31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 3: Cronos

Spooky Day 3: 1993

This project is about revisiting all the years I've been alive, but also I want to see new movies from this era. Sure, I've seen a lot of horror movies, but certainly not all of them. There's new and weird stuff out there. I need to keep experimenting and exploring. So here’s a Mexican horror movie, Cronos, the first film directed by Guillermo del Toro.

Unfortunately, I'm only pretty sure I haven't seen this. I don't remember seeing it. Yet, it felt deeply familiar. Felt a lot of déjà vu. 

My grandma is getting close to eighty-years-old. She's still fine, but she forgets movies she’s seen all the time. Meanwhile, my memory is still prety good. I can remember truly awful crap like Corky Romano which I saw once in 2002, on Pay Per View. Still, I’m thirty now, sometimes I just forget everything about a movie. Most of the Friday the Thirteenth movies are a single mush of vagueness in my mind now. I cannot tell you anything distinct about Part II vs Part III.

In this case, Cronos, I cannot tell whether I’ve seen it or not. That scares me. I could definitely imagine having seen this movie before. It seems like a movie I would have rented in college on Netflix mail-in DVD. It’s a sad drama in Spanish, so maybe I lost interest and started playing my Nintendo DS halfway through. Or I saw it with friends and we barely paid attention. Who knows? All I can tell you is my brain is failing me. These are the signs of aging: gray hair, an inability to stay up after midnight, and completely forgetting stuff.

Fortunately, this all works thematically, because while Cronos is a vampire flick, it's themes are about aging. It forces its characters to confront their age, while teasing fantasies of youth, but then crushing those hopes with the inevitability of death. Nobody is living forever, the end is the same for all of us. Some people hang on to the bitter end in desperate struggles to fight time. Some people can just live their lives happily. It makes no difference. Vampirism can promise immortality. However, eternal life comes at a monstrous cost.

Cronos is the story of Señor Jesus Gris (Federico Luppi), a dapper antiques dealer in Mexico City. He is a warm caregiver to his tiny granddaughter, Aurora (Tamara Shanath). Señor Gris finds a small golden mechanical device hiding within an angel statue. The discovery puts him at odds with a cocky American businessman (Ron Perlman), who wants to purchase the device for his uncle, Deiter (Claudio Brook). The device is some kind of insectoid bloodsucker, which injures Jesus’ hand. But later, Jesus feels younger, healthier, and might have a bit more color in his hair. Yet with the vitality comes terrible cravings from raw meat and blood. Aurora gets to watch her grandpa descend into an almost-drug addiction to the device.

While Cronos is a vampire story, the script never uses the V-word. Still even little Aurora knows the rules. She helpfully makes her grandpa a coffin from an emptied toy chest. Ultimately, though, Cronos is not interested in being a traditional vampire tale. Señor Gris never runs around Mexico chewing on the supple necks of young socialites. Just when you think the movie is heading one direction, things are literally thrown off a cliff to become something much sadder. Vampirism here is not empowerment. It's a humiliating decay and horrifying transformation. Jesus doesn't need to eat people to be isolated. Once he’s no longer human, the world sees him as merely a nuisance, leftover trash to be disposed of.

Guillermo del Toro fills Cronos with clocks: the antiques in Jesus’ shop, a silly costume at a New Years’ party, and a billboard that serves as the setting for the film’s finale. The scarab-shaped device is full of clockwork gears, spinning and turning as they drain Señor Gris’ blood. The film is named after the God of time in Greek mythology, Chronos. Jesus is not clinging to time as desperately as his foe, Deiter, who lives in a clean room. Perlman's character: "That fucker does nothing but shit and piss all day, and he wants to live forever?" The minute warning has been called for all these characters. Time is running out.

Jesus should live longer. He should see Aurora grow up. He is a good man with plenty more to live for. The tragedy of Cronos is that time is finite, regardless of how well you'd spend it. Señor Gris deserves more time. We all deserve more time.

Next time: we travel to 1994, the year of Tonya Harding, The Lion King, and our next movie, Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 2: Dead Alive

Spooky Day 2: 1992

In 1990, a horror film called Brain Dead was released starring Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton. I’ve seen it, it’s not great, and it's not what we're talking about today. Because of that movie, a much better and much more famous Kiwi horror movie had to be released in the US under the name “Dead Alive”. It’s Braindead everywhere else, but Dead Alive to me.

