Top 10 September 2020 First-Watches

As promised, I did not see Tenet in September. Most of you seem to have followed my advice, because the opening box office for that movie was $12 million. If you had told me a year ago that Christopher Nolan’s giant new blockbuster would only clear $12 million domestically, I would have gasped in horror. Abject horror. Thing is... who gives a fuck about the box office? I cannot really worry too much how Mulan is doing when I spend my days wondering if maybe I should have an escape plan if shit goes real bad in November. (Can't relax yet, folks. This isn't over.)

I really needed some kind of escapism in September. Hell, I need escapism now, which is why I’m doing that 31 Days, 31 Horror Movies series. But last month, my escapism of choice was blockbusters of a kind. Sure, the reservoir of US blockbuster resources are stone dry. Also, I didn't want to see Mulan even if there wasn't a pandemic. However, there is a big blockbuster scene I have been ignoring these past years of criticism: India. If you want big joyous feasts of movies, India has you covered. It is a land where even the superhero movies are musicals. It is a treasure trove.

India’s film scene feels like an alternate dimension where Old Hollywood never died. So the biggest movies remained massive three hour musical epics. Imagine if Hello, Dolly! and Camelot had not killed the big Roadshow movies. Imagine a 1977 where George Lucas needed Star Wars to be 230 minutes long and full of pop love songs between Luke and Leia? Al, movie stars are not the business-drivers they used to be here in the West. Our hottest actors like Chris Hemsworth cannot draw a crowd like say Gene Kelly could back in the day. Hemsworth's Men in Black movie flopped like Kevin Nash getting a fingerpoke from Hulk Hogan. In India though, movie stars like Shah Rukh Khan and Aamir Khan have dominated the box office for decades. Their movies are guaranteed hits. Shah Rukh Khan is probably the biggest star in the entire world, and most of us in West have no idea who he is.

I’ll get into the positives and negatives of Indian cinema as I review the movies I saw. I maintain that Bollywood and its Tamil and Telugu language equivalents should not be so obscure in Western film circles. I aimed to see the biggest Indian movies I could find across the last fifty years. Obviously that approach limits me to a certain kind of movie, and I still am no expert. (Plus, I only saw six movies since Indian movies are so damn long.) I’ll definitely come back to this theme one day.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 4: A Return to Salem's Lot

Days of SPOOKY continue. A Return to Salem's Lot (1987), directed by Larry Cohen.

'Salem's Lot is one Stephen King's better novels, and great vampire fiction. Big recommendation if you need something spooky to read this month. In 1979 a primetime miniseries directed by Tobe Hopper aired on CBS. That movie is a classic, holds up too. In 1987 Warner Bros decided to make a sequel, A Return to Salem's Lot. Clearly they did not want to spend too much money on it. The resulting sequel was... less classic, let's say.

While the title claims to be "Returning" this movie has none of the Salem's Lot characters. I assumed this movie would be about Ben Mears and Mark Petrie returning to the fully-vampired town of Jerusalem's Lot and getting revenge. (That does happen in the novel.) Oh no. A Return to Salem's Lot has none of the book's or first movie's characters. It has nothing to do with Stephen King at all, really. Maybe there are two Jerusalem Lots in Maine that both got attacked by vampires? The legendary genre film director Larry Cohen went his own way with this movie. And oh boy. Oh boy, oh boy. We got a weird one today.

I knew A Return to Salem's Lot would be pretty fucking wild just from the first shot after the opening credits. This movie does not start in Maine. It instead starts in the Amazon Rainforest where a ruthless anthropologist, Joe (Michael Moriarty) films a tribe of "savages" performing a human sacrifice. Everybody hates Joe because he's generally a scummy jerk. His estranged son, Jeremy (Ricky Addison Reed) is a filthy-mouthed wiseass with a thick New York accent. Joe is saddled with Jeremy and takes the boy up to Salem's Lot, trying to start a new life. Instead they discover the town is infested with vampires. Old-money WASP vampires. Vampires who have child weddings and drink cow blood. Turns out they want Joe to write their Bible for them. Yeah.

A Return to Salem's Lot is probably a more interesting movie to review than to see. It isn't very good as a scary vampire movie, but it is great as an off-the-rails wild one. I mean, the kid Jeremy starts the movie by cursing at his father, is all of twelve but gets to drive their car, and later decides he wants to be a child vampire. It gets even better when seventy-year-old Samuel Fuller shows up as Van Meer, a grouchy Ashkenazi Jewish old man who has taken a break from hunting Nazis to hunt vampires. Van Meer has seen it all, and is not worried at all about a whole town of vampires. When one jumps on the hood of his car, he casually lowers his window to reach around and shoot it with his pistol. Replacing the windshield is expensive. I *LOVE* Van Meer. Van Meer is who I want to be when I get old - taking no shit, but getting the job done.

I should note that much of A Return to Salem's Lot's score is pretty clearly ripped-off from The Exorcist. Also baby Tara Reid plays Amanda, one of the child vampire brides offered to Jeremy. Apparently vampires can get pregnant too since Joe knocks one up. The deeper layers of biology is pretty unclear. Thankfully Stephenie Meyer would sort all that out decades later with her vampire baby epic.

