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Fright Club: Best Korean Horror

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It’s time again to travel the globe and pull together a list of the best in horror to be found, this time in the ripe ground of Korea. Just a decade or two ago, Korea’s horror output tended to feel like an echo of Japan’s cinema, but by the early 2000s, a number of truly wonderful filmmakers began working in the genre and the outcome has been a breathtaking onslaught of the most extreme kind. Hooray!

Listen to the full podcast HERE.

5. Bedevilled (2010)
Cheol-soo Jang’s first feature film bears witnesses not only to some horrific deeds, but to an amazingly confident new filmmaker who knows how to sidestep expectations, turn the screw, and offer surprising insight in a genre that doesn’t always generate that kind of thoughtfulness.

The film opens as beautiful if cold Hae-won (Sung-won Ji) witnesses a crime and chooses not to involve herself. She takes a (somewhat involuntary) vacation on the remote island where she grew up, to find her childhood friend Bok-nam (Young-hee Seo). On the isolated, backward island – though Hae-won is treated to rest and nurturing by her adoring friend – Bok-nam’s life is about as far from ideal as possible.

Jang captures the rugged, isolated beauty of the island and offsets both ideas with his leads – one, an elegant and pristine beauty, the other a rough-hewn image – and sees two sides of the same humanity. This is a morality tale, but it’s also a brutal but sympathetic (and seriously bloody) comeuppance. Jang does not leave off where you think he might, instead crafting a compelling and satisfying whole that will stick with you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbSZqvDvOFs

4. The Host (2006)
Visionary director Joon-ho Bong’s film opens in a military lab hospital in 2000. A clearly insane American doctor, repulsed by the dust coating formaldehyde bottles, orders a Korean subordinate to empty it all into the sink. Soon the contents of hundreds of bottles of formaldehyde find its way through the Korean sewer system and into the Han River. This event – allegedly based on fact – eventually leads, not surprisingly, to some pretty gamey drinking water. And also a 25 foot cross between Alien and a giant squid.

Said monster – let’s call him Steve Buscemi (the beast’s actual on-set nickname) – exits the river one bright afternoon in 2006 to run amuck in a very impressive outdoor-chaos-and-bloodshed scene. A dimwitted foodstand clerk witnesses his daughter’s abduction by the beast, and the stage is set.

What follows, rather than a military attack on a marauding Steve Buscemi, is actually one small, unhappy, bickering family’s quest to find and save the little girl. Their journey takes them to poorly organized quarantines, botched security check points, misguided military/Red Cross posts, and through Seoul’s sewer system, all leading to a climactic battle even more impressive than the earlier scene of afternoon chaos.

3. I Saw the Devil (2010)
An actor who can take a beating, Min-sik Choi plays Kyung-Chul, a predator who picks on the wrong guy’s fiancé.

That grieving fiancé is played by Byung-hun Lee, whose restrained emotion and elegant good looks perfectly offset Choi’s disheveled explosion of sadistic rage, and we spend 2+ hours witnessing their wildly gruesome game of cat and mouse.

Director Jee-woon Kim breathes new life into the serial killer formula. With the help of two strong leads, he upends the old “if I want to catch evil, I must become evil” cliché. What they’ve created is a percussively violent horror show that transcends its gory content to tell a fascinating, if repellant, tale.

Truth be told, beneath the grisly, far-too-realistic violence of this unwholesome bloodletting is an undercurrent of honest human pathos – not just sadism, but sadness, anger, and the most weirdly dark humor. You might even notice some really fine acting and nimble storytelling lurking inside this bloodbath.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2h52riooIc

2. Oldboy (2003)

So a guy passes out after a hard night of drinking. It’s his daughter’s birthday, and that helps us see that the guy is a dick. He wakes up a prisoner in a weird, apartment-like cell. Here he stays for years and years.

The guy is Min-sik Choi (remember him?). The film is Oldboy, director Chan-wook Park’s masterpiece of subversive brutality and serious wrongdoing.

This is not a horror film in any traditional sense – not even in South Korean cinema’s extreme sense. Though it was embraced – and rightly so – by horror circles, this is a refreshing and compelling take on the revenge fantasy that takes you places you do not expect to go. But that’s the magnificence of Chan-wook Park, and if you have the stomach, you should follow where he leads.

Choi takes you with him through a brutal, original, startling and difficult to watch mystery. You will want to look away, but don’t do it! What you witness will no doubt shake and disturb you, but missing it would be the bigger mistake.

1. A Tale of Two Sisters (2003)
A lurid Korean fairy tale of sorts – replete with dreamy cottage and evil stepmother – Jee-woon Kim’s A Tale of Two Sisters is saturated with bold colors and family troubles.

Kim also directed I Saw the Devil, but where Devil breathes masculinity, Tale is a deep, murky, and intensely female horror.

