Purging John Carpenter

Warning - This post is rife with spoilers!

 

I'm a big fan of the Purge movies, and am looking forward to seeing the newest one, Election Day.  When I watched the first film, I remember thinking, "This is the most John Carpenter-like film I've seen of the new John Carpenter wannabes."  I thought the same thing about the even-better sequel.  They carry on Carpenter's great strengths - pounding synth scores and completely batshit-insane, yet brilliantly simple, central concepts.  On reflection, though, I realized it wasn't just the music or the stories that reminded me of Carpenter films... They're actually remarkably step-by-step remakes, with new titles. 

Consider:

Assault on Precinct 13 - A traumatized man seeks shelter inside a fortified station which comes under waves of attacks from subhuman gang members. There is a focus on race relations as the black captain and the white convict must cooperate to survive, gaining mutual respect in the process.

The Purge - A traumatized man seeks shelter inside a fortified home which comes under waves of attacks from subhuman Young Republicans. There is a focus on race relations as the white family must decide whether to sacrifice the black victim to save themselves.  

In neither movie do we learn much of anything about the primary target - He's simply there as a magnet to draw down the wrath of the horde.  Assault gives us a middle-class Average White Guy, who attracts the gang's attention by shooting one of their members in anger over the death of his daughter.  We don't know who he is, why he was there, and he's virtually mute for the rest of the film.  The Purge is even simpler - We're given zip about the main target except that he's a black man of lower social class, and presumably that's all that's needed to make him a target for the rich kid psychopaths.  

 

The interesting thing is the total inversion of the villains. In Assault, it's two working class men defending the middle class against the zombie-like attacks of a subhuman street gang - Characterless, near-mindless killing machines that are invading the safe neighborhoods. In Purge, it's wealthy people with consciences defending the lower class and themselves from the psychotic attacks of... their own young. Assault fears the street gangs consuming the working class, Purge fears the upper class consuming itself and the lower class both.  It's a testament to the times and the decades between the films that there simply is no middle class in the Purge movies.  Everyone is either the wealthy or the working poor or homeless. 

Also diverging are the final messages - Assault is ultimately a much more positive film, despite its grimness.  In Assault, the black guy and the white guy, the hardworking policeman and the "gentleman criminal", come together in understanding and realize that their values are far closer than the creatures they're fighting.  When Bishop insists that Napoleon not be chained, and that they walk out to meet the dawn together, it's a triumphant moment.  The values of hardworking decency have been defended, and even though Napoleon is going back to jail, you understand that the day is won for civilization, for the moment.

Purge is very similar in structure - The black man sides with the white family and in the end, saves those who sheltered him.  The victorious survivors walk out to meet the new day in an almost identical ending scene, except... in Purge-Land, there is no victory.  The chasm between the wealthy family and the poor guy remains, and now the wealthy family realizes the depth of the hate and loathing and jealousy that their own "kind" have for them also.  They've survived the night, but they're living in a nest of people who all want to kill them, just because they're perceived to have a little bit more than the next wealthiest household.  There's no real victory, and only a thin veneer of icy smiles and cocktail parties will cover the seething violence that's being held in check until the next Purge Night.

They make for a fascinating comparison, back to back.  If time and interest permit, look for a follow-up post to this on the virtually identical storylines of The Purge 2: Anarchy and Escape from New York.

You're Next

NetFlix 4/5
IMDB 6.6/10
My Rating: 7/10

When shy Erin joins her new boyfriend at a family reunion to commemorate his parents' anniversary, the tense gathering is horrifically interrupted by a gang of masked invaders who brutalize the celebrants ... until someone starts fighting back.


MAJOR kudos for this one! I'd read tons of excellent magazine reviews praising this movie up and down, but I kept putting off watching it because the concept just didn't grab me... It sounds bleak, grim, and non-fun, and I was confused by some of the descriptions of this as a comedy-horror. Well, it is, but only in the way that Evil Dead 2 is. What it really is, though, is a marvelous deconstruction and reconstruction of a slasher/giallo film - It's like watching a modern take on Black Christmas as directed by 70's John Carpenter from a script written by Joss Whedon. In other words, really clever and really well put-together. It's also stuffed to the gills with sneaky little homages to classic horror of the past, with wink-winks to Halloween, Black Christmas, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and even Night of the Living Dead.

The basic plot is this - All the scions of a wealthy 1%er family are getting together for their parents' anniversary, for the first time in years. The setting is excellent. It's a HUGE, classic Tudor-style mansion out in the boonies, and the fact that its these folks' vacation house only underscores the class tensions in the film. They're your basic clan of wealthy WASPS, classic Mitt Romney supporters, and the father even works for a defense contractor. Also, they all pretty much hate each other in typical passive-aggressive family ways, and this is their first big chance for everyone to bring home their various SOs to meet each other. This produces some funny scenes as old-money yuppies are forced to mingle with gothoid girlfriends, artsy students, etc.

Artsy boyfriend of family daughter: "I make films. My last film was a documentary that aired at the Underground Film Festival in Toronto."
Fratboy eldest son: "Underground? What, do you mean you ... watch the movies in a cave or something?"

