31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 3: Demons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next time: Demons (1985)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next time: 2018's The First Purge.

'Marvel's Avengers': Earth's Mightiest Incoherence

Marvel’s Avengers is a hero game with a thousand faces. You never know what game you will be playing any minute. Avengers might be Uncharted 3, it might be Destiny, it might be Aquaman: Battle of Atlantis. The cutscenes present a finely-polished AAA video game from 2020. The combat transports you back seventeen years and suddenly you’re playing a PlayStation 2 brawler you found at the bargain shelf of EB Games – complete with a missing cover. The menus are a byzantine labyrinth of loot, gear, abilities, and currencies. Now, you’re back in good old 2020. Every superhero game apparently has to be this now.

I could find a thousand games in the incoherent, barely-finished world of Avengers. But really, I want to focus on two games: the game developer Crystal Dynamics wanted to make, and the game their bosses made them make. In truth, I have no idea what happened behind the scenes in the development of Avengers. Jason Schreier has yet to crack this case. Maybe I'm wrong. Crystal Dynamics perhaps were inspired by Anthem and thought it would be a perfect fit for the MCU.

But I see a studio that made 2012’s Tomb Raider, a cinematic action-adventure that out-Uncharted Uncharted. They brought in developers from Naughty Dog and from Sony Santa Monica. These are people who made some of the best AAA experiences of the last decade. Square Enix told them to make a brawler with monetization hooks. You end up with Avengers, a game with a solid campaign in service to a bland looter shooter with very little shooting or very good loot. It is like if Wolfenstein II’s story was made for Battleborn.

As late as last month I figured Avengers would be a failure in an obvious, boring way. It would be simply a game not for me, maybe not for anybody, but that was fine. I do not need to play every video game in the world. I’m not offended by a gear loot game if that’s what the developers wanted to make. I definitely will not be playing or reviewing Godfall, don’t worry. (Really, I’m only covering this game because I happened to luck into an extra copy a friend of mine had.) But upon Avenger’s release, I was shocked to learn this was fairly close to something I wanted to play. Avengers has ambitions to be a playable Ms. Marvel MCU movie. That should have been great. 

Sadly, there was another, much worse game Avengers also had to be.

I Do Not Understand 'I'm Thinking of Ending Things'

Fifteen minutes into I’m Thinking of Ending Things, I guessed the big twist. I was right. That didn't help. I still have no idea what Charlie Kaufman's newest movie is really about.

 

If you're more lost than I am, I can tell you what's "real" and what's "fantasy". That part is easy. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is not some intricate Mystery Box built to surprise you in a single grand reveal. It isn't Fight Club. The details of the story make no sense right from the start. I could clear up some points, but this review is not one of those "I'm Thinking of Ending Things - Ending Explained!" pieces that are so distressingly popular. No, I'm maybe a few steps ahead of you. But I'm no closer to the answer. What is Kaufman trying to say with this movie? I don't know.

I am not really sure what genre I'm Thinking of Ending Things even belongs in. It definitely is not a love story, because the romance is already terminally ill by the time the movie begins. There's plenty of ridiculous moments, including a broad parody of one of the worst Best Picture winners of the last twenty years. But it isn't a comedy. I was terrified watching much of the film, but horror feels wrong too. If it is a tragedy, it has picked a particularly unsympathetic hero. I'm Thinking of Ending Things is two hours of uncomfortable conversation interrupted by moments of extreme existential nightmares. Then the main narrative dissolves completely. Genre is not a useful tool to help understand this piece.

Never mind my utter bewilderment at I’m Thinking of Ending Things. If you just want a simple yes or no recommendation, then reading stop now. This movie rules. It is an extraordinary piece of art made one of the true greats of cinema. We are spoiled to have Charlie Kaufman. I say we're spoiled, even as he tortures us with his stories about miserable men and the unattainable women around them. I'm Thinking of Ending Things might be his weirdest film yet. Still, while I am so entranced by the filmmaking craft on display here, I don't know much of anything about this purpose of this movie. Does Charlie Kaufman even like the character he's created here? Is this a plea for sympathy for a man ignored by the world? Or is it telling us the character was better off silent because he had nothing to say in the first place?