel. Williamson only wrote the screenplay.

Thus there are a lot of references to sci-fi movies and literary science fiction -- more so than I usually expect to see in a movie like this, where all too often sci-fi references seem to begin and end with the inevitable shout-outs to Star Wars, Star Trek and The Matrix. Plus there are the inevitable celebrity cameos including a quick glimpse of cybercritic Harry Knowles and a slighter longer view of my beloved Salma Hayek as the school nurse, not to mention a view of an early Jon Stewart as a science teacher in a part which must make Jon Stewart foes rub their hands with glee.

The result is not the most watchable science fiction b-film I have ever seen. In fact, I suspect this film actually played better on DVD instead of the big screen because of its slow pacing.

Nor does it help that neither director Robert Rodriguez nor Kevin Williamson seemed quite sure whether to stick with the same parody style that worked so well with Williamson’s previous effort Scream or to try something new. This last part was a shame because halfway through the movie, I got the impression that the movie had great potential to become a lot more than yet another mediocre Invasion of the Body Snatchers parody, especially when it starts subverting the usual B-movie tropes by, say, implying that alien possession might actually improve some people. For example, the football coach became less of a type-A personality and more of a “I’m o.k.-you’re o.k.” type of guy. The repressed English teacher suddenly started expressing her sexuality. The school nurse suddenly lost her cold and even the most emotional teenagers stopped acting out so much after becoming possessed.

A line in the script blamed these changes on the havoc the local climate played with alien neural systems and the way it thus made the alien-possessed humans more open to expressing their most repressed impulses. Yet I could not help but wonder what would have happened if Williamson had further explored this theme instead of sticking with more tired horror tropes like surprise murders and disappearing corpses. If only he had had the chutzpah to hint at a world in which alien possession might actually seem like a tempting alternative to the status quo rather than just another rival system of conformity to be stamped out, this might have been quite an intellectually provocative movie.

For that matter, I also couldn't help wondering why some obvious impulses -- for example, ones involving interracial romance and same-sex affection -- never seemed to get acted upon. One could argue that this movie was set at the one American high school where such impulses did not exist but that would require a greater suspension of disbelief than alien possession. Besides, it seemed strange that a movie which seemed to be about a group of outsiders proving their worth by defending the school against an alien foe seemed to approve of some real-life outsiders more than others -- and that the group of outsiders it did approve of just happened to be all white heterosexuals. (What? None of the nonwhite or gay students had enough school spirit to fight back against alien invaders?)

After seven seasons of Buffy and a single season of Freaks and Geeks, any movie kvetching about the hellishness of American high school cannot help but seem a bit obsolete. Yet I found myself liking The Faculty more than I expected. True, it is more the type of affection one feels for a runty little puppy but then not every B-movie can be the equivalent of the award-winning show dog and some of the ideas hinted at in Williamson‘s script showed great potential.

I just worry that Williamson might have learned the wrong lesson from The Faculty. That in the future, he might feel more comfortable pandering to his fans with another Scream sequel like the one he is supposedly working on now rather than taking a chance on a story which has not been done before. That would indeed be a shame if that happened. Yet, short of an alien invasion, I do not really see things turning out differently.

Betrayed by Winona Horowitz aka Kiss of the Ryder Woman

He always enjoyed watching Tim Burton's films -- they were eye candy, for one thing -- but they left him feeling vaguely pissed off. They all seemed to have an agenda of relentless normalcy hiding behind a thin veil of weirdness. He'd loved Beetlejuice until the last scene, which sent him storming from the theater and left him kicking things all day. The sight of Winona Ryder's character, formerly strange and beautiful in her ratted hairdo and smudged eyeliner, now combed out and squeaky clean, clad in a preppy skirt and knee socks and a big shit-eating sickeningly normal grin... it was entirely too much to bear.
--Poppy Z. Brite, Drawing Blood

I have always been fascinated by the above quote because it seems so different from my view of the movie. After all, the end of the movie had the Winona Ryder character floating in mid-air while dancing to an old calypso tune. Hardly a normal activity for a young girl of that period. Moreover, the end also had her relate more warmly to two ghosts than she ever did to her own living parents. Once again, hardly an endorsement of normality.

Granted, the character responsible for the above quote did not come from the same type of family background as myself and understandably had different issues to deal with than I had when I was growing up. Besides, normality is a deceptive phrase. I grew up in an environment where Spanish was frequently spoken and almost every other week saw a visit from a Spanish-speaking relative who may or may not have been dark-skinned. It took me the longest time to understand that I could lay out in the sun all day and never become as brown as my favorite female cousin. It took me even longer to realize how many of my relatives spoke with Mexican accents. (After all, when I was growing up, such accents were normal. It was the non-Hispanics I met at school who usually talked with what I considered to be accents.)

As a result, I grew up with a different idea of normality than most of my classmates. Thus it always seemed silly to me to rebel with tattoos and unconventional hair styles to “prove” I was an outsider when it seemed obvious to me every time I showed up in school that I was already an outsider. I just was not a fashionable outsider. This did not mean that I had anything against those who chose to rebel with dyed hair, mohawks or tattoos. I just found it a bit hard to understand.

