Tag Archives: horror movies

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Backdoor Progression

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Dreamland

by Hope Madden

“You don’t want to suck me.”

There are moments in Bruce McDonald’s head trip Dreamland that are just bizarre fun, like that self-aware line delivered by Henry Rollins. A lowlife gangster kingpin, his statement is as much a moment of self-defense as it is a warning.

Rollins’s Hercules is one of many unseemly characters orbiting each other in this surreal, jazzy noir. Veteran character actor and welcome sight Stephen McHattie (Pontypool) plays dual roles: jazzman junkie and conflicted hitman.

One needs to exact retribution on the other, you see, but maybe redemption of sorts could be arranged for both of them?

From one flesh-peddling nightclub to the highfalutin debauchery of a palace, McDonald’s fever dream offers consistently weird moments, each loosely connected to the next, all meandering toward a wild climax. Dreamland is a nutty drug trip of an underbelly film.

McHattie’s fun, especially as the anesthetized trumpet player. The other McHattie is having a tough time learning that you can’t rely on a junkie.

Both Rollins and Juliette Lewis are clearly enjoying themselves—Lewis, in particular, relishing every moment of over-the-top decadence and weirdness. Belgian character actress Stéphane Bissot impresses most as the sole voice of reason in the entire film. She’s deadpan hilarious.

Not that Dreamland is a comedy. Not that it isn’t, either. It’s a tough film to characterize.

McDonald hit his artistic high water mark in 2008 with the inspired lunacy of Pontypool. For Dreamland he teams again with writer Tony Burgess, and together they dive back into themes of sanity, reality and jazz. But Dreamland lacks the fidelity of vision and the internal logic that made Pontypool simultaneously hilarious and terrifying.

Dreamland occasionally feels like a cheat. Worse still, it too often feels predictable when its every breath is meant to be just the opposite.

Still, there’s more than enough carnage and madness packed into this 90 minutes to keep you gawking.

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Imagine There’s No Heaven

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Z

by Hope Madden

There is a moment that currently fascinates horror filmmakers. It is the moment when we forever lose the sweet little white boy destined to become a sociopath.

Director Brandon Christensen (writing with Colin Minnihan) examines parental involvement and even responsibility with the imaginary friend horror, Z.

Beth Parsons (Keegan Connor Tracy) and her husband Kevin (Minnihan regular Sean Rogerson) are at odds about how best to handle son Josh (Jett Klyne) and his new buddy.

This sounds familiar.

Mother is immediately creeped out. Dad is lenient. Boy begins to lash out, blaming imaginary friend. Mom wants to enlist expert help. Dad agrees within reason, but begins to pull away once Mom becomes convinced of a supernatural presence. Bodies begin to pile up.

Brightburn

The Boy

Brahms: The Boy II

Hole in the Ground

Prodigy  

That’s just in the last three years. This phenomenon means two things: filmmakers have hit upon a provocatively of-the-moment topic and it will be hard to find a unique perspective on that topic.

Though Z never seems fresh, there are moments that feel more authentic than they have any right to. Christensen’s direction lets conversations, in particular, breathe. Actors get the chance to give their characters a heartbeat. Adult family relationships have a lived-in quality that both reinforces themes and carves out layers for the story.

As is often the case in this subgenre, the film lives or dies on the role of the mother. Lucky, then, that Tracy gives such a powerful performance. Never showy, Tracy’s weary, passive, put-upon delivery creates a mysterious yet believable character. Beth’s actions feel both natural and unpredictable, which creates a lot of space for the filmmaker to build in surprises.

Too much convenience, too many unearned jump scares and too much predictability threaten to sink the effort, but a handful of narrative choices and a few truly solid performances (plus a cameo from the always welcome Stephen McHattie) elevate the film.

It’s no We Need to Talk about Kevin (the high water mark for the category), but what is? It is an unsettling way to worry about what we pass on to our kids.

Fright Club, Slider

Fright Club: Best of Troma

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Here it is—the topic to test the marriage. Luckily, so George did not have to watch every film on the list, we were able to snag a couple of experts. Phantom Dark Dave and Jen Dreadful join Fright Club to gush, ooze, splurt, spray and basically get sloppy with Troma.

5. Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead (2006)

Are you squeamish? If so, best of luck trying to make it through anything on this list. Poultrygeist is certainly not recommended.

Part Better Off Dead, part Night of the Living Dead, a whole lot of Poltergeist, Kaufman’s film picks apart horror tropes and fast food chains. The film will do nothing for your appetite.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s74J-XtfOE4

4. Tromeo and Juliet (1996)

James Gunn is one of many cinematic giants who got started with Troma. Along with Troma co-founder Lloyd Kaufman and Shakespeare, Gunn penned a troma-tastic version of the Bard’s star-crossed romance. Truth be told, things work out a little better for Gunn’s cute couple.

