VENOM (2018) ****

As a nerd for all things Spider-Man, I’ve been looking forward to this spin-off ever since it was first announced.  The casting of Tom Hardy as Eddie Brock/Venom got my fanboy pulse racing, as did the fact that Zombieland’s Ruben Fleischer would be directing.  Not only that, but they were aiming for a no-holds-barred Venom movie complete with an R rating.  Once it was revealed weeks before release that the film would in fact have a PG-13 rating, my heart sank a bit.  

I think my lowered expectations may have helped considerably.  Or perhaps it was the fact that the previews didn’t really do the film justice.  Whatever reason, I wound up loving Venom.  It is simply the most fun I’ve had at the movies all year.

The secret to the film’s success is Hardy.  He throws himself into the role with a Brando-like intensity that just sucks you into the character’s world.  Hardy starts his performance at eleven and cranks it somewhere up to thirteen by the time everything’s said and done.  He gives Brock a twitchy, broody vibe, one that only becomes accelerated once he’s overtaken by Venom.  In fact, the film makes you wish Universal’s Dark Universe hadn’t bit the dust because Hardy would’ve made a helluva Wolf Man as he plays a person afflicted with the tortures of the damned with humor, heart and a memorably crazy zeal.

There’s a slight change from what we know of Brock in the comics (and from Spider-Man 3).  Here, he’s an investigative journalist who loses his job when he presses Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed), the Elon Muskian owner of a high-tech company about his unethical practices during an interview.  Eddie winds up getting fired for that stunt, but when he learns that Drake is using homeless people for his experiments with alien symbiotes, he decides to sneak into the lab to get a scoop.  Naturally, Eddie winds up getting attached to the alien symbiote Venom in more ways than one.

My daughter, who is eight years old and a far more astute critic than I, stated that the film was, in her words, “Like Little Shop of Horrors, but if Seymour and Audrey II were the same person”.  That pretty much hits the nail on the hammer.  There were also moments that reminded me of Splash, All of Me, Aliens, and The Thing.  There’s even an action set piece that manages to combine elements from Bullitt and A Nightmare on Elm Street 5.  What I’m trying to say folks, is that this movie is awesome.

One thing the previews don’t tell you is just how funny Venom is.  I guess I should’ve known with Fleischer at the helm, but this is almost on par with Deadpool as far as hilarity in a superhero picture goes.  As with Zombieland, Fleischer nails the tone perfectly.  It’s a rollercoaster from start to finish with tons of laughs, moments of jaw-dropping insanity, and badass fight scenes.  I especially loved it when Hardy is at the mercy of the symbiote and inadvertently mops the floor with various cops, security guards, and SWAT team members, mostly while apologizing profusely.  Heck, Hardy gets most of his laughs while muttering to himself as bewildered passersby look on.

I know in the comics he’s driven by revenge, but I liked the fact that Venom is kind of a loser in his own world.  Making Venom seem like a plausible underdog is a heady task, but Hardy and Fleischer are up for the job.  Because both Venom and Eddie have something to lose, it makes their bond meaningful, and when they finally decide to team up, it leads to some truly memorable moments.  

One question though:  Is Venom using Eddie for his own purposes, or do they have a genuine bond?  That’s one of the more intriguing aspects of the movie as it moves forward.

There’s enough superhero action here to satisfy the demands of the genre, along with a few moments of squeamish body horror, but it’s more of a thrill ride than the horror movie it was teased to have been.  I know it got cut down from an R rating to get a PG-13, and while some of the action cuts away at the last second, there’s enough face-biting, head-devouring action here to keep this fan happy.  Quite honestly, it didn’t really need a Deadpool level of ultraviolence to be effective.  In terms of “scariness”, it’s about on par with a Jurassic Park movie, which is fine by me.

On top of everything else, it has what is probably the best post-credits sequence of any of the Marvel movies, so be sure you stay put for that.

Overall, I can’t quite say if Venom is better than Spider-Man 3 (a movie I will defend to my dying day), but it’s certainly a lot more fun than Spider-Man 2, that’s for sure.

