Thursday, December 5, 2024

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: HELLBLOCK 13 (1999) ** ½

FORMAT:  DVD

I’m a sucker for a good anthology horror movie.  Having Scream Queen Debbie Rochon and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre’s Gunnar Hansen in the cast doesn’t hurt either.  They star in “The Wraparound Segments” (***), which are kind of like a cross between the wraparound sequences from Tales from the Darkside:  The Movie and a Women in Prison flick.  Rochon is a serial killer (who is allegedly the illegitimate child of Charles Manson) who is about to be executed.  To pass the time, she tells her executioner (Hansen) scary stories she has written. 

The first story, “Watery Grave” (** ½), is a mix of the “Something to Tide You Over” segment from Creepshow and the real-life Susan Smith case (who coincidentally is in the news again).  A spiteful mother drowns her two kids to spend more time with her boyfriend.  Before long, her waterlogged zombified children come after her.  This one is short and sweet and to the point.  It doesn’t knock it out of the park, but it doesn’t make any missteps either. 

Next is “White Trash Love Story” (**), a tale of a battered teenage bride who lives in a trailer with her abusive redneck husband.  After a particularly brutal beating, she turns to her neighbor, an old witch for help.  The grizzled crone gives her a potion to get revenge, but it predictably backfires on her.  Although this story starts out fine, the ending is rushed and unsatisfying.  The goopy transformation scenes and rubbery effects aren’t bad though. 

In the final story, “Flashback Biker Girl” (** ½), a biker gang converges on a cemetery where they perform a ritual to resurrect their long dead biker mama (J.J. North from Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfold).  This segment is kind of slow and the ending is predictable.  Since it features J.J. as an undead biker babe and some brief lesbian biker sex, it’s tough to be too finicky about it. 

Rochon gives a great performance and is the main reason to see it.  She always excelled when she was given a character that’s equal parts horny and homicidal.  Debbie has a nice rapport with Hansen too.  It makes you wish they did more films together.

Hellblock 13 sort of acted as the final installment of a loose trilogy of anthologies directed by Paul Talbot and starring Hansen.  (Campfire Tales and Freakshow were the other two.)  

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: FEAR IN THE DARK (1991) ** ½

FORMAT:  DVD

Christopher Lee hosts this short (less than an hour long) documentary on horror films that was originally broadcast on British television.  Things kick off by tracing the origin of modern horror back to the works of Edgar Allan Poe.  Then there’s a discussion on vampire films, a look at the impact of The Exorcist, and the gimmick movies of William Castle.  Other topics include gore, Video Nasties, horror comics, and even real-life serial killers. 

The interviewees include John Carpenter, Clive Barker, Wes Craven, Dario Argento, Robert Bloch, Barbara Steele, William Friedkin, John McNaughton, and Brian Yuzna, all of whom offer some illuminating insights on the genre.  (The input from an assemblage of horror fans is decidedly less interesting.)  Carpenter is especially fun to listen to while speaking of his love for Blood Feast and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.  Along the way, there are clips from Silence of the Lambs, A Nightmare on Elm Street, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Nosferatu, Opera, The Tingler, Don’t Scream It’s Only a Movie, Queen of Black Magic, Hellraiser, Suspiria, Halloween 4:  The Return of Michael Myers, Henry:  Portrait of a Serial Killer, and Society.  Most of the time, the best footage isn’t shown, although I suppose that might’ve been due to the censors.  (At least they were still able to show the “butthead” scene from Society.)

Since it was a British production, it’s a little on the dry side.  It also glosses over some genres too quickly, and only shows lobby cards for some films instead of playing actual clips.  (Interestingly enough, they are forced to do that for The Exorcist because apparently British censors won’t allow it to be shown on television.  Pussies.)  Also, the random shots of audience members covering their eyes in a darkened theater feels more like padding than anything else.  

Overall, Fear in the Dark is watchable and entertaining.  I just wish it had more focus as it jumps around a bit too much and many of the segue-ways feel incongruous.  That said, any documentary/clip show package/horror compilation that includes scenes from Vampyres is OK by me. 

