31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 7: Gremlins 2: The New Batch

Week 1 of Spooky is done. Welcome to Day 7: Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990), directed by Joe Dante.

I have loved this movie since I was a little kid. I like it better than Gremlins 1. Always have. The first Gremlins is a great horror movie, if maybe just a bit too scary for little kids. Gremlins 2 is just a step-up in terms of zaniness. The series went from horror with some comedy to comedy with some horror, AKA, the Evil Dead trajectory. It works either way.

Gremlins 2: The New Batch opens with an animated Daffy Duck fighting Bugs Bunny over the opening titles. That is a clear statement of what Joe Dante wants this movie to be: a Looney Tunes cartoon. It is jokes a mile a minute. The Gremlins start their rampage early and keep going for most of the movie. If anything, there might be too much imagination in here. Gremlins 2 is entertaining you so much you're a bit exhausted afterwards. Or after an hour and forty minutes of Gremlin cackles you might have a slight headache.

All franchises must eventually Take Manhattan. Jason did it, the Muppets did it, the Daleks did it. Now the Gremlins are doing it. After his owner dies, our precious little baby Gizmo is taken over to Clamp Tower, "the largest smart building in North America". Mr. Clamp (John Glover) is parody mixture of Donald Trump and Ted Turner, but more benevolent than either of them. Where Donald Trump turned out to be a disgusting and awful human in every way who deserves nothing but the worst punishments that God could bring upon a cursed soul (please do not get well soon), Mr. Clamp is full of childlike excitement at his toys. Underneath it all he's more a Walt Disney softie, up to and including the terrible labor politics. Make John Glover president, is what I'm saying.

Clamp Tower is full of gadgets and uncaring automated voices. Gremlins 2 has like nine gags going on in the background of most scenes. It has an almost Airplane!-esque density of humor. There's a running gag that the revolving doors do not work. When you pull the fire alarm the alarm system reads out "Fire: the untamed element, oldest of Man's mysteries, giver of warmth, destroyer of forests! Right now this building is on fire!".  

As you might expect, Gizmo gets wet and out come a new batch of Gremlins to attack the Clamp building. There, that's your plot.

Gremlins 2 has so much going on at all times that it would really be impossible to go over every great scene. Leonard Maltin gets murdered while reviewing the first movie. Hulk Hogan shows up to rescue the forth wall at one point. The Gremlins break into Christopher Lee's mad science lab to splices themselves into all kinds of hybrids. So you have electric Gremlins, fruit Gremlins, and pretentious evening talk show Gremlins. There's so much going on that our heroes, Billy (Zach Galligan) and Kate (Phoebe Cates) largely disappear from the movie. Phoebe Cates is missing for like a whole half hour without much explanation. In Gremlins 2 the humans take a back seat. The real stars are the Gremlins.

As a horror movie, Gremlins 2 is maybe not the scariest thing on Earth. But the effects are great. All this puppetry holds up thirty years later. The stop-motion looks a bit off, but there is not much of it. There's some really solid melt effects on the Gremlins. I'm especially impressed by the close-ups we get on the baby Gremlins growing out of the tumors on the Gremlins' back. Yuck. And yeah, some scenes like the big Spider Gremlin and the Gremlins in the elevator are kinda creepy. The Gremlin that Robert Picardo fucks at the end is creepy as well... in a different way. (Yes, he definitely fucks that Lady Gremlin.)

Oh, Gizmo is absolutely the cutest fucking thing to ever walk in celluloid. He was the Baby Yoda of his day. They're both puppets, CG just wouldn't be as adorable. I feel my biological clock tick every time he says or does anything.

Gremlins 2 gets a huge recommendation to me. Absolute must-watch. There's so much in this movie I didn't even get to the Canadian restaurant yet. Or how America's Sweetheart, Dick Miller gets to fight a gargoyle. You cannot really get more movie in a movie than you do with Gremlins 2.

Next time: One Cut of the Dead (2017), a low-budget Japanese zombie movie with a 37-minute long-take shot. I'm curious.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 6: Exorcist II: The Heretic

Still More Shocktober. Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977), directed by John Boorman.

The Exorcist is often called the scariest movie ever made. Exorcist II: The Heretic has never been called the scariest movie ever made. It has, however, topped lists of Worst Movies of All Time. That is a bit unfair. But Exorcist II is a terrible movie. Don't worry.

The reputation of this movie has done it no favors. Exorcist II has attained kind of a legendary status as the ultimate disaster of a sequel. I've heard stories that this movie inspired riots in test screenings. William Friedkin, director of the original Exorcist, claims that after just ten minutes test audiences were chasing the Warner Bros execs out of the theater. I don't fully believe this story, it might be 70% bullshit. Maybe those audiences saw a different cut than I did. The current version of Exorcist II is not offensively bad or any kind of betrayal of the original. It is just a limp movie that feels incomplete and very unfocused. You don't get angry at a movie like Exorcist II. You're just disappointed and bored.

Describing the plot you'd think Exorcist II is a really wack-a-doo thing. Boorman brings in these Seventies New Age bunk science ideas of hypnotism and shared dreaming. (Interestingly, these crackpot hypnotism repressed memories ideas would manufacture a Satanism scare a few years later.) Having survived her first demonic possession, Regan (Linda Blair) is now sixteen and is getting psychological treatment at a pediatric center built entirely out of SciFi hexagonal glass rooms. Her doctor, Gene Tuskin (Louise Fletcher, Nurse Ratchet) allows Father Philip Lamont (Richard Burton) to interview Regan. Lamont and Regan uncover latent memories about the Assyrian demon Pazuzu and its connection to an African man, Kokumo (James Earl Jones).