We also get introduced to our heroine Erin, a working class Australian girl in the states for college. Soon enough, however, things turn very dark as the isolated family is besieged by a group of mystery killers in animal masks, who are creepy as fuck:

I loved the direction and style of this movie. It's all very slow, creeping, handheld camera long shots, very much in the style of Halloween or Black Christmas. In fact, the Black Christmas nods are all over it, as it's obvious that at least some of the killers have already gotten into the immense house and it plays much like the sorority house in BC - A huge, mostly empty building where we keep getting killer POV shots as masked figures quietly wander the halls and watch the family cook, chat, and sleep.

Where it really gets going, though, is when the killers start picking off the family and it becomes obvious that heroine Erin is WAY more than anyone expected. Erin isn't just a blue collar toughgirl, she was raised by a family of crazy survivalists in the Australian outback and someone on IMDB accurately described her as Crocodile Dundee's daughter. This is the film at its most Whedon-esque, because the bulk of the film is the crazy ongoing battles between the attacking killers and this absolutely vicious Buffy who keeps turning the tables on them.

It's absolutely loaded with, "Fuck YEAH!" moments for longtime horror fans, as Erin is absolutely NOT the girl who will stick a knife in an attacker and then turn and walk away, assuming he's dead...

Most of the black humor is in the second half and it's very Evil Dead in style. Some people complained that it was a jarring tonal shift, but I found it fun and enjoyable, mostly because if it had just been a straight horror all the way through, it wouldn't have been nearly as unusual or distinctive. We've all seen so many of these "home invasion by masked killers" films now that it's a real joy to see one where you end up not knowing WHO is really the biggest threat... It really does play out like the "Scream" guys accidentally picked on Buffy (or more accurately, Faith) by mistake.

The Bay

NetFlix 3.5/5
IMDB 5.5/10
My Rating: 7.5 /10

A Wikileaks-style found footage assembly tells the story of a small bayside town that experiences a rash of horrific infections which eventually are revealed to be something much more terrifying.

Watched this last night. Holy SHIT. Terrifying and creepy and deeply disturbing. It is, IMO, even worse than Contagion for making you never want to touch anything or leave the house ever again. It is also apparently a movie that people have wildly different reactions to, because its IMDB comments all devolved into either 1 star reviews that hated it or high ratings that loved it. It only has a 5.5 on IMDB but IMO it's a 7.5/10, easily. It was just recently added to Netflix streaming.

It's a found footage movie, so I was prepared to hate it. We started watching it basically just to see if it was tolerable, and planned to de-queue it and watch Spiral instead if it was another shakeycam barf-athon. 30 minutes later, we were totally hooked. It's directed by the fellow who did Rain Man and a bunch of other big budget films, but he did this as a personal project for $2 million with unknown actors. The fact that he is a professional director with decades of experience shows, because the found footage format is a lot more stable and better arranged than the usual jiggly-crazy camcorder movies. In fact, at times he shrugs and blows off the whole idea of it being found footage by including background soundtrack, but by the times that happens you're so immersed in the story that it's more funny than distracting. And at least there's a good reason for the footage assembly because it's been assembled and ordered by professional editors into the form that we see.

A lot of the low reviews came from horror fans who thought it was boring because there weren't enough "stalk and jump" scares. It is NOT that kind of movie, though. The fear here is more like in Contagion - not individual people being chased around by slashers, but in the overall look of the looming epidemic and the vast repercussions it's going to have as the scale of it becomes clear. It's eco-horror at its best. The whole thing is presented in a Wikileaks-style format, as a series of video clips and footage that's been obtained by whistleblower types to inform the world about what happened. So, you don't get a movie with a few characters and a story, you get a movie that is presented documentary-style and which is a sequence of events that get more horrifying as they progress.

The whole thing is narrated by this young intern reporter and we follow her through it in much the same way as the young woman in [REC]. She's assigned to cover the town's July 4th festival as a puff piece when things start going wrong. As folks begin piling up in the hospital with blistering rashes, the movie moves between footage of her, a family recording their vacation visit, some police footage, and a pair of experts studying mass fish die-offs. The whole found footage angle is utilized really well here, as there are logical reasons for most of the footage (Expert exposition for the record, police car cameras, TV news footage of events, etc). Ergo, you don't get a lot of the, "Why are they still filming this monster as it attacks them?" effect of some other found footage films. It gradually becomes obvious that there's something in the water as polluted run-off from chicken farms has bred steroid-enhanced isopods. I don't want to tell any more of the plot as half the fun is in the dawning realization of the sheer horribleness of the situation and how hideous things are going to get.

See it. It will stick with you long after viewing. In fact, I'm still thinking about it a day later. It's a "1 tick from reality" sort of film, where the horror is not in evil slashers or vampires but in the daily news. It becomes more horror-film-like by the end but it still retains this very real feeling. In a lot of ways, it reminded me of Cloverfield - Not in the giant monster sense, but in the style of how it looked at the widescale impact of this sort of environmental disaster from a very human, very limited viewpoint.