I struggle to fully recommend A Return to Salem's Lot since it is a bit slow and cheap. It is a vampire movie with few scares and exactly one really great monster effect, used very rarely. But you never get an uninteresting movie from Larry Cohen. If you want some of his flavor but in a more digestible package, check out The Stuff or Q: The Winged Serpent. But I am glad I found a movie like this. This is the kind of bizarre lost cultural object I live for.

Next Time: From Beyond (1986), my first rewatch of the month.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 3: Demons

SPOOKY Day 3: Demons (1985) directed by Lamberto Bava, Mario Bava's son.

Confession: I don't like Italian horror movies. I love Italian Westerns and Italian Neorealism was very important to cinema, but Italian horror movies really annoy me. They make no sense. And not just in a "oh, I'm a dumb American who cannot appreciate foreign art" way. I don't think anything is lost in translation. The plots are nonsense in any language. Sometimes they will have a creepy surreal quality like in Suspiria or Beyond the Door. Most of the time they feel like movies made-up as they went along.

Demons from 1985 is a pretty damn cool rock'n'roll horror flick. It is as cool as it is incoherent. If you like gore, rock music, and exactly one exposed nipple, here is a movie for you. If you like a plot that actually goes anywhere or explains anything, this will be really frustrating. I'm torn towards the latter.

At first Demons seems like it is going in an arty metafiction direction. Random people at a Berlin subway station are given free tickets to a horror movie. The guy handing out the tickets has an awesome SciFi Phantom of the Opera metal mask. When the audience gets to the theater, they see in the lobby a mannequin on a motorcycle holding a katana and a similar scary metal mask. (Really cool imagery.) The mask then appears in the movie they're watching, turning people into demons, who are basically zombies. Guess what? The audience starts turning into zombies too.

However, all these metafiction ideas are abandoned immediately by Demons. I was hoping this was going to be the Italian zombie House of Leaves. Instead our heroes turn off the movie within a movie. Then they spend the rest of the ninety minutes getting eaten by their zombie ex-friends. Now all of sudden Demons wants to be The Evil Dead. George (Urbano Barberini) is our local Italian Ash Williams. He grabs the katana and rides the motorcycle. He's riding all over the auditorium seats, swinging his blade left and right, hacking off zombie limbs, all while his new girl, Cheryl (Natasha Hovey) rides bitch. That part is cool as shit. Maybe don't watch Demons, but find that scene.

Then after that Demons is inexplicably a zombie apocalypse movie too. It only took a few hours but Berlin fell almost immediately to the undead. The ending is very sudden and brutal. I don't think Lamberto Bava intended for me to laugh at it.

Plot-wise, Demons is a fucking mess. There's a running group of coke-head side characters who take up twenty minutes of the movie's screentime but never contribute anything. We never find out who made the evil mask, who made the movie within a movie, who the guy in the mask is, or what the fuck any of this is. Nostradamus is involved somehow. There is a hot theater attendant lady (Nicoletta Elmi) who acts very sinister and briefly is turned-on by the mask. I thought she might be part of the bigger evil plan here, but nope. The zombies just eat her too. Italy, why? Why can't your horror movies make any sense? Where the fuck did the helicopter come from??

As for that "rock'n'roll" part. Demons has a Hell of a soundtrack. Most of the music is Eighties metal or punk. So if you want to listen to Billy Idol or Mötley Crüe while watching fairly decent practical gore effects, Demons is your movie. The main theme is a synth track that samples "In the Hall of the Mountain King". That's pretty hilarious.

Next time: A Return to Salem's Lot (1987)

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 2: The First Purge

October SPOOKY TIMES Day 2: The First Purge (2018), directed by Gerard McMurray.

Most horror franchises get dumber with the sequels. The Purge is one of the few that got smarter. The first Purge movie (not to be confused with today's subject, The First Purge, which is actually the *fourth* Purge movie) had a ridiculous SciFi premise but only used it to justify why Ethan Hawke's family couldn't run away from their house or call the cops. That was, because of "The Purge", a wacky government plan to save society by making crime legal for one night. The sequel, The Purge: Anarchy took that premise and made it more interesting and more political, by giving us the perspective of regular people getting hunted by the rich. Then The Purge: Election Year all but begged its audience to vote Hillary Clinton. Which... oh well.

So The Purge movies were never masterpieces or very sophisticated. But they were ahead of the curve in some ways. They beat Jordan Peele to the punch by making mass-market social commentary horror. And as our society has collapsed over these four years, the high concept Purge idea seems all the more possible and less farfetched.

The First Purge (not to be confused with The Purge 1) is a prequel and shows how the whole Purge thing got started. It chooses to jump deep into ethnic tensions as its main focus, much more explicitly than the other movies. Our cast of heroes is almost entirely Black. The villains are almost entirely White, including several guys dressed in KKK hoods and one fellow in a smart Hugo Boss coat. If it were not currently 2020, I would call think this is all too obvious. I'd even wonder if maybe the scene of cops beating a Black man to death at the Staten Island Yankees stadium was too much... except... shit. In Trump's America, subtlety is out.

