Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory Review: Groove is in the Heart

"Just one more level.", is what I keep telling myself. "One more" is one of Data Riku's taunts in Kingdom Hearts III's DLC. After he says it, he attacks you dozens of times with savage ferocity. "One more" is just as false when I say it to myself. "One" easily becomes "five" or "ten" more. Until eventually it means "lose entire days and nights to level after level". While sketching out this review, I wrote that first sentence, then figured I should take another look at the game. Before I knew it, two hours had passed. Then three days. So if my review of Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory is late, it is because of Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory.

Melody of Memory came out just a few days after the launch of the glorious new Xbox and PlayStation consoles. If you are looking for a game to prove the value of your expensive hyper-modern hardware, this is not it. It is a small rhythm game dressed up in the skin and assets of the Kingdom Hearts series. You won't need 4K or HDR or Ray Tracing. 

In fact, I would not buy this game on a home console at all. Melody of Memory is a game built for mobile. It would have been great on phones. If any genre is perfect for a relaxing ten-minute shit break at the office, rhythm games are it. Luckily, Melody of Memory is on the Nintendo Switch. You will not find here the next revolution in gaming. But you may find an unhealthy addiction that somehow justifies the game's slightness.

Melody of Memory has to be the least impressive Kingdom Hearts game that Square Enix has ever charged a full price for. At $60 - plus tax - the value is hard to justify. You get a ten hour campaign with about a half hour of new story content. Digging deeper to unlock your mastery of these melodies might grant you as much as 30 hours of playtime. In terms of pure consumer advise, you can spend that same money and get ten thousand hours of Ubisoft content instead. And that stuff might look a lot better on the new gargantuan TV your gaming hobby now demands of you. Ten years ago, Birth by Sleep was half this game's price and was a full Kingdom Hearts experience, not just a vague impression of one. Games are more expensive now. Even smaller filler titles like Melody of Memory are investments I suggest you make in caution.

My critic brain keeps finding any number of issues with this product. My hands, however, cannot put it down. In fact, literally after writing that last sentence, I walked over to my Switch and played another level. I just unlocked "Don't Think Twice", the Kingdom Hearts III theme song and really need to try that out. Give me a second... I'll get back to you... Just hold on...

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 31: Night of the Demons

Adieu. Adieu. Parting is such sweet spooky. Day 31 (FINAL): Night of the Demons (1988), directed by Kevin S. Tenney.

To be clear, this is not a review of Night of the Demon (singular). That's a 1957 British horror movie. Neither are we discussing Night of the Living Dead, Night of the Creeps, Night of the Lepus, Rats: Night of Terror, or Fright Night. Nope, Night of the Demons, for better or worse.

Night of the Demons is definitely not the best Halloween movie. If I am picking a horror movie set on Halloween I would rather watch Trick 'r Treat, The Guest, or the obvious: Halloween. I am definitely not picking C.H.U.D. II: Bud the Chud, that movie actually was the worst one I reviewed this month. We are not lacking for Halloween movies. But we might be lacking for Halloween party movies. Michael Myers is more about babysitters and trick'r'treaters, not really shindigs. If say, the year is 2020 and you can't really have a Halloween party, maybe Night of the Demons can scratch an itch.

I will not call Night of the Demons a great movie. Actually, even as a dumb horror B-movie, it is disappointing in a few ways. However, it certainly is not an un-fun movie.

From the start the movie lets you know the primary thing on its mind: sex. Send this movie straight to Horny Jail because we open with our protagonist, Judy (Cathy Podewell), topless in a bra and mocked for her big tits by her baby brother. "Wow, bodacious boobies' sis! If you keep on growing you'll have to hire someone just to tie your shoes." Except this kind of prose all throughout Night of the Demons' script. We meet Scream Queen Linnea Quigley's character, Suzanne, ass-first as she leans over to present her panties to some store clerks while playing Pac-Man. "Do you guys have sour balls? Too bad, I bet you don't get many blow jobs!" That kind of talk never stops.

We have a cast of about ten teenagers all traveling to an abandoned mortuary called Hull House. (Presumably not related to Jane Addams or late 19th century feminist social reform movements.) Angela (Amelia Kinkade) is considered something of a "weird girl" at school, but she's putting on this party along with her slutty friend, Suzanne, whose ass you've already met. Judy is coming with her boyfriend Jay (Lance Fenton), who did not even bother putting on a costume. Angela decides it would be fun to perform a seance and summon some demons. Evil Dead shit thus begins.

Angela and Suzanne end up possessed immediately. First Suzanne, then Angela after a very long lesbian kiss. This is really where Night of the Demons can make or break itself. You have a comic script, a few memorable characters, Linnea Quigley is bound to take her top off at some point, one guy Sal (William Gallo) talks like he's Tony Soprano opening up some gabagool. All you need is some great gore and creative kills. Sadly, that does not happen. Nothing happens that is all that scary.

One guy gets his eyes gouged out. A naked couple fucking in a casket gets smashed, but you never see anything. Those are the best kills and they're pretty basic. Even the "Deadite" designs are not that impressive. They get decent monster make-up, Angela especially, but not a unique visual. The demons do not get very good "crazy" moments. Angela talks like Dr. Claw from Inspector Gadget. Her actress was a professional dancer, so they had her character dance for awhile, which really spooks the other characters for some reason. Suzanne shoves lipstick up her nipple in an impressive magic effect. That wasn't gore, the lipstick just disappears in slight of hand, seemingly into her tit. Linnea Quigley is stealing this show, but they barely have her talk in the second half of the movie.

Here's my problem with Night of the Demons. I love that you have Linnea Quigley topless and doing weird stuff. That lipstick idea is really twisted and bizarre. It creeps me out. However, nothing comes of it. Her tits are not some like cartoon Hammer Space. Later she seduces a dude, and I was thinking, "okay, let's build on this boob idea". Maybe the guy is fondling her and his hands get stuck inside. Or like the boobs grow mouths with razor-sharp teeth and devour his hands. Nope. Nothing like that. She just kills him while fucking him. Later she suggests that his corpse might be able to get hard again. That's gross, I wish there was more of that.

I mean, one character dies off-camera! That's a waste of a kill. We lose all the expendable characters in the span of ten minutes, leaving a final half hour where Judy and the Final Boy, Rodger (Alvin Alexis) have to hide from the Deadites. The gore is not just there. Nor are the scares.

Rodger at least is the one guy smart enough to try to escape. He's the Black guy, and decides early-on that all this demon shit is White People Problems. I bring up Rodger because watching this movie reminded me of that old saying "Black dude dies first". Is that ever true? I'm totally off-topic here, but having seen a lot of horror movies from a lot of eras, the Black character almost never dies first. Scream 2 kills the Black characters first but just to mock the idea. I've seen more subversions of the trope than the trope.

Anyway, Rodger isn't very good as a hero and neither is Judy. They're both boring.

To conclude, Night of the Demons is not a great horror film. However, at least it ends on one of the best brick jokes in the history of horror. The whole movie might be redeemed by that single choice.

Night of the Demons was not the grand finale I was hoping for. I couldn't have rewatched Night of the Comet? Night of the Comet rules! Night of the Demons has a good reputation as a horror movie, which I don't think it has earned. If you want a dumb horror comedy about horny teenagers, Chopping Mall is a way better pick. Spookies, a much cheaper and much more incompetent movie from 1986 with roughly the same plot, has better scares than Night of the Demons. I guess it is essential viewing if you're a huge Linnea Quigley fan. Oh well.

And that, my dear Space Monkeys, concludes Spooky Month. Happy Halloween. And remember, don't eat any apples with razor blades hidden inside them.

THE END?

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 30: Deep Rising

Now what? (But Spooky.) Day 30: Deep Rising (1998), directed by Stephen Sommers.

The year before he directed The Mummy, Stephen Sommers made another action blockbuster inspired by old horror movies. Only this one was far less successful and made much less money at the box office. Roger Ebert hated it. Wikipedia lists it as a "cult movie", but I don't see any cult. If there was a cult, trust me, I would be going to every meeting. Put me first in line for the human sacrifices in honor of this underrated should-have-been-classic.

The movie in question is Deep Rising, one of my all-time favorites. I've seen a few modern reviews call Deep Rising "so bad its good", which is really unfair. "So bad its good" is what you say for a movie like Cats, a disaster so confounding that it never ceases to fascinate. Deep Rising is a plain old good movie. If you're entertained, it is because the movie was made to be entertaining. This is effective movie-making. It isn't incompetent, it isn't cheap. Deep Rising doesn't need a cult, it needs a whole religion complete with a pope, pilgrimages, and flying buttresses.

The movie has a great script, the characters are all memorable, and the monster designs are fantastic. Deep Rising mixes together action, comedy, and horror as effectively as The Mummy. If you love that, you'll probably really like this.

The plot is an action thriller that gets abruptly hijacked by a monster movie. The cruise ship Argonautica is sailing the South China Sea when somebody on board disables its communications. The ship is paralyzed just minutes before some unknown force surging from below ("deep rising", if you will) attacks. 

