31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 5: Lord of Illusions

1995.

Clive Barker is one of those absolutely essential names of modern horror. He belongs in the same breath as people like Cronenberg or Carpenter, huge names in the last generation of horror directors. The sad thing is that in spite of his legacy and talents, Clive Barker only directed three movies, Hellraiser, Nightbreed, and our topic today, Lord of Illusions. His writing was even more influential, inspiring both ridiculous shlock like Rawhead Rex and immensely important movies like Candyman. Barker added a spiritual edge to modern horror and a uniquely twisted queer edge. You could easily read his Nightbreed as a queer allegory. His worlds are underground places of kink and sometimes violence beyond the heteronormative imagination. Lord of Illusions is probably Barker’s most mainstream attempt to court the hetero normies. That’s probably why it is his least-celebrated and least-loved creation.

Lord of Illusions is an interesting experiment at least, combining a noir detective story with supernatural horror. Scott Bakula played our lead, Harry D’Amour, a New York private eye who travels to Los Angeles just in time to get involved with a magician conspiracy and multiple violent murders. The movie is not much interested in introducing Harry to the audience. It acts like we’ve known him for years. Harry has flashbacks to demonic events and a prominent back tattoo, and Lord of Illusions never tells you what either of those things mean. Thanks to Bakula being a prominent TV actor, Lord of Illusions has this air of being like, the season finale of a show your friends are really into but you’ve never seen. It’s like an above-average episode of The X-Files but with an R-rating.

The problem with Lord of Illusions is that while Clive Barker is excited to combine detective stories with horror, the two genres do not much mix well here. We lose any sense of mystery because the film opens with a huge sequence involving dirty cultists that kidnapped a little girl in the desert. We see immediately that their leader Nix (Daniel von Bargen) can dig his fingers into your brain to plant illusions. After all that, watching Harry hunt down witnesses is not as impressive. A big question for Harry is whether magic is real or not.

Well, we know. I saw Nix fucking fly! Magic is real! Harry is just circling around for an hour to catch up to the place the audience already reached by the first ten minutes. It becomes boring.

Harry D’Amour is a recurring character in Clive Barker’s stories, so there’s probably more to the guy. He’s prominent enough to have his own Wikipedia page. However, he just does not belong in Lord of Illusions. It’s that same effect you have in Big Trouble in Little China issue where Kurt Russell’s Jack Burton does not belong in this genre or this story and so comes off ridiculous for it. Except Lord of Illusions is not in on the joke. Scott Bakula is a solid lead, he’s got a great jawline, he can carry a movie. But he’s just not the main character here.

The main character instead should be Swann (Kevin J. O’Connor), this celebrity magician with a spectacular show modeled on Cirque Du Soleil. His whole vibe feels like Criss Angel ten years ahead of time. Swann is also Nix’s greatest apprentice and the man who defeated him in the opening of the movie. Between Swann and Nix is this bisexual love quadrilateral involving Swann’s wife, Dorothea (Famke Janssen in her first big movie role), and a rival acolyte, Butterfield (Barry Del Sherman). Butterfield is the main threat throughout the movie, murdering people while dressed in tight gold pants. Somehow all the major characters connect to Swann, yet Harry is the star. It doesn’t work.

That leads me to the issue of queerness here in Lord of Illusions. I am unsure what sexuality Swann is supposed to have, but certainly he is not an all-American hunk like Harry. Harry is totally straight. Swann and Dorothea have a non-traditional marriage that seemingly doesn’t involve sex, which is fine, good for them. The problem is that the openly queer characters like Butterfield are shown to be complete monsters and their queerness is part of their menace. Lord of Illusions is pretty regressive, the straight guy wins the day and is our hero and gets the girl. The maybe-gay guy is sidelined to a supporting role and cuckolded. And anybody completely out is a freak and should be feared. It’s bad.

Harry being the lead doesn’t work too because the final battle you’d want is between Swann and Nix. You want to see the two wizards have a big Jedi duel, but instead you got this Muggle guy here instead. Perhaps this is my own personal bias speaking. Kevin J. O’Connor would go to star in two of my favorite movies of the 1990s: Deep Rising and The Mummy. I guess if you’re a huge Star Trek fan you’d be happier Bakula getting the spotline.

Despite failing as a noir movie, Lord of Illusions still works as a cosmic horror movie. Nix’s return in the finale is as disgusting and horrifying as you’d want. The movie basically turns into Stuart Gordon’s From Beyond at the end, up to and including the throbbing pineal gland. Daniel von Bargen is better-known for his comedy roles. I can’t not see George’s last boss from Seinfeld. But he’s a great villain here. “A man who wanted to become a God, then changed his mind. I’m going to be rotten shit from now on.”

Lord of Illusions is a badly flawed movie with not-great sexual politics. But Famke Janssen wears a lot of incredible outfits in this movie. That can’t be a negative.

Next Time we head to 1996, the year of the great Macarena plague, the rise of the last Yankees Dynasty, and our next movie, Hellraiser IV: Bloodline. (Spoiler: it sucks.)

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 4: Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead

Spooky Day 4: 1994

I am going to cheat a bit and use Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead as a vehicle to discuss the entire Phantasm franchise. The plan was to just watch this one movie. But I found myself drawn in by this singularly beautiful horror series. So I went a bit overboard and watched them all.

There are dozens of horror franchises, more than you could ever imagine. Most horror franchises are less about a continuous story than dumping new parties of fresh meat for the killer to devour. There is rarely an overarching plot, just every season new teenagers come to Camp Crystal Lake to fuck around and find out. The franchises are rarely one artistic vision either. It's new directors coming in, rarely with new spins on the formula. Maybe this time Jason kills a paintball club, that's as creative as it gets. 

