This Old Boring House

Like a lot of horror fans I find myself spending more time scanning the lists of streaming horror than I do watching the fear-fests they claim to present.
A long time back I stopped falling for the lure of anything with 'zombie' in the title. The only zombie films I'm willing to try these days are overt comedies like the Dead Snow movies.
Also, I'm generally avoiding anything sporting cannibal hillbillies (unless they're in France), slashers, demonic possession and haunted dolls.
I'm still quite gullible regarding witch cults, weird parasites, fairy tale creatures and plain old bizarre setups for disaster.
Generally I'm more inclined to supernatural or 'weird' horrors than I am the mundane and purely gorey sorts.
So, I'm kind of surprised to find myself losing interest in most of the haunted house offerings I'm seeing these days.
I was good on the first Insidious... even the first Paranormal Activity film... but the last several 'spooky house' movies I've watched have been pretty played out. I find myself just yawning till the next jump scare. I've watched my way through most of the better Japanese ghost films... and those are fun... but again, they seem to end up being the same bag of tricks rearranged.
My tastes have definitely drifted toward 'the weird'. I've been reading lots of Thomas Ligotti and Michael Cisco and Robert Aickman. Not necessarily 'scary' but definitely haunting... stuff that sticks with me long after I'm done reading. Sadly I'm not coming across many films that capture that feel. Maybe it's something that doesn't translate well to film.
I'd like to find a new Eraserhead or another Banshee Chapter to watch... Bellflower wasn't really horror in the usual sense but it put me in the same zone as The Snowtown Murders and the first season of True Detective. The best ghosts I've seen lately were in my recent binge-watch of Carnivale and its cursed town of Babylon, Texas. Haunting and sad... frightening without jump scares.
Maybe I'm tired of movies trying desperately to scare me when what I want them to do is haunt me and leave me feeling that old Chapel Perilous doubt of my perceptions.
That's harder to do and not something the average U.S. audience can sit still for these days. But that's what I'm hunting for at the moment.

Return to Boggy... oh, wait...

Last night a friend and I watched Willow Creek... Bobcat Goldthwaite's (!) love song to Bigfoot and The Blair Witch Project. I liked it quite a bit... slowly building dread... a long sustained scene of encroaching horror... a sudden chaotic mess of violent weirdness before the darkness... and then some crappy music over the credits that kinda shit all over the mood but... meh, up to the end credits I was firmly on its side.
Anyway... my point isn't to review the thing... it comes down whether you hate found footage movies or micro-budget horror or anything that requires an attention span and imagination (no, you do NOT get to see the monsters)... if so this one isn't going to please. On the other hand... if you love The Blair Witch Project, June 9, Bigfoot in general... or movies that take their time telling the tale... maybe it's worth a watch.
The thing I thought was worth discussing about this one, besides the fact that I found it pretty scary, is that up until the very final moments... and mostly after it was over... I hadn't found it creepy. Scary... but not creeeeepy. And then I did.
From here on it's all about the ending... so... lots of spoilers... so... whatever.


The thing is... at the end of the movie... amidst running and screaming and unseen monsters and weird inhuman noises... there's this woman. A naked woman.
You'd heard her a bit earlier in the film... and maybe seen a photo of her on a missing poster in the diner. She whimpers and jabbers out in the darkness and you're not really sure until that brief glimpse that it's a human woman you hear... but it is.
She just standing there. Huge and naked and obviously a bit past sanity.
Only a glimpse. But it changes the context on much of what came before it... and made the movie haunt me for a good while after.
Being naked is important here... because if she'd been fully clothed it would have implied something much different. 
See, up until that naked mumbling woman showed up I was pretty firmly expecting that this wasn't really about Bigfoot at all... that it was angry mountain folk exacting revenge on the city folk for nosing around in their woods. There would be a violent beatdown... but it would come from fists and axe handles and maybe a gun... and would probably involve rape and/or cannabilism of at least one of the protagonists if not both.
Just saying that was my guess... it seemed reasonable because if the movie just ended up with the couple being smacked by a hairy claw... that would seem kind of anti-climactic, even if it was in fact a climax (and maybe it was just a bear, yeah?)