Meanwhile, our hero, Finnegan (Treat Williams) is transporting a group of wacky mercenaries to some mysterious undisclosed location. "If the cash is there, we do not care" is Finnegan's motto, which he and his crew quickly come to regret. The mercenaries force Finnegan on board the cruise ship, only to discover everybody is already gone. And the ship is infested with tentacle monsters with very big teeth.

Right from the start, Deep Rising sets up a lot of mystery in its plot. Beyond the usual question of "what are these monsters and how do they eat you?" the movie also has you wondering who these bad guys are, who disabled the cruise ship, and if anybody's plan involved Finnegan or his crew going home alive. It's a good set-up. The movie adds in a sexy thief, Trillian (Famke Janssen), who fits right into this gang of low-lives, con artists, and killers. Finnegan as close as we have to a moral center, and he's a sarcastic sea asshole who really doesn't need this shit right now.

It helps a lot that most of Deep Rising's cast can bring comic chops. Joey (Kevin J. O'Connor) is Finnegan's dweeby side-kick and the movie's main comic relief. He was funny enough that he got himself a role in The Mummy a year later. But everybody has their comedy moments. The entire mercenary crew is made up of character actors like Djimon Hounsou, Cliff Curtis, Clifton Powell, and Jason Flemyng. If you need slimy, Anthony Heald as the ship's owner is a great source of scumbaggery. The script is so good and so consistently funny, Deep Rising reminds me of a Shane Black movie. Treat Williams is certainly not an A-lister movie star, but he pulls off sarcastic well-enough. "Now what??" is the man's catch-phrase. He never fails to hit that note with just the right tone of tired irritation.

My one cast issue is that Treat Williams is about ten years too old for Famke Janssen. They don't lack chemistry, but I dunno. This is one of those movie romances that probably won't last long beyond the end credits.

There are quite a few dumb B-movie details to Deep Rising. The bad guys carry around machine guns that have seemingly infinite ammo. Nobody bothers to reload to the point its hilarious. Towards the end Finnegan and Trillian have a jet ski escape sequence through the ship. Finnegan has to shoot the door buttons to get them to open with his shotgun. I've never seen a movie so lovingly turn itself into a video game level. Speaking of video games, there's a big monster at the end for no reason other than to have a Final Boss.

However B-movie dumb it gets, the script is stays smart. There's a lot of details that keep the characters clever and intelligent even during a horror movie. Trillian starts the movie in a red evening gown, then changes into sensible clothes in the background while the men are screaming at each other. Finnegan catches the evil plan before the audience does. These characters are fodder for the tentacle monsters, but they're wholesome meals, not junk food.

As for the monsters themselves, mostly they're good. Deep Rising does not show the monsters at all for the first third of the movie, leaving them to kill people in well-crafted suspense deaths. (That poor lady on the toilet got it the worst of anybody.) They are a solid design, at least at first. Eventually you see that Final Boss monster that is much less scary than the regular creatures. This is 1998 so the CG effects have aged. The individual monsters look okay. The Final Boss monster looks like shit. Its death looks even worse.

However, don't think these effects are all bad. The most amazing effect is this legendary gore gag where one of the mercs falls out of the ceiling with his face half-digested. This was made in CG, with only 1998 technology, and it still looks incredible. You would almost believe it was practical effects.

Another big thing that helps Deep Rising immensely is Jerry Goldsmith's score. Maybe this would be just an above-average B-movie without it. Instead that score turns Deep Rising into a legit blockbuster.

While I'm dropping random unstructured thoughts in my giddy glee about this movie, here's another side note: Deep Rising has a random lesbian kiss during a montage. Neither women are named or ever appear again. But those few frames turn Deep Rising into a better vehicle of LGBT acceptance than the entire MCU.

So if it isn't clear, I love Deep Rising. No, it is not better than The Mummy, but I still love everything about this movie. I'm still laughing at the jokes and I've seen this movie probably twenty times. The action is thrilling. The suspense holds up. There's one crazy good gore gag. It has everything a movie should have, everything that should be thrilling audiences decades later. Just there is no audience. If there is no cult or organized religion, I'll be the Pope of nobody in the Deep Rising faith. I could gush for hours, even if it is to nobody.

By the way, that is definitely King Kong at the end, right?

Next Time and Final Time: Night of the Demons (1988). We're having a Halloween Party, Jason and Freddy are too scared to come.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 29: Final Destination 5

Spooky has a plan for us all. Day 29: Final Destination 5 (2011), directed by Steven Quale.

Final Destination 4 kinda sucked. Can the fifth movie improve things? Yes. Yes it can.

The final Final Destination movie opens like all these movies do: with a big absurd disaster that kills everybody. Perhaps what is really happening in this universe is not that Death is a Calvinist force of predestination hunting down our heroes. Maybe this is just an alternate reality where screws don't work? That neatly explains everything in these five movies.

Anyway, This time it's a big wonderfully silly bridge collapse with plenty of creative deaths. When a girl falls off the bridge to get impaled on a passing sailboat, who could not help but laugh with the movie? This is what you're here for: gore slapstick. One guy gets his face destroyed, fall off the bridge, and just for extra punishment lands on the concrete supports so he goes splat like that poor motherfucker who hit the rudder in Titanic. If that disgusts you, Final Destination 5 is not your movie. If you're applauding, you're in for a good time.

Luckily, Final Destination 5 is not so stupid it becomes purely about the gore, like Final Destination 4. The opening scenes actually establishes characters. Imagine that, you are watching people with personalities and interesting relationships. Our hero this time is Sam (Nicholas D'Agosto) who is torn between his girlfriend Molly (Emma Bell) and his dream to be a chef in Paris. Sam and Molly are pretty boring characters, but at least they have something. The dude cooks a mean breakfast.

The rest of the cast is where most of the color lies. Peter (Miles Fisher) is Sam's best friend and boss at the office they both work at. He's easily the best part of the movie and the one given the most acting to do. Peter loses his girlfriend Candice (Ellen Wroe) early on, and then breaks down during the movie. By the climax, Peter is certain that the only way to stop Death is to kill somebody else and "take their years". I should mention that Miles Fisher looks shockingly like Tom Cruise, so his final villain turn is all the more exciting. He's crazy killer Tom Cruise! That's fun, right?

I should also mention that the filler side characters have something to them. There's the sexist (and unfortunately really racist) nerdy guy (P.J. Byrne). I don't think the performance is bad but we really didn't need Jack Nicholson in The Departed-levels of rapid fire anti-Chinese bigotry. A better character is the party girl, Olivia (Jacqueline MacInnes Wood), who opens the movie showing her underwear to her coworkers and inexplicably has her own Wikipedia page. She's not relevant to the plot besides dying horribly, so I don't know why she was given her own article. She wins best death, at least. I suspect a wiki editor couldn't forget the sight of her tits and had a crush. Finally, good actors who you'd recognize like David Koechner, Courtney B. Vance, and of course, Tony Todd are in this movie.

Most of the people on Death's revenge list make his job easy for him in Final Destination 5. Olivia gets laser eye surgery. The racist guy gets acupuncture. Death has to be thinking, "there is no sport in this" when they throw him such softballs. Our hero is a chef and surrounds himself with blades. That leads me to comment on how great the suspense in Final Destination 5 is. Yeah, it certainly is scary to have your head ripped open by a falling construction crane. But also, just as scary is a screw on a balance beam, daring Candice, a gymnast, to stab her naked foot right through it. You don't cringe at the big deaths, you cringe at the small wounds you can actually imagine.

I do wish that one of the side characters had ended up the lead instead of boring Sam. Imagine if Olivia was our lead? You set up a vanilla "Final Boy" in Sam, and an obvious victim in Olivia, the slutty one. Then you twist us up by killing Sam off and leaving Olivia our heroine. Final Destination 5 does not do that, but it does have its own clever twist. There is a final reveal at the end of this movie that brings this whole franchise full circle.

I won't say that Final Destination 5 ever transcends being "just another one of those". But it is at least a good one of those. It's the best movie in the series since Final Destination 2, maybe even since the first one. The kills are great and the movie is not boring between those deaths like Final Destination 4. Plus the ending is so deliciously nasty you cannot help but love it. If you're not cheering, you're the wrong audience for this kind of schlock.

Plus, Tony Todd is back! Final Destination 3 and 4 were missing him dearly. If you're looking to improve your horror movie by a whole point, add Candyman in.

Now What?: Deep Rising (1998). I was going to watch The Craft: Legacy but that movie looks like boring dogshit. Deep Rising, however, is an underrated classic.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 28: The Final Destination (2009)

You can't cheat spooky. Day 28: The Final Destination (2009), directed by David R. Ellis.

The Final Destination is actually Final Destination 4. I can only imagine the studio dropped the numbering scheme because they were embarrassed. Calling it "*THE* Final Destination" maybe is a bit classier. They stopped caring about classiness after the title.