Incest, cannibalism, homoeroticism, body fluids, poor food safety protocols and more delirious nastiness mark this as a bone-deep Troma effort, so don’t let the highbrow source material throw you.

3. The Toxic Avenger (1984)

Here’s the classic. No way we could put together a tribute to Troma without Toxie. The Eighties underdog flick feels tame compared to what came before and after, but Eighties Troma tended to be a little friendlier, almost mainstream.

Well, that might be an exaggeration, but Toxic Avenger offers an excellent first toe into the massive, polluted gene pool that is Troma.

2. Father’s Day (2011)

The creative team behind loving giallo spoof Editor started off making what could reasonably be considered a spoof of a Troma film that wound up being an actual Troma film because, let’s be honest, who could tell the difference?

Story schmory—the film sets up every conceivable way to offend, disgust and dismay and it has the best time doing it. You’ll know if this film is for you within two minutes. Chances are good you won’t make it through that opening scene, and even better that you be sickened before the end of the movie if you do stick it out. What they do is vile and hilarious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMZBXdf-6qA

1. Killer Condom (1996)

A Troma-distributed splatter/horror/comedy, Killer Condom is an enormous amount of fun. This is a German film—German actors delivering lines in German—but it’s set in NYC. You can tell because of the frequent shots of someone opening a New York Times newspaper machine.

Luigi Mackeroni (Udo Samel) is the grizzled NYC detective who longs for the good old days in Sicily. In German. He’s assigned to a crime scene in a seedy Time Square motel he knows too well, where it appears that women just keep biting off men’s penises.

Or do they?

This film is refreshingly gay, to start with, as nearly every major character in the film is a homosexual. The run-of-the-mill way this is handled is admirable, even when it is used for cheap laughs. (Babette, I’m looking at you).

It’s fun. It’s funny. It’s gory and wrong-headed and entertaining from start to finish. Who’d have guessed?

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Ways to Be Wicked

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The Wretched

by Hope Madden

A tidy opening sets the stage, spilling enough beans to prepare you for the full tale while creating an atmosphere of genuine horror. Some excellent soundtrack choices establish a time and generate a mood.

So far so good, The Wretched!

As sometimes happens when a horror movie starts out strong, this one falls into familiar tropes to move things forward. Writers/directors Brett and Drew T. Pierce (Deadheads) stumble slightly as they usher in Act 2, relying on stock concepts as well as shorthand character introductions: rich asshole, hot girl, unfussy hot girl wearing eccentric socks who you should actually care about, Dad who’s trying but just isn’t that good at this.

Basically, there’s too much here that you’ve seen before and may not need to see again. If horror movies have taught me anything (they have, too!), it’s that Never Have I Ever is a lame game that only brings on death.

Still, the Pierce brothers and a game (if mainly unknown) cast keep even the familiar pretty fresh.

High school kid Ben (John-Paul Howard) finds himself out at the lake, working the docks with his newly single dad (Jamison Jones). Sure, he’d planned to spend the summer tooling around town in the Lincoln his mom was passing down to him, but he got himself into a little hot water and now it’s a summer job catering to pampered townies and vacationing families.

If only that was going to be his biggest problem.

Zarah Mahler is especially effective in breaking through tropes as the neighbor lady who is not what she seems, and The Wretched uses the “child in danger” plotline to worrisome effect throughout its running time.

Weird behavior from those tourists next door finds Ben doing a little sleuthing. Quickly, The Wretched turns into Rear Window/Fright Night/Disturbia—but without the actual house arrest kind of thing, which seriously limits its tension.

There are other, lesser-known films that are thematically closer and, honestly, better, including last year’s Irish horror The Hole in the Ground and Oliver Frampton’s almost entirely unseen 2014 gem, The Forgotten.

At about the time you begin to weary of the film, it recovers with a nice surprise that reaffirms the promise of Act 1. There’s far too much borrowed and rehashed between Acts 1 and 3 for it to stand the test of time alone, but The Wretched delivers enough to entertain and to leave you interested in what’s next for the Pierce brothers.

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Bite Club

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Bit

by Hope Madden

There is something appealing to the glam trainwreck that is Bit, Brad Michael Elmore’s anti-Twilight.

An angsty adolescent fresh from high school graduation voice overs: “You know those teen vampire movies that feel like the horny soap opera fever dreams of an 8th grade diary? Here’s how mine began.”

Like it. It’s self-aware, a little deadpan funny, a little whatever. Go on.

Laurel (Nicole Maines), the recent grad, packs up her Oregon-plated car and takes off to spend the summer with her brother in LA. On her very first night in town, she’s hit on by  the super hot girl Izzy (Zolee Griggs), brought to an after hours full of incredibly cool people, and immediately she feels as if she’s found acceptance, found home.