My final comment -  I was going to post the trailer but naturally, it spoilers a couple of the best shock scares of the film, so I would advise against watching the trailers online. They completely blow one of the best moments of the movie - My wife jumped so much she fired the cat off her lap.  Some things are definitely best left to jump at you from out of the dark.

Grave Encounters

NetFlix 3.5/5
IMDB 6.1/10
My Rating: 6/10

For their ghost hunting reality show, a production crew locks themselves inside an abandoned mental hospital that's supposedly haunted - and it might prove to be all too true.

Anyone who's ever done any business traveling is probably familiar with those "ghost hunting" shows that litter cable TV.  You know the drill - You're in a strange city, it's after hours, there's nothing to do and you don't want to blow $45 sitting in the hotel bar looking pathetic.  Instead, you flip through the TV channels and are reminded instantly of why no one pays $85 a month for cable TV anymore... It's wretched.  200 channels of reality shows and commercials will illustrate in a heartbeat just how out of touch that HBO exec was who claimed that cord-cutting was just "a passing fad".  And as you channel surf, one type of program you're almost bound to stumble over is the "ghost hunting" show... They seem to be on every frickin' channel now.  

These things are all the same, whether they're hunting ghosts, aliens, or Bigfoot.  A bunch of eager young 20-somethings go to a remote location and stumble around in the dark uttering lines like, "I feel something.  I definitely feel something here." and, "I just sensed a cold presence move through the room."  You know going in that they're not about to discover anything remotely provable or you'd already have heard about it on the real news, so instead you suffer through a half hour of Blair Witch wannabes freaking out over house-settling noises and random breezes.  I can usually stand about five minutes of these shows before I flip over to watch the infomercial about treadmills.

Grave Encounters, then, is both a clever idea and a "ghost hunter" hater's wet dream - A horror movie built around the cast of a ghost hunting show being driven insane and slaughtered by discovering very real ghosts.  "Grave Encounters" is the title of their ghost hunting program and it's just like all the real ones - They go to a "haunted" location, slip the locals a few bucks to dramatize some stories about past encounters, and then hole up inside the haunted spot for a night of jumping at shadows and generally making fools of themselves. And it's blackly funny, too - The cast and crew make no bones about how much they're going to have to "sex up" the location to make their show scary, and wearily laugh off any pretense that what they're selling on video might be true.

The movie is a recording of what happens when the Grave Encounters crew goes to investigate a haunted asylum.  They get the usual dire warnings from the caretaker, they set up their cameras and "ghost detecting" equipment, and then we're off...  And that's where the movie really gets good.

(I should point out that this is another "found footage" movie.  I tend to dislike these things because the handicam shakes make my stomach gurgle, but this is definitely a superior example of the sub-genre.  Static camera positions give us welcome relief from the constant bobbing of hand cams, and it's really less frenetic and jump cut-ish than many traditional moves I've seen lately.  Quantum of Solace, anyone?)

For dramatic reasons, they lock themselves in for the night, then regret it as it becomes obvious that for once, this isn't just another haunted house fake.  Things go bump in the night, indeed.  And this is what I loved about the movie - You get to see the cocky TV ghost hunters come absolutely unglued by encountering an actual horror... It's like the episode of "ghost hunter" TV that you've always wanted to see.  And it's beautifully subtly done, too - For the majority of the movie we're in Haunting territory, where the quiet click of a door closing by itself is far creepier than any CGI monster.  I give the film high praise in bestowing the "Made the hair on my arms stand up" award... Several times, in fact.  As the crew become increasingly unhinged, you're pulled right along with them through this Very Long Dark Night via their camera recordings and flash photographs.  It's a really terrific experience.

And then you hit the final act.

The last 20 minutes or so drops the movie at least 2 points on my ratings scale, because it jumps its own shark.  After a wonderfully creepy middle section, it seems to lose track and can't decide if it wants to be [REC], Blair Witch, or Lord of the Flies.  Chilling "Did you just see that?" moments become screaming ghost attacks and the scare factor vanishes like a pebble into the well of Donald Trump's ego.  It's entertaining right to the end, mind, and I'd certainly recommend it for anyone looking for a fun haunted house movie with some quality shocks... It's just a bit frustrating because it came so, SO close to being a really great film.  Still, you get to see a "ghost hunter" cast go insane and die, and who wouldn't enjoy that?

The Innkeepers

NetFlix 2.7/5
IMDB 5.6/10
My Rating: 8/10

Two minimum wage, 20-something employees face the last weekend of operation at the Yankee Pedlar Inn, a historic establishment that is closing its doors.  Their bored hours are spent doing amateur ghosthunting, until disturbing things begin going bump in the night.

First off, I must say that I absolutely loved this movie - I adored every minute of it and enjoyed the characters, the plot, and definitely the style of direction.  That said, I seem to be in the minority - A lot of viewers, especially younger ones, absolutely hate the film and thus its low IMDB score.  Even more puzzling is the dislike among reviewers I otherwise tend to agree with, like Emily over at Deadly Dolls, who was hoping it would be another House of the Devil.  That seems to be a common refrain - Fans of Ti West, the director, loved HOTD and want another HOTD, and this is not that and thus they are disappointed.    I enjoyed HOTD too, but I liked Innkeepers better.