Why did I pick Final Destination 4? Just because I have not seen this one or Final Destination 5. This will is a two-part two-day death fest towards the end of our October celebrations. I think the original Final Destination is one of the best horror movies of the early 2000s. Final Destination 2 and 3 were both diminishing returns. By 4 I was pretty bored of the franchise. A lot of the reason I'm doing this horror series is to give second chances movies I skipped. I thought Final Destination 4 was too stupid to be good. Was I wrong?

No.

Final Destination 4 is actually far dumber than I thought. This was the movie shot in 3D riding that brief Avatar fad. But instead of any pretense of realism, this 3D is pure carnival gimmick. It reminds me of 3D horror flicks from twenty years earlier. It is in the vein of movies like Friday the 13th Part 3 or Jaws 3D, which are mostly about gore flying at the screen over and over. Since the 3D era is now all but dead, I couldn't watch Final Destination 4 in any more than two dimensions. Yet still that dumbass "look at that dude's head flying at me" atmosphere survives.

This movie opens at a race track to the sound of screaming late-2000s buttrock. (2009 was not that long ago but somehow this low-rent Nickelback music sounds more dated than disco in 2020.) Our heroes are openly contemptuous of the "rednecks" all around them, and admit outright that they are only watching to see wrecks. They're immediately awful people. But they get their wish - there's a huge pile-up. Then everybody dies in graphic and hilarious gore gags. The first eight minutes of Final Destination 4 are a delight. Beyond that well...

Then our hero, Nick (Bobby Campo) in typical series fashion, realizes that was all a premonition. He pushes his friends and some strangers out of the disaster before it happens. However, because the unseen force of Death in this franchise is very anal about his schedule, he kills them all one by one in increasingly preposterous ways. Death really has no subtlety this time. He'll have an air tank push you through a fence so your body can slice off in chucks into the audience's face. Abstract concepts of predestination can have fun with their jobs too, as it turns out.

The best part of Final Destination 4 is the utterly shameless gore. But the second best part is the sometimes decent suspense. It is not really suspense of "will these people die?" - they all will die. But more "how will these people die?" Take the dead of the "MILF" character (I never caught her name besides "MILF"), played by Krista Allen. She is getting her hair done in a salon. The movie sets up a broken barber's chair that might collapse, some hair spray getting slowly heated by a hot straightener, a loose ceiling fan, and her head is in one of those dome perm things. Which one of these Looney Tunes Rube Goldberg nonsense contraptions will kill her? I'll bet five bucks it's the ceiling fan, you in?

The worst part about this movie, however, is the cast. Final Destination 1 was not exactly an Oscarbait drama, but it had solid actors. Devon Sawa, Ali Lartner, Stifler!, those guys could get you a movie. Final Destination 3 at least had Mary Elizabeth Winstead. This movie has a cast of nobodies who are mostly terrible. These people have no personality or even an attempt at personality. I could not tell you a single defining trait about our lead, Nick. I could not tell you anything about his girlfriend, Lori (Shantel VanSanten).

Then when Final Destination 4 gives its character's personality, its terrible. Nick Zano plays Hunt, Nick's friend. They call him "Hunt" but clearly this guy was born to be a "Chet". The actor plays the role of Hunt/Chet as a horny dumbass, the kind of guy who if he wasn't in a Final Destination movie would probably be chilling with a machete through is torso around Crystal Lake. Hutn/Chet gets the best death in the movie when he recreates Chuck Palahniuk's short story, "Guts".

Another memorable character is the racist dude (Justin Welborn) who drops N-bombs. He dies while trying to leave a burning cross on the lawn of the one Black guy. That was a bad idea, Final Destination 4. Even in 2009, that was the wrong kind of tasteless.

In conclusion, Final Destination 4 is "another one of those". Most fourth entries in horror franchises end up being just "one of those", so do not get too surprised. Final Destination 4 is stupid to the point of self-parody. You'd really be better off just watching a kill compilations on Youtube than the entire movie. It is not atrociously terrible. It is watchable. But... eh.

Next Time: Final Destination 5 (2011), which to the shock of all, got very good reviews. Maybe that's the "good one".

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 27: The Wailing

I want to get off Mr. Spooky's wild ride. Day 27: The Wailing (2016), directed by Na Hong-jin.

Earlier this year I celebrated Bong Joon-ho and his movie Parasite's sweeping of the Oscars by watching a ton of Korean movies. South Korea's movies are not easy watches. Those dramas make them out to be very unhappy people. Even the movies that start out light and funny turn into miserable exercises in tragedy and social disintegration. They're all great movies, even this. But they're heavy, upsetting things that make you feel worse.

The Wailing probably should not have hit me as hard as it did. I have seen plenty of grim Korean movies. For this series I saw Pulse and a Lars von Trier movie, neither are exactly big happy fun times for the whole family. I was fine after both of those. I could not really say why The Wailing in particular left so beaten and defeated. It isn't that much worse than say Burning or Mother, it is actually lighter than Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance. But this one hurt. It really did.

The opening of The Wailing seems inspired by Bong Joon-ho's Memories of Murder, a 2003 murder mystery drama that ends very poorly for everybody involved. Both are about a small Korean town beset by horrible murders which the local police force is completely unable to handle. Our lead is Jong-goo (Kwak Do-won), a chubby and incompetent police sergeant who is the wrong man for the job. He's a failure, but a lovable one. He has a young daughter Hyo-Jin (Kim Hwan-hee), who is possibly more mature than her father.

Imagine Paul Blart trying to solve supernatural killings. Yet the movie plays the horror and drama entirely straight. That's the real genius of Korean movies, they are not afraid to be silly and funny even if their ultimate aim is bitter tragedy. If anything, the comedy disarms you further and lets the ending hit you even harder. If anybody does not deserve what is coming to him, it's Jong-goo. He's scaredy-cat who screams helplessly at anything spooky.

Even the horror elements in The Wailing alternate between straight fear and horror comedy. There's a lot of comic yelping from the entire cast. Even as late as two hours in when Jong-goo and his friends are fighting a zombie, it's like Shaun of the Dead slapstick. The monster has a rake stuck in his head and everybody is slipping on their ass. There's a point where they keep screaming for so long I just started laughing uncontrollably.

The Wailing has a complicated and confusing plot. Normally this would be a detriment, but it fits with who our protagonist is. Jong-goo has no idea what is going on in his village and neither do you. There's a sullen elderly Japanese man (Jun Kunimura) who might be causing the outbreak of unexplainable murders. Or maybe it is a mysterious woman in white (Chun Woo-hee). Jong-goo hires a shaman, Il-gwang (Hwang Jung-min) to try to exorcise the demons. But Il-gwang only makes things more difficult because his story keeps changing.

By the end, Jong-goo has no idea what do to. He's trapped between bad advice and unrelenting horror at all sides. All the dude wanted to do was read manhwa comics and sloppily bang his girlfriend. Instead his life is an incomprehensible nightmare.

Maybe that's why The Wailing hurts so bad. Jong-goo has no tragic flaw other than being a silly fatass. Still, such horrible things happen to him. It is clearly unfair. Evil wins again, just like it does in the real world every fucking time. You try your best and the only help you have comes from useless people with their own agendas. Decades pass and evil only gets stronger and its crimes are forgiven due to the sheer enormity of its next cycle of violence and lies. Competent or incompetent, hard-working or lazy, knowledgeable or ignorantly, you're still as hopelessly lost before the sheer enormity of hate and injustice on this Earth. Screaming is about all Jong-goo can do. 

Wailing into the oblivion is about all anybody can do either in times like these

Next Time: I didn't need The Wailing right now. .That wasn't fun. I want to have fun tomorrow. Let's do The Final Destination (2009).

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 26: Blair Witch (2016)

I put a spell on spooky. Because you're mine. Day 26: Blair Witch (2016), directed by Adam Wingard.

The Blair Witch Project is, whether I like it or not, a masterpiece. Mostly a masterpiece of marketing. The producers were able to take an ultra-cheap experimental movie and turn it into a genre-defining hit. Every found footage film before or since has to be compared to The Blair Witch Project.

I only begrudgingly respect The Blair Witch Project. I hated it in 1999 and still don't enjoy it despite several rewatches. It is a weird kind of movie to blow up as big as it did. Mass audiences like their horror with easy big scares, which Blair Witch Project has none of. You never see the witch. Instead most of the movie is three people lost in the woods slowly turning on each other. It does end with a fantastic final scene in that dirty abandoned house. But you aren't getting gore or big jump scares. The Blair Witch Project commits to its simplicity, for better or worse.

Decades later, a sequel came out, Blair Witch (2016). (There is also Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2 that nobody on Earth likes. Blair Witch 3 would prefer you forgot Blair Witch 2 happened.) Much like the original, the third Blair Witch was largely built around a stunt marketing campaign. Nobody could be fooled into believing this was a real story. Decades of mostly terrible found footage movies had poisoned that well. So instead, they made Blair Witch a total surprise. It had a shock release at San Diego Comic Con, airing to an audience that had no idea they were seeing a Blair Witch Project sequel. The studio got Adam Wingard and Simon Barrett, two rising horror names, to make the film.