2018 Comic Book Scorecard:

Venom: ****
Ant-Man and the Wasp: ****
Teen Titans Go! To the Movies: ****
Avengers:  Infinity War: *** ½
Black Panther: *** ½ ,
Deadpool 2: *** ½
Accident Man: ** ½

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: THE NUN (2018) **

So, I had no desire of seeing The Nun as part of The 31 Movies of Horror-Ween.  Even the horror sequel completist in me was happy enough to include two Conjuring sequels in this month’s movie watching list and move on.  My intention was to watch Amityville:  The Evil Escapes and Amityville 1992:  It’s About Time and make them part of The 31 Movies of Horror-Ween festivities.  I hadn’t seen either movie and since they were set to play at my local theater as part of Bloody Disgusting’s “Retro Nightmares” series, I thought that would be a perfect way to experience them for the first time.  

I mean, who wouldn’t want to see a cheap direct-to-TV Amityville sequel playing on a double feature with a cheap direct-to-video Amityville sequel on the big screen?  

Apparently, I was the only one. 

Due to lack of interest, the showings were pulled from the theater the day of the screening with no fanfare on the company’s website.  So, stuck at the movies with a Regal gift card burning a hole in my wallet, I decided to see The Nun instead.

Now before I get to my review, I just want to point out that I attended the Retro Nightmares screening of The House on Sorority Row the week before, but I never got around to reviewing it.  I reviewed the film more than a decade ago on my old site and I was less than kind to it.  Most of my complaints revolved around it being “too dark”.  Well, that review was of a VHS copy viewed on a small TV.  This time, seeing it on the big screen, I was able to appreciate it a lot more.  I still don’t think it quite works, but in a sea of ‘80s interchangeable slashers, it’s just weird enough to keep its own identity.

Also, the print was a lot lighter, so I could actually tell what the hell was going on most of the time.  I did like that they did very little to remaster the film.  it’s chockful of grain and looks probably just as it did when it was first released in ’83.  So, now instead of giving it a * ½ rating, I’d say it’s closer to a ** ½ flick.

The fact that The House on Sorority Row went over so well with the crowd made me hopeful for the Amityville screening.  Unfortunately, that never happened.  The management did assure me that the third and final Retro Nightmares screening of Sweet Sixteen and The Convent is still a go, so I hope to catch those next week.

Okay, so onto The Nun.  The Vatican sends a miracle hunter/priest (Demian Bichir) to Romania to investigate the suicide of a nun.  He brings along a young nun in training (Taissa Farmiga, sister of Vera, who also appears briefly in the Conjuring-heavy wraparound segments) because of her knack for having holy visions.  After arriving at the church, they soon run afoul of evil spirits, creepy graveyards, and of course the killer ghost nun (Bonnie Aarons) herself.

The Nun is overstuffed with too much backstory (like Bichir’s past as an exorcist) and too many visions and nightmare sequences that heavily pad the running time, which can only mean one thing:  It’s just like all the other movies in the Conjuniverse.  This is one of those cases where the filmmakers made a spin-off to something without realizing that they pretty much told you everything you already needed to know about the character in the last one.  Because of that, there’s really nowhere for the flick to go, and it quickly becomes a rapid succession of jump scare after jump scare.

Also, how many scenes of people slowly creeping up on a nun in the shadows can one movie take?  Six?  Maybe seven?  Let’s say eight.  Well, this one probably has double that. 

There are a couple laughable moments here which keeps it from being a total letdown.  I especially dug the scene where Bichir is mysteriously buried alive in a graveyard and he takes it all in stride.  You know, it's just like another day at the office for him.

Bichir and Farmiga are both quite good, despite the hokey surroundings.  They help to anchor the movie and keep it from devolving into an overlong gothic music video.  Director Corin Hardy does show a nice eye for setting up atmosphere and the production design is excellent, but there’s barely enough quality moments here to fill a short film, let alone a full-fledged spin-off.

PRIME EVIL: BLOODBEAT (1983) * ½

Ted (James Fitzsimmons) brings his girlfriend Sarah (Claudia Peyton) home for Christmas to meet his family.  Soon after, his mother (Helen Benton) is having odd psychic premonitions and painting ominous pictures.  One night, Sarah finds an old sword and before long, a glowing samurai ghost is knocking people off left and right. 