These days if you think about director Peter Jackson, your mind probably sees Hobbits and Wizards. But before he revolutionized cinema with The Lord of the Rings and then failed to repeat that accomplishment with The Hobbit, he was a horror guy. Specifically, Jackson loved gore. His first movie was Bad Taste, a zany no-budget SciFi action comedy where Peter Jackson had to play three roles to fill out the cast. At one point Jackson, as the hero Derick, fills his own broken skull with freshly-killed alien brains. Bad Taste is a gross and wonderful fun time. But, it has nothing on Dead Alive.

It is entirely possibly that Dead Alive is the goriest movie ever made. That's a hard superlative to prove, I'm not sure how you'll measure that. However, Dead Alive at least is up there with the goopiest and most extreme of Japanese or Italian horror movies. It is a zombie movie, but as viscerally intense as any zombie movie ever before. Imagine the most disgusting moments of Dawn or Day of the Dead sustained at that level for an entire third of a movie.

You might expect to gag. No, you won't. You're going to laugh.

The movie is set in 1957 Wellington, New Zealand, where a dweeby but well-meaning man, Lionel (Timothy Balme) catches the attention of Paquita (Diana Peñalver). This leads to a conflict with his domineering possessive Agnes Skinner-like mother, Vera (Elizabeth Moody). The potential romantic comedy is interrupted suddenly by a Sumatran Rat-Monkey at the zoo, carrying some kind of undead disease, which bites Vera. Vera quickly degenerates – eating her own fallen ear out of a pudding while polite company is over – and soon, much of the town is zombified. Can Lionel keep the undead quiet while stopping the zombification from spreading?

Also, there’s a zombie baby. Two zombies fuck and they have a zombie. You’re either down for this or Dead Alive is not for you.

This is all leading to a grand finale where Lionel’s house is full of party-goers just in time for the zombies to get loose and chow down. Peter Jackson and his crew then fill the screen with practically every single gore gag they could imagine. If you've ever imagined a way to destroy a human body, it’s probably in this movie somewhere. A zombie can’t eat because he stabbed a spoon through his head. Intestines come alive and chase Lionel through the house. There’s a glorious sequence involving a lawnmower where a lot of flesh is reduced to spilled soup. And finally, we have a super kaiju Vera making the Freudian drama of the film very literal. Take notes, Hideaki Anno.

Despite being a horror guy, and a guy who is going to pick a lot of gross movies for this series, I’m actually very squeamish. I can't look at bodily injuries. I've almost passed out when I've cut myself in the past. But with Dead Alive, there’s nothing to squirm at. British censors in 1993, still in the Video Nasty era, considering giving Dead Alive their equivalent of the PG-13 rating because despite all the gore.

The thing about Dead Alive is that it's actually innocent. There’s no malice or perversion watching bodies get disintegrated here. Nope, it’s fun on the simplest and most Kindergarten levels of humor. Instead of laughing at a fart, you're laughing at an exposed intestinal tract - which then farts. There are limits. I felt dizzy after the fifth straight minutes of the lawnmower scene. There’s just so much blood. So much pooling, pooling blood.

I need to also say that the opening scene involving Maori actors playing "savages" is just bad. It's actually set on Skull Island, a direct King Kong reference, which in turn has a troublesome strain of White explorer fantasies. It's all a cartoon, so it isn't heinous, but I shouldn't let it go unmentioned.

Though I also can't not mention the kung-fu priest. "I kick arse for the lord!" Greatest line of the movie.

Despite a few issues, I would not hesitate to call Dead Alive a classic. We have had plenty of zombie comedies since, and sure, Shaun of the Dead got close, but nobody has topped Dead Alive for gore or laughs. For movie nerds, there’s plenty to love in the practical effects. There’s an adorable miniature tram car set, I love it. Classic stop-motion effects on the Sumatran Rat-Monkey too. Despite all the death and destruction, or maybe because of it, Dead Alive is still a great time.

Next time we travel to 1993, the year of the first World Trade Center bombing, Jurassic Park ruling the box office, and our third movie, Cronos.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 1: The People Under the Stairs

Pull your sweatshirts out of your closet, its chilly out. Remember to moisturize, the air is getting dry. Fill everything coffee with pumpkin spices. It's October. The SPOOKY is upon us, and with it comes a whole month of horrors.

This is our Annual 31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews, a project where I review a horror movie every single day through the month of October. And this time, it's special. This Halloween is my thirty-first Halloween since my birth. This means we have 31 days, 31 horror (or horror-adjacent) movies, and 31 years to celebrate. We start in 1991 with Wes Craven's The People Under the Stairs.