None of that did Blair Witch much good. It disappointed at the box office and nobody fights for it now. That is a shame because I think Blair Witch is actually great. This is the movie I wanted The Blair Witch Project to be twenty years ago. You actually get to fucking see something this time.

If you're a Blair Witch Project 1 purist, if you love the original because of its subtlety and slow build, Blair Witch 3 might offend you. The original movie had its characters scream in the dark at sounds you could not hear. The 2016 movie has them scream in the dark at loud roars and trees toppling over. You were never sure in the original if there was a witch at all or if these were just stupid dumbasses with no sense of direction. The new movie explicitly shows spooky shit happening all around them. You even get blurry shots of the Witch. She's real! The last half hour is a giant climax of scares and effects.

The plot this time is about James (James Allan McCune) who is the presumably much younger brother of the main character from the first Blair Witch Project, Heather. Decades after his sister disappeared in the woods and left her spooky footage behind, James believes she might still be alive. She seems to have shown up in a freaky Youtube video. Ignoring the obvious danger and the Jersey Devil-esque lore around the Blair Witch, James wants to find his sister. He joins up with his girlfriend Lisa (Callie Hernandez) and some other friends to explore the Maryland wilderness. Leading them is some locals, Lane (Wes Robinson) and Talia (Valorie Curry), who claim to be experts.

The locals are experts in all of jack and shit. Everybody gets lost real fast. The GPS and modern technology are easily defeated by the evil. Stick figures begin to appear all around the campsites. Then much larger, freakier ones surround the camp. Time does not work quite right in the Blair Woods. The whole final hour of the movie is endless night which the characters believe lasts for days. A horrible thing happens to one girl, Ashley's (Corbin Reed) foot. Something is growing inside her leg in some delicious body horror.

Blair Witch is helped a lot by a much larger budget and the easy availability of HD cameras. The 1999 film is shot on crappy cameras, which gives a rough and filthy realism. But also, half the time you barely understand what is even happening. The new movie does not care too much for realism at all. By the final climax, the filmmakers barely care about keeping track of the cameras. Lisa puts down her camera yet we keep getting POV shots from her. This is not a movie that allows the found footage gimmick to get in the way of good movie-making. I don't know who edited conversations into shot-reverse shot (maybe the Witch uses Adobe Premiere), but thanks for that.

Blair Witch is more of the big dumb blockbuster horror I'm looking for. I ended up really enjoying this movie. The cast is really solid. The scares are there. It isn't subtle and it isn't revolutionary, but who cares? I want a good scary horror movie that can give me a freaky POV experience of a haunted house and a witch. I got that with the third movie. Maybe I won't die on the Book of Shadows hill, but I'll die on this hill. Blair Witch is great.

Next Time: The Wailing (2016) because I need to get Korea in this party.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 25: Jason X

Spooky... the final frontier. Day 25: Jason X (2002), directed by James Isaac.

Eventually all horror franchises need to go to space. Godzilla went to space, Leprechaun went to space, and Alien started out in space. Ten movies deep, after first taking the big guy to Manhattan and to Hell, finally Friday the 13th traveled the cosmos with Jason X. By the way, this isn't "Friday the 13th Part X: Jason in the 24½th Century". The movie is just called "Jason X". You pronounce "X" like the letter, "exxx". 

A roman numeral was just too brainy for a movie like this.

It is surprising that it took Friday the 13th this long to become self-parody. Eight of these movies came out in rapid succession throughout the Eighties. They were never high art or particularly well-regarded. But even as late as the ninth movie, Jason Goes to Hell, the series was still mostly playing it straight. There were jokes in the movies but the movies weren't *a* joke. Jason X is a joke. It is a stupid movie about Jason in the FUUUUTURE, and knows it.

Honestly, this is an improvement. Most Friday the 13th movies are pretty bad, or least, not very memorable. A few are hilariously bad like Jason Takes Manhattan. For the most part they're very same-y movies. You could play me a random kill from any of these films and I'd struggle to tell you which movie it came from. They're movies you can play in the background while browsing Reddit. You do not need to pay much attention. Even if you miss a scene, you basically know the formula by now. So at least, Jason X is doing something different, tonally.

Even so, Jason X is not a good movie either. It isn't a great comedy. There aren't that many good kills. The production value is terrible. Jason X has a cast of total nobodies. Kane Hodder, the guy playing Jason whose face you never see, gets top billing and is actually the most famous person in the movie. (Well, behind David Cronenberg's cameo.) The "future spaceship" sets that feel like a D-grade SciFi series from the Nineties. These sets remind me way too much of dirty-cheap space horror movies Roger Corman was doing decades earlier. This movie could easily have been a SciFi Channel "original" in 2005 just with slightly better than usual CG effects.

Luckily, Jason X is so outrageously and shamelessly stupid it kind of still works.

After being frozen and thawing out in the future, Jason finds himself on a spaceship. Turns out though, the 24½th Century is just as aggressively horny as the Eighties. At times Jason X feels distressingly like the horrible - and even more horny - 2000 SciFi movie, Supernova. Everybody on board is fucking and Jason does not like it. Oh, also, Jason was frozen with a 20th century girl, Rowan (Lexa Doig), who gets to serve as both our first and Final Girl. People get stabbed, you know the drill.

Jason X is not entirely sure what kind of comedy it wants to be. At times it feels like Spaceballs when say, Brodski (Peter Mensah, the only actor you'll recognize) is fighting Jason. Jason stabs him once and Brodski yells "It's gonna take more than a poke in the ribs to put down this old dog!" Then Jason stabs him again and Brodski admits "...Yeah, that'll do it" and collapses. Later Jason wanders through a satire of his own movies where topless bimbos yell "We love premarital sex!" There's a great cut of him smashing their bodies against a tree. There are a lot of other jokes that are not nearly as funny. Anybody who the script calls for to be a comic relief is immediately terrible. This kid Asriel (Dov Tiefenbach) was really annoying. Luckily those character do not last long.

Later we do get a super form of Jason, Uber Jason. He's Mechagodzilla with a future machete. He's got chrome armor because everything is chrome in the future. I think Uber Jason is mostly in the movie to sell toys, but he sure looks cool.

Less cool is the cyborg girl, KM-13 (Lisa Ryder) who has a romance with a human guy, Tsunaron (Chuck Campbell). "Kay-Em" gets an upgrade where she turns into an S&M leather queen with guns. The actress can't pull that off either physically or with her delivery. I don't often feel embarrassed for a movie, but I do for Jason X when Kay-Em is supposed to be "badass". This movie needed more Peter Mensah...

Ultimately, I liked Jason X less than I thought I would. It has been about twenty years since I've seen it. It has held up worse than I hoped. There are a couple good kills. The frozen head smash and the "screwed" guy are good. Otherwise this is a cheap fucking movie that is only sometimes funny. If I had to recommend a Friday the 13th, this would definitely be up there. I recommend Jason Lives first, however. 

Next Time: Blair Witch (2016). A movie that does not go to space, but maybe it should have?

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 24: The House That Jack Built

Abandon hope, all ye who enter spooky. Day 24: The House The Jack Built (2018), directed by Lars von Trier.

Lars von Trier is the last filmmaker on Earth I'd want to meet in person. He seems like a truly horrible person based on his movies. Based on his personal life, he might have molested one of his actresses, is rumored to be an awful director to work with, and was enough of an edgelord that he claimed to be a Nazi. Maybe he's nicer in real life. His movies show a nihilistic, disgusting, sexist, arrogant worldview - which still gets him critically acclaimed. I believe he's at 50% a troll, which the last four years have shown us is no better or very different from sincerity.

To my irritation, Lars von Trier has never made an uninteresting movie. The man isn't lazy and works hard on his art. I imagine if he was less of a piece of shit he would make much better movies. "Piece of shit" is the public persona he has crafted and wants, I don't feel bad calling him that. If he's reading, I'm sure he's fine with it. Still, I have to respect the guy as a director. Nobody else is making movies like this. The world would be a less rich place without him.

The House That Jack Built is Von Trier's newest movie, coming out in 2018. It is a story about a psychopath mass-murderer, Jack (Matt Dillon), who believes his grotesque sins are actually an artistic statement. He is not just a murderer, he's a murderer auteur. We watch his recollections of his life while Jack is already in Hell. Jack discusses his sins with his guide through the Underworld, the poet Virgil  (Bruno Ganz in his last role). That's "Verge" for short. No matter how beautiful his art, Verge is still going to take Jack to his ultimate fate with the rest of the damned.

Therefore this movie is Dante's Inferno meets American Psycho. Jack has five stories to tell about what he believes are his five greatest masterworks. The House That Jack Built juxtaposes its graphic, deeply disturbing violence with long slideshows of various philosophical topics. No matter how pretentious Jack gets with his Powerpoint presentations, the shocking acts between will always wake you back up. While Jack murders one his girlfriends and her two sons, he tells Verge about the ethics of hunting. He goes into the art of taxidermy while turning a dead boy's face into a ghastly bloody smile. This movie is tedious freshmen-level art lecture meets unfathomable nightmare.