Phantasm though is unique in that it has a core cast of five men who are constant in almost every movie. Those five are director Don Coscarelli and his four principal leads: Mike (A. Michael Baldwin), his big brother Jodi (Mike Thornberry), their buddy Reggie (Reggie Bannister), and of course, the villain, The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm). Over forty years, against all the odds, with decreasing resources, these five men managed to pump out five movies, each one feeling like more of a miracle than the last. They all managed to tell one continuous epic of a horror story. Every few years they reunited and continued Mike, Jodi, and Reggie's lifelong battle against The Tall Man and his forces of chaos.

In 1979, Don Coscarelli, with a tiny budget, managed to make a small horror movie with his buddies. He actually wrote a lot of the script just to include them. That's why Reggie Bannister got to play Reggie, the role was written for him. The movie they made was Phantasm, a unique combination of cosmic horror, a fluid dreamy narrative, and a blue-collar American cast. Phantasm is an American movie but Italian horror logic. It never makes sense, but it's terrifying terrifying and fascinating all the same. 

Angus Scrimm played an instantly icon horror villain with his Tall Man. Nobody has ever said the word “BOY!!!!” with more power and menace. Any idea Coscarelli had, he threw it into this movie. So we have a movie with flying death spheres that drill into your forehead and alien planets. I love the first Phantasm. If you must see any of these movies, see that one.

Phantasm II is the one movie that broke up the core cast. A. Michael Baldwin was replaced by Studio demand and the character of Jodi is missing entirely. There is an alternate timeline where Phantasm becomes purely a product of the studio, pumping out nonsense sequel after nonsense sequel. Hellraiser went down this path, losing all creative energy and everything that made it cool and unique. (More on that in 1996's post.)

However, by our movie, Phantasm III in 1994, Coscarelli was back to independent production. He was able to bring back Baldwin and Thornberry, so the full cast was back. Just to prove that Phantasm would remain uniquely Phantasm, Phantasm III opens with the love interest character from II getting her head ripped-off. She was a studio demand, and so Coscarelli didn't want her

Phantasm III is a difficult movie to discuss since it is right in the middle of a continuous story since Part 1. And there’s still two movies after this. Within III, not a ton happens in the overall plot either. Mike and his brother Jodi both are missing through most of the movie. Jodi is dead and his soul is now living inside one of the Tall Man’s signature flying death balls. He keeps reappearing somehow as a kind of Jedi Ghost. This leaves, of all people, Reggie as the star.

Reggie Bannister is a bald, schlubby guy. He looks like a friendlier Dean Norris with a ponytail. As the Phantasm franchise progressed, Reggie went from an everyman to the kind surreal kind of action star and sex symbol. Imagine if your high school shop teacher was Ash Williams. It’s so patently ridiculous, and the movies know it. Reggie carries around a four-barreled shotgun and kills two ghouls with one shot. His character is proof that if you're an honest good guy, you too can fight Cthulhu or cenobites.

Most of Phantasm III is about Reggie running into various beautiful women who kick his ass. He's then unfortunately creepy around them, which is just bad. However, before Reggie can ever get murdered or laid, they're attacked by supernatural monsters, and have to run away. There isn't much of a plot as much as Reggie wandering from one individual episode to another. 

Along the way Reggie runs into Rocky, (Gloria Lynne Henry), who tries to fight a Sphere with nunchucks. He also meets Tim (Kevin Conners), who despite being a tiny child, introduces himself by killing three outlaws. Then this strange team wanders the American West, in search of answers that never arrive. Then the crew just kind of run into The Tall Man in a mausoleum for a final confrontation that leaves us with more questions than answers.

You might ask yourself, what is going on? Wasn’t Phantasm about cosmic horror at one point? Why do we have nunchaku and four-barreled shotguns and Tim’s killer frisbee? (That’s a frisbee with razor blades taped to the rim, which actually does work in killing a bad guy.) And yeah, that kind of Evil Dead action schlock does not fit in a dream-like story of Lovecraftian horror. But that’s what Phantasm is. It’s a bunch of ideas that don’t fit together. The story beats miss more than they hit and it never makes sense. But there’s still something wonderful at the heart of it. There's really nothing else it.

Phantasm never got huge budgets, and after Coscarelli broke with Universal, he sent the franchise on a rapid decline through the sequels. Phantasm III still looks like a proper movie, though one that had a tiny theatrical release and mostly was sold straight-to-video. By Phantasm IV in 1998, they were working with well under a million dollars and struggling to keep the camera rolling. A good chunk of Phantasm IV is repurposed footage from the first movie. It's barely-finished, and you can tell. 2016’s Phantasm V (which Coscarelli did not direct) was shot by an amateur team. Its production values are roughly that of fan films.

But even as Phantasm declines, there’s something deeply charming about how these five men somehow keep coming back. Even as the cast visibly ages and grows out of practice with acting, they're all still here, and still are buddies. There's real friendship on the screen that's heartwarming, even if most of the movies are objectively not great. These five men beat the odds and kept a franchise going for nearly forty years. Even at Phantasm’s worst, that kept it wacky and special. Phantasm is the ultimate underdog horror franchise.

Next time: we travel to 1995, the year of the OJ Simpson Trial, Oasis, and our next movie, Lord of Illusions.

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 3: Cronos

Spooky Day 3: 1993

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 2: Dead Alive

Spooky Day 2: 1992

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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