So anyways... there's this naked woman. Out in the woods, in the darkness, just standing there like she's in a daze.
The obvious implication is that Bigfoot (Bigfeet? The movie implies there's a bunch of them) kidnaps human women... but kills human males (so sorry birthday boy... but at least your beliefs were vindicated).

Now... here's the second squicky aspect of that ending. Earlier in the movie the female of the couple, who has no interest or belief in Bigfoot at all, makes several jokes about Bigfoot's sex organ. How big it must be and whatnot. At one point she mock strokes the (non-existent) penis of a wooden Bigfoot statue.
This seemed like pretty standard joking around early in the movie when it all seems a lark... but seeing that naked woman in the woods... and the final sounds of that girlfriend screaming out in the darkness... followed by multiple howls of her captors... well, there's not much way around the idea that she was about to get up close and personal with cryptozoology in a way she (and I) never expected.
Captured and raped... probably gang-raped... by monsters.
It's a horrid, lurid thought... and in a way a really really black bit of humor giveb her earlier comments about the big hairy guy's privates.
It's creepy... it's horror. It bothers me. That's good right?
So is this a successful horror movie? I guess so... it scared me... then it creeped me out... and it's a bit squicky as well. Not that the idea of monsters raping women is anything new... implied or not. Humanoids From The Deep did it in the Wayback with a whopping lot more exploitation dolloped on top.
The idea of Bigfoot running off with women isn't anything new either.

So should I be 'offended' by this movie? Bothered about Mr. Goldthwaite's choices and such? Is there some nasty undertone of something here? Not that a WHOLE LOT of horror films don't pack in the overt misogyny. But I guess I'm not sure if I should identify this as one of those... or not. There's no exploitation angle... no shots of horny Bigfoot. That one shot of the nude woman in the wood is NOT something I imagine any normal male could build a house with.

I'm also on the record for thinking that modern horror films often shy away from sexual horror, particularly when it obviously SHOULD part of the story.
Chief on that list would be the Hostel movies... because it just seemed so damn weak that they failed to address what very likely would have gone down in those filthy little rooms before the final cut/drill/saw. And I don't mean just to the female victims. 
Sure, there are lots of nude women in horror films... and there's often some sexual predation on the minds of the hillbilly cannibals or mutants or whatever is chasing them... but it hardly ever comes to pass. Male characters are generally pretty safe from anything rapey happening to them at all.
Compare that to a rarefied something like Calvaire... where the protagonist seems to generate unrequited lust in everyone he meets... and DOES get the blunt end of it eventually.
Things seem wilder in 70s horror... could something like They Came From Within even get made nowadays? Maybe/probably? Even if it did those little girls on leashes would NOT be there.

I'm not saying I WANT to see rape and other genital nastiness in horror... but when it really should be present and it blatantly isn't... AND yet tosses in loads of topless women in the non-horror sequences... what's that about?
So... circling back to Willow Creek... yeah, I guess it makes total sense and feels appropriate that the female protagonist ends up in THAT sort of awfulness. It's a much more shocking and confrontational ending than anything else I can think of. The movie didn't pull its punches and I appreciate that. Even if it does leave me feeling a pretty icky.

More October horror!

So... more with the October horror viewings... 

After The Whip and the Body I was in the mood for more Mario Bava... if I could find something I hadn't seen... so I remembered this:

Lisa and the Devil... which I think I must have skipped over because of the presence of Elke Sommer and Telly Savalas... which is of course silly of me. Did Telly start his lollypop thing with this movie or with Kojack (started the same year)?
I was never a huge Telly Savalas fan but I think he's just right here. Not too malevolent, not too comical. The lollipop thing is a bit distracting though.

I particularly liked the music and opening credits in this one, very 70s... and the atmosphere/sets are great. The plot is a bit of a mystery... reminding me both of Nightmare Castle and Carnival of Souls. I love anything that hints at old forgotten tragedies reaching out from the past... sad/tragic horror, which is what this is. The basic tale is pretty easily discerned but murky in the details... which I'm fine with and somewhat expect in Italian horror. My only real complaint is the location of the very end... which kind of takes it out of its otherwise solidly gothic mood.