Now, one of the reasons I don't like Von Trier is that The House That Jack Built is really about one thing: Von Trier. This movie has roughly the same structure as his previous movie, Nymphomaniac, but instead of impulsive sex we now have poor Riley Keough's breasts being mutilated. (One of her breasts becomes a wallet.) As gross as it is, Jack is Von Trier. These murders reflect the director's movies and all the grotesque shit he filled them with.

Von Trier is not even subtle about it. Late in the movie Jack babbles about art while a montage plays of all his previous movies. Jack has incoherent misogynist rants while openly admiring Nazis. This is Von Trier playing up his worst public persona and throwing it back in our faces ten times more extreme.

Verge is not convinced that rot and decay can be meaningful subjects for art. But Verge is a strawman Von Trier created to lose an argument as a stand-in for his critics. The House That Jack Built is basically any Taylor Swift song where she rails against her haters. Only Uma Thermon gets her face smashed inward.

Weirdly enough, I like The House That Jack Built. It is a movie I could not recommend to another person without them believing I was just as deranged as Jack/Von Trier. I do not want to watch this movie again. This is very unpleasant stuff, no matter how well-made. (Matt Dillon is really great in this movie.) For more though, what saves this rickety House, is that there is ultimately a cosmic justice. Jack opens the movie in Hell and he belongs there. I do not recommend murdering people as a form of artistic expression. But movies about murdering, sure. You can do that handsomely and artfully. You can find truth in that.

Hell in this universe has a low humming ring. That's the sound of the damned, all screaming together echoing up from hundreds of miles deep into the endless fire. Maybe Lars von Trier does not deserve to go to there. But final judgment on the man belongs to a higher power than myself.

Next Time: Jason X (2001). SPACE JASON.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 23: Roald Dahl's The Witches

I'll get you, my spooky, and your little dog too! Day 23: Roald Dahl's The Witches (2020), directed by Robert Zemeckis.

Nicolas Roeg's 1990 adaptation of the Roald Dahl story, The Witches, is a classic. If you're of a certain age, you probably remember that movie from a dark childhood memory or two. The 1990 version is a great movie and a great children's horror movie. It is terrifying, even decades later. That old British film did not hold back on the practical make-up or puppetry. That wanted children shaking in fear. As a child, I shook.

I think shaking was good. Kids like being scared. You do not always need to protect them from it. They love Halloween and crave fear. We all do on a fundamental level. Being afraid is as much fun as it is unpleasant, like running around in circles until you puke. So sure, let your kids watch an old horror movie with intense special effects. It is good for them. The nightmares and bed-wettings build character. They'll never forget it.

Meanwhile, nobody is going to remember this 2020 version thirty years later. Roald Dahl's The Witches is a bad movie in the least interesting ways. Though I have been wrong before about remakes, I won't be wrong this time. There is no reason to watch The Witches (2020). It is the same movie again, just less good. The scares are weaker, the effects are less amazing, and everything about it is just less memorable. The Witches (2020) is a movie with some charm here or there. Director Robert Zemeckis is not talentless and knows how to conjure some whimsy. That is not enough to make his movie worth anybody's time.

The Witches (2020) barely tries to distinguish itself from the original movie. It is now set in the US rather than England's shore. Our protagonist, Charlie (Jahzir Kadeem Bruno) is a Black boy in 1960s Alabama. (Chris Rock provides voice over narration as Adult Charlie, turning this movie into the weirdest episode ever of Everybody Hates Chris.) Charlie is raised by his Grandmother (Octavia Spencer). Now I know what you're thinking. And no.

This movie completely ignores the racial history of its time and place. All that would be far too dark for the edgeless tone The Witches wants. Still, I cannot help but point that little boys like Emmett Till had more to fear in the Deep South than silly witches. Charlie and his grandma check into an upscale Louisiana hotel with seemingly no problem. This is a universe where Jim Crow never happened. Still, erasing history is a bizarre and distracting decision and the only interesting element this new movie offers to the material. I guess not everything has to be Lovecraft Country. But still.

Most of the cast is pretty game for the work, at least. Anne Hathaway as the Grand High Witch is chewing up scenery to great effect even if her fake accent is hilariously inconsistent. Sometimes she sounds Russian, sometimes Swedish, sometimes Scottish. Whatever, she is having fun. Octavia Spencer is always great. I wish Stanley Tucci had more to do as the hotel manager. The kids are even okay. 

The worst acting, however, is not on screen. Chris Rock's overly-saccharine narration is horrible. I wish it was not in the movie at all. I believe most movies with voice over could be massively improved if you just muted the narrator's voice track. The most important rule is Show don't Tell. Too many movie narrators, including Chris Rock here, bluntly Tell the audience the story, losing any subtlety or tone. The Witches has maybe the worst narrator I've suffered since Stephanie Meyer's The Host.

The CG work is effective but was doomed to fail. Nothing will ever top the grandiose make-up Angela Houston put on in 1990 or those old adorable mouse puppets. The new witches have only three fingers and no toes. That looks great. Anne Hathaway's cheeks rip open to reveal a snarling snake grin. That effect only works half the time, it usually looks terrible. The CG mice cannot help but look like Stewart Little no matter what you do.

The CG just makes the movie too cartoony, not helped at all by the forced cheer of Chris Rock's narration. There's none of that dark British edge you'd want out of a Dahl story. Even keeping the disturbing original ending does nothing to add to this movie's total lack of impact.

I never understood while watching The Witches why this movie got made. Why did Robert Zemeckis want to make this? (Zemeckis's stock has fallen so low that the best thing he's done in ten years is be a punchline in I'm Thinking of Ending Things.) Why did Guillermo del Toro lend his name to this project? Who is this movie for? Most of the charm feels as artificial as the digital effects. The movie insists that you're having fun, even when you're not. The original was a meal with a lot of layers. The remake is just sugar. This movie ends with the mice dancing to fucking "We Are Family".

Yet as embarrassing as that is, the real problem is that nothing in The Witches is scary enough for adults or children. It is a bite with no teeth and leaves no lasting marks.

Actually, that still isn't the problem. 

The biggest problem is this: why would you watch the 2020 version on HBO Max when the 1990 original is streaming on Netflix right now? There is usually very little point to remaking a great movie. In a normal year though, at least the remakes get to go to theaters. They had the big screen and caught your attention as an event. This year both Witches are on your TV, side by side. You either watch the mediocre one or the good one.

Next Time: Nothing makes me angrier than something this pointless. I'm pissed enough that I am inflicting Lars von Trier on you all with The House That Jack Built (2018). I just want to watch the world burn.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 22: Evil Dead (2013)

Hail to the spooky, baby. Day 22: Evil Dead (2013), directed by Fede Alvarez.

I believe this is my first ever re-review. I actually reviewed Evil Dead back in 2013. Those were my early days, so that review is terrible. If you're not embarrassed your past self you're not improving as a person or a critic, I suppose. 

When it came to Fede Alvarez's Evil Dead movie, I was really mean to it. Savage, in fact. "What else does it have besides whole fuel tankers full of bodily fluids? Absolutely nothing." That was one of my kinder comments.

History has not been on my side on this one. I have seen Evil Remake listed very often on lists of people's  favorite horror movies. People really love this movie. So I figure that there is a good chance that I was just an asshole. Maybe seven years later I could appreciate Evil Dead more.

To be fair to myself, I should give some context to 2013 me. Evil Dead came out at the tale end of a historic plague of horror remakes. The years 2007 to about 2014 were real bad times to be a horror fan. Evil Dead also came out only a year after Cabin in the Woods, a hilarious and more creative spin on the original Sam Raimi idea. Finally, The Evil Dead is one of my favorite horror movies of all time. There was no reason to remake it in 2013, and no movie will ever be able to hold up to the original.

Okay, so now with fresh eyes and a more mature heart, how did I like Evil Remake?

Well, I'm going to be less furious with this movie now. I was being really unfair to Fede Alvarez and everybody involved in that project with that first review. I'm sorry. Alvarez and his star, Jane Levy, went on to make Don't Breathe. That movie rules. I still don't think Evil Dead is a great movie though. It has fantastic visuals. It has even more fantastic gore. It's characters suck. Evil Dead is much less fun than it needs to be.

The original Evil Dead is a cheaper movie and a sillier one. But it is a fucking terrifying movie. I believe Evil Dead is a perfectly example of how camp and less realism can actually make a movie much scarier. The effects look nothing like reality and that only adds to the weird mood, that you'd stepped out of your sane reality to an insane world that laughs at you. Laughs at your fear. Evil Remake has no camp at all and all the budget to make its horror real. 

I still disagree with those choices in comparison. I cannot help myself. I wish I didn't have to compare Evil Remake to the original at all. It feels unfair. However, it is a fucking remake! I have no choice. I wish Fede Alvarez had just made "Freaky Forest Cabin Movie" instead with no connections to Sam Raimi at all. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil doesn't have this problem. Cabin Fever doesn't have this problem. Evil Remake does. 