Anyway, I always liked the 1988 fantasy Beetlejuice even though it was obvious to my young eyes the first time I saw it that parts of the script could have used some improvement. The contrast between the Maitlands (the ghostly couple played by Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin) and the Deetzes (the living couple played by Jeffrey Jones and Catherine O’Hara) was funny but hardly original and the emphasis on the admittedly funny title character (played by Michael Keaton) often led to scenes that had no real business being in the movie save to showcase Keaton’s character.

Then again, it did have a truly memorable Danny Elfman score plus good performances by a cast that was at the top of its game. Adam Maitland (Baldwin’s character) seemed to actually love his wife Barbara and though the two of them often acted like overgrown kids, there was a maturity about their later actions that seems refreshing compared to the childish adult characters who have appeared in more recent movies.

One could truly believe Barbara Maitland would make a good “stepmother” for Lydia Deetz (played by Winona Ryder née Horowitz) and Ryder seemed convincing as a teen-age Goth wannabe who nevertheless yearned for the same affection from her parents as a conventional teenager -- an affection she eventually got from the Maitlands.

The first time I saw this movie with my youngest brother, he could not help observing that the Maitlands were better parents to Lydia than her real parents. They cared about her. They made time for her. They helped her with her homework and generally made it quite clear that they gave a damn about her. The Deetzes, on the other hand, did not really know how to deal with Lydia. The father looked as if he had always been more interested in making money than anything else and while he was never unfriendly to Lydia, he never seemed overly eager to have her around. The stepmother was far more interested in her art than Lydia, going so far as to spend more of her time pandering to her metrosexual friend Otho (played by the late Glenn Shadix) than tending to her stepdaughter.

In the end, the conflict between the Maitlands -- the couple who used to own the house into which the Deetzs had moved -- and the Deetzs -- the couple who currently owned the house -- seemed less important than the conflict between the Maitlands and the character they originally hired to scare the Deetzs out of their house -- Beetlejuice. Beetlejuice was easily the most memorable character in the movie and yet because his actions were so much more cartoonish than those of his co-stars, he seemed like a bit of a distraction.

Granted, the movie was named after him and not one of the other characters and he was rather funny the first few times he showed up on screen. Michael Keaton always had a way with a throwaway line and the screenwriters gave him quite a few.

But director Tim Burton had no real idea what to do with him. Was he a good ghost? Not necessarily. But he did not really come as being evil so much as amoral. If he wished to save you from falling, he would do so but only if he was in the mood. If he was not in the mood, he saw nothing wrong with dropping you down a flight of stairs. In short, he was not a very nice person -- and yet there are times when he seemed like the closest thing this movie has to a hero. For example, there is one point when he actually saved the Maitlands from a gruesome fate -- yet he accomplished this by distracting two other characters with a stunt which eventually led to either their injury or their death. (The movie never specified which.)

I suppose if I was more of a Poppy Z. Brite fan, I would turn against this movie and seek something better.

But naah!

Any movie which could have a sympathetic character say something like, “I myself am... strange and unusual” and have said character say such a line with the same type of pride most people normally devote to the earning of sports trophies and straight-A report cards has the right attitude toward normality as far as I am concerned, no matter how many makeovers said character eventually went in for.

If you still think Ms. Brite’s character is right and that Lydia Deetz becomes little more than a mealy-mouthed sell-out by the end of the movie, ask yourself this question: if a female friend were to walk up to you and confess to having done the same activities that Lydia Deetz performs in the last few minutes of this movie, what type of reaction would you have? Would you say, “Oh, how cool!”? Or would you say “Oh, how lame!”? Or would you just give her a long, steady look and then head for the nearest exit when you realized she was being totally serious?

Enter Sade Man

This movie was a mess. A literal mess.

As much as I would have liked to have liked the 1998 horror film Strangeland because my beloved Elizabeth Peña was in it, there was no denying the fact that not even she could save this movie for me. Indeed, I felt a bit sorry for her whenever I saw her onscreen during this film because her role as housewife Toni Gage wasn't one of her better-written parts.

I also felt sorry for actress Linda Cardellini, who played Ms. Gage's daughter Genevieve -- a girl who ended up becoming the victim of a serial torturer named Captain Howdy (played by former rock star Dee Snider) who lured victims to his residence via the Internet. If you thought the way Ms. Cardellini went from playing a great character on TV's Freaks and Geeks to playing Velma in the Scooby Doo movies was a tough break, just wait until you see her in this movie. On second thought, don't. This movie does not deserve more viewers.

The movie made some feeble attempt at social commentary by having the plot include an attempt to “reform” the villain via medication only to have him revert to type after he had been attacked and almost killed by a group of vigilantes. But in the end, it was just an excuse to have the villain do a lot of nasty things to people of varying degrees of guilt until he finally got a taste of his own medicine.

Unless you get off on seeing innocent people like Genevieve Gage hurt, there is just no way you are going to enjoy this movie.

However, I suspect the Marquis de Sade would have liked it quite well.