Maybe what others miss is the retro-70's style of HOTD.  I loved it but I also found it a little distracting, in the sense that half my brain was marveling over their careful recreation of a grainy late 70's drive-in movie and paying less attention to the story.  Innkeepers eschews the retro look but proceeds in gloriously retro pace, which seems to be the other bone of internet contention.  One of the most common complaints on IMDB is, "It's so SLOOOOOOW."  Yes.  Yes, it is slow.  That's called, "Building tension and atmosphere", and not many movies bother with that anymore, much to their detriment.  Instead of giving us a pile of characters with 3 minutes of screen time and one breast flash each, and then burying us in chop-chop mayhem, Innkeepers spends most of its running time simply letting us follow the two main characters and get a feel for who they are, and care about them.  And what great characters they are!

Sara Paxton plays Claire, the heroine, and you already love her, you just don't know it yet.  Seriously, she was one of the most appealing horror film heroines I have seen in years, maybe decades...  This is not a case where you're just passing time until the annoying characters die.  You'll genuinely care for her and that makes the scary parts of the film a hundred times more fearful.  She and co-star Pat Healy also pull off the near-impossible in creating a pair of bored yoof-generation types that I didn't immediately want to kill.  Instead, you're drawn into the sheer pettiness of their lives - Both are undirected.  They don't know what they want to do.  They have no goals.  All they can think to do in their spare time is fritter it away.  Someone on another board pointed out that it was a theme of the movie that the Yankee Pedlar seemed to draw in "lost souls" like a vortex, and consume them, and I thought that was a clever observation.  They're the last employees running the hotel until the bitter end and this gives them impetus to hang on there when otherwise you'd hit the usual haunted house movie plot problem of, "Just leave the house!"  They could, but to be blunt, they don't really have anywhere else to go.

I am increasingly convinced that Ti West, the director, is one of the few directors left in Hollywood who knows how to properly pace a film.  Conversations are long takes that you're drawn into, not chopped up with 57 cuts to create faux-tension.  When a character walks cautiously down a spooky hall, the camera follow them slowly, tracking them for sustained tension instead of cutting every 3 seconds or, god forbid, spinning in circles around them as they walk.  This movie was the virtual antithesis of everything I've hated about the recent Doctor Who seasons for the simple reason that Ti West knows how to hold a camera still.  So basic, and yet so rare...  and for me it was a joy to be able to relax into the story and the personalities, without constantly being reminded of how clever the cameraman or director thought he was.

So, is it boring?  Well, it wasn't to me.  Other reviewers fuss that nothing happens until the last 20 minutes, but I viewed that time as investment in the atmosphere, of which Innkeepers has oodles.  I haven't run across many films that build this sort of nervousness so well.  It harkens back to movies like The Shining or The Fog, where "brooding" becomes a palpable thing.  And as for the last act, holy crap, I was on the edge of my seat!  My one real complaint is with the very final scene, or rather the "secret scene" - A bit that was rendered so subtly that I did not notice it on the first viewing, and found the ending rather generic.  Only after reading about it and following it with the director's commentary did I spot "the secret"... Probably a very unusual case of a director being TOO subtle.

In the end, I give this lots of love - It's one of the rare movies I want to go out and buy on blu-ray.  I wish badly that I'd held onto it and watched it on Halloween night, because it would have been a perfect Halloween treat.  If you can't handle slow movies, it's not for you.  But, if you're fond of older films and especially 40's-style haunted house pictures, I recommend it highly.  I haven't liked a ghost story this much since poor Eleanor met her fate in The Haunting in 1963.

14 (A Book Review)

My Rating: 7/10

Padlocked doors. Strange light fixtures. Mutant cockroaches.

There are some odd things about Nate’s new apartment. Of course, he has other things on his mind. He hates his job. He has no money in the bank. No girlfriend. No plans for the future. So while his new home isn’t perfect, it’s livable. The rent is low, the property managers are friendly, and the odd little mysteries don’t nag at him too much.

At least, not until he meets Mandy, his neighbor across the hall, and notices something unusual about her apartment. And Xela’s apartment.  And Tim’s.  And Veek’s.

Because every room in this old Los Angeles brownstone has a mystery or two. Mysteries that stretch back over a hundred years. Some of them are in plain sight. Some are behind locked doors. And all together these mysteries could mean the end of Nate and his friends.

Or the end of everything...

I just finished this in audiobook form (I listen to tons of audiobooks during my long days in my woodworking shop). It was loads of fun. It is by Peter Clines, an author whose work I've previously read in "Ex-Heroes", a very straightforward genre mashup of superheroes and zombies (After the zombie apocalypse, the world's masked avenger types round up the survivors in LA and attempt to defend them inside a fortified compound. This was every bit as entertaining and as dumb as it sounds).

