HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: TERROR TRAIN (2022) **

The original 1980 Terror Train was a novel slasher in two ways.  The first was its location, a passenger train, which helped set it apart from its contemporaries (most of which took place in either small towns or summer camps).  The second difference was unlike most slashers, the killer wore more than just one mask (he stole the masks from each of his victims and impersonated them to lure the next one).  The first remake, 2008’s Train was novel in that the setting was changed to Europe.  It also upped the gore considerably, which is always appreciated.  

Now, here comes the third iteration, Terror Train, and it’s a fairly close remake to the original.  There’s even a magician on the train!  However, this guy is no David Copperfield.  (Then again, who could be?)  I guess the big difference this time out is that the conductor is a woman.  (Mary Walsh, who looks like Judi Dench’s stunt double.)  She isn’t bad, but I did miss Ben Johnson from the original.  The new leading lady, Robyn Alomar, is no Jamie Lee Curtis either (but you already knew that).  Heck, she isn’t even Thora Birch.

Things start off OK with a solid Fraternity Prank Goes Wrong scene.  Then, we flash forward to a Halloween Party thrown by the fraternity aboard the titular train.  A killer boards the loco locomotive and before long, he’s picking off the people who perpetrated the prank one by one.  

I was kind of hopeful for this one since it was a Tubi original.  I’ve never seen a Tubi original before, but Tubi has long been my favorite streaming service because it’s free and it features some of the weirdest, dumbest movies I’ve ever seen.  Sadly, Terror Train is thoroughly generic and by-the-numbers in just about every way.  The kills are fairly bloody, sure, but they lack imagination.  (They’re mostly assorted stabbings, slashings, and at least one decent decapitated head.)  Ultimately, it’s a rather pointless remake, and the changes/concessions to the modern era (characters must learn hazing and sexism are bad) are halfhearted at best.  You’ll probably head for the sleeping car long before this train pulls into the station.

Incredibly enough, a sequel has been announced… and it’s coming out before the end of the year?!?!

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: SMILE (2022) ****

Smile had a great viral marketing campaign where they had several people sit in the stands of baseball games and smile unblinkingly into the camera inning after inning.  That was cool, but it wasn’t quite enough to get me into the theater to see it.  When it was released, it became the rarest thing in horror:  An original horror film with no big movie stars that became a word of mouth hit, grossing over $100 million at the box office.  Even as the positive word of mouth was spreading, I still somehow never found time to check it out.  Now, I’m home for the holidays, it’s on Paramount+, and I no longer have an excuse.  Even with little to no expectations and knowing very little about it, Smile knocked me on my ass.  Unlike Barbarian, this is one horror flick that lives up to the hype.  

An overworked shrink named Rose (Sosie Bacon) is horrified when her patient commits suicide right in front of her.  The worse thing about it?  The demented smile that remained on her face the whole time she performed the deed.  Now, Rose keeps seeing weird, smiling people everywhere she goes.  After doing some Encyclopedia Brown-style investigation, she discovers a pattern:  Anyone who comes into contact with a sinister, smiling suicide victim will themselves commit suicide seven days later.  Will Rose be able to break the curse, or is she doomed to perpetuate it?

It would be flippant to shrug Smile off as “It Follows Meets The Ring”.  Yes, the bare bones of that scenario is there.  However, this flick sets out and accomplishes what it intends to do a hundred times better than those two overpraised movies did.

Smile is a slow burner, but somehow writer/director Parker Finn (making one heck of a debut) cracked the code of how to make a slow burn horror flick that manages to keep the tension simmering, while at the same time carefully doling out jump scares, gross-out moments, and gnarly set pieces at expertly timed intervals, so that the audience’s patience is never once tested.  In fact, these sequences (chief among them, the birthday party from hell) add to the allure and mystery of the premise.  

A lot of that has to do with Bacon’s performance.  She runs the gamut from caring doctor to raving lunatic with about a hundred different shades in between.  The film wouldn’t be as effective as it is if we didn’t believe the terror she was experiencing, and brother, we buy it hook, line, and sinker.

I joke about every horror movie these days being about “trauma”.  Smile is the first one to say, “Yup, that’s what this one is all about:  TRAUMA.  Bold, underlined, italicized trauma.”  What’s interesting and effective about the film is the way the supernatural menace assaults its victims much like, say, PTSD.  They go around having a fairly good day without a care in the world until the entity (trauma) comes tumbling down on them like a ton of bricks, making them on edge, unable to cope, and pushing themselves away from their loved ones.  

The wildest part is the ending (Vaguest of Spoilers Ahead, but it’s hard not to discuss the thing that makes the film so great), in which our heroine finally confronts the monster (trauma) head-on.  And I don’t mean “wild” as in it’s crazy or weird.  I mean “wild” as in I’ll be damned if I didn’t get a little choked up.  We all have a little trauma inside us all.  Smile foregoes a fiery, balls-to-the-walls conclusion befitting a great horror movie, and instead gives its heroine an opportunity to confront, reconcile, and move on from her past trauma (monster)… Of course, then it continues onto a fiery, balls-to-the-walls conclusion befitting a great horror movie.

Smile sure left this horror fan grinning from ear to ear.

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: TRAILERS #1: HORROR AND SCI-FI OF THE ‘50S AND ‘60S (1992) ***

Here’s the first installment (of many) in Something Weird’s trailer compilation series.  It’s a good primer for anyone looking to get into trailer tapes.  Many of the previews wound up on later Something Weird releases (and elsewhere), but there are still plenty here I had never seen before (including She Devil, The Night the World Exploded, and a re-release trailer for the 1943 Batman serial).  Overall, it’s a fast and fun two hours of black and white thrills and chills.  (Well, the trailer for Eyes of Hell is tinted.)  

Things kick off with a couple of ‘50s re-release trailers of horror classics including a cool MGM Triple Feature of Mark of the Vampire, The Mask of Fu Manchu, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as a trailer for One Body Too Many.  The low budget sci-fi schlock world of director W. Lee Wilder is showcased through previews for Phantom from Space, Killers from Space, and The Man Without a Body.  Roger Corman classics such as Not of This Earth, The Viking Women and the Sea Serpent, and Teenage Caveman are featured as well.  Universal Pictures is represented by Tarantula, Monster on the Campus, and Curse of the Undead.  And movies that appeared on episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 such as Terror from the Year 5000, The Beast of Yucca Flats (narrated by director Coleman Francis), and 12 to the Moon also turn up.

Some of my favorite trailers include Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (in which Mr. Hyde is a… vampire?!?!), Allison Hayes overacting to the hilt in The Disembodied, and Tabonga the killer tree doing his thing in the ad for From Hell It Came.  And what would a trailer be without a great tagline?  Some of the best belong to Attack of the Puppet People (“SEE—A Baby Doll Take a Bubble Bath in a Coffee Can!”), The Brain Eaters (“It’s an Adventure That Will Burst Your Blood Vessels with Suspense!”), Return of the Fly (“The Thriller-Chiller That Will Really BUG You!”), Beyond the Time Barrier (“Will YOU Die Sixty-Four Years from Today?”), Strait-Jacket (“Warning:  Strait-Jacket Vividly Depicts Axe Murders!”), and Cat Girl (“To Caress Me is to Play with DEATH!”).

All in all, this is a solid collection.  Since the trailers are culled from the ‘50s and ‘60s, they are a tad tame.  That said, fans of cheesy space exploration movies, mad scientist flicks, and monster mashes will surely enjoy it.  

The complete trailer line-up is as follows:  MGM Triple Horror Feature - Mark of the Vampire / The Mask of Fu Manchu / Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, One Body Too Many, Phantom from Space, Killers from Space, Tarantula, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Not of This Earth, Voodoo Woman, Daughter of Dr. Jekyll, The Viking Women and the Sea Serpent, The Astounding She-Monster, The Haunted Strangler, The Colossus of New York, I Bury the Living, Frankenstein 1970, Attack of the Puppet People, War of the Colossal Beast, Teenage Caveman, Monster on the Campus, The Brain Eaters, The Screaming Skull, The Man Without a Body, Curse of the Undead, Jack the Ripper, The Alligator People, Return of the Fly, Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow, Missile to the Moon, The Leech Woman, Beyond the Time Barrier, The Terror of the Tongs, The Beast of Yucca Flats, Homicidal, The Creature from the Haunted Sea, Phantom Planet, Burn, Witch, Burn, Panic in Year Zero, The Vampire and the Ballerina, Varan the Unbelievable, Night Tide, The Playgirls and the Vampire, Strait-Jacket, The Last Man on Earth, Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte, the 1943 Batman Serial, Untamed Women, She Devil, The Night the World Exploded, Unknown Terror. The Disembodied, From Hell It Came, Cat Girl, Macabre, War of the Satellites, Terror in the Haunted House, Terror from the Year 5000, Monster from Green Hell, The Headless Ghost, Caltiki, the Immortal Monster, 12 to the Moon, Doctor Blood's Coffin, The Devil's Partner, Mr. Sardonicus, Eyes of Hell (AKA:  The Mask), and The Innocents.

CENTERFOLD FEVER (1981) ** ½

R. Bolla stars as the editor of a dirty magazine (called “Skin”) who wants his centerfold girls to be different from the models found in other smut rags.  (“Just having a pussy isn’t enough anymore!”)  When he hires his girls, they not only have to pose nude, but must write stories for the mag as well.  Kandi (Kandi Barbour) has to interview Marc “Mr. 10 ½” Stevens to see if he still lives up to his measurement, Heather (Tiffany Clark) tries to get a scoop on the latest centerfold and winds up balling her, and Suzanne (Samantha Fox) goes undercover to investigate a porn theater which gives new meaning to the term “audience participation”.

It all ends with a big porn magazine party where there are various floorshows.  (Veri Knotty ties her pussy lips together, a dominatrix makes her slave lick her ass, and Stevens and a porn starlet make like a XXX version of Bobby and Cissy and do a dance and fuck number.)  Afterwards, there’s an orgy and Annie Sprinkle performs a “Bosom Ballet”.  With a finale packed to the gills with this kind of action, it’s easy enough to overlook some of the film’s flaws in the early going, but overall, it’ not quite hot enough to make it entirely recommended.

The premise is thin, and the pacing is herky-jerky, but it does get better as it goes along.  The sex scenes don’t get very hot until the end.  Until then, they’re mostly standard issue, as they are shot in static fashion, and with little in the way of chemistry between the performers.  

The cast is kind of funny too, which helps.  Ron Jeremy does his usual shtick (juggling, sucking his own dick, doing impressions, etc.) as a horny photographer called “The Maniac”.  R. Bolla gets all the best lines as the editor.  When Fox sucks his dick to get a job, he muses, “I liked her credentials, so I hired her”.  My favorite line occurred when he was surrounded by a bunch of big-breasted starlets, and he quipped, “As Bob Hope would say, ‘Thanks for the mammaries!”  Although his performance is good for a chuckle or two, it’s not quite enough to sustain your interest throughout the entire running time.

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: CRIMES OF THE FUTURE (2022) ****

In the future, people start developing weird organs and shit, which starts to blur the line between what is and isn’t considered “human”.  Viggo Mortensen and Lea Seydoux are a team of performance artists who dutifully tattoo and register their newly acquired organs at Kristen Stewart’s office for “National Organ Registry”.  Oh, and by “performance artists”, I don’t mean they don clown make-up and recite slam poetry or shit like that.  I mean Viggo hops into his fleshy-pod while Lea performs a robo-autopsy on him WHILE HE’S STILL ALIVE as audience members gawk and salivate like extras from Café Flesh.  You know, because “SURGERY IS THE NEW SEX!”

Crimes of the Future is probably the David Cronenbergiest David Cronenberg has ever David Cronenberged.  After decades of making serious grown-up movies, The Man is back with a vengeance.  It’s like all those years making mainstream films caused all his cinematic excesses and fetishes to bottleneck and when he finally uncorked that sucker, it went nuclear.  Last week, in my review of Jean Rollin’s Dracula’s Fiancée, I wrote, “It has the confidence of a genre director in his twilight years gleefully indulging us with his cinematic fetishes one more time.  I respect that kind of shit.”  I could’ve easily been talking about David Cronenberg and Crimes of the Future.  

It's got all his weird little touches.  Growths, tumors, people being attached to machines that look like growths and tumors.  It’s also chockfull of Cronenbergian dialogue containing unending pseudoscientific gobbledygook and he never for a second stops to explain any of it.  As a lifelong fan of the man, I respect that kind of shit.

You know you’re in for something special right from the opening scene where a kid eats a trashcan.  His mother knows, once shit like that starts happening, there’s only one option:  Suffocate that little bugger in his sleep.  I mean, first it’s trashcans.  Then sofas.  Next thing you know, they eat you out of house and home.  Literally.  

I also love how at one art show, the guy who sews a bunch of ears to his face and body is kind of looked down upon as a poseur because, after all, “the ears don’t work”.  It may be the dystopian future, but we still must demand high standards from our artists.  Goddamned, I love this movie.

There’s an intriguing question that is proposed about halfway through:  Is Viggo just another mutant who’s popping out strange new organs, or is the “artist” willing these tumors into existence for the sake of art?  Cronenberg is basically saying that art isn’t just some intangible thing that you pull out of thin air, but a living, organic part of the artist themselves that must be surgically removed and displayed.  This point is further conveyed when someone asks Viggo if he’s working on anything new and he muses, “I don’t have a choice”.  

Mortensen is excellent, grunting, grumbling and grousing, but with a playful twinkle in his eye the whole time.  Seydoux is great too, but it’s Kristen Stewart who steals the movie by acting exactly like Chloe Sevigny hopped up on Spanish Fly.  In fact, this might be her horniest performance yet.  That on its own accord makes Crimes of the Future highly recommended.

It’s also full of great lines like, “I found her attractive… in a bureaucratic kind of way”, “There’s no crime like the present”, “Watching you filled me with the desire to cut my face open”, and “I’m sorry.  I’m not very good at the old sex”.  I never thought anything would surpass Videodrome’s mantra of “Long Live the New Flesh”, but “Surgery is the New Sex” comes awful close.  

In short, Crimes of the Future is a goddamned masterpiece.  I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it after I saw it, and I already want to watch it again.  It gets under your skin and demands to be reckoned with, just like a Cronenbergian tumor.

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: MR. HARRIGAN’S PHONE (2022) ** ½

When his eyes begin to fail him, reclusive billionaire Mr. Harrigan (Donald Sutherland) hires a young boy named Craig (Jaeden Martell) to read to him.  As the years go on, the two develop a strong friendship.  One day, Craig decides to bring Mr. Harrigan into the 21^st century and gives him a cellphone, which, much to his surprise, he takes to like a duck to water.  Eventually, Mr. Harrigan passes away, and at the funeral, Craig places his phone inside the casket.  Before long, Craig begins receiving ominous, indecipherable texts from his dead friend.

Written and directed by John Lee (The Little Things) Hancock, this adaptation of a Stephen King novella has echoes of Apt Pupil (older man bonding with a young boy) and just about every King story in which a kid uses supernatural powers to get back at his bullies.  (Martell himself is no stranger to King adaptations after starring in It Chapter 1 and 2.)  It exists in that middle ground of King films that aren’t scary enough to work as horror and aren't involving enough to function as a strong drama.  That said, the performances are solid, and Hancock handles the admittedly thin premise with enough panache to keep you watching, even if the whole thing feels more like an overlong Tales from the Darkside episode than a Netflix Original.  And like most Netflix Originals, it runs on about fifteen to twenty minutes too long. 

Mr. Harrigan’s Phone never really makes any major missteps, but it doesn’t exactly knock it out of the park either.  It’s probably most effective during the scenes where Martell gets butt dialed from beyond the grave.  The subplot where he uses the phone as an instrument of revenge is kind of neat too.  Despite being a little on the tame side, it remains a solid, disposable, little film that works more often than not. 

HALLOWEEN HANGOVER: BARBARIAN (2022) **

I’ve always been iffy on the whole Airbnb thing.  Like, why would you stay in a stranger’s house when you could spend the night at a perfectly reasonable hotel?  Who knows what kind of maniac could live there?  Same with rideshare apps.  How are you supposed to know the person who’s picking you up isn’t a complete lunatic?  I haven’t done either of those things and I have made it this far in life without getting slaughtered.  Then again, if people in horror movies made smart decisions, they wouldn’t be in a horror movie.  

Barbarian tells the story of Tess (Georgina Campbell) who rents an Airbnb online, only to discover it’s ocupado.  Since the guy who’s renting it already (Bill Skarsgard) seems nice enough, she accepts his invitation to share the house with him for the night.  Tess slowly lets down her guard until…

People have been very good about not letting the secrets of Barbarian slip, so I will return the favor and refuse to go any further describing the plot.  I will say writer/director Zach Cregger does a good job setting up the characters and scenario.  It’s only in the second half when he pulls a Death Proof on us and starts to follow a new main character (Justin Long) does it begin to stumble.  Once we finally learn the big secret of what’s inside the house, I had already grown tired of being jerked around so much.  By that point I was nearly mentally checking out of the film, so the big reveal just didn’t make much of an impact on me.  

Lots of people had talked Barbarian up, so I guess my expectations were a bit too high.  To me, it really wasn’t as freaky as some were suggesting.  Again, I won’t spoil it, so I’ll tread lightly.  I’ll just say that… well… OK… it seemed like a pretty sweet deal to me, especially if you had a certain fetish that I won’t mention… again… due to spoilers.  I mean, c’mon, I’ve seen hundreds of worse fates in horror movies than the one that befell our hero here.

So, I guess it’s all relative.  I didn’t find the finale as shocking as many horror fans obviously did.  I won’t make a big deal about it though.  No use crying over spilled milk.