I wish I could adequately explain the plot of Exorcist II. You'd think an Exorcist movie would be relatively simple. There should be easy questions like "who is processed?" or "what is the Devil trying to do here?" or "what are the good guys trying to accomplish?" that cannot be answered. Regan is barely imperiled. Nothing much scary is happening at any point. For 90% of this movie the scariest things to happen to Regan is that she trips on stage or she stares over a balcony in Manhattan.

Richard Burton gets to fly out to some striking orange African sets. He wanders through some very cool surreal imagery. This whole section of the movie turns into a narrative dead-end that maybe at best sets up a vague insect metaphor that might explain the ending. Maybe? Kokumo turns out to be a biologist who in dreams appears as a man in an insect hood. There are a lot of locusts - which is Beelzebub than Pazuzu, but whatever. 

I believe John Boorman and the writers had a clear idea at some point what Exorcist II was supposed to be. That was lost either in editing or the many rewrites of the script.

It is not until the last twenty minutes where Regan and Lamont go back to her house in Georgetown that anything really scary happens. This is a great sequence. The house set tears apart while Father Lamont rips the heart of an Evil succubus taking Regan's body. A woman sets herself on fire. However, what the fuck does that have to do with anything? Why did they go back to Georgetown at all? Exorcist II is a movie that had no idea how to end. I think even the filmmakers lost track of what they were trying to do by this point. 

Why is this movie subtitled "The Heretic", anyway? What heresy are we talking about? Paulicianism? Arianism?

Exorcist II is a slow movie that manages to still be remarkably difficult to follow. Worse, it is a hard movie to even pay attention to. I expect more out of John Boorman. He made Zardoz! This should be so much weirder and fascinating. Exorcist II at least looks great. The African imagery is unique at least. The great Ennio Morricone did the score and it's awesome. But the movie just never came together. Exorcist II is the least interesting kind of failure. What a shame.

Exorcist III, however, rules. Should have seen that instead.

Next Time: Yeah, I'm not risking two big failures in a row. Let's watch something fun. Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990). 

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 5: From Beyond

Days of the Scaredy-Cat, Day 5: From Beyond (1986), directed by Stuart Gordon.

From Beyond is not an official sequel to Stuart Gordon's classic, Re-Animator (that would be Bride of Re-Animator), but it is a sequel in spirit. They're both loosely based on an H.P. Lovecraft story. They both star Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton. Finally they're both really gross and horny movies with a twisted sense of humor. H.P. Lovecraft wishes he ever could be this icky. He seems like a kind of humorless sexless man from his fiction. Plus, Stuart Gordon's take on the material cuts all that racism. So yeah, Stuart Gordon is better at Lovecraft than Lovecraft. There, I said it.

If you love practical gore effects, From Beyond is not merely a gem, it is a goldmine. No, it is El Dorado. From Beyond should be in the same conversation as The Thing or The Fly for wonderfully disgusting body horror perfection. I made my sister watch this with me. And before the movie started I had to quote Pinhead and said, "we have such sights to show you". You are in for a ride. You might need a shower afterwards from all the slime and perversions.

From Beyond is about Dr. Crawford Tillingast (Jeffrey Combs), a scientist locked in a loony bin because he is suspected of murdering his partner, Dr. Pretorius (the very hairy Ted Sorel). Dr. Katherine McMichaels (Barbara Crampton) believes Tillingast's crazy story about exploring alternate dimensions and growing the pineal gland to create a "third eye". She forces him to restart the Mad Science at Pretorius's house, whose address is amusingly 666 Benevolent Street. Turns out Pretorius has become one with the sensual pleasures "from beyond". The machine has a stimulating side-effect, because Katherine and Crawford are pretty damn horny for each other, and the demons are way horny for Katherine. 

Oh, also Ken Foree is hanging around in a Browns jersey. It is always nice to see Ken Foree, but he does not get a lot to do in this movie.

From Beyond then starts going off the rails even further, as if it ever was on rails to begin with. There are killer fish floating around from beyond our universe. Pretorius's flesh begins to mutate and melt. You can push his shoulder inwards like it is playdo. Yuck. Stuart Gordon here inspires a generation of hentai artists by wrapping tentacles around helpless red-faced women. People grow tentacles out of their foreheads which gives them a craving for brains. Katherine dresses up in an S&M outfit and dry humps a sleeping guy. Ken Foree wears only a speedo and fights a sandworm in the basement. From Beyond has everything. Any bad taste idea you can imagine, it is probably in this movie. Chow down.

I will say what keeps From Beyond from being just an absolute masterpiece is a few limits of budget here or there. 90% of this movie is set in one bland house set with only four actors. There is a particularly bad miniature of 666 Benevolent Street that they keep using and staging actors in front of. The characters do actually develop, but mostly so Stuart Gordon can have them do weirder shit. None of the characters feel finished though. That isn't on the actors, everybody is great in this. As an effects movie, From Beyond is great. As Lovecraftian mindbending horror, it is overshadowed by In the Mouth of Madness, Annihilation, and yeah, even Event Horizon. 

But none of those have S&M dry-humping, so From Beyond's place in history is unquestionable.

Next Time: The very unloved The Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977).

Top 10 September 2020 First-Watches

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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