14 was a whole different kettle of fish, and it's as hard to review as Triangle was, because I don't want to give away what made it so cool. It's like a combination of Lost and Lovecraft, with a mystery/horror/SF bent.   The hero is a young slacker type who works as a data entry temp and is stuck in that "Waiting for his life to start" phase (Weren't we all, once?  Let's just call it "Age 21-26", eh?), when he finds a new apartment that is too good to be true - Incredibly cheap rent, included utilities, and a nice building. After moving in, however, he begins to notice oddities - The elevator is always in the basement, the building has no power lines going to it, his kitchen light fixture turns any bulb put into it into a black light, and his neighbors are a collection of oddities. Tim is a former book publisher with a skill range from James Bond, there's a young actress who spends her time topless on the roof, and computer nerd Veek is a cranky geekette with an apartment so crammed with high powered PC gear that she could run 4Chan in her spare time.

The book is about the deepening mystery as these disparate characters begin to cooperate, Scooby Doo fashion, to delve into the mysteries and secrets of their strange building.   I went into it expecting either a haunted apartment story or an evil landlord story, and instead got the Phantasm effect - That feeling I had way back when first watching Phantasm, that I was completely expecting the story about a funeral home to be a ghost or vampire movie and instead got weird yellow-blooded aliens and fingers turning into crazy bugs and evil jawas from another dimension. 14 is an ongoing succesion of unexpected twists and discoveries and weirdness that goes from Mystery Gang fun to sanity-shattering, universe-threatening horror. The characters are simple but it's well written and has a lot of clever, natural-sounding dialog. Worth reading.

Another opinion!

Marchlands (2011)

NetFlix N/A
IMDB 7.4/10
My Rating: 8/10

In this ITV 5 part miniseries, 3 families across 3 different time periods are impacted by the supernatural repercussions of a young girl's death.

During the years we lived overseas, we watched a lot of BBC via our satellite dish but very little ITV, other than the occasional US TV shows they'd run.  ITV was... Well, as the Brits might say, it was Chav-TV.  Reality shows by the ton, trashy soaps about self-obsessed young people having sex all the time, and just generally not what you'd think of as intelligent television.  That's why I was all the more surprised to be so impressed with this show - When did ITV start making TV for people who weren't the UK equivalent of Dittoheads?  (Normally I'd pick on the Tea Party as my example of Stupidus Americanus, but Rush is on my mind at the moment for his absolutely hilarious and roundly internet-mocked accusations that comicbook villain Bane is a liberal conspiracy to make Mitt Romney look bad.  Nevermind that Rush would probably be a Bane fan if he'd just get to know him...)

So, Marchlands is a great show.  Let's just start with that up front.  You especially need to see this if you're an old-school horror fan, because the style of scares here is right out of The Haunting or The Legend of Hell House.  This is not full up with jerkycam ghosts and "BOO!" jump scares - Instead, we're introduced to a cast that we believe in and invest in, and we're slowly drawn into the mystery of the hauntings that occur... So slowly that when something genuinely creepy happens, the skin goes all prickly.

The story is really three stories in one.  In the 1960's, a young couple live with parents in the titled household and cope with grieving over the loss of their daughter.  Mysterious circumstances surround her accidental drowning and the heartbroken mother is essentially walled out by the "Everything must be normal" facade of her family and village friends.  In the 80's, a family with children live in the same house and find their daughter increasingly targeted by an unseen presence that she calls her "invisible friend".  And in the present day, a young couple buy the house for their quiet country escape and find something is very interested in their newborn baby.

All three tales connect in ways both expected and unexpected.  It reminded me somewhat of American Horror Story in this respect with the house's past always lurking right on the edge of the current day experience and giving deeper layers of meaning to all sorts of seemingly casual occurrences.  It isn't so intense as American Horror Story, though - While AHS was like a steam train barreling directly at you, Marchlands is more of a soft touch...  Just a delicate whisper of scares here and there, just enough to keep you uneasy.  It helps that the characters are so real.  Alex Kingston departs from her River Song persona in Doctor Who to embody a frustrated, anxious 80's housewife, and the producers did a great job at choosing look-alike actors to play younger and older versions of the same characters across the time span.

To enjoy it the most, don't look at it as a horror series, look at it as a mystery with horror elements.  The cloud overhanging the death of the young girl is gradually unveiled over the series and for once, everything wraps to a tidy conclusion without any jarring, "Let's throw this in just to be clever" twists - It's smart but doesn't try to be TOO smart.  Worth seeing!

Tranzor's "The Thing"

Recently I've been sending some time browsing at fanedit.org, a site dedicated to amateurs re-editing their favorite movies for various reasons - Sometimes improvement, sometimes drastic alteration, and sometimes just fun tinkering.  This is a case of the latter, and it's a generation-targeted nostalgia missile in the extreme.  You see, what fan editor "Tranzor" has done is not try to improve John Carpenter's 1982 classic The Thing in any way - Instead, he has transformed it into an edited-for-television late 70's Midnight Movie.

Before I go on, a word about legality.  Fan edits exist in a weird sort of murky grey zone in copyright law - It is legal to make them and it is legal to watch them and it is legal to own them... provided you actually own the original DVD as well.  So, while I can download this fan edit with impunity, someone who didn't own the original DVD would essentially be committing a file sharing copyright breach by downloading it, which is why I'm not posting any download links with this article.  If you want to see this yourself... Well, let's just say that Google is your friend.  That said, on with the show!