I don't think The First Purge is a great movie. It is not very well shot and really lacks particularly good acting. Marissa Tomei is in the movie off to the side somewhere and thoroughly wasted. Too many characters in the cast feel like they were written by somebody who just binged The Wire on HBO Max. The best villain is Skeletor (Rotimi Paul), a Black psycho, who is sadly given some tribal scarifications on his face. Let us just carefully walk around the unfortunate implications of that decision and move on.

But The First Purge does have some decent ideas. It reveals that the entire Purge premise was bullshit from the start. In fact, if you take away laws and cops, people will just party in the streets and have fun. Get me the ghost of Bakunin, he'll be excited to know that anarchism actually does work. The Not-Republican villains realize they need to bribe people to even starting shooting and when that doesn't work, they send in racist militias. The subtext allows the Purge movies to be more than Anti-Purge films. (The other movies were protesting an idea that doesn't exist, what's the point?) Now the series is more a broad metaphor of how crime is created by corrupt governments and how collective action by communities can fight back. That is my most positive read on the material.

My less positive read is that this movie is kinda cruddy and mediocre. It isn't scary. In 2018 I chose to see Sorry to Bother You instead of this. I made the right choice. The Purge: Anarchy is still the "good one" if only want to see one of these films. 

The First Purge is probably is a better movie to watch than Antebellum, which I might have to see this month. I am not happy about that either.

Next time: Demons (1985)

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 1: C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud

Do you feel that in the air? That feeling can be only one thing: SPOOKY. We have reached the season of fear, October. Change into your SPINE-TINGELEST clothing and watch some movies with me. HAHAHAHA!!

Welcome, to the second annual 31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews. This is a tradition I started last year where I watched a horror (or horror-adjacent) movie a day every day through the month of October. Most of that got posted on my twitter and, weirdly enough, in the Reddit NFL Free Talk threads. This year I figured I should doll up the process a bit more and place it officially here, next to all my other writing.

Our theme this year is going to be SEQUELS. Not every movie I review will be a sequel, but more than half should be. I am trying to focus particularly on sequels to movies I covered last year. I saw American Psycho in 2019, that means I might have to watch American Psycho 2 this year. I am not looking forward to every movie, needless to say. Reviews will be longer or shorter, depending on how interesting the movie is.

Anyway, let us start out with a movie with a name as fun to type as it is to say: C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud.

C.H.U.D. was worst movie I saw during last year's Halloween festivities. Hopefully C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud is the worst movie I see this year. Both these movies are horrible. The first one is a really mediocre monster movie that inexplicably stars a lot of actors who would go on to be in Home Alone. The second one has nothing to do with C.H.U.D. 1. Yup, C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud is basically the Troll 2 of the Chud Cinematic Universe (The C.H.U.D.C.U.).

C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud trades the dirty streets of Manhattan of the original for sunny Southern California. Instead of actual Chud monsters, it has zombies who are somehow connected to the original group of sewer creatures. Therefore, C.H.U.D. II has no Chuds. It does have a Bud, played by Gerrit Graham, best known for the role of Beef in Phantom of the Paradise. Bud is our zombie hero. He mostly stumbles through the movie doing bad physical comedy. C.H.U.D. II is sadly a comedy more than a horror movie, and a miserably unfunny one at that. The rest of the human cast are SoCal teenagers, none of whom are funny or likable. Bud does get an attraction to Katie (Tricia Leigh Fisher), in the one vaguely interesting turn on anything in this movie. Bud the Chud tries to be Bud the Stud, and gives her his heart, literally, at the end. It is is a weirdly sweet gesture and a decent gore gag. Katie looks good in a very revealing bikini.

Katie's bikini and Bud's heart are the only good parts of this thing. The rest of this movie fucking sucks. C.H.U.D II is only 84 minutes but feels three times longer.

I would call the kind of humor in C.H.U.D. II "newspaper comic"-y. And not a good newspaper comic like Calvin & Hobbes or something, this is lame Family Circus shit. A zombie dog attacks a mailman. A crowd of zombies visits a burger stand and orders the fry cook. Bud has troubles with a toilet flushing. These gags are all so fucking obvious and had to be tired even in 1989. At least Robert Vaughn as Colonel Masters is doing a Colonel Trautman impression and chewing a lot of scenery. He's not funny but he has energy.

C.H.U.D. II is too tame for a zombie movie and also too tame for an Eighties comedy. There's no gore other than Bud's heart. Nothing is scary. There's no nudity. There's no edge of any kind. It extra hurts to watch this movie knowing that I could have turned on Dan O'Bannon's 1985 masterpiece, The Return of the Living Dead instead, which has tits, gore, scares, laughs, and plenty of edge.

Thankfully they never made a C.H.U.D. III. 

Next time: 2018's The First Purge.