Moral of the story: never remake one of the greatest horror movies of all time, it only makes your movie worse.

Anyway, in terms of actual quality and trying to ignore the remake issue, Evil Dead is doing great work. The gore is believable and lands hard. Mia (Jane Levy) licks a box cutter and slices her tongue in half. That's pretty extreme and pretty awesome. Evil Remake deserves credit for that. The tree rape now has unmistakable penetration, that's horrible and intense. Pure cringe and pure shock are impressive in their own ways. Not as impressive as Sam Raimi -and oh fuck, there I go again. I can't help myself.

Jane Levy's Mia is the best part of the movie. She is so good she ends up being both the hero and the Final Boss. That is because the cast is not given much to do.  Lou Taylor Pucci as Eric gets a lot of great work to do as the Shaggy of the group. That's where the good ends. It is strange how little characterization they are given. There's plenty of time to develop them but Evil Dead simply does not. Mia's brother David (Shiloh Fernandez) outright sucks and has no personality. He is so boring and I'm glad he is only a Fake-Out Ash, not a true Bruce Campbell replacement.

There is an attempt with greater context since Mia is a drug addict trying to recover. I cannot say this idea is much development. Deadites are not a metaphor for drug addiction. Maybe this movie needed inspiration from Frank Henenlotter's Brain Damage. But that would require camp value and unfortunately, Evil Dead is extremely anti-camp. This movie it way too serious all the way through. And that really is my ultimate problem with this movie.

It just isn't enough fun. If Evil Remake were a more fun movie it would be a scarier one. I can appreciate Evil Dead (2013) more, I suppose now. If Fede Alvarez can ever get an Evil Dead sequel off the ground, I'll watch that. Most likely, though, I'll probably never love his take on the franchise. However, I can be grateful that Evil Remake eventually led to Ash vs. Evil Dead, a really fun show. Groovy.

Next Time: The Witches (2020), another remake, just releasing to HBO Max today. I don't think anybody is going to list this among their favorite horror movies.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 21: The Masque of the Red Death

And Darkness and Decay and the Red Spooky held illimitable dominion over all. Day 21: The Masque of the Red Death (1964), directed by Roger Corman.

Edger Allan Poe's classic 1842 short story, The Masque of the Red Death is only about 2,300 words long. It has almost no characters and not much plot. Most of it is a setting description, immediately followed by a horrifying end. Roger Corman, a century later, was the master of efficient workman filmmaking. But getting 2,300 words to fill out a ninety-minute movie is a tall order even for the B-movie king himself. How do you do it?

Hiring horror legend Vincent Price as the villainous protagonist, Prince Prospero is a good start. Prospero is the only named character in Poe's story. In the movie and the story, Prospero is an arrogant lord who locks himself up in his castle to party with his friends while a plague destroys the Gothic fantasy countryside. In the story he was just a 1%er who thought he could ride out the apocalypse. In Corman's movie, he's a hedonist, sadist, and sure enough, a Satanist. He tortures villagers and his noble friends alike for his own amusement and out of true faith for the Dark Lord. That means you have an hour and a half of Vince Price hamming it up with a wonderfully bitchy smirk. He is the reason you watch Masque of the Red Death.

Since Red Death needs an actually sympathetic protagonist, we have Francesca (Jane Asher) and Gino (David Weston), a pair of good Christian peasants. Francesca is beautiful and has a pointy rack, so Prince Prospero decides to seduce her to the Dark Side. Neither good character ends up terribly interesting. They are the wet blankets of moral and sanity in this otherwise debauched film. I guess audiences needed that in 1964.

That still, however, only gives you half a movie. So there are quite a few subplots involving the various intrigues of Prince Prospero's court. Alfredo (Patrick Magee) lusts after a dwarf dancer (who is very unfortunately played by a little girl dubbed by an adult woman, so Alfredo is made a pedophile by implication). This annoys the dancer's partner, Hop-Frog (Skip Martin), a character from a totally different Poe story. We have a few gruesome moments to fill up the running time. Hop-Frog's revenge is more violent than you would expect out of a 1960s movie. Juliana (Hazel Court) attempts to commune with Satan and her death is awesome as well.

But most of Masque of the Red Death is a wordy, close to tedious horror movie. There is a forty minute section of Prince Prospero again and again being a pompous asshole. As fun as Vincent Price is, there just isn't much to the guy.

That almost squanders a lot of the great atmosphere Masque of the Red Death started out with. We open with this incredible image of a red-hooded figure sitting by a dead tree in the thick Gothic night air. It takes us almost an hour to finally get to the Masque where Death falls upon Prospero and his awful rich friends. The ending is absolutely worth it. Corman paints all his actors in dripping red, moving in a Danse Macabre on the handsome castle set. That is way worth it.

Everything in between though... Eh. A bit good, a bit bad. Still, there is never a bad time to depict the wealthy finally seeing justice for their crimes against the world. Give me a Masque of the Red Death remake for 2020. Lord knows there are far too many Prince Prosperos in the real world.

Next Time: Evil Dead (2013), a remake I absolutely hated seven years ago. But everybody I know insists this movie is great. I'll give it a second chance.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 20: The Conjuring 2

I can't help falling in love with spooky. Day 20: The Conjuring 2 (2016), directed by James Wan.

The Conjuring series is a good example of what I call "normie horror". That sounds dismissive, and it definitely is, but I don't look down at horror like this. It just isn't horror for me. These are movies for "normal" people. I am an abnormal sick puppy. In the past week I've seen a dude's dick explode, a woman get raped by a snake, and a teenage girl kiss her father. I am an explorer in the further regions of experience. Most people don't want that.

General audiences want The Conjuring. They want to be startled but not disturbed. They want a few jumps, not a lingering sense that their reality is fundamentally broken forever. There is nothing transgressive in The Conjuring or its sequel. They are fundamentally safe movies where good triumphs over evil, love conquers all, and good Catholic morals remain the bedrock of all. Nobody dies, nobody is maimed, but they are nicely spooked.

All that is fine. It isn't very interesting to me, personally. Basic Bitches need horror too and that is perfectly okay. If I had kids I probably wouldn't let them watch Mandy either. But all the billion Conjuring spin-offs like Annabelle or The Nun? Sure. I'd show them that.

The Conjuring 2 is a sequel that ignores the first old haunted house and first family. Instead we are following Lorraine and Ed Warren (Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson), the paranormal investigator power couple. We open with The Amityville Horror, the case that made the real-life Warrens famous and inspired like 30 horror movies, most bad. Lorraine is so freaked out by Amityville that she wants to retire. That is until a another famous haunting, The Enfield Poltergeist in the London suburbs, draws them back into the world of demons. Saving that family and their daughter, Janet (Madison Wolfe), is the main focus of the movie.

Note: the actual Warrens were total con artists. Most of their cases were bullshit.  But The Conjuring movies don't care about historical accuracy, anyway. And neither do you or neither do I. It isn't that important.

The best thing about either Conjuring movie is definitely the direction of James Wan. This guy can build a jump-scare like nobody else. The production just all-around is flawless. Wan is so good at this stuff it is annoying. He makes it look so easy where a million other filmmakers cannot make a haunted house movie half as good. The Conjuring 2 looks great. Maybe there is not much value gained out of using con-artists like the Warrens as heroes, but there is a ton of value gained from the English Seventies wallpaper and fashion.

About jump scares. A lot of horror fans whine about jump scares. However, I've never been against them as a technique. Some indie horror movies could use a jump scare or two, actually. If your pulse is racing and your adrenaline is running, that means the movie has had an effective emotional reaction. Nothing about them are "cheap". Maybe some movies overdue the jump scares. The Conjuring 2 does not. It even has a fake-out jump scare that I think was great filmmaking. More importantly, jump scares are fun.

Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson are great leads. They're cool and confident enough to dive right into some X-Files shit. But they can still be freaked out when it goes out of their control. They have amazing chemistry. You wish your parents were this warm around each other and so accepting. Patrick Wilson is one of the most bland White guy actors in Hollywood. Yet he can sing Elvis like a pro - best scene of the movie. And yeah, there is a weird Good Dad charisma in his blandness.

I love the ghosts in The Conjuring 2 as well. There are three ghosts or demons in Enfield, which makes it a bit overstuffed. The best one is The Crooked Man, this long spindly creature that recites his own nursery rhyme while he tries to eat you. Then there's The Nun, who is always a solidly creepy silhouette. James Wan sets up these amazing scares. What you think is a dog transforms into a monster. Or an ugly painting turns into a monster rushing at Lorraine. Any time somebody goes down a basement alone is an absolutely master class of suspense.

Sure, The Conjuring 2 is not very extreme. It is sometimes so wholesome as to be outright corny. (That Elvis scene again.) But there is something to be said for a horror movie that leaves you feeling warm. You're too happy for these people by the end of The Conjuring 2 to really have nightmares.