I’m always on the lookout for a Christmas themed horror movie, but something tells me I won’t be re-watching Bloodbeat come December.  Imagine if Bill Rebane remade The House Where Evil Dwells and that might give you an idea of what we’re dealing with.  There’s an occasional odd scene that’s good for a laugh, like when Benton has a psychic argument with her daughter.  (“Don’t you dare come into my mind!”)  My favorite scene though was when Peyton was making love and orgasmed every time the samurai killed someone.

Speaking of the samurai, he is one of those heavy breather types who sound like Darth Vader.  His glowing sword sort of looks like a poor man’s version of a lightsaber too.  Heck, even the ending plays like a Jedi power battle with lots of people throwing their hands in the air and acting like they’re concentrating REALLY HARD to defeat the demented samurai ghost.

The low budget and hokey low-tech effects are one thing, but the amateurish acting pretty much sinks it.  The negative vision photography also gets annoying, especially when it’s used in such a random fashion.  Still, this is the only movie I can think of in which a can of Tab attacks someone.  So, I guess that’s fairly original.

The most amusing aspect of Bloodbeat has nothing to do with the movie itself, but more with how the film is set up on Amazon Prime.  Sometimes, I have to turn the sound down when I watch a movie, especially when everyone in my household has gone to bed.  Prime’s closed-captioning for Bloodbeat is priceless.  The audio cues are funnier than anything in the flick itself.  A few of the samurai attacks are accompanied by a weird sound and the subtitle, “mystical boinging” appears at the bottom of the screen.  If that technical term isn’t good for a laugh, I don’t know what is.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: CABIN FEVER (2016) * ½

Cabin Fever is about as unnecessary a remake as there ever has been.  I mean, the original was only thirteen years old when this was made and from the looks of things, the franchise was far from being put on life support.  In fact, the DTV sequels were marginally better than most franchises.  I’m sure they could’ve squeezed out a few more of them before panicking and hitting the reboot button.  

The original film’s director, Eli Roth “presented” the film and also co-wrote the script.  However, I think this is one of those deals where the new filmmakers changed so little of the old script that the original screenwriter gets credit because of the writing guild rules.  I’m not sure why Roth did this, other than a paycheck, but the whole thing is just uninspired and a tad depressing, especially when you consider just how mind-blowing Cabin Fever was when it first came out.

If you’ve already seen the original, there’s very little reason to see this.  Sometimes, director Travis Zariwny remakes the original scene for scene using identical dialogue and camerawork.  There are a few concessions to updating the material, like when the characters complain about not having the internet to play video games, but even these moments land with a thud.  

The one big change is the fact that Deputy Winston is played by a woman, Louise Linton.  This isn’t one of those progressive types of changes where they give a woman an opportunity to update the role.   Instead, she just acts weird and crude, and the effect is just plain odd and doesn’t work at all.  Part of the problem is that Giuseppe Andrews was so memorably offbeat in the original that it’s hard to picture anyone else in the role.  Here, when Linton tries to act off-kilter, it just comes off feeling forced.  The socially awkward moments when she flirts with Matthew Daddario are painfully unfunny and are a bit of a chore to sit through.

Zariwny hits all the highlights of the original, but without the wit and style that Roth brought to the material.  There’s the finger bang scene, the kid who says “Pancakes!” (although he doesn’t do any random Kung Fu moves, which is disappointing), and the leg shaving scene, and yet all of it just feels like a hollow imitation than anything.  It’s almost like you’re watching an Unsolved Mysteries re-enactment of the original than a real movie.

Zariwny also oddly eschews the final nightmarish hospital sequence for whatever reason.  That was one of my favorite bits, so maybe it’s best he left it off limits.  I guess he figured he couldn’t top Roth so why try.  Instead, we get a lame post-credits tag, which adds very little.

In short, this Cabin Fever needs to be quarantined.

AKA:  Cabin Fever:  The New Outbreak.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: CABIN FEVER: PATIENT ZERO (2014) **

Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever is one of the great horror-comedies of the new millennium.  Ti West’s messy, but fun Cabin Fever 2:  Spring Fever is as good as you could hope for from a modern DTV horror sequel.  Kaare Andrews’ Cabin Fever:  Patient Zero is an adequate, yet thoroughly uninspired prequel that has a handful of good ideas, but never figures out a way to properly do them justice.