The People Under the Stairs is so many things at once. Therefore it is unsurprising that it feels like nothing else from its time or any others. It is one of the only movies to center itself around the crisis of mass eviction and tenant abuse, a problem that continues today. But beyond social commentary, The People Under the Stairs also is completely gonzo with its its ideas. There's a psycho running around in a gimp suit, a fairy tale of a princess trapped in a castle, and pale ghouls in the basement. Then it's also a Home Alone-style comedy of a boy against the adults using wacky traps and prat-falls. Serious issues can coexist alongside very un-serious kicks to the balls.

The People Under the Stairs is the story of Poindexter (Brandon Adams), a preteen boy who everybody calls “Fool”. Fool and his family are evicted from their apartment at the opening of the movie, due to missing the rent by only three days. The slumlords who rule their lives are the Robesons, a strange married couple who live alone in a fortress home in a Whiter and "safer" part of Los Angeles. Fool teams up with his older friend Leroy (Ving Rhames), a wanna-be crook, in a plan to break into the Robesons’ home and redistribute their ill-gotten wealth. This goes poorly for everybody involved.

The Robesons are not merely bad landlords, not merely racist, not merely eccentric, they’re also complete monsters. “Daddy” and “Mommy” (Everett McGill and Wendy Robie, hired right off of Twin Peaks) have been kidnapping dozens of children to engineer a perfect Nuclear Family. Their one success is Alice (A.J. Langer) a normal girl forced to live as their perfect doll. But also, they keep all the failures for their impossible "boy-child" ideal in the basement in wooden concentration camp pens. Those kids have descended into cannibalism and are completely feral ghouls by the time Fool runs into them. In case you’re worried that the Robesons are not deranged enough, Daddy does his killing in a full leather masochist suit. Oh, and Mommy and Daddy are actually Brother and Sister.

Honestly, not sure we needed the incest on top of all the other fetishes going on here, but sure, throw it on the pile. It’s all a grotesque parody of the fantasy American family of the Reagan-Bush era, up to the 1950s dress code and décor. The only sign that the 1990s exist at all inside the Robeson House is a TV upstairs broadcasting Gulf War news reports. America made great again.

Considering the themes of child abuse, cannibalism, and racism, The People Under the Stairs could be a very dark movie. One could also imagine that the comedy might undercut the important tone of a social thriller. I'd argue, that actually, the comedy never defeats the film's message. Instead an important message is presented to mass 1991 audiences in a disgustable and entertaining way.

This is a solid comedy too. Leroy complains about Fool’s age: "Thirteenth birthday is unlucky anyway, too old to get tit, too young to get ass". Everett McGill rushes around his house as a furious berserker, but his attacks are usually answered with physical comedy. Fool drops bricks on his head or kicks him in the nuts. Then there is the Robeson house being filled with whimsical traps, like a staircase that turns into a ramp, or an electrified door. The People Under the Stairs is never gorey enough to work as a slasher, but it is silly enough to be funny. The jokes also do not kill the deranged and disturbing edge to Mommy and Daddy's behavior.

The Los Angeles of 1991 was already at the center of American racial politics, and would remain so throughout the decade. In May of this year, Rodney King was savagely beaten by the LAPD. The People Under the Stairs releases only five months before the city will explode after King’s assaulters are found not-guilty in a grotesque parody of justice. Wes Craven started work on The People Under the Stairs before any of that began, but he must have felt that energy to begin the project. He's still a White author and White director working in a Black space, but his work never feels inauthentic or misguided. Meanwhile, a different White writer/director would release the equally prescient and important Candyman set in Chicago a year later.

People seemed aware that something was terribly wrong, that our society was betraying entire classes of Americans. At they knew in 1991, they forget quickly. They voted overwhelming in Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution of 1994, and the story turned forever towards cutting budgets, cutting welfare, and pouring money into the hands of the police. For a moment we recognized the problem, then chose to make it worse. So the horrors have continued to compound until this very day. Rodney King did not need to be the template for George Floyd. But he was.

The People Under the Stairs is less beloved today than Candyman, and it isn’t hard to see why. Candyman is far more terrifying and more primal. It’s a conscious act of mythmaking. Meanwhile, The People Under the Stairs sacrifices fear and stakes for the occasional goofy trap and one-liner. Though, to Wes Craven’s credit, his movie is set from a Black perspective. Fool is an able, strong hero, supported by his community. Candyman’s perspective still is terrified of Black neighborhoods. The People Under the Stairs sees those places as home. In the ghetto, there is community, family, and love.

In the White suburbs, that’s where the real evil lies.