The Conjuring 3 is supposed to come out next year. There is no reason to think, no matter how weird your tastes are, that you are too good for that movie.

Next Time: The Masque of the Red Death (1964), because I can't do a plague year without a plague movie.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 19: The Mortuary Collection

Spooky comes for us all. Day 19: The Mortuary Collection (2020), directed by Ryan Spindell.

Let us talk about horror anthologies. This is a classic kind of horror movie built out of three or four short films. There are more of these than I could possibly count between Creepshow, V/H/S, Trilogy of Terror, Twilight Zone: The Movie, Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, Tales from the Hood, XX, and etc. etc. etc. Those are just the ones I can remember off the top of my head. 

I think these kinds of movies are so popular because horror as a genre is great for short stories. There are countless urban legends or campfire stories that can become 5-10 page stories which can then become short films or episodes of a TV series like The Twilight Zone. Short horror is the form at its most primal and most classic.

Anyway, since horror anthologies have not gone away or even slowed down, here's a brand new one: The Mortuary Collection, which was just released on Shudder this weekend. This is a movie aiming for good old-fashioned spooky thrills. The whole movie is set in some indeterminate mid-20th century period, maybe the Fifties or early Sixties. The kind of horror is almost Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark-vintage. The kind of creepy stories passed down for generations so that kids won't sleep tonight. It is so classic and even camp it could be family-friendly - except for all the gore.

The Mortuary Collection has a frame story involving an old, most-likely haunted house which serves as the funeral home for the town of Raven's End. The mortician is Montgomery Dark, played by everybody's favorite Kurgan, Clancy Brown in a ton of age make-up and thin yellow teeth. He is visited by Sam (Caitlin Custer) who claims she is here for the "Help Wanted" sign out front. But really Sam is more interested in Monty's collection of books and the stories within. Monty keeps trying to impress her with his best ghost story, which he claims really happened to the corpses he tends to, but Sam has a story of her own, which she thinks can top them all.

So then we watch the short films that make up the anthology of The Mortuary Collection. There is also a much shorter one at the beginning that Monty tells as something of a warm-up, I am not really counting that. (That one is also clearly inspired by the opening of Deep Rising.) All the stories are riffs on the usual kind of thing you'd need in a book of haunted tales or an episode of Tales from the Crypt.

You have the usual suspects here: a sexual encounter that goes disgustingly wrong, a murderer who meets supernatural justice, and a babysitter all alone on the night a psychopath escapes the asylum. I think all you needed was the hitchhiker that gets picked up the long-dead trucker and the family that brings home a Mexican rat as a pet to complete the set. It is familiar territory. But also, The Mortuary Collection has its own twisted edge to all of them.

I won't spoil the twists in any of the stories, but there is a place these stories usually end. The Mortuary Collection goes way beyond all of that. It isn't exactly a French Extreme movie in terms of blood and guts. But it is a movie that goes places. I was left so shocked after the first story I could not believe The Mortuary Collection could ever top that. That was some truly wonderful perverted and disgusting justice. Take that, patriarchy!

My only real complaint is that I think the digital color correction is way overdone. I get the old-timey ghostly atmosphere the filmmaker's want. But it is a bit much for me.

All in all, The Mortuary Collection is the perfect kind of movie to watch around Halloween. Everybody can love this kind of horror. It is fun and creative, while featuring some really memorable final images. The filmmakers did not have the world's largest budget, but they sure make the big effects land when they need them to count. The Mortuary Collection would be a great double feature with Trick'r'Treat or add the wonderful and underrated Ghost Stories to make it a triple feature. And who doesn't love Clancy Brown hamming it up as a creepy old man?

Next Time: The Conjuring 2 (2016), another Conjuring movie.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 18: Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II

Hello Spooky Lou, goodbye heart. Day 18: Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987), directed by Bruce Pittman.

The original Prom Night is not that great. There were roughly a billion slasher movies that came out in the wake of Halloween, and Prom Night... sure was one of them. Jamie Lee Curtis disco dances and that is the most memorable part of it. Not a fan.

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II has nothing to do with Prom Night 1. The producers made this a Prom Night sequel at the last minute, a timeless marketing trick of horror films. I don't think it worked in Hello Mary Lou's case, however. This movie did not make a ton of money at the box office. And it remains obscure. That's totally unacceptable. Hello Mary Lou is fantastic. It is one of my favorite slasher movies of the Eighties. It is a blast and a half.

The concept is Carrie meets A Nightmare on Elm Street. In 1957, Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage) is the most popular girl at Hamilton High School. She's the biggest - and proudest - slut in Canada. However, after an accident involving her boyfriend Billy and a stink bomb, she's set on fire at her prom and dies in horrible medieval ordeal. Thirty years later, the ghost of Mary Lou is back. She will be Prom Queen, no matter what.

Our heroine is Vicki (Wendy Lyon), a surprisingly popular girl despite dressing in very frumpy clothes. Her mom is a religious fanatic but Vicki has a social life. Her boyfriend Craig (Louis Ferreira) is the son of the principal, Billy, who is now all grown up and played by the great Michael Ironside. Vicki slowly loses contact with her circle of friends as she goes more and more crazy. She's having visions of Mary Lou, and then starts to become Mary Lou.

One of the downsides of Hello Mary Lou being so underrated is that this should have been the start of a great horror icon. Mary Lou Maloney should be up there with Freddie Kruger as a slasher superstar. She got one other movie in Prom Night III, then disappeared forever. We just do not have many female slasher figures, and that's a shame. 

Mary Lou is just out for a good time and does not give a shit how she gets it. She'll bang another dude right in front of her boyfriend. Mary Lou opens the movie giving a confession to a priest that she's a dirty whore just to see the look on his face. Plus, she has seemingly unlimited supernatural powers and is pretty creative with her kills. Lisa Schrage is great in her few scenes and so is Wendy Lyon as possessed Vicki.

(Also, Wendy Lyon chose to walk around naked for like five minutes. There are very horror movies with that much nudism that I do not like.)

Hello Mary Lou is full of great supernatural horror moments. Vicki has this big white rocking horse in her room. It later comes alive with dark red eyes and sticks out its slimy foot-long tongue. There is simpler stuff like when a volleyball net turns into a spiderweb or when hands under a sheet grope a girl. One of the best special effects is when Vicki gets sucked into a blackboard while in a classroom. It is a really clever trick where they replace the blackboard with a swimming pool of dark water and film it from above. So Vicki is swimming around with the chalk letters floating as Mary Lou drags her under. I especially love the big Carrie climax where Mary Lou rips herself out of corpse to come back alive.

While I'm gushing about this movie, I need to tell you that Hello Mary Lou is fearless. This movie states definitively that there is no heaven, there's no God, but there is Mary Lou. The priest character is no help, Christianity loses very definitively to the power of this teenage ghost. Mary Lou murders a pregnant girl. There's an incest kiss! Hello Mary Lou goes for it, man. This is a really dark movie but it is constantly having fun with pushing its boundaries. Yeah, maybe it is bleak since nothing can stop Mary Lou. But Mary Lou is enjoying herself, you can't help but join her a bit.

The cast is great too. Even the ones who are just there to get murdered are pretty well-rounded. Terri (Kelly Hennelotter), Vicki's best friend, should be a nothing character but comes off strong and caring for her friend. She has a sweet romance plotline with a boy who is just slasher-bait himself. Too bad Terri gets crushed in a locker by naked Vicki, oh well.

There is nothing Hello Mary Lou does poorly. It is scary, it is fun, it is creative, I love it. Its only mistake was being a sequel to a better-known but far less impressive horror movie.

Next Time: The Mortuary Collection (2020), a brand new horror anthology on Shudder.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 17: Alien 2: On Earth

In spooky, nobody can hear you scream. Day 17: Alien 2: On Earth (1980), directed by Ciro Ippolito.

Ridley Scott's Alien came out in 1979. It was one of the greatest movies of all time. A year later, some Italian low-budget producers created Alien 2: On Earth, a movie that has nothing to do with Ellen Ripley or Xenomorphs. It is not one of the greatest movies of all time.

I don't love Italian horror. But I do love their very loose, if not reckless, approach to copyright. Alien 2: On Earth is just one of dozens of unofficial sequels. Many horror fans know of Lucio Fulci's Zombi 2, which was a sequel to George A. Romeo's Dawn of the Dead (known as Zombi in Italy). Plus there's Troll 2, a movie that has so little to do with Troll 1, it doesn't even have Trolls. There's two different Troll 3s!

Thing is, other than the notoriety of ripping-off a major Hollywood film series, Alien 2: On Earth is not a memorable horror movie. It is quite terrible and maybe the least interesting movie I've covered so far.

In terms of an Alien sequel, it just isn't one. I don't know if Ciro Ippolito even saw Ridley Scott's movie before he made this. This is set in then-present of 1980, so cannot possibly be a sequel to Alien, which was in the far future. The movie opens with some blurry stock footage of real life space exploration. But there is no indication this is The Nostromo or Ripley's escape pod. In fact, the spaceship has nothing to do with anything because our heroes are cave explorers. The killer monsters may or may not be aliens at all, and who knows if they have anything to do with that opening. 