A group of friends take a cruise to the islands as part of their bachelor party festivities.  Meanwhile, on a nearby island, scientists are performing experiments on Patient Zero (the film’s lone star, Sean Astin), the cause of the flesh-eating disease in the first film.  Naturally, that’s the island where the partygoers decide to drop anchor.  It doesn’t take long before they become infected and try to fight their way off the island.

The scenes of the boating bachelor party bros are OK, but they lack the dark humor and outrageousness of the other films in the series.  Likewise, the scenes inside the laboratory are played far too seriously for their own good, which takes much of the fun out of it.  Maybe I would’ve felt different about the film if it hadn’t carried the Cabin Fever label.  I guess it’s a matter of expectations.  Shifts in tone within a particular series happen occasionally (Return of the Living Dead 3 is a good example), but this is a case where the more serious tone doesn’t quite work.  (Although I guess the fact that the women scientists all look like models and have plunging necklines is a clue that we shouldn’t take any of this seriously.)  

The laboratory setting is just novel enough to sustain your interest.  At least there was an attempt to try to take the horror out of the cabin and do something fresh with the concept.  It’s just a shame that Andrews doesn’t have the same touch Roth and West do when it comes to balancing the yuks with the yucks.

The good news is Patient Zero delivers on the gore.  Granted, that’s about the only department in which it delivers in (aside from some occasional gratuitous T & A), but we’ve got to take what we can get.  The inevitable escalation of the “finger bang” scene from the original is the obvious highlight and one of the rare moments where the film comes close to matching its predecessors in terms of melding gore and comedy.  Other notable gory goodies:  Blood puking, a skin-peeling catfight, and the deadly aftermath of a pistol’s recoil.  While some of the effects start to look like something out of a Troma movie by the end, you can at least say this for Andrews:  He isn’t afraid to toss the red stuff around.

THE 31 MOVIES OF HORROR-WEEN: ANNABELLE: CREATION (2017) ** ½

A dollmaker (Anthony LaPaglia) and his wife (Miranda Otto) suffer the devastating loss of their daughter.  Years later, they open their home to a group of young orphan girls.  It doesn’t take long for one of the girls, who is stricken with polio, to become possessed, which might hamper her chances of being placed in foster care. 

The first Conjuring spin-off, Annabelle was thoroughly awful and had the distinction of being the worst major release horror film in recent memory.  David F. (Lights Out) Sandberg’s prequel manages to top it in the very first scene with a disturbing sequence detailing the accidental death of a child.  There’s a lot more going on here technically too.  Sandberg’s use of camera movement and effective atmospheric lighting, especially early on helps to set mood nicely.  He also delivers one or two crackerjack moments, like when a sheet begins walking around all by itself. 

The problem is, the stuff with the evil doll feels unnecessary.  The scenes of the orphan girls exploring the creepy house at night work much better.  These scenes are compelling, and every time the doll pops up fighting for screen time, it takes the wind out of the girls’ storyline.  Their lowkey moments are much more effective than the stuff involving the CGI oil slicks, gratuitous jump scares, and random appearances of the doll.  You almost get a sense that the doll was put in there so it could be sold as a Conjuring movie but deep in its heart, it wants to be its own thing.  It’s also too long at 109 minutes.  

Like Ouija:  Origin of Evil, Annabelle:  Creation manages to outdo the original in every way.  If you ever saw Ouija or Annabelle, you realize that wasn’t very hard to do, but still.  Neither film is exactly a home run or anything, but you at least have to appreciate the enormous uptick in quality.

Anthony LaPaglia does a fine job as the bereaved father, especially in the early scenes.  You’ll wish he had more to do though.  Stephanie Sigman is quite fetching as the sexy nun in charge of the girls.  I’d pay good money to see her in a reboot of the Laura Gemser Emanuelle series. 

Overall, Annabelle:  Creation works better as a possession movie than as an example of the killer doll genre.  In the end, I guess that was smart considering how bad the first Annabelle was.  It still has to be disappointing for anyone who walks in expecting a killer doll flick.

Hey, are you wondering where my review for the original Annabelle is?  Well, you can find it in my latest book, The Bloody Book of Horror, which is currently on sale at Amazon.  To get your copy, follow this handy link:  https://www.amazon.com/Bloody-Book-Horror-Mitch-Lovell/dp/1542566622/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1538450805&sr=8-3 

PRIME EVIL: DEMON SEED (1982) ** ½

So, in between all the various horror franchises, sequels and remakes I’ll be reviewing this month for The 31 Movies of Horror-Ween, I’m going to try to sprinkle in a few reviews for some of the bizarre, offbeat, and generally WTF movies I stumble upon while perusing Amazon Prime.  If you’re like me, you find tons of this oddball oddities while searching Prime.  Most of them have misleading titles, strange thumbnail images, and/or cryptic plot synopses.  Whenever I find something that looks incredibly weird (and sometimes just plain bad), I immediately put it into my watchlist.  Folks, this is about as close to being in a video store and renting the most random, strangest movie on the shelf you can find as we’re likely to get in the 21^st century, so we must embrace it.

The first film in this (hopefully ongoing) column is Demon Seed.

Now, Demon Seed is a film that’s popped up several times while searching for other movies with the word “Demon” in the title.  I incorrectly assumed it was the Demon Seed where Julie Christie gets impregnated by a horny supercomputer.  I looked a little closer and saw that the cast list was completely different, so I took a chance on it.  As it turns out, Demon Seed is actually Fury of the Succubus, a movie I’ve always wanted to see after reading about it in Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In.  While it isn’t perfect, it made my jaw drop enough times for me to want to create this new column.

The opening crawl states, “Loneliness is the gateway to the supernatural”.  Lucky for us, our main character, Lisa (Lana Wood) is a lonely married woman who is about to have a run-in with the supernatural.  She lives with her family in a house by the beach and… can I interject something here?  Why is it all these emotionally troubled women in these movies live by the beach?  Is it because it affords the director an opportunity to give the audience endless shots of actresses wandering around in a daze in their nightgown as they slowly sleepwalk towards the crashing surf?  It certainly helps to pad out the running time, but it does diddly for the atmosphere.  

Okay, where was I?  Oh, after having a bad dream, Lisa’s asshole husband, Carl (Don Galloway) picks a fight with her and storms out of the house.  That night, she is attacked and raped by an unseen force.

Remember when Wood played Plenty O’Toole in Diamonds are Forever?  Well, she gets plenty of tool in this movie.  Invisible demon tool that is.  These scenes are a lot like the invisible rape scenes in The Entity, except done on a nonexistent budget.  That is to say, they just rely on Wood to roll around the bed naked a lot.  That’s right, Wood gets plenty O’Nude scenes too. 

The specter isn’t always invisible though.  Sometimes it appears as a purple smudge on the camera lens.  Other times, it’s a projection of Octopussy’s Kabir Bedi on the ceiling. Or sometimes, it’s a pulsating pink light.  About halfway through the movie, Bedi just appears and starts making love to her in the flesh.  By this time Wood has become his willing sex slave, which starts to put a crimp in her already testy relationship with her husband.

So, what does Carl do?  He asks her best friend Ann-Marie (Britt Ekland, from The Man with the Golden Gun, and if you’re keeping score at home, that’s THREE James Bond alums in the picture) to check in on her.  When their hot tub almost kills poor Ann-Marie, Carl finally starts to realize the Wood Lana has been getting belongs to the devil. 

All of this SOUNDS great.  The first half when Wood is getting naked and yielding her will to the sexual desires of an unseen demon is good times.  The second half isn’t nearly as much fun.  It’s here where Ekland’s character becomes more prominent (she was top-billed don’t you know), which gets in the way of the supernatural shagging.  You also have to put up with a lot of blurry-vision nightmare sequences, many of which are too dark to make out.  Speaking of which, there’s a potentially awesome accidental death-by-guillotine scene that’s completely undermined by the fact you can barely see what’s going on.  

It also hurts that Wood gets less and less to do as the movie wears on.  She basically just stands around looking catatonic for the second half of the film.  The finale, which mostly requires the cast to hang around a burning basement before a few of them accidentally stumble into the flames, is weak too.  Hey, The Entity’s ending sucked too so what did you expect? 

Despite that, there are enough moments of WTF lunacy here to make Demon Seed marginally recommended.  You also get John Carradine popping up in one scene as a priest who offers up a lot of helpful plot exposition shortly after a funeral.  All in all, Demon Seed is worth planting.

AKA:  Satan’s Mistress.  AKA:  Dark Eyes.  AKA:  Demon Rage.  AKA:  Fury of the Succubus.  AKA:  Incubus.