Remember the late night monster movie?  There was the news at 11, then Benny Hill or Monty Python, then some sort of late night horror movie in edited-for TV mode, usually something from the 50's.  For all the talk about the "grindhouse" theater experience, this sort of midnight movie had its own strange charms - Missing reels, terrible film quality, choppy cuts, dropped-out profanity, etc.  What this fan editor has done is to recreate this experience with The Thing.  The movie is reformatted into 4:3 and changed to B&W, with a few other tweaks here and there.  You know you're in for fun when you put the disc in...

Right after an intro that will throw you straight back to age 12, you start realizing that this is going to be a wholly different "Thing" viewing experience:

The funny thing about this is how GOOD the movie looks in black and white - The setting is pretty timeless and with the color and the cussing gone, you could almost think you were watching a genuine 1957 drive-in classic.  It's funny how some films time-travel well and others do not.  We were watching the original Alien the other night and it could have been shot last week - Other than some amusing computer nostalgia (A text-prompt green screen monitor on a starship), the look and style were timeless.  Compare it to something like Logan's Run, which immediately says, "1975-1978" really loudly.  I wouldn't have thought that The Thing could get more brooding, but then I saw it in B&W:

There's a great irony here that I've spent most of my adult life avoiding commercials, and yet the commercial breaks in this are the highlight of the experience.  You'll be totally into the movie and then it will hit a crisis point and BAM! - Commercial cutaway:

I haven't watched commercials since the day I got my first VCR - I'm a little hostile to the messages advertisers try to shout at us.  I don't mind informative advertising, but 99% of TV commercials amount to either, "Use our product or no one will ever have sex with you!" or, "Use our product because all our competition sucks."  Thanks, but no thanks.  However, in this case the nostalgia factor wins out, and I'm sitting there watching original 1977 commercial blocks all over again, filled with cheery disco music and ads for Tab cola.

Yes, Tab has even less calories than water.  Never knew THAT, did you, you fatty water drinkers...
Overall, this DVD is a blast, right down to its custom printable DVD case cover.  If you have fond memories of staying up for the late movie, then watching it in wide-eyed childish terror and running to the kitchen for snacks during the commercial breaks, then this is an experience to love.  If you were born after, say, 1978, then I suspect you'd only find this confusing - A bizarre re-edit of a great move for no understandable purpose.  Like the man says, ya just had to be there...

Super Shark

NetFlix NA
IMDB 2.5/10
My Rating: 5/10

An oil drilling rig run by the Dukes of Hazzard awakens a giant, bulletproof prehistoric shark that can walk on land and fly.  Clearly this was a film aimed at the NPR audience.

Once I saw the trailer to this thing on YouTube, there was no way I could resist checking it out.  So whadda we got here, eh?  Sleazy oil man Bo Duke (John Schneider of Dukes of Hazzard) is using some kind of weird chemical to dissolve ocean floor rock to make drilling easier.  I guess at this point, when you join the oil industry you just automatically have to change alignment to Lawful or Chaotic Evil.  Anyway, said chemical releases Super Shark, a gigantic monster shark that possesses not just the abilities to walk on land and perform jet-powered leaps, but also a really savvy intelligence and a, *ahem*, biting wit.  Super Shark doesn't just eat the cast, he eats them in the most ridiculous and embarrassing moments possible.  Feel like your love life is in the dumps?  Don't answer that doorbell, it's Super Shark!  Annoyed by obscene phone calls?  It's Super Shark calling you from upstairs!  He hovers over the movie like an omniscient giant eating machine, and half the reason I give this movie a 5 is due to the laughs induced each time Super Shark turns up to take another bite out of the assembled crew.

With a giant walking shark on the loose, it isn't long before people notice and begin delivering observations like, "That's bad" and, "I need a drink."  The heroine, a lady CSI-type, fences with Bo Duke a bit and ends up advising the army that they're going to need a bigger boat.  Said military types send a squad of soldiers, a jet fighter, and a robotic walking tank to battle the beast.  Along the way, lots of people get chomped in ways both gruesome and hilarious.

The Kentucky Fried Popcorn Relationship Guide tip #1 - If you want to have a happy marriage, start with a woman who is willing to watch Super Shark with you.  But be prepared to get punched in the arm a lot, because the cheesecake level in this flick is, well, right up there with a Fred Olen Ray film because it IS a Fred Olen Ray film.  Yep, that would be the guy who brought us classics like Hollywood Chainsaw Hookers, an understated gem of the 80's video store era.  This is a TV movie so there's no nudity, but ole Fred takes advantage of his beach setting to throw bikini boobies at us every chance he gets, which is roughly 2/3 of the film.

Aside from the cleavage FX, we get a whole lotta CGI shark.  Syfy has gotten better at this, but most of their rendering still looks like something you could do on a Mac, and it doesn't help that when the shark is out of water crawling around, the bright sunlight isn't too forgiving on the special effects.  The climactic fight with the CGI robot tank is even sillier - It's a lot of fun to watch (assuming sufficient quantities of beer are on hand) but it lacks the coolness of the great Ray Harryhausen monster battles because A) the robot design is REALLY uninspired, and B) it isn't nearly long enough.