Tomorrow it's 1992. The rise of Bill Clinton, Achy Braky Heart, and our next movie: Dead Alive.

Evangelion Rebuild Part 2: 3.0+1.0 - Thrice Upon a Time

IMPOSSIBLY HUGE SPOILERS ARE COMING, YOU WERE WARNED A SECOND TIME.

The production of the original Neon Genesis Evangelion was notoriously difficult. Creator Hideaki Anno did not yet know where the story would end when he started with Shinji piloting Eva Unit 01 to fight the Angel Sachiel. Many endings disappeared into his drafts. But two different endings made their way to the public. Anno poured all of himself into of both of those endings. The work and his illness very nearly killed him. That struggle shows "on the page" as it were, with The End of Evangelion, the intense and controversial conclusion of the first Eva cycle.

Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time is the final release in this second generation of Evangelion. It is both the culmination of a four-part film series, the Rebuild of Evangelion, and also the culmination of a story Anno has been telling since 1995. "Thrice Upon a Time", refers to the fact that this is now the third - and final - ending Anno has written for Shinji Ikari. This is the farewell. This is letting go.

The Rebuild of Evangelion series has proven to be a very difficult creation as well. During the course of production, Rebuild clearly changed paths multiple times. Evangelion: 2.0 You Can (Not) Advance and 3.0 You Can (Not) Redo both end with Next Episode teasers which preview movies that were never made. 3.0 cuts far into the future beyond the events its preview displayed. And then none of the footage shown at the end of 3.0 made it into the fourth film. At one point the master plan for Rebuild predicted that the fourth movie would be released in 2008. It took thirteen years longer than that. Covid-19 can only be blamed for months of delays, not years.

Yet, nothing that truly matters can or should be done quickly. The wait for 3.0+1.0 has been long, and much longer than anybody thought. It has been over eight years since the last movie. Yet, I never lost faith. Most of the fandom seemed to be patient as well. We knew whatever was coming would be amazing. We could not imagine what was coming next, but whatever it was, it would be wonderful.

And so it was. 3.0+1.0 is both a response and a supplement to The End of Evangelion. It dramatically turns course but never reject its past. It's a triumphal movie of vast positivity and warmth. The End of Evangelion limped out of the darkness, 3.0+1.0 races fearlessly up into the future.

Evangelion Rebuild Part 1: The End of Evangelion

IMMENSE SPOILERS TO COME. REMEMBER, YOU WERE WARNED.

When Evangelion: 3.0+1.0: Thrice Upon a Time ended, I didn't know what to do at first. The movie had been pouring emotions into me for two and a half hours. All that feeling was choking me. There was simply so much on the screen, so much in the text, it was impossible to respond in any appropriate or sane manner. I wanted to scream, I wanted to weep, I felt like I was about to explode. I thought I would lose control and write a million words that very day. And...

...I've already begun to lose control.

Before we get to Evangelion 3.0+1.0, we have to go back to 1997 and talk about a different movie. Thrice Upon a Time is the fourth movie in the Rebuild of Evangelion film series, a very telling title of the new series' goals. Why are we rebuilding at all? At some point in the past, in spite of the sustained popularity as a brand, Neon Genesis Evangelion was destroyed. The film The End of Evangelion was that destruction. So before we get into the Joy of Rebirth, we need to watch endure the Fate of the Destruction. These two films are intertwined on many levels, which I'll get into more in Part 2.

The End of Evangelion, directed by Hideaki Anno, is still a controversial film, decades later. Considering how bold, unflinching, and strange the film it is, it would be disappointed if it wasn't divisive. A movie this difficult should not have an easy response. One of the bigger (re)-examinations of Evangelion in recent years happened on the Waypoint Podcast feed. The critics there gave a deep analysis in their first brush with the franchise. The End of Evangelion left them miserable and defeated. The movie is at times both challenging and hideous. Its grossest scenes remain notorious. All the technical artistry at work in Anno's eye for cinematography and gorgeous animation are somewhat betrayed by the twisted sexual insecurities at play on the script level. It's a hard movie to love.

Oh, and the world ends and everybody fucking dies.

The End of Evangelion is also one of the greatest movies ever made. It may sit right at the very top for me. That's a claim I'm a bit sheepish to admit to. But if I'm a critic worth anything, I should be able to back it up. This movie and Neon Genesis Evangelion have meant quite a lot to me personally. My own psychic defense, my AT field, is alarmed considering that I am daring myself to open up to such an extent. There is brilliance in The End of Evangelion. It isn't a movie that only exists to shock and appall, it is about redemption, hope, and the shaky first steps towards growth.