Next up I watched:

I'd been wanting to see Deliver us from Evil for a while and finally got the chance. Its idea of a rash of demonic possessions had me thinking of Rec and Fallen... which I had liked a lot. Once it got started it was obvious they were going after the style of Seven... with near constant rain and darkness and filth... a theme of madness and corruption (one of the secondary characters even has the seven deadly sins tattooed on his upper back). It's an obvious 'homage' but they did it well and the first three quarters of the film are genuinely creepy.
Where I lost interest was in that last quarter when the mystery has been pretty much solved and the films shifts over into Exorcist territory. The Bible and crucifix come out for the big exorcism extravaganza we knew was coming. For whatever reason (maybe my not being Catholic) this sort of stuff never much works on me and I found it all a bit ho hum. Not scary... and fairly predictable.

Pretty good horror flick though. 

Last night I finally got around to watching:

 

I'd heard mention of Banshee Chapter in some of the darker internet holes I frequent. Probably in some vague connection to Slenderman and the Marble Hornets videos (which it kindasorta reminded me of). 

It's a weird/uneven movie, stylistically... jumping in and out of 'found footage' and traditional styles. It probably moves a bit faster than it should have. Obviously low budget but doing a lot with what its got. 

It made me jump at least once and set up a very creepy tone that lasted after it was over. A lot of that lingering fear was due to the wise choice of never defining or showing what exactly the threat was. There are various suggestions... and Lovecraft is pulled in at one point (the movie is basically a re-imagining of his story From Beyond)... but the extent and nature of the 'monsters' is left mostly to our imagination, which MUCH better for me than whatever CGI fest we would have gotten if someone had rained cash on the production.

I think the low budget really helped the atmosphere in general... many of the spaces feel quite real (because they are) and not like sets at all.

Outside of the atmosphere, by far the best thing going for Banshee Chapter is having Ted Levine along as a Hunter S. Thompson/William S. Burroughs avatar. His performance brought the whole thing up several notches for me. I've seen some folks complain that his character brought too much comedy... but for me it was the sort of humor that just makes the scary parts even scarier.

Uneven and quirky but I really enjoyed this one. 

Next up I'm going to try to get back to more gothic fare... my original plan was to stick to movies I hadn't seen and which exemplified atmosphere and ghoulish fun over gore and outright violence... Wolf Creek 2 was my only big step off that path so far... so no more serial killers.

October Movie Challenge... worse and better

Despite the fact that for the past couple days all I've watched were more old episodes of Dark Shadows (which I'm enjoying but not feeling inspired to write about) I was inspired to keep posting after reading Undead Johnny over on The World Of The Weird Monster Blog... 

So tonight I watched this:

I knew nothing about it, picked it mostly because of the title (being a sucker for anything with Witchdoctor in the title) and the kindasorta 'grindhouse' poster art. 

Anyway, it was utter crap... so why waste any space on it?

Really, utter crap.

So... to wash that bad taste outta my brain I moved on with another something I'd never seen but had little doubt would be much better:

And... it was indeed much much better. Hard to go wrong with Mr. Bava and Mr. Lee and loads of creepy gothic atmosphere.
I'd certainly heard of The Whip And The Body... and love Mario Bava's films... but had somehow never gotten around to watching this one.
It might just be residue from too much Dark Shadows but Christopher Lee here reminded me quite a bit of freshly decanted Barnabas Collins... no fangs but cruel and conniving.
 

So once again I'm trying to do the October horror challenge and watch a new-to-me horror film each day of the month.
So far I've kept up despite not having written about them... so... catching up:

Oct 1st. I Vampiri. A B&W Italian horror with Mario Bava's influences all over it. It's got a 'vampire', a mad scientist, a resurrected corpse, a dungeon full of skeletal victims, a creepy castle w/ nearby creepy crypt accessible by secret passageways, nubile coed victims, determined reporters and an electronic gargoyle burglar alarm.
The story is nothing special but that's more than made up for by all the gonzo elements at play.

Oct 2nd. The Demon. Another old B&W Italian movie. This one is much more cinema verite... most of the cast seem to be non-actors and there are no overt FX or gore to be seen. The sets seem to be real buildings though in some cases I wondered why people were living in what appeared to be ruins.
Here it's the story that's of main interest. A young woman named Purif is romantically obsessed with a local stud named Antonio... based on some earlier roll in the hay it seems. Purif goes a bit nutty when she learns that Antonio intends on marrying another local girl and sets out to put a curse on him that will either ruin him or bring him to her arms.
I'm not real clear on what Antonio has against Purif, she's the definitely the prettiest girl in town and has a load more personality than the bland woman he's betrothed to.
Anyway, the curse leads to the rest of the townsfolk wanting to chase Purif out of the village. Purif herself gets so distraught over Antonio's wedding that she tries to chase a herd of goats into the church and then... appears to become possessed.
At some point she has a chat with a dead boy... undergoes and exorcism that might include being raped by a priest... does the Linda Blair spider-walk (a decade before Linda did)... and generally acts like a bit of a loon.
The scary/creepy stuff is a combination of Purif's bizarre behavior and the rampant old world superstitions of the townspeople. Purif might just be insane but the local nuns just seem to think she's got a bad attitude... meanwhile the townies are running through the streets with burning branches looking for her.
This one is kind of bleak and doesn't have much nice to say about rural Italy.

Oct 3rd. On the mention of someone in my reading group I watched Wolf Creek 2... which I'd been avoiding after only barely enjoying the first one.
The first one played a bit coy with its villain, not giving him all that much screen time and kind of lulling you into thinking he might be an OK guy to have a beer with. The sequel just drops all pretenses of such mystery and puts him on camera, spouting wise-cracks, every chance it gets.
In the original the guy was menacing, creepy, mysterious... a decent monster. In this one he's just fucking annoying. I kept hoping someone would manage to kill him, or at least break his jaw... but that obviously wasn't in the cards.
Another thing that bugged me was how the sequel felt the need to be much BIGGER... we've got Mick driving all over the outback, shooting random locals and police... using a semi truck as a torpedo, riding a horse into the sunset, showing off his fancy new tunnels of terror complete with pit traps and attack dogs. It's MORE not less. 
About midway I was actually considering turning it off and looking for something less stupid... but then it kind of got better... or less bad... as it closed frame and got up close and personal between the two leads. Still not good, but less annoying... and I made it to the end.
I fully expect the next installment to have Mick on a Carribean cruise ship or maybe in space.

Oct 4th. I kind of copped-out here and watched the first several episodes of the original Dark Shadows... which were new to me since I'd only seen later episodes and even on Netflix they usually only have the later episodes from Barnabas onwards. I've always had a soft spot for the show... despite it's soap opera failings... and it's fun watching the pre-Barnabas episodes, knowing that Barnabas was only ever intended to be a brief storyline, not the primary protagonist he became. 

So I have been doing pretty well at keeping to my plan to watch horror movies every day in October. Not that I've been writing here about them.
I've been sticking to watching stuff I haven't seen before... so not counting stuff like The Haunting, which played on TCM a few weeks back.
I watched a bunch of older stuff I'd been negligent about... like White Zombie (great atmosphere but the background music needs to shut up)... and I finally watched The Conjuring... which, much as I suspected, just annoyed me with it's Christian-babble.
I don't get why I can watch stuff like The Exorcist, with all its Catholic magic and not be bothered... but add in some Bible-thumpers like the Warrens and I just lose all tolerance. The Conjuring has some stuff that would otherwise strike me as ghoulish fun... but the Warrens (real or acted) just put me right out of the mood.
I don't think it's a flaw with the movie... it's a flaw with me... surely something to do with my previous life as a Christian and subsequent coming to my senses about it all. Kinda like an ex-smoker who becomes an anti-smoking zealot.
Not that I was ever 'super christian' or even a fundamentalist (though I did attend some very fundamentalist churches).
Anyway... enough with my self-analysis.
The two movies I've liked the most so far are kind of similar in that they both feature cute psycho girls on a rampage.
The Love Ones was more from the victim's point of view... but boy, was that driller killer a cute mess of a murderess. I was rooting for her right up to the bitter end... hoping against all likelihood that she and her latest boy-toy would work out their differences and find true crazy love in the Outback.
My other fave is Alyce Kills... which has a slow build up to some solid bloody rampaging in the last quarter hour. Again, the crazy girl is hot stuff... as acknowledged by everyone around her.
I'm not necessarily a fan of woman-on-a-rampage films. I did like Ms. 45 but that was mostly because of the way it looked, the sleazy urban mood it dished out.
The Loved Ones has a cheerfully gruesome thing going on... a bit in the EC end of the pool with it's head drillings and loboto-zombie filled basement.
Alyce Kills is a bit more like Ms. 45. It's got a similar vibe. Even though it's not really a revenge story there's a certain note of justice involved in the killings... and the dark philosophizing of the drug dealer guy is some of my favorite bits. I'm thinking the ending was a bit too cute though... or at least cuter than I wanted it to be.

Hopefully I'll get around to watching the Insidious sequel and Escape From Tomorrow before the month is out.

Hey! It's October!

So I'm once again going to try, and most likely fail, to watch a horror movie every day of October and come up up with some lame insight based on what I watched.

Yesterday, October 1st, I went looking for something to start off with...
I had some criteria.
I wanted to start with something somewhat decent, hopefully classic.
I also wanted to watch something I'd never seen.
It's kind of hard to hit both... I've seen most of the good old stuff... that I know of... that's available to be seen.
What I settled on was Dr. Cyclops. I'd never seen it all the way through, it's something of a classic in that it gets name-dropped in several other genre films.
Too bad my internet crashed at the last minute and I couldn't get to it...

So, instead I ignored my rules and just shoved in Undead, the Australian zombie/alien movie from a few years back.

Now, I hadn't seen Undead, so at least that box got checked... but it wasn't 'classic'.
I'm still not sure if it was 'decent'.
For one thing, I went in not knowing it was a comedy. A fairly broad comedy at that. It reminded me a bit of Peter Jackson's early films... though not nearly as gross or funny.
It's definitely one of those movies where people/zombies are big bags of red juice... waiting to be split asunder by any handy implement of destruction. Fists go through heads, a man is split in half by a steering wheel lock, a head is knocked off by a weaponized zombie-arm. All of that in the first several minutes of the movie.

So, lots of red on everyone.
The dialog is very 'wacky'. The characters are obvious archetypes.
I seem to remember reading a bit of chaff about this movie back when it came out... something about it doing a bait-n-switch on viewers by not being a 'real' zombie film. Having watched it though, I don't see how anyone could have gone further than a few minutes into it without it being obvious that some sort of sci-fi mumbo jumbo was going on... 'things from space' doing bad/weird things.
Maybe the complaints I read were about the ending... which does get pretty wild and weird, compared to the early bits of the film which are just kind of silly/dumb. Not that the ending is entirely opaque... but a lot of stuff goes vague or unexplained. It's never made quite clear what the 'aliens' are or what they're up to... what the 'zombies' were or weren't.
None of that bothered me though. I much preferred the second half of the movie over the first.
OK, two things I took from the movie...
First, I still like zombies. Despite the glut of zombie stuff from the past few years, on film I still like them as monsters. Yes, too much damn zombie crap being made... too much zombie merchandise... but when they're done well they make for great creepy monsters. (all of this goes for Cthulhu as well).
Second, despite my ersatz prejudices about Australians, they make some of my favorite movies. Just about always surprising and willing to shift around genres... a bit like Bollywood films in that.
One of my favorite movies is Muriel's Wedding. It's usually marketed as a wacky comedy... but anyone who's seen it knows that it shifts all over the couch... from slapstick to black comedy to tragedy... even a few moments encroaching on horror. It all comes together into something that's a bit surreal... and despite the feel-good ending there is a good bit of badness that remains under the carpet.
Undead has those elements as well... it shifts around. It's never really scary, but it has moments of weird and moments of sad.

Favorite bits:
The running grudge between the small-town beauty pageant contestants.
The scene late in the movie with the 'levitating' van.
The scene where the fisherman fights the zombie fish.

OK, hopefully I can get Dr. Cyclops to work tonight...