The cast does a bouncy job throughout, and they're the other reason I give this a better rating than IMDB...  I mean, as a movie, it's a 2.5, yes, but as an entertainment package it's a hundred times more fun than any Sex & the City episode ever made.  The leads are competent, the sidekicks are tolerable, and everyone delivers their Ed Wood dialog with a sense of barely-suppressed fun.  Except for Jimmie "JJ" Walker, who delivers his own performance through a megaphone of 1977 insanity:

Does he have anything to do with the movie?  Absolutely not, why do you ask?  He just plays a local radio host who occasionally pops in to narrate the latest news of Super Shark's thrilling adventures on land and sea and air.  Acting-wise, however, everyone takes a back seat to Super Shark himself, that mega-Pacino of the high surf - He has a lot of personality for a CGI blob and I expect him to be invited to host Cannes any day now.

Bottom line - The leads are decent actors, the story is fun and silly, there are copious amounts of  boobage on display, and it stars a giant shark that eats an oil rig. This is not a movie that I'm ever going to want to go back and watch again, but it was a hoot, and would be great for group MST3K sessions. If you watched Sharktopus, you'll get much the same thing here.   And if you're at all curious for a taste of this flick, check out the FUNKTASTIC trailer below - Yes, Super Shark even has his own theme tune, straight out of a 70's disco!  Truly, this may possibly be one of the greatest movie trailers I have ever seen.

Chaw(z), the Korean Pig

NetFlix 3/5
IMDB 5.9/10
My Rating: 6.5/10

A gigantic killer pig begins eating residents and tourists in a small Korean village, but the mayor won't close the beaches because...  Look, it's Jaws with a monster pig, OK?

This one was recommended to me personally by Netflix, "based on my viewing preferences".  This is why we should all be terrified of internet privacy issues, folks, because one of these days you're going to be walking through the mall and advertising placards will be shouting, "Hey you!  You should buy this stuffed toy, based on your interest in Furry porn!"

So, Netflix thinks I will like this, a black comedy/horror from South Korea about a killer pig. The giant hog movie is already a crowded genre, what with Razorback (1984) and Pig Hunt (2008), but as it happens, I DO like this savory bacon morsel.  It doesn't take the killer pig crown from Razorback, but it's a close second, and if it only had a little more originality it could have tipped the difference (It's hard to compete with Razorback's early 80's post-apocalypse Mad Max wasteland vibe, and it had practical FX that were more convincing than the often Syfy-esque CGI on display here).

And when I said Jaws above, I wasn't kidding.  I'm not going to worry so much about spoilers in this review as usual, because seriously, if you've seen Jaws, you've seen this...  Well, OK, if you've seen Jaws while tripping slightly on psychedelic mushrooms and listening to Hawkwind on your headphones, you've seen this.  Locals begin getting gobbled up by a giant boar but the village mayor refuses to close the farms because it will scare away the tourists, and before you know it, a plucky police officer has to team up with a young science type and a grizzled pig hunter to chase the thing down.

I'll try to keep the Jaws references to a minimum, but...Oh, hell, screw it.

Young person gets half eaten at night. 
Hero cop assigned to case. 
"This was no boating accident. In the mountains." 
Hero cop warns mayor to close the beaches, err, farms. 
"Are you crazy? This is tourist season! The local merchants will collapse without city tourists vacationing here to eat organic foods!" 
Giant pig attacks. 
Hero cop - "We must close the beaches! Err, farms." 
Mayor - "LOLZ. We'll hire someone." 
Army of yahoos shows up and begins dynamiting harbor, err, forests. Giant pig killed. Mayor happy, stages press event to announce death of killer pig. 
Expert young guy shows up. "The bite radius of this pig does not match" 
Mayor - "LOLZ" 
Expert - "Pigs digest slowly. Let's cut it open to see what it's recently eaten." 
Mayor - "I am not going to let you spill that little Kitner boy all over the dock for some half-assed post mortem on a fish! Err, pig." 
Heroes sneak in later, cut open pig, find Florida license plate inside pig. (OK, I made up that last line, but that's all) "This is not the pig we're looking for." 
GIANT PIG ATTACKS JULY 4TH BEACH FESTIVAL. Err, town hall party.  
Heroes (Cop and young smartypants) and retired master pig hunter Quint gear up and head into the mountains set on makin' bacon.

In my opinion, the movie's only real failing is missing a golden opportunity to have the Quint character give a speech about how his WW2 shipmates were all devoured by killer pigs.  They do manage to blame the whole mess on the Japanese, however, which I understand is something of a hobby in South Korea.  More vexing is their bizarre confusion of Finland and Ted Nugentland.  When the mayor puts out his call for expert pig hunters, the initial crew that turns up consists of giant burly Americans speaking Southern and driving giant American pickup trucks, yet the subtitles AND the in-movie characters all refer to these people as being from "Finland".  Ping the WTF Meter on this one... I have no idea if I'm missing a cultural in-joke or what, but in the world of Chawz, Finland is the home to all  Nashville Network hunting and fishing show hosts.