The "aliens" do bury inside bodies and burst out your face though. That's the one thing Alien 2: On Earth has: gore. Right from the start the aliens attack a little girl on the beach. We see her face carved inward like she's made out of watermelon. Then later there's a decent head explosion.

Alien 2 actually has more to do with The Descent than Alien. Most of the movie takes place in a dark cave. That sounds a lot scarier than it actually is. There's some decent footage of stalactites and stuff. Being trapped in a cave with monsters should be terrifying. But you have no sense of geography or even claustrophobia. It is just character running around same-y looking backgrounds, sometimes getting eaten. You barely get to see the alien! There's no clear money shot of the monster at any point.

Other than that, Alien 2 is a slow fucking bland movie. It is the kind of movie that has five minutes of driving footage just to pad out the run time. We spend a lot of time in a bowling alley doing nothing. None of the characters get any personality. I could never tell who was who, especially since so much of this movie is in the dark. One girl is a psychic for some reason. Another guy brings a typewriter with him underground so he can write by candle light. Another girl has big boobs. 

Anyway, who really gives a shit with a movie like this? I was too bored to pay attention through most of it.

This was a mistake. Watching something this boring and generic, I couldn't help but think about just turning Alien 1 on. It's on HBO Max right now. Absolute masterpiece. Nothing would complain if I broke my promise and didn't review Alien 2: On Earth. What is stopping me? Anyway, I didn't do that, you're all welcome. This movie sucks.

Next Time: I was going to do Jaws 5, but that looks even more bland than Alien 2. So instead Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (1987), a sequel that has even less to do with the original - in the best ways.

31 Days, 31 Horror Movies Day 16: Lady Terminator

Come with me if you want to spooky! Day 16: Lady Terminator (1988), directed by H. Tjut Djalil.

Lady Terminator is an illegitimate sequel to the 1984 film, The Terminator. Or maybe it is a remake? Spiritual successor? I guess "felonious rip-off" is the best way to put it. Mockbusters were a lot more interesting in the Eighties.

Lady Terminator is the English release title. In the original Indonesian it is called Pembalasan Ratu Pantai Selatan, which means "Revenge of the South Sea Queen". It was directed by Jalil Jackson, which is an alias for H. Tjut Djalil. (Foreign directors would often make up fake Anglo-ish names.) And of course, James Cameron had nothing to do with this movie. I wonder if he even knows it exists.

If you know any of H. Tjut Djalil's work, Lady Terminator is actually far less weird. Lady Terminator opens with an evil queen biting the dicks off of dudes with her vagina. That is only 10% as weird as Djalil's Mystics in Bali, a movie where a woman's head flies off her body to drink fetuses out of pregnant women. Indonesian horror is a treasure trove of wonders.

Indonesian horror at this time was trying to break out into a wider Western audience. They were not very successful. But it does explain why Lady Terminator has a mostly White cast. A good portion of this movie is a straight action movie, playing with all the big dumbass tropes of the time. Unlimited magazines, every car explodes with a single bullet, and lots and lots of angry action screaming. They probably thought this is what Americans wanted. The final fight scene is set on an empty runway so dark you cannot see anything past the characters. There's so much void space around the figures in the foreground, Lady Terminator is practically an MCU movie.

The "Lady Terminator" in question is Tania (Barbara Anne Constable), an anthropologist out to study an Indonesian myth, the South Sea Queen. She instead has a snake crawl her up snatch and then is possessed by the Queen. She's out to kill a pop star, Erica (Claudia Angelique Rademaker). Erica is the great-granddaughter of a nameless White guy who originally defeated the Queen. The Queen for some reason insists her revenge must take a century. There's a lot of weird surreal rules in Indonesian horror. Anyway, Erica is rescued repeatedly by Max (Christopher J. Hart), an American guy inexplicably working for a Southeast Asian police force.

As per the cast: Max sucks. He's a like shitty even worse Reb Brown. Barbara Anne Constable is surprisingly great in Lady Terminator. It is a lot harder to pull off Arnold Schwarzenegger's menace when you're naked half the movie. She does it. Her character Tania is basically abandoned by the movie once she is possessed. No attempt is ever made to save her. It's pretty cruel.

However, this also the kind of movie that is so cheap and obscure I'm not sure if these actors even are credited under their real name. I saw the movie dubbed in English, so who knows how much of the story I missed? At least the dubbing company tossed in some Terminator references: "Come with me if you want to live!" There are also at least two cuts of Lady Terminator floating around. Luckily I saw the more coherent one. RedLetterMedia reviewed a much more chaotic one years ago. I cannot say which one is the original director's vision.

Either cut though, Lady Terminator is a glorious rip-off. There are whole sequences from The Terminator that are completely copied. This movie recreates the Tech Noir shoot-out, the car chase, and the police station massacre. It is almost shot-for-shot at times. There are a few changes. Lady Terminator fucks Indonesian Bill Paxton to death, for one. Most of the time the Indonesian version is a pale imitation to the original. Instead of a final metal skeleton, Lady Terminator becomes a kind of half-melted zombie.

All together, I have seen much worse Terminator movies. Lady Terminator sucks as an action movie, but as a weird horror movie with a nudist witch queen? Sure. There's some really twisted sex stuff going on in this movie.

Next Time: Alien 2: On Earth (1980), the first Alien sequel! The one they don't want you to know about!

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 15: Pulse

double-u double-u double-u dot spooky dot com. Day 15: Pulse (2001), directed by Kiyoshi Kurosawa.

Pulse (AKA: "Kairo" in the original Japanese) was one of the highlights of the early 2000s supernatural J-horror boom. It was up there with The Grudge and The Ring as movies so terrifying they could not help but cross the Pacific. Most of those movies made it over here in the form of remakes. Pulse got a remake in 2006 - a movie I saw and have since completely forgotten about, but vaguely remember it being fucking terrible and so have no curiosity in revisiting it. The far superior Japanese Pulse has unfortunately ended up a bit underrated. The Weinsteins did all they could to bury the original, not releasing it until 2005 in the West to promote their shitty remake.

We are all better off without Harvey Weinstein.

The Weinstein-less Pulse is a master class at how much mileage one can get out of a simple silhouette. This movie has almost no special effects. The ghosts are typically just people standing at the far end of a hallway in black clothes. No make-up, no post-production, no scary appliances. They are not even the typical J-horror icon of the little girl with long stringy hair covering her face. In Pulse you cannot quite make out the ghost's face, or if they have a face. Whatever you're imagining is always worse than what the movie shows. The mere implication that something is so horribly wrong is all Pulse needs to terrify you down to the bone.

This is also a movie that violates one of the key laws of horror immediately: only show the monster at the end. Pulse is ready to show a creepy lady at the end of a dark concrete hallway by the first half hour. There she is. She starts walking towards the camera, moving slowly and jerking awkwardly, like a Kabuki theater dance. The hero in the scene jumps under a couch. You'll want to do the same. You might wonder how it can top that moment. Pulse does so by ratcheting up the scale. The last hour is no longer a ghost story. It's an apocalypse story.

Most of these J-horror boom movies were in some way about the horror of technology, particularly shared technology. Creepypastas are just evolutions on what these movies were already doing. The Ring would be nothing without that freaky video tape. Meanwhile, Pulse is an early internet horror movie. It is so early that characters still use floppy tapes and one guy needs the concept of "bookmarking a page" explained to him. Various young adults across Tokyo keep running into weird signals and unexplained websites on their computer. It keeps showing footage of dank apartments with individuals living lonely lives. Or a figure with a bag over its head. I couldn't imagine what was under that dark bag, but I really did not want to see.

Yup. Internet's haunted.

Most of Pulse is divided between the separate stories of Michi (Kumiko Asō) and Ryosuke (Haruhiko Kato), both slowly losing their friends around them while uncovering more about the greater mystery. Pulse is a movie about isolation, specifically the thesis that internet life would only make us more alone, not more connected. In 2020, the internet has created many horrible things, but I can't say I'm more lonely for it. Who else would I have to talk about this twenty-year-old horror movie with if not for you guys? These are plague times. If we didn't have the internet, we'd have nobody now. So Pulse's thesis is weak and really it does a bad job explaining much of anything other than "internet's haunted". But the execution is perfect.

Pulse commits to its dark theory of modern life through a very grim filmmaking style. Tokyo is constantly overcast. Every apartment building is dirty and a bit worn. The effect is clear, Pulse's Tokyo is a cold place where you're alone no matter how many millions surround you. It only gets colder and more disturbing once those crowds start to disappear. This is a slow movie with a lot of quiet pauses between the big scary scenes. I think that only adds to the sense of inevitable dread and absolute terror. 

If it isn't clear yet, Pulse is one of the best horror movies I've reviewed this month. Massive recommendation.

Next Time: Lady Terminator (1988), Indonesia's take on James Cameron.