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: PURANA MANDIR (1984) **

FORMAT:  DVD

The Ramsay brothers, the directors of Bandh Darwaza, made this frustrating and uneven horror flick.  Hundreds of years ago a creature named Saamri roamed the countryside killing women.  The king finally put a stop to him by cutting his head off and hiding it away.  Now in the present day, the king’s last descendant is a pretty college student with no idea of her family’s past with Saamri.  When her father forbids her to see her poor boyfriend, they defy his wishes.  He then reveals to them the family secret, and the determined lovers set out to break the curse once and for all. 

In some ways this feels like a warm-up to Bandh Darwaza as they are both thematically similar.  (Both films contain chases involving a horsedrawn carriage.)  However. there’s just too many characters (like the comic relief bandit) and subplots (including one stolen from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly) that get in the way of the fun.  Even more disappointing is the fact that the film often forgets about its main baddie for long stretches at a time.  (His head doesn’t reappear till about the hundred-minute mark.)  While I’m not a Bollywood expert or anything, it just seemed like the musical numbers occurred at the least opportune times.  (Save for the awesome, albeit brief, disco dance number.)

That said, there’s still plenty of goofy shit here.  We get Kung Fu fights, a freaky birthing scene, a fantasy love sequence where a guy and his girlfriend have a literal roll in the hay, a headhunter attack (one wears a Frankenstein mask), a bloody shower, and a bug-eyed possessed servant.  Nothing really sticks, but it does have a silly charm about it.  The monster is cool looking too as he resembles a cross between a werewolf, Evil Ash from Army of Darkness, and Frankenstein from Frankenstein Conquers the World.  

Ultimately, the unwieldy running time gets the better of it. In fact, this might’ve been a ** ½ flick if it ran a brisk ninety minutes.  At nearly two and a half hours, it just doesn’t know when to quit. 

AKA:  The Haunted Temple.  AKA:  The Old Temple.

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: SMILE (2022) ****

FORMAT:  4K UHD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on November 29th, 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 worst 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.

QUICK THOUGHTS: 

I got a good deal on the Paramount Scares 4K box set and I was looking for an excuse to revisit this before the sequel came out, so I was able to kill two birds with one stone.  I’m happy to say that on my second viewing, even knowing how it all plays out, the film still cooks.  It remains one of the most original horror flicks in recent memory.  Director Parker Finn gets a lot of mileage out of a slim premise and Bacon delivers a true tour de force performance.

4K UHD NOTES:

I was surprised how well this popped in 4K.  The unsettling off-kilter aerial shots are twice as dizzying in high def, and the fluid camerawork looks mesmerizing.  I don’t even have the best set-up in the world, and it still looked like a million bucks. 

TERRIFIER 3 (2024) *** ½

There’s “over the top” and then there’s “through the roof”.  Terrifier 3 is a case of the latter.  There is more blood and guts in this sequel than most horror flicks have in their entire franchise.  I have a feeling that somewhere Herschell Gordon Lewis is smiling. 

Terrifier 3 earns extra points for being a Christmas horror flick, something the world can always use more of.  It manages to give us all the things we crave in a Christmas slasher (namely a killer in a Santa suit chopping up people with an axe), but with fresh new nuances (like the killer making “blood angels”) to make it feel fresh. 

If you recall, Art the Clown (David Howard Thornton) got decapitated at the end of Terrifier 2.  To put it delicately… he got better.  Now, he’s back with his horribly disfigured girlfriend Victoria (Samantha Scaffidi) in tow, and he’s looking to finish off The Final Girl, Sierra (Lauren LaVera) once and for all. 

Terrifier 3 is for my money, the best installment yet.  It dials back the fairy tale weirdness of the second flick while still adding enough touches of it as to not turn off die-hard fans.  The running time is thankfully shorter than 2 and while it still clocks in at a hefty two hours, it certainly isn’t boring and there is no shortage of the red stuff to go around. 

Speaking of which, some of the kills must be seen to be believed.  I will go on record by saying that the chainsaw up the ass scene will go down as an all-timer.  Sure, some of the gore scenes flirt with tastelessness (like when Victoria masturbates with a shard of broken glass), but if you’re still watching this series after the grisly second entry, then you probably already know what you’re getting yourself into. 