A tight-lipped father returns home with his daughter after her prolonged hospital stay. Her sister has missed her; her stepmother has not. Or so it all would seem, although jealousy, dream sequences, ghosts, a nonlinear timeframe, and confused identity keep you from ever fully articulating what is going on. The film takes on an unreliable point of view, subverting expectations and keeping the audience off balance. But that’s just one of the reasons it works.

The director’s use of space, the composition of his frame, the set decoration, and the disturbing and constant anxiety he creates about what’s just beyond the edge of the frame wrings tensions and heightens chills. The composite effect disturbs more then it horrifies, but it stays with you either way.

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The Invitation

by Hope Madden

Dinner parties are the worst.

This is especially true when said party is thrown by your ex and her new man in the house that used to be yours. So, why go?

Curiosity – which is what will or will not keep you invested in director Karyn Kusama’s new film The Invitation.

Will (Logan Marshall-Green) and his new girlfriend Kira (Emayatzy Corinealdi) tough it out. They drive out to the LA hills to join Will’s ex Eden (Tammy Blanchard) and all the friends Will has forgotten about since his son accidentally died in this very house a couple years back.

The party marks Eden’s return to the fold and an introduction to the new man in her life, David (Michiel Huisman), another grief survivor who, like Eden, owes his very sanity to the life-changing vision of Dr. Joseph.

Oh, God. Have they unwittingly submitted themselves to the one thing worse than a time-share opportunity gathering – a religious conversion attempt?

Kusama’s slow build mines societal tensions well. Besides the obvious ex-lover friction and the fear of cult propaganda, many in this once tight circle of friends have avoided the grief-stricken parents since the accident. It’s all very uncomfortable, though the film slowly turns the discomfort toward paranoia as Will begins to wonder where missing buddy Choi (Karl Yune) may be, why Eden has a bottle of barbiturates in her bedroom, and why David keeps all the partygoers locked inside.

Is something amiss, or is Will just dealing with those damaging issues of grief that Eden and David were able to overcome thanks to Dr. Joseph?

As The Invitation slowly evolves from tense drama to thriller to horror, Kusama is always throwing uncomfortable moments and unsettling clues at you. Were it not for the often tediously stilted dialog penned by Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi – whose track record includes the Ride Along series, if that tells you anything – The Invitation would have a consistently nightmarish, hypnotic quality that keeps you uncomfortably captive.

You know, just like that last dinner party you went to.

Fright Club

Fright Club: WTF?! Horror

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Horror films have the power to freak you out, to terrify you, to disturb and unsettle you. And often enough, along with inspiring some combination of the aforementioned emotions, certain horror films just beg the question WTF?! Like, almost anything Takashi Miike has ever directed. Or Antichrist – I’m sorry, did that fox just speak? Whether the bizarre puppetry of Hausu or the skull sex of Headless, the orifice’s point of view camera angles in Enter the Void or the queasying sibling relationship in Pin, horror movies can hit that unsettling nerve. So let’s just embrace it today, shall we? Today we count down the five (or six!) best in WTF?! horror.

6. The Woman (2011)

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-scriptor 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 came in a vomit bag.

Aside from an epically awful performance by Carlee Baker as the nosey teacher, the performances are more than just good for the genre, they’re 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. It’s 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.

5. Bad Boy Bubby (1993)

The hell?! Why? What?! Good God.

Nicholas Hope is astonishing as the titular Bubby, a 30-year-old manchild who’s never, ever left the room he keeps with his mum.

Remember the Oscar-winning indie film Room? Remember how tragedy is somehow skirted because of the courageous love of a mother for her son? Well, this was not Bubby’s mum. Bad things are happening in that room, and once Bubby is finally free to explore the world, his adventure is equal parts deranged and soul-crushing. Hope is so frustratingly empathetic in the lead that no matter what he does, you root for him. You root for friends who will love him, for someone who will care for him, but it’s the resigned cheerfulness with which he faces any kind of abuse that really just kills you.

This taboo-shattering film is so wrong in so many ways, and yet it’s also lovely, optimistic, sweet, and funny. And just so, so fucked up.

4. Baskin (2015)

Welcome to hell! Turkish filmmaker Can Evrenol invites you to follow a 5-man police squad into the netherworld, where eye patches are all the rage, pregnancy lasts well under the traditional 40 weeks, and you don’t want to displease Daddy.

The serpentine sequencing of events evokes a dream logic that gives the film an inescapable atmosphere of dread, creepily underscored by its urgent synth score. Evrenol’s imagery is morbidly amazing. Much of it only glimpsed, most of it left unarticulated, but all of it becomes that much more disturbing for its lack of clarity.
The further along the squad gets, the more often you’ll look in horror at something off in a corner, that sneaking WTF? query developing along with your upset stomach.

The central figures in this nightmare are one eye-patch wearing helper who enjoys tossing his or her hair over one shoulder, and the breathtaking father figure played by Mehmet Cerrahoglu. There is no one quite like him.

Cerrahoglu’s remarkable presence authenticates the hellscape. Evrenol’s imaginative set design and wise lighting choices envelope Cerrahoglu, his writhing followers, and his victims in a bloody horror like little else in cinema.

3. Calvaire (The Ordeal) (2004)

A paranoid fantasy about the link between progress and emasculation, The Ordeal sees a timid singer stuck in the wilds of Belgium after his van breaks down.

Writer/director Fabrice Du Welz’s script scares up the darkest imaginable humor. If David Lynch had directed Deliverance in French, the concoction might have resembled The Ordeal. As sweet, shy singer Marc (a pitch perfect Laurent Lucas) awaits aid, he begins to recognize the hell he’s stumbled into. Unfortunately for Marc, salvation’s even worse.

The whole film boasts an uneasy, “What next?” quality. It also provides a European image of a terror that’s plagued American filmmakers for generations: the more we embrace progress, the further we get from that primal hunter/gatherer who knew how to survive.

Du Welz animates more ably than most our collective revulsion over the idea that we’ve evolved into something incapable of unaided survival; the weaker species, so to speak. Certainly John Boorman’s Deliverance (the Uncle Daddy of all backwoods survival pics) understood the fear of emasculation that fuels this particular dread, but Du Welz picks that scab more effectively than any filmmaker since.

His film is a profoundly uncomfortable, deeply disturbing, unsettlingly humorous freakshow that must be seen to be believed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn3oba5HmH8

2. Possession (1981)

Speaking of sex and monsters – wait, were we? – have you seen Possession? WTF is going on there?

Andrzej Zulawski – writer/director/Czech – created this wild ride with doppelgangers, private investigators, ominous government agencies, and curious sexual appetites. It’s more precisely fantasy than horror, but it feels like David Cronenberg meets David Lynch, which is a pairing we can get behind.

Sam Neill plays Mark. Mark has just left his job – a mysterious position with some kind of lab. He’s being offered a lot of money to stay, but he needs to go home. We don’t know why.

Back at home, he greets his genuinely adorable son Bob (Michael Hogben). Bob – the names is so normal, and yet feels so unusual for a small child. Mark’s wife Anna (Isabelle Adjani) is also at home with Bob. There’s nothing normal about Anna.

Mark and Anna’s relationship boasts an intentional artificiality – a queasying sexuality – that makes it hard to root for either of them as their marriage deteriorates. Anna, it seems, is in love with someone else. Is it the sexually open – really, really open – Heinrich? Is it a bloody, mollusk-like monster? Is Mark boning Anna’s mean friend with a cast on her leg? Does Bob’s kindergarten teacher bear an unreasonable resemblance to Anna? Is anyone caring properly for Bob?

These questions and more go basically unanswered in a deviant, summary-defying, fantastical bit of filmmaking that mocks the idiocy, even insanity of obsession and boasts a handful of weirdly excellent performances. And sex with a bloody mollusk monster.

1. Gozu (2003)

If you are looking for genuine lunacy in film, your search should begin and quite possibly end with filmmaker Takashi Miike. His shit is nuts. Truth be told, there are scads of Miike films that could have populated this list because even his tamest, most logical, no-puppetry films are wild rides. So when he starts coloring way outside the lines, expect to be surprised.

This one starts off as a yakuza film – one guy on a mob-style assignment – then descends into absolute madness.

Minami (Yuta Sone) has been ordered to assassinate his feeble-minded yakuza boss Ozaki (Sho Aikawa), but he’s conflicted. Then he loses him and wanders, in search, into – you might say it was the Twilight Zone, except this place is considerably weirder. There’s a minotaur. An electrified anal soup ladle death scene. Some seriously, seriously weird shit.

Like a walk through somebody’s subconscious, the film is awash in repressed sexual desires of the very most insane and unspeakable. There’s a comical element that’s almost equally unsettling. Gozu is not as violent as many Miike films – it’s violent, don’t be mistaken, but the horror here is more in unseemly behavior and wildly inappropriate imagery. It’s just stuff you can’t unsee.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=penZT2N2xDw





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To Hell and Back

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Baskin

by Hope Madden

“Hell is not a place you see. You carry Hell with you at all times.”

Cheery stuff, that! If you’ve ever wondered what hell might look like, first time feature director Can Evrenol has some ideas to share. They are vivid. You’ll swear they even have an odor.

Evrenol’s Baskin is a loose, dreamily structured descent into that netherworld in the company of a 5-man Turkish police unit. (Baskin is Turkish for “police raid.”) The serpentine sequencing of events evokes a dream logic that gives the film an inescapable atmosphere of dread, creepily underscored by its urgent synth score.

We are trapped along with this group of somewhat detestable, somewhat sympathetic men as they respond to a call for backup in an “off the map” nearby area. What they find is deeply disturbing.

Unless you really like frogs. If so, then – hooray! Frogs!

The rest of it, though? Horrifying.

Evrenol’s imagery is morbidly amazing. Much of it only glimpsed, most of it left unarticulated, but all of it becomes that much more disturbing for its lack of clarity.

The cast is uniformly solid with the exception of Mehmet Cerrahoglu, who may leave you speechless. The director has taken to calling him the new Michael Berryman – a name genre fans will recall as the haunting, hulking, hairless menace in Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes and their nightmares.

Cerrahoglu’s remarkable presence authenticates the hellscape of these characters’ descent. Evrenol’s imaginative set design and wise lighting choices envelope Cerrahoglu, his writhing followers, and his victims in a bloody horror like little else in cinema.

There are moments when Baskin feels like a classier, more stylishly made Nightbreed, but there’s no camp factor here. Just a surreal exploration of the corruptibility of the human soul, and its final destination.

Baskin may infuriate viewers looking for a tidy package, and it may underwhelm gorehounds intrigued by reports of audience walk outs. Be that as it may, the film represents a vital new voice in the genre (Evrenol), not to mention a potentially iconic new face in horror and bad dreams (Cerrahoglu).





Fright Club, Slider

Fright Club: Best Horror Musicals

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We’re on a music kick. Last week we looked at the best rock star horror movies, so it seemed only natural to move on to the best horror musicals this week. At our house, this particular sub-genre might serves as a kind of bridge between the two of us, since Hope generally hates musicals while George appreciates them. And though it is true that Hope can find some love in her heart for a musical with a side of bloodletting, it turns out that George only likes actually good musicals. Which is to say, they disagree a bit on this list.

Hear the full disagreement, er, podcast HERE.

5. Phantom of the Paradise (1974)

Dude, 1974 must have been nuts. Brian De Palma’s first and only musical is a Phantom of the Opera/Faust/The Picture of Dorian Gray mash up (with some Frankenstein, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and more than a little Rocky Horror thrown in for good measure). That’s a heady mix, and while the film was nominated for an Oscar for its music, it isn’t exactly the classic you might expect.

A campy skewering of the soulless music industry, Phantom sees tiny Seventies staple Paul Williams as the Satan-esque Swan, a music executive with a contract for you to sign. Poor Winslow (William Finley) is just as wide-eyed about his music as all those would-be starlets are about their chances for fame and fortune in this evil world of pop super stardom.

Like many horror musicals, the film works best as a comedy, but Finley’s garish visage once he makes his transformation from idealistic musician to mutilated Phantom is pretty horrifically effective. The film as a whole is a hot Seventies mess, but that’s kind of the joy of it, really.

4. House (Hausu) (1977)

If Takashi Miike’s Happiness of the Katakuris were to marry Pee-wee’s Playhouse, this would be their offspring.

A spoof of sorts, Hausu tells the story of six uniform-clad high school girls named Gorgeous, Fantasy, Sweet, Melody, Kung Fu, and Mac. The nomenclature alone should clue you in on the film’s lunacy. The giggling sextet spend spring break at an aunt’s spooky house – or, in fact, a cheaply made set of an aunt’s spooky house. Not a single thing that follows makes sense, nor is it really meant to.

Expect puppets, random musical sequences, remarkably bad backdrops, slapstick humor, and an amazingly sunny disposition given the sheer volume of human dismemberment. The trippy nonsense wears a bit thin eventually. Luckily director Nobuhiko Obayashi’s film clocks in at under 90 minutes, so the screen goes dark before the novelty wears off.

3. Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007)

Here’s a bizarre idea for a musical: The barber upstairs kills his clients and the baker downstairs uses the bodies in her meat pies. Odd for a Broadway musical, yes, but for a Tim Burton film? That sounds a little more natural.

Burton’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street is a full-on musical – Burton’s first – and every inch a stage play reproduction. For many films, this would be a criticism, but Burton’s knack for dark artificiality serves the project beautifully, and he achieves the perfect Dickensian Goth tone. His production is very stagy and theatrical, but never veers from his distinct, ghoulish visual flair.

As in most of Burton’s best efforts, Sweeney Todd stars Johnny Depp in the title role. Depp is unmistakably fantastic – consumed, morose, twisted with vengeance – and he’s in fine voice, to boot.

The supporting cast boasts a liltingly nefarious performance by Alan Rickman. As the judge whose sent an innocent Todd off in shackles, raped his wife, then took custody of his daughter, whom he leeringly admires, Rickman is wonderful as always. His duet with Depp on “Pretty Women” is the film’s real musical gem.

With Burton’s help, Depp found another dark, bizarre anti-hero to showcase his considerable talent. With Depp’s help, Burton gorgeously, grotesquely realized another macabre fantasy.

2. The Happiness of the Katakuris (2001)

Takashi Miike is an extremely prolific director. He makes a lot of musical films, a lot of kids’ movies, a lot of horror movies, and then this – a mashup of all of those things. Like Sound of Music with a tremendous body count.

The Katakuris just want to run a rustic mountain inn. They’re not murderers. They’re lovely – well, they’re losers, but they’re not bad people. Buying this piece of property did nothing to correct their luck, either because, my God, their guests do die.

You might call this a dark comedy if it weren’t so very brightly lit. It’s absurd, farcical, gruesome but sweet. There’s a lot of singing, some animation, a volcano, a bit of mystery, more singing, one death by sumo smothering, and love. It sounds weird, truly, but when it comes to weird, Miike is just getting started.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDfMXwRapNc

1. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

Surely you expected no other atop this list because, honestly, nothing else comes close. The most iconic of all horror musicals, The Rocky Horror Picture Show boasts the best soundtrack, the best performances, the best mad scientist, and quite possibly the most fun there is to be had (legally) at the movies.

I’m afraid you’ve touched on a rather tender subject there.

Tim Curry is utter perfection as Frank-N-Furter (A Scientist). The entire balance of the cast is also amazing, but no matter how many times you watch Curry step out of that elevator, abuse his servants, or seduce his houseguests, it never gets old.

Creator Richard O’Brien’s raucous, once controversial film about a sweet transvestite, a slut, an asshole, and a couple of domestics who sing, time warp, throw rice, animate monsters, swap partners, and finally put on a show is still as much fun as it ever was.

Once a subversive take on the classic musicals and sci-fi films of the 30s and 40s, Rocky Horror is now a high-camp icon of its own.





Fright Club

Fright Club: Rock Stars in Horror

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The rock star/horror movie crossover seems a natural extension of the darkness and cool of each, and it has happened countless times. Some of the crossovers are almost too obvious – Ozzy Osbourne in Trick  or Treat or Grace Jones as an aggressive stripper/vampire in Vamp. John Mellencamp, Iggy Pop, Cherie Curie, Jon Bon Jovi, and, of course, Meat Loaf – these rockers and others have lined up to dance with the dead.

But here are the best rock star performances in horror.

Listen to the full podcast HERE.

Alice Cooper: Prince of Darkness (1987)

Let us just get this out of the way now – we don’t care for this film. Yes, John Carpenter is a master of horror, but this film felt stale in ’87 and it has not aged well.

However, perhaps the greatest stroke of genius Carpenter had when filming was to cast Alice Cooper as the leader of the demon-possessed band of shopping cart people.

As scientists and theologians hole up inside an abandoned church in a very bad neighborhood, they begin to notice the attention of the silent, menacing homeless man outside. And every time they look, he has more friends. It is possibly the only genuinely chilling image in the film, and much of the success is due to Cooper’s effortlessly menacing presence.

Alice Cooper’s stage persona makes him a perfect fit in horror – perhaps moreso than any other rock star. Indeed, he’s gone on to play Freddy Krueger’s father, a vampire, and all manner of supernatural lowlife in film. But for his most unsettling turn, all he needed was a disheveled appearance and his own natural presence.

5. Tom Waits: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

Francis Ford Coppola took his shot at Dracula in ’92. How’d he do?

Cons: Keanu Reeves cannot act. Winona Ryder can act – we’ve seen her act – but she shows no aptitude for it here, and lord she should not do accents. Anthony Hopkins has always enjoyed the taste of scenery, but his performance here is just ham-fisted camp.

Pros: Tom Waits as Renfield – nice! Creepy yet sympathetic, with that haggard voice, Waits brings a wizened mania to the character that’s more than refreshing. Likewise, Gary Oldman, who can chomp scenery with the best chewers in the biz, munches here with great panache. He delivers a perversely fascinating performance. His queer old man Dracula, in particular – asynchronous shadow and all – offers a lot of creepy fun.

Still, there’s no looking past Ryder, whose performance is high school drama bad.

4. Henry Rollins: He Never Died (2015)

With a funny shuffle step and a blank stare, Henry Rollins announces Jack, anti-hero of the noir/horror mash up He Never Died, as an odd sort.

Jack, you see, has kind of always been here. The “here” in question at the moment is a dodgy one bedroom, walking distance from the diner where he eats and the church where he plays bingo. An exciting existence, no doubt, but this mindlessness is disturbed by a series of events: an unexpected visit, a needed ally with an unfortunate bookie run-in, and a possible love connection with a waitress.

From the word go, He Never Died teems with deadpan humor and unexpected irony. Casting Rollins in the lead, for instance, suggests something the film actively avoids: energy. The star never seethes, and even his rare hollers are muted, less full of anger than primal necessity.

Rollins’s performance is strong, offering Jack as a solitary figure who clings to all things mind numbing as a way to pass the time without complication or human interaction. As a survival mechanism, he’s all but forgotten how to behave around humanity, a species he regards without needless sentimentality.

3. Sting: Brimstone & Treacle (1982)

Easily the best acting of Sting’s career, his con man Martin turns out to be a far more malevolent presence in the Bates household than poor Norma (Joan Plowright – wonderful as always) and Tom (Denholm Elliott) could imagine.

Martin feigns a fainting spell on the street long enough to lift Tom’s wallet. When he returns it – cash light – to the address on the license, he quickly eyeballs the surroundings and claims to be the fiancé of their bedridden daughter Pattie (Suzanna Hamilton).

The film mines layer after layer of repression – societal, sexual, religious and other – as it plays on your constantly expanding sense of dread. Sting is wonderful. His playfully evil performance and the way he eyes the audience/camera gives him the air of something far more unwholesome than your run of the mill conman. Maybe even something supernatural.

2. Debbie Harry: Videodrome (1983)

As bizarre as anything he ever made – even Cosmopolis – Videodrome shows an evolution in David Cronenberg’s preoccupations with body horror, media, and technology as well as his progress as a filmmaker.

James Woods plays sleazy TV programmer Max Renn, who pirates a program he believes is being taped in Malaysia – a snuff show, where people are slowly tortured to death in front of viewers’ eyes.

Punk goddess Deborah Harry co-stars as a seductress intrigued by the slimy Renn. Harry is, as always, effortlessly sultry – a quality that works queasyingly well in this Cronenberg head trip.

But the real star is Cronenberg, who explores his own personal obsessions, dragging us willingly down the rabbit hole with him. Corporate greed, zealot conspiracy, medical manipulation all come together in this hallucinatory insanity that could only make sense with the Canadian auteur at the wheel.

Long live the new flesh!

1. Bowie: The Hunger (1983)

Tony Scott’s seductive vampire love story has a little bit of everything: slaughter, girl-on-girl action, ’80s synth/goth tunage, David Bowie. What more can you ask?

Actually the film’s kind of a sultry, dreamily erotic mess. Oh, the gauzy, filmy curtains. It looks great, but the internal logic of the vampirism as a disease doesn’t work very well. Lots of meaningless parallels with some experiment apes don’t help.

Catharine Deneuve is the old world vampire Miriam, David Bowie is her lover. But he suddenly begins aging, and she needs to find a replacement. Enter Susan Sarandon as a medical specialist in unusual blood diseases and a fine actress who’s not above smooching other girls.

There are three reasons people still watch it: Bowie, Catherine Deneuve’s seduction of Susan Sarandon (classy!), and the great dark-wave Bauhaus number Bela Lugosi’s Dead. Together it’s a Goth Trifecta! And Goths do love them some vampires.





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Hitchhiker’s Guide to France

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Road Games

by Hope Madden

Writer/director Abner Pastoll takes his cues from existing genre efforts, but the tale he weaves with Road Games is more than fresh and intriguing enough to stand on its own.

The film opens with unnervingly effective sound editing, as we witness the disposal of a body, pulled from a car trunk on its way in pieces to the overgrown countryside. Cut to Jack (Andrew Simpson) standing roadside, his thumb proudly announcing his purpose. He stands directly in front of a roadway sign warning in French: Danger! Do not pick up hitchhikers.

We’ll soon realize that Jack doesn’t speak French.

Pastoll continually uses this type of clever shorthand to utilize language barriers and heighten Jack’s helplessness – a state Jack himself is blissfully unaware of.

Unsurprisingly, Jack’s having no luck on the road, but soon he comes to the aid of a young woman – a fellow traveler – whose ride has become belligerent. Veronique (Josephine de la Baum) and Jack make the most of the time they have to kill on the sun dappled countryside until a kindly if odd man offers both a ride to his home for the night, with the promise of a lift to the ferry in the morning. Weird things get weirder in a film with an equal volume of red herrings and road kill.

Pastoll develops atmospheric dread reminiscent of that 1970 doomed road trip through the French countryside, And Soon the Darkness. In both films, there’s plenty you don’t know, language barriers heighten tensions, and pastoral isolation amplifies the danger.

But Pastoll inverses the narrative. And Soon the Darkness asked you to participate in the unraveling of a mystery. In Road Games, you can’t quite figure out what the mystery is.

The film has its share of problems. It too often feels contrived, it relies a bit heavily on stock genre images for shock value, and its slow pace sometimes feels leaden rather than languid. But in the end, the film succeeds due to Pastoll’s slyly layered writing combined with committed, idiosyncratic performances – especially from genre favorite Barbara Crampton and French character actor Federic Pierrot, as the couple who puts up the travelers for the night.

<Verdict-3-0-Stars





Fright Club

Fright Club: Best Wes Craven Movies

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It’s time again to celebrate the work of a great horror filmmaker. Today it’s Wes Craven, a man who reimagined the genre again and again over his career. Sometimes with graphic violence, sometimes with satirical humor, always with a vivid imagination, Craven could make the viewer feel unsafe – a great place to start if you’re making a scary movie. Do you like scary movies?

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5. Last House on the Left (1972)

Wes Craven made his dubious feature directorial debut with this 1972 revenge fantasy. Watch the film at your own risk, and follow the tale of a trusting family whose beloved and wholesome daughter falls into the hands of evildoers. Her fate is unknown to her family until her attackers are unknowingly taken in for the night by her family in an act of kindness. Once their crime is discovered, the family abandons decency and wreaks bloody vengeance.

Craven’s interest is the brutality – of the killers, and then the family. He wallows so mercilessly in both that this picture carries a measure of notoriety missing from anything else Craven’s directed – even The Hills Have Eyes. It’s been banned in countries the world over.

His film is not a good one, and what psychological merit it has – the idea of decent people abandoning decency in favor of blood soaked revenge – isn’t Craven’s own. (Last House on the Left is, in fact, a remake of Ingmar Bertman’s Oscar winner The Virgin Spring.) Still, for all its cartoonish sadism and contempt, for its artless disgust, Last House is an interesting genre entity, particularly as the first step in Craven’s career. It’s a horror film, plain and simple. No tidy idea that violence can be resolved through violence, or that any act of brutality is justifiable. It’s an ugly film that leaves you feeling ugly, but horror is not meant to brighten your day, eh?

4. The Hills Have Eyes (1977)

Wes Craven’s original Hills – cheaply made and poorly acted – is a surprisingly memorable, and even more surprisingly alarming flick. Craven’s early career is marked by a contempt for both characters and audience, and his first two horror films ignored taboos, mistreating everyone on screen and in the theater. In the style of Deliverance meets Mad Max, Hills was an exercise in pushing the envelope, and it owes what lasting popularity it has to its shocking violence and Michael Berryman’s nightmarish mug.

The Hills Have Eyes is not for the squeamish. People are raped, burned alive, eaten alive, eaten dead, and generally ill-treated.

In fact, Craven’s greatest triumph is in creating tension via a plot device so unreasonably gruesome no audience would believe a film could go through with it. The freaks kidnap a baby with plans to eat her. But by systematically crushing taboo after taboo, the unthinkable becomes plausible, and the audience grows to fear that the baby will actually be eaten. It’s not the kind of accomplishment you’d want to share with your mom, but in terms of genre control, it is pretty good.

3. Scream 2 (1997)

Updating his celebratory meta-analysis of genre clichés, Craven checked back in on Sydney Prescott (Neve Campell) and crew a couple years later, as the surviving members of the Woodsboro murders settled into a new semester at Windsor College. The movie Stab, based on the horrors Sydney and posse survived (well, some didn’t survive) just two years ago is already out and screening on campus, but has it inspired copycat killers?

Craven, working again from a screenplay by Kevin Williamson, goes even more meta, using the film-within-a-film technique while simultaneously poking fun at horror sequel clichés in his own horror sequel.

And in the same way Scream subverted horror tropes while employing them to joyous results, the sequel – funny, tense, scary, smart, and fun – manages to find freshness by digging through what should be stale.

2. Nightmare on Elm St. (1984)

Teens on suburban Elm St. share nightmares, and one by one, these teens are not waking up. Not that their disbelieving parents care. When Tina woke one night, her nightgown shredded by Freddie’s razor fingers, her super-classy mother admonished, “Tina, hon, you gotta cut your fingernails or you gotta stop that kind of dreamin’. One or the other.”

Depositing a boogieman in your dreams to create nightmares that will truly kill you was a genius concept by writer/director Craven because you can only stay awake for so long. It took everyone’s fear of nightmares to a more concrete level.

The film was sequeled to death, it suffers slightly from a low budget and even more from a synth-heavy score and weak FX that date it, but it’s still an effective shocker. That face that stretches through the wall is cool, the stretched out arms behind Tina are still scary. The nightmare images are apt, and the hopscotch chant and the vision of Freddie himself were not only refreshingly original but wildly creepy.

1. Scream (1996)

In his career, Wes Craven has reinvented horror any number of times. When Scream hit screens in 1996, we were still three years from the onslaught of the shakey cam, six years from the deluge of Asian remakes, and nearly ten years from the first foul waft of horror porn. In its time, Scream resurrected a basically dying genre, using clever meta-analysis and black humor.

What you have is a traditional high school slasher – someone dons a likeness of Edvard Munch’s most famous painting and plants a butcher knife in a local teen, leading to red herrings, mystery, bloodletting and whatnot. But Craven’s on the inside looking out and he wants you to know it.

What makes Scream stand apart is the way it critiques horror clichés as it employs them, subverting expectation just when we most rely on it. As the film opens, Casey (Drew Barrymore) could have survived entirely (we presume) had she only remembered that it was not, in fact, Jason Voorhees who killed all those campers in Friday the 13th; it was his mother. A twisted reverence for the intricacies of slashers is introduced in the film’s opening sequence, then glibly revisited in one form or another in nearly every scene after.

We spent the next five years or more watching talented TV teens and sitcom stars make the big screen leap to slashers, mostly with weak results, but Scream stands the test of time. It could be the wryly clever writing or the solid performances, but we think it’s the joyous fondness for a genre and its fans that keeps this one fresh.





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The Final Project

by Hope Madden

A university class at a Louisiana college decides to document a presumably haunted plantation for some extra credit. It will be their The Final Project.

Their footage is made public by a man whose voice and image are hidden. He wants us to know what really happened that night. Why we need to sit through an excruciating amount of “Oh, is the camera on?” footage during study sessions, classroom antics, and the van trip to the plantation is anybody’s guess.

The film itself feels like a student project, but not necessarily in the way it’s meant to. Clearly made on next to nothing, The Final Project is a fair if amateurish effort, the cast and crew doing what they can with no budget for blood or effects. An awful lot is left to the imagination. Unfortunately, the film doesn’t bring the suspense, the sense of foreboding, or the visual panache to keep your attention long enough to engage your imagination.

Like The Blair Witch Project and far too many other found footage films since, The Final Project pulls you through the seemingly innocent hours before the catastrophic end of an attempted documentary. Aside from the very rare window apparition or an underdeveloped plotline involving a portrait on the plantation, the film offers precious little in terms of scares or suspense.

The set-up is more like that of a slasher: six unpleasant yet attractive young people head to a disastrous location to be picked off one by one. The characters are underdeveloped, with performances ranging from mediocre to poor. The actors are not helped at all by the routinely unrealistic dialog.

The Final Project is a first effort from director Taylor Ri’chard, who also co-wrote the script, produced, and handled the visual FX. Kudos to him for handling so much and for actually producing a film, which is, in itself, a victory. Also, better luck next time.

Verdict-1-5-Stars





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Aussie Cujos

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The Pack

by Hope Madden

There are not a lot of Australian horror movies I would pass up. Whether it’s the relentless, grisly terror of Wolf Creek, the shattering metaphorical horror of The Babadook, or one of the trademark muscular, bloody comedies like Wyrmwood or 100 Bloody Acres, somehow Aussie genre output satisfies more often than not.

Nick Robertson’s The Pack offers a slight premise, but mines it for all it’s worth as an isolated farmhouse family must survive the night once a pack of flesh-hungry dogs surrounds their property.

There’s precious little story outside the nightlong attack. Carla (Anna Lise Phillips) is a vet who tends to the pets and farm animals in the surrounding countryside, a job that’s meager wage pays most of the bills now that something’s been killing so much of her family’s livestock. Her husband Adam (Jack Campbell) refuses to sell the property to the creepy banker; their son (Hamish Phillips) wants to stay while their teenaged daughter (Katie Moore) would rather live in town.

And then dogs come.

The wild isolation of the outback has provided the backbone for most of the country’s horror output – as it does again here. Rather than filming the vast, surrounding woods and wilderness as a menace, cinematographer Benjamin Shirley’s camera captures the elegance and beauty of it. You don’t wonder what makes this family want to stay. It’s an interesting cinematic choice, because you aren’t given the sense that their separation from the larger society is necessarily dangerous, rather that this abundance of beauty somehow betrays them.

Same with the dogs. These are not your sinewy, feral beasts slinking through the woods. They’re gorgeous – fluffy, even. And yet, when enough of them spread out through the trees just beyond the edge of the property, their heads lowered, their eyes catching the fading light, it’s all you can do not to yell to Adam to run.

The problem with The Pack is that the whisper thin plot doesn’t allow for much of a climax or denouement. The final scene in this film leaves more questions than answers, and not in an exciting, ambiguous way.

It’s a quick and finely acted rush, but like the sugar from this box of Thin Mints next to me, it’s not a rush that sticks around.

Verdict-2-5-Stars