Moving on... I learned these things from this movie:

• When Koreans need a giant human-eating pig killed, their first thought is to outsource the job to Finnish bear hunters.
• Korea, like Japan, is at least 25% populated by sunken eyed Ringu-looking women.
• Korean hoodie yoof rap bands are an unspeakable sign of the apocalypse and should be burned before they spread.
• Korean pigs are bulletproof, seriously. Bullets bounce off, flattened.
• I never want to go to Korea because ALL of the food shown is absolutely terrifying.

There are aspects that set Chawz apart from the big fish movie, however.  Chief among them is a weird sort of slapstick humor sprinkled throughout, as if the Three Stooges were consulted on all of the action scenes.  Also, there's the surreal factor...  First represented by a strange witch-like lady in the forest and later appearing in the form of talking dog ghosts.  The Ringu woman is an odd diversion that sneaks into a really hilarious ending and helps tie the whole package up into a hoot of an experience.

I recommend this, definitely.  It's completely insane, and South Koreans should know that everything I now believe about their country is drawn from Chawz and The Host.  See it.  Get your hog on.

KFP salutes Forgotten Fiends - Dargent Peytraud

Everybody knows the big guys - Myers, Dracula, the Mummy, the Wolfman, Freddy.  They have their own franchises, their own toys, and worldwide recognition.  The KFP "Forgotten Fiend" awards, however, are dedicated to the guys who didn't end up with action figures...  Who were in only one movie and yet their presence was so memorable that they MADE the movie.  The ones about whom you go away thinking, "Damn, that was a great villain!"

My first entry into this category is this guy, Zakes Mokae.  Or as I will always remember him, Dargent Peytraud from The Serpent and the Rainbow, a favorite horror movie of mine and one of the few Wes Craven flicks that I actually like.  In Serpent, Peytraud is the Bad Guys' Bad Guy - Scheming, brilliant, devious, mischievous, and often downright terrifying.  Even more frightening is the fact that he personifies the sort of depersonalized, bored government sadism typical of despotic regimes and French administration.  He's not out to control the world, just to keep Haiti held together with an iron fist, and if you threaten to upset his applecart even one iota, hold onto your nuts!

I'm hard to scare in horror movies - The Exorcist girl did nothing for me, Freddy and Jason are just goofy, and the less said about franchise characters like Chucky and the Leprechaun, the better.  When I look back over my movie history, I can really only think of a few movie villains that genuinely creeped me out.  There was the Tall Man from Phantasm, Max Schreck in Nosferatu, the ghosts in The Fog, the original Michael Myers, that thing at the end of [REC], and a few others... and among them is Zakes Mokae's Peytraud, the guy who can say, "See you in your dreeeeeeems, blanc" and really mean it.

I love a lot of things about Peytraud.  I love the way he talks.  I love the way he says, "Dreeeems".  I love the way he depersonalizes the hero as merely, "Blanc"...  Just one more annoyance to be swatted out of the way, unless you really irritate him enough to give you his full attention, and you really, really don't want that.  Dracula might toss you around and drink your blood, and the Alien might spray acid on you, but Peytraud will hammer a nail through your testicles just to convince you he's serious.  Throughout the whole movie, he marvelously communicates the aura of the guy that you simply do NOT screw around with.

His sense of mounting menace helps.  At first meet, you think he's just a bureaucrat, pushing papers at the ministry and being suitably brusque to foreigners messing in his country.  But hero "Doctah Alan" finds out quickly that Peytraud is no pushover to be intimidated by the presence of an American in his Third World.  The interactions between Bill Pullman and Mokae are electric and Mokae dominates every scene he's in.  For the actors around him, it's like trying to do "Death of a Saleman" starring William Shatner - You just know that everyone's looking at THAT guy, no matter what you do.

Peytraud is no one dimensional comicbook villain, though.  Probably what makes him so memorably scary and so freaky is his sense of demented fun - Sending a voodoo ritual into chaos for idle kicks and making people into zombies just for the hell of it.  He's not just frightening when he hammers in that nail, he's enjoying it - This is him finally getting to unwind and have some good times.  And later, when the hero realizes there's just no escaping the guy...  That he's perfectly happy to reach across the world just to fuck with his mind...  Well, that really caps him off as an ideal villain.  When he notices you, run.

It's a shame we never saw this guy again.  Serpent was never going to be a franchise (This was back in the magical days when every single property that came out was not necessarily immediately vetted for franchise and toy marketing potential).  But that's probably best - Overexposure would only have diluted his menace and malice, Freddy Krueger-style, until he became a shadow of his original self.  I'm quite happy that he's a perfect one-time villain and he can easily stand alongside the famous "movie monsters".  I can say with certainty that I would MUCH rather have to face off with Jason than Peytraud.  At least Jason will only kill me.  So thanks, Zakes, for giving us one of the best underappreciated villains in horror films!

And if you want to see a clip of just what makes this guy so amazing, watch and shudder.  He wants to hear you SCREEEM, blanc.

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