Naturally, Izzy and her also-hot friends are lesbian vampires who see Laurel’s specialness and invite her to Bite Club.

First rule of Bite Club: No. Fucking. Boys.

Maines is a transgender actress, a fact that elevates Laurel’s angsty “oh, high school was kind of a horror show” schtick because it probably was. Maines does not show an enormous amount of range, unfortunately, and Elmore’s script offers her few opportunities to shine.

She’s entirely convincing with her eyes at half mast, enduring the well-meaning but clueless affection of her family. But Elmore penned very few realistic reasons for Laurel’s behavior and Maines is left struggling to convince us, simply repeating the phrase “I’m fine” ad nauseam.

Diana Hopper, on the other hand, cuts an impressive figure as Bit’s Tyler Durden. Hopper elevates Elmore’s sometimes weak dialog (there are times when it works) with wearied badassedness.

It is fun and sometimes really witty the way Bit mocks boys, though, even if Elmore’s core theme is, “Some of us are OK!” Indeed, Bit undercuts its feminist intent as often as it offers genuine insight.

But maybe its main thesis is that kids are stupid, because Laurel’s philosophy for the future of the human race is…well, it’s stupid.

Still, there’s low-rent garbage fun to be had with this. Everything about it could have been better, but like most guilty pleasures, it appeals in a sugar high kind of way.

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Pop Goes the Scary

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0.0 Mhz

by George Wolf

Imagine it’s 1984.

One of the members of Banarama has joined one of the members of Duran Duran in the cast of a new horror movie. That movie is assembled with the ideas and scenes from much better films, but young pop music fans probably haven’t seen any of ’em, so who cares?

Now, put on your mask and join us back in 2020. A similar mindset seems to propel 0.0 Mhz, a Shudder original that brings two stars of the South Korean K-Pop phenomenon to the screen.

Jung Eun-ji, lead singer of the band Apink, also takes the lead here as So-hee, the newbie in a teen team of ghost-chasers known as “Club 0.0 Mhz.” See, that’s the best frequency to call ghosts (don’t argue), and So-hee’s first outing with the group is to a supposedly haunted house in the woods where the kids aim to dial up a little necromancy.

But what Sang-Yeob (Lee Sung-yeol from the band Infinite) and the rest of the gang don’t know is…their new recruit comes from a long line of dead people-seers.

The local at the general store who tells them all not to go to there is just the first in a string of heavily borrowed narrative checkpoints. Pulling from The Grudge to Elm Street to The Conjuring to The Exorcist, first time director Sun-Dong Yoo adapts Jang Jak’s popular webcomic with barely a whisper of originality or visual flair.

But 0.0 Mhz is clearly aimed a notch below anyone who has seen those films. This is strictly teenage fare, content to provide good-looking idols to swoon over and warmed-over scares for kids who want to scream but not have nightmares.

It accomplishes that, and not much else.

So when get-togethers are all good again, 0.0 Mhz will be more than ready to slumber party!

Halloween Countdown, Slider

Saturday Screamer: The Strangers

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The Strangers (2008)

“Is Tamara home?”

Writer/director Bryan Bertino creates an awful lot of terror beginning with that line.

A couple heads to an isolated summer home after a wedding. It was meant to be the first stop on their life together, or so we gather, but not all worked out as James (Scott Speedman) had planned. As he and what he’d hoped would be his fiancé, Kristen (Liv Tyler), sit awkwardly and dance around the issue, their very late night is interrupted by a knock and that immediately suspicious question.

Bertino beautifully crafts his first act to ratchet up suspense, with lovely wide shots that allow so much to happen quietly in a frame. This is a home invasion film with an almost unbearable slow burn.

Bertino creates an impenetrably terrifying atmosphere of not just helplessness, but sadistic game playing. The film recalls Michael Haneke’s brilliant Funny Games, as well as the French import Them, but Bertino roots the terror for his excruciating cat and mouse thriller firmly in American soil, with scratchy country blues on the turntable, freshly pressed Mormon youths on bicycles, and rusty Ford pick ups hauling folks in kids’ Halloween masks.

His image is grisly and unforgiving – part and parcel with the horror output of the early 2000s – but The Strangers is a cut above other films of its decade.

Yes, this couple makes a lot of bad decisions. Indeed, Kristen appears to be borderline mentally challenged. But in this particular situation, they probably just aren’t thinking clearly.

Halloween Countdown, Slider

Saturday Screamer: The Mist

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The Mist (2007)

Frank Darabont really loves him some Stephen King, having adapted and directed the writer’s work almost exclusively for the duration of his career. While The Shawshank Redemption may be Darabont’s most fondly remembered effort, The Mist, an under-appreciated creature feature, is our vote for his best.

David Drayton (Thomas Jane) and his young son head to town for some groceries. Meanwhile, a tear in the space/time continuum (who’s to blame?!) opens a doorway to alien monsters. So Drayton, his boy, and a dozen or so other shoppers all find themselves trapped inside this glass-fronted store just waiting for rescue or death.

Marcia Gay Harden is characteristically brilliant. As the religious zealot who turns survival inside the store into something less likely than survival out with the monsters, she brings a little George Romero to this Stephen King.

In a Romero film, no matter how great the threat from the supernatural, the real monsters tend to be the rest of the humans. King does not generally go there, but he does so with The Mist and it’s what makes this one of his most effective films.

While Harden excels in a way that eclipses all other performances, the whole cast offers surprisingly restrained and emotional turns – Toby Jones is especially effective.

The FX look good, too, and let’s be honest, a full-on monster movie with weak FX is the lamest. The way Darabont frames the giants, in particular, gives the film a throw-back quality to the old matinee creature features. But he never gives into cheekiness or camp. The Mist is a genuinely scary film – best seen in the black and white version if you can find it.

Regardless, it’s the provocative ending that guarantees this one will sear itself into your memory. Though this is likely what kept The Mist from gaining an audience in theaters, it is a brilliant and utterly devastating scene that elevates the film from great creature feature to great film.





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Sunday Screamer: The Woman

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The Woman (2011)

It’s time to get real. And by that, we mean real nasty.

There’s something not quite right about Chris Cleese (an unsettlingly cherubic Sean Bridgers), and his family’s uber-wholesomeness is clearly suspect. This becomes evident once Chris hunts down a feral woman (an awesome Pollyanna McIntosh), chains her, and invites the family to help him “civilize” her.

The film rethinks family – well, patriarchy, anyway. Notorious horror novelist and co-scripter Jack Ketchum may say things you don’t want to hear, but he says them well. And director Lucky McKee – in his most surefooted film to date – has no qualms about showing you things you don’t want to see. Like most of Ketchum’s work, The Woman is lurid and more than a bit disturbing. (Indeed, the advanced screener I watched back when the film was first released came in a vomit bag.)

Aside from an epically awful performance by Carlee Baker as the nosey teacher, the performances are not just good for the genre, but disturbingly solid. McIntosh never veers from being intimidating, terrifying even when she’s chained. Bridgers has a weird way of taking a Will Ferrell character and imbibing him with the darkest hidden nature. Even young Zach Rand, as the sadist-in-training teen Brian, nails the role perfectly.

Nothing happens in this film by accident – not even the innocent-seeming baking of cookies – nor does it ever happen solely to titillate. The Woman offers a dark and disturbing adventure that finds something unsavory in our primal nature and even worse in our quest to civilize.

Don’t even ask about what it finds in the dog pen.





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Unlucky Streak

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Cursed Films

by Hope Madden

The success of Shudder’s wildly informative and entertaining 2019 doc Horror Noire (still streaming – see it!) paved the way for their new 5-show doc series, Cursed Films. Each of writer/director Jay Cheel’s episodes spends 30 minutes examining one allegedly cursed horror movie production: The Exorcist, Poltergeist, The Omen, The Crow and Twilight Zone: The Movie.

Episodes 1 – 3 were made available for review, and the first thing we noticed was that each show is stronger than the last. Our hopes were highest for Ep 1: The Exorcist, but the series has a tough time finding its footing. The idea of a “cursed” production never really materializes and the episode feels padded with unrelated material.

In particular, time spent with a shyster modern day exorcist adds little to the overall theme of the program and offers limited at best entertainment value.

Poltergeist is a film more recognized for an alleged curse, so there’s a little more meat on Ep 2’s bone. Cheel opens up a handful of different, related conversations and braids them interestingly. The episode actually examines the bad luck that dogged all three films in the Poltergeist series and gets some skinny from one of the filmmakers (no, not that one).

It digs a little more at fan obsession in ways that non-Shudder audiences might mock while feeling perfectly at home with this target market. Still, the content feels light and the doc never seems to unveil much.

By Episode 3, though, Cursed Films finds its groove. The Omen offers not only more bountiful nuttiness to examine, but bigger and more interesting interview opportunities.

The big question: Why repeatedly use the single least flattering photo ever taken of Gregory Peck?

By halfway through the series, Cheel has begun to dig into the psychology of what makes a person – or the public – cling to the idea of a curse in the first place, and the psychology on display in this episode is fantastic. The random nut job guests, however, still feel like an unpleasant way to pad.

Though Episodes 4 and 5 were not available for review, the series seems to have hit its stride just as it hits two films that, while less popular than the first three in the series, suffered more profound bad luck than the first three combined.