Thornton delivers yet another fun performance as Art.  He’s basically a mix of Pennywise, Freddy Krueger, and Charlie Chaplin. Some of his reaction shots are priceless this time around.  LaVera once again makes for a formidable adversary for him, although her nerdy brother (Elliott Fullam) kind of gets the short end of the stick in this one.  The supporting cast, which includes everyone from Clint Howard to Tom Savini to Jason Patric, is fun too. 

Your mileage may vary of course, but Terrifier 3 got this old Grinch into the holiday spirit. 

Wednesday, December 4, 2024

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: BANDH DARWAZA (1990) ***

FORMAT:  DVD

A woman desperate for a child, sneaks off to the sinister “Black Mountain” to get knocked up by the Dracula-like “Master”.  When she finally gives birth to a daughter, the Master demands she join him on Black Mountain.  Naturally, she refuses to give up her baby and he has her killed.  Her grieving hubby then comes to get revenge, but with his dying breath, the Master places a curse on his daughter.  Years later, she falls madly in love with a man who rejects her advances.  Soon, she finds herself pulled to Black Mountain where the witches there promise to grant her powers in exchange for her soul.  With the help of a magic book, she bewitches her intended love.  His friends then team up to break the spell and stop the Master and his evil witches at the Black Mountain. 

If all that seems like a lot of plot… well… it kind of is.  However, the film moves at a fast pace and is never boring.  Since it’s a Bollywood movie, it has a few musical numbers, but honestly there weren’t nearly as many as I was expecting.  They aren’t intrusive to the plot and are moderately entertaining for the most part.  In fact, it just adds to the bizarre “anything goes” vibe. 

Like most Bollywood flicks, it’s long (almost two and a half hours), but there’s enough weird and/or cool and/or goofy shit here to keep just about any genre film lover entertained.  There’s Aerobicizing, annoying comic relief, dorky grown ass men wearing Michael Jackson Thriller jackets, some interesting camerawork, a scary bat idol with glowing red eyes, and random Kung Fu fights.  It also blatantly steals music from Friday the 13th (and Abbott and Costello Meets Frankenstein), which ups the overall kitsch factor. 

The first half is full of witches and spells and assorted weirdness.  By the end of the film, things switch over to a more traditional Dracula type of deal with the red-eyed Master seducing and biting women on the neck.  Sure, a lot of this is wildly uneven, but it’s still plenty of fun, and the scene where he flies through a car windshield and bites the driver is legit.  

LET’S GET PHYSICAL: EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1962) ** ½

FORMAT:  DVD (REWATCH)

ORIGINAL REVIEW:

(As posted on October 25th, 2007)

After his daughter’s face is terribly disfigured in a car crash, a slightly crazed doctor (Pierre Brasseur) works frantically in his lab to perfect a face transplant. His assistant (Alida Valli from Suspiria) lures girls back to the lab where they are anesthetized and become unwilling facial donors. Meanwhile his timid daughter (Edith Scob), who wears a creepy featureless mask, becomes increasingly loony, especially after the latest botched surgery.

This atmospheric and stylish film, directed by Georges Franju benefits from some truly unsettling operation scenes where victims' faces are scalpeled off with impeccable precision. They must have really been something to see back in the '60s and pack quite a punch today. Unfortunately for the most part though, the film can’t make up its mind whether it wants to be an arty French movie or a balls-out horror movie. Even though most of the movie is stuck in this bizarre state of genre limbo, it’s still worth a look just for those nasty operation scenes alone. The stiff pacing and art house sensibilities don’t do it any favors either.

The performances are a mixed bag as Brasseur doesn’t make much of an impression as either a concerned father or a mad scientist. Valli fares much better and brings a touch of sensitivity to her otherwise underwritten role, but it’s Scob who really steals the movie. With her majestic, hopelessly sad eyes peering through her expressionless mask, her touching performance elevates the movie and gives it a much-needed shot of pathos.

Some people will be turned off by the subtitles and the slack pacing, but others will want to check it out for the botched facial surgeries and Scob’s memorable performance. Besides it’s not every day that you can say you saw a French mad doctor movie, is it?

AKA: House of Dr. Rasanoff. AKA: Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus.