EARTH VS. THE SPIDER (1958)

Dir: Bert I. Gordon

 EARTH VS. THE SPIDER (2001)

Dir: Scott Ziehl

Taking its title (but nothing else) from an old AIP drive-in hit of 1958, this enjoyable fantasy-horror item functions as a salute to, spoof of, variation on and ripoff of SPIDER-MAN all at the same time. A shy, lonely, impoverished security guard who lives in a depressing little apartment has little to live for apart from his favorite comic book, Arachnid Avenger.  He's too timid to ask the beautiful girl down the hall for a date even though she's perfectly friendly and has many things in common with him. Punks regularly pick on him outside his home and nobody at work respects him except his kindly old partner on the job. When the older man is murdered by thugs during a robbery, poor Quentin Kemmer (named after Ed Kemmer, the actor who was the star of the original movie with this title) can't take it any more. As fate would have it, the top secret research facility at which he works has been experimenting with breeding resilient, nearly indestructible tarantulas (just what the world needed) and he sees it as an opportunity to acquire the comic book style superpowers he's always dreamt of. Secretly allowing himself to receive an injection of high-potency spider goo in the lab, Quentin at first develops the strength, agility and confidence of an honest to goodness superhero. Soon he's even able to shoot webs from a weird new organ in the middle of his chest.  He only has time to deal with a few of the city's lowlifes, though, before things get out of hand like in David Cronenberg's THE FLY as that pesky new monster DNA begins to take over.  Dan Aykroyd is the equally unhappy, traumatized, world-weary cop trying to solve the resultant series of strange deaths while coping with his cheating lush of a wife. The glum parallel tales of the would-be superhero and the has-been detective dovetail nicely.  The monster effetcs and makeup, the work of Stan Winston, are outstanding and supply the movie with some great visuals and there's even a nice ironic twist at the end.  It may not be destined to win any awards, but this is a clever and well-made little rumination on the hazards of confusing comic book logic with reality. 

 EATEN ALIVE (1976)

Dir: Tobe Hooper

Hooper's followup to his landmark 1974 horror classic THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE was this clumsy, entirely pointless and disappointing time-waster. TEXAS CHAIN SAW had a grinding momentum and a steadily mounting sense of dread that are conspicuously missing here. None of the characters have any real plot function, but that's probably because there isn't any plot. The dialogue is so meaningless and repetitive that it's hard to believe any of it was ever committed to paper and the whole project stinks of desperation and a lack of focus. Hooper doesn't seem to have had anything particular in mind or to have offered his actors anything by way of direction beyond "Act crazy" and "Action!". Nothing that happens in this lame movie ever goes anywhere. Neville Brand mumbles and grumbles his way through an underdeveloped role as a psycho who owns the broken-down old Starlight Hotel located in a swamp. When people stop there, Neville whacks them with garden implements and then tosses them to the crocodile that lives in the bog under the building. The crazed family in TEXAS CHAIN SAW were cannibals, but we never get the slightest idea why this guy murders everybody he can get his hands on. There isn't one single believable moment as an unlikely parade of losers show up at Neville's place, behave irrationally and end up as croc food. Most of the victims behave as crazily as the killer, so there's nobody one can relate to. One character after another registers nothing beyond mild mental disturbance, jabbering to themselves and droning on meaninglessly. The wonderful once-in-a-lifetime cast is wasted since nobody was given anything remotely interesting to say or do and no two parts of the film ever fit together in any sensible way. It's strictly amateur night stuff, despite the presence of name actors like Brand, Mel Ferrer, Carolyn Jones, Stuart Whitman and Robert Englund, all of whom hang around babbling gibberish for a few scenes but ultimately add nothing of interest. There is some question as to whether Neville's "pet" is actually a crocodile or an alligator, but that's probably only because whoever supplied the prop wasn't sure which it was. A little girl spends half the film crawling around under the house, even while there are people nearby, before it occurs to her to yell for help. William Finley shows up as a husband who acts even crazier than Brand, but it doesn't matter because he's soon tossed to the toothy critter. Goofy old Neville rapidly hacks at most of his visitors with a scythe, but one actress is much unluckier, as she is inexplicably tied up and forced to listen to his tedious ad-libs for the rest of the movie.  Robert Englund is good as an ignorant redneck troublemaker but like everybody else his character is thrown away.  Talking about his pet, Brand mutters that it "will eat anything and it don't make no distinction" about a dozen times, so that when it finally eats him at the end, it's exactly what you expect to happen. You never even get a good look at the croc or gator or whatever it is. Red lights are used outdoors at night in an effort at style and to cover up the movie's overall cheapness. In the last five or ten minutes, the film finally kicks into high gear and things get fairly gripping, but it's too little too late. The crude clunker was also released as STARLIGHT SLAUGHTER and DEATH TRAP but it's a loser under any name.  It just may be Hooper's worst movie ever. And yes, I saw SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION.

EMPTY ACRE, THE (2007)

Dir: Patrick Rea

The American dream backfires in grand style in this poetic, often fascinating tale of tragedy. The suffocating aura of indescribable, almost irrational dread in this movie comes much closer to the flavor of H.P. Lovecraft's darkest writings than any of the movies actually adapted from that author's work. A newly married couple with a 6-month-old son buys an isolated Kansas farm which contains a mysteriously barren acre of flat, lifeless land. Late at night, a shapeless black shadowy mass emerges from the ground and swallows up nearby residents and passersby. The victims' screams and moans can occasionally be heard coming from underground, but no physical trace of them can be found. Some people from the nearby town are contaminated by the unknown force and released, doomed to live out the rest of their lives as aged, hopeless husks of their former selves in constant danger of becoming as dehydrated as the lifeless patch of land itself. When the newlyweds' infant son disappears one night, their lives begin a downward spiral nothing can reverse. While the bulk of the story focuses its attention on the crumbling marriage of the protagonists and the husband's degeneration into an insufferably bad-tempered, controlling (and possibly two-timing) creep, the nameless evil works as a metaphor for their ruined lives as it continues to literally suck the life out of everyone and evrything in its reach. The unexplained underground monster functions rather disturbngly as a comment (warning?) on the ability of smalltown life (and especially farm life) to destroy the hopes and dreams of ordinary people who can be made through trying circumstances to give up on their expectations of perfect little lives and eventually find themselves resigned to emptily plugging along in their own personal, inescapable ruts, deprived of their youth and left with thirsts that can never be sated. Horror fans accustomed to special effects-driven mayhem may be bored by the movie's relative lack of violent incident, but this unnerving look into the depths of sadness and loss is more shuddery and challenging than any half-dozen of Hollywood's top horrors. Which is not to say, of course, that it's a perfect film. The pace honestly does flag from time to time, there are way too many repeated flash cuts of spooky imagery, the acting is inconsistent and the characters don't always behave with great intelligence. Tighter editing would have helped a lot. And then there's the lack of any rational explanation for the evil that haunts the field, which will be seen as frustrating to those who prefer straightforward storytelling over nightmare metaphor. But in the case of a psychological tale like this that wants to get into your head rather than simply shock you, any literal explanation for the story's malignant supernatural force seems almost superfluous. It might only have served to distract viewer attention away from the emotional and very personal nature of the horror at hand. This eerie tale may not make much sense on a literal level but as a gloomy exploration of misguided emotions and wasted lives it's dead-on, concluding on a devastating note that chillingly feels like the only way this scenario could possibly have played out. The director was only 27.

 ENCOUNTER AT RAVEN'S GATE (1988)

Dir: Rolf DeHeer

This is one of the scariest films about UFO encounters I've ever seen. It doesn't feature any space monsters but it's clever, insightful and completely unpredictable. It also offers a frightening look at how ordinary people might react to events that are beyond their scope of experience or understanding.  The hero is an ex-con who can't seem to stay out of trouble. He's staying at his short-tempered brother's isolated farm in the Australian outback, and even before anything strange happens his life is pretty rough thanks to some rowdy local sport fans who pick fights with him, a bullying middle-aged cop with a chip on his shoulder, and constant temptation in the form of his brother's cute, attention-starved wife. Things get even more tense after an older couple's house is blown inside-out by unseen forces that affect practically everything and everybody nearby. Weird lights and clouds of fog are seen in the sky, but we never see any extraterrestrials. Instead, all sorts of seemingly unrelated problems arise and reality itself seems to be fracturing as a result of the brush with the otherworldly presence. The farm's entire water supply dries up overnight and the hapless hero's negligence is blamed for it. But that's only the beginning. Dead birds fall out of the sky. People are blown through solid walls, fused together, or driven mad. The mean cop, an opera fanatic who already seemed to be on the verge of a mental breakdown, completely loses it after entering the ruined farmhouse. Sound waves are distorted and mixed up, so that some areas are left with a weird hollow echo effect in the atmosphere. People near the ruined house hear their voices speeded up, and some people say things that were spoken earlier by other characters, in the other persons' voices.  Cassette tapes play the wrong music and sometimes continue to play it even when they're not in a tape player. This is intense, nightmarish stuff, gradually building a sense of dread that leads to a chilling climax which works as both science fiction mystery and knife-wielding psychokiller scenario. A government scientist investigating the bizarre phenomena is such an insufferably smug little creep that you can't stand him, but his role in all of this isn't quite what it seems. The ending throws you another curve that doesn't seem like it could have happened in an American-made movie. Nothing is ever really explained in any literal way, but ENCOUNTER AT RAVEN'S GATE feels like a complete story anyway since it focuses more on the devastating psychological effects on already stressed, struggling people of a chance meeting with forces that are not only unknown but utterly unknowable. You have to wonder whether Chris Carter saw this before he created THE X-FILES for TV.  It is a/k/a INCIDENT AT RAVEN'S GATE and it deserves more recognition.

 ENDANGERED SPECIES (2002)

Dir: Kevin Tenney

It's something of a shock to see so many talented, legitimate actors (Eric Roberts, John Rhys-Davies, Arnold Vosloo, Tony LoBianco) trying to hold onto their dignity in this amateurish project that (stumbles and) falls into the TERMINATOR wannabe category.   Did they all lose a bet or something?  Combining TERMINATOR with THE HIDDEN isn't as interesting an idea as you might think, as this tedious movie is irrevocably derailed by a sophomoric script, inept action, unconvincing stunt work and the chintziest special effects since children's Saturday morning TV of the '70s.  As for the story and the presentation of its science fiction elements, well, if this had been made in 1989 it might have been understandable, but, 2002?  Holy cow.  An emotionless guy dressed in black stomps through a city in Lithuania that's supposed to pass for somewhere in the USA, ruthlessly killing people who are working out at gyms and health clubs.  He's actually an alien poacher collecting the most perfect human hides to make into clothing which will then be sold on the intergalactic black market.   There's much talk about how he's after the most perfect specimens of humanity, but when we finally see some of the supposedly horrifying "human leather" jackets they look more like they're made out of lumpy, crinkled rice paper.   A second alien is of course an interplanetary game warden sent to stop the killer, but the nature of their conflict is juvenile and simplistic.  The space jerks insist that their advanced society is to humans what the human race is to monkeys, yet they never demonstrate any behavior that makes them seem one bit brighter than the Earth clods surrounding them.  What this movie is really about is shooting people, as one scene after another climaxes with scores of extras in police uniforms unrealistically dropping, flopping and plopping in one hail of bullets after another.  It's the kind of senseless, overdone brutality that becomes desensitizing early on.  By the time you get to the scene in which two police cars explode into a huge inferno after bumping into each other in what should realistically have been only a fender bender, most viewers will have tuned out on every emotional level.  Roberts' detective hero is the kind of low-grade action movie idiot who leads a charmed life, repeatedly firing rounds of traditional Earth ammo into the bad guy long after he knows they'll have no effect and taking too many stupid risks to count without getting blown away like everyone else.  Dozens and dozens of other people are gunned down on sight, but since Roberts is the star the killer has to pick him up and throw him across the sets time after time instead of shooting him.   Watch Roberts literally outrun a fireball without even getting knocked down!  After the murderous alien has wiped out the supporting cast and gone through the motions of massacring an entire police station (yes, just like in THE TERMINATOR), he finally runs out of extras to shoot and tears off his rubber human face to reveal the alien countenance beneath, for no other reason than to give the audience one more reminder that the writer-director really liked THE TERMINATOR.  The briefly seen alien makeups are mediocre at best, but they're far in advance of the cheapskate green-screening work and other outmoded visual effects.   Completely out of step from the era in which it was made, this shabby compendium of action movie cliches and laughable technical work is a true embarrassment.  No wonder those stuck-up aliens have such a superiority complex regarding Earth people.        

 ENTER THE DEVIL (1972)

Dir: Frank Q. Dobbs.

 ERAGON (2006)

Dir: Stefen Fangmeier

EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN, THE (1972)

Dir: Jesus Franco

 ETERNAL (2004)

Dirs: Wilhelm Liebenberg, Federico Sanchez

The makers of ETERNAL obviously went to a lot of trouble to give it a rich, luxurious look.  Nearly every shot is painstakingly set up and elegantly photographed with a keen eye toward pleasingly bold colors, artful angles and a gorgeous sense of visual style.  It would be a very agreeable movie to watch if only the same kind of attention had been paid to the script. The disparity between the beautiful look of this movie and the cheesy nature of its by-the-numbers plot and dialogue creates a clunky, uneven viewing experience, a  problem that was perhaps exacerbated by the presence of two directors.  Countess Elizabeth (Erzsebet) Bathory, the crazy 16th-century Hungarian noblewoman who believed she could attain eternal youth by bathing in the blood of young women she had tortured to death and whose warped history provided the basis for movies like COUNTESS DRACULA, THE LEGEND OF BLOOD CASTLE and others, is the villain here.  She's still alive and gorgeous in Montreal of 2004, even though in real life her "treatments", naturally, failed to work.  Her servant, a kind of female Renfield, is a demented vampire wannabe who wears hard plastic fangs to bite men's throats out just for fun while she eagerly awaits the day when her mistress will make her an immortal pseudo-vampire.  The dialogue is often stilted and unrealistc and the story is set in a very phony, very movie-style reality (all women are over-sexed knockouts, etc.) but the greatest liability is the lack of sympathetic characters to root for. The closest thing to a hero is a police detective whose sleazy bisexual wife was one of the one-dimensionally evil Countess' recent victims. But since he's an arrogant macho jerk who is having a kinky affair with his partner's slutty wife,  thus cheating on both his spouse and his best buddy at the same time, he isn't exactly hero material.  Some of the battle-of-wills conversations between the tough-as-nails creep of a cop and the completely heartless, mocking, sarcastic Countess are fun to listen to in a perverse way since we know neither of them will ever give in, but most of the time the emphasis is on silly softcore sexploitation tableaux.  So much time is devoted to interchangeably pretty actresses in chains and leather fetish gear crawling all over each other that the finished product feels more like a leering, snickering  schoolboy sexual fantasy than a serious story. When the Countess eventually flees to another country, it is ridiculously easy for the cop to follow her and walk right into her latest whereabouts.  There are several clever plot points and twists near the finale, but the very last scene negates them by having the detective, who you'd think might have learned a thing or two by that time, do something incredibly stupid in order to provide one of those tired "the horror isn't necessarily over yet" conclusions. Giving the story an honest ending with some closure would have helped the film a great deal, and it's a shame someone felt a need to fall back on an unsatisfying nonending, probably either to allow for a sequel or maybe just to try to give the paper-thin story a nihilistic point of view.  The empty conclusion, coming after an hour-and-45-minute array of duplicitous, perverted, selfish, trashy characters, makes the film that much more difficult to warm up to.  Recommended only to those viewers who want to ogle the shapely body of the slinky Countess and her parade of various vacuous vixens and victims.  It was shot on location in Quebec, Rome and Venice.

 ETERNAL EVIL (1985)

Dir: George Mihalka

The director of MY BLOODY VALENTINE (1981), one of the best HALLOWEEN knockoffs of the '80s, moved on to this sporadically interesting (very talky) Canadian item about astral projection.  A disillusioned director of TV commercials has learned how to leave his physical body in his sleep and float around the countryside as a spectral mist which witnesses describe as "a blue man".   Bizarrely (particularly since the film's shooting title was in fact THE BLUE MAN), the audience never gets to see this shadowy figure, only one of several disappointments.  The short-tempered hero comes across as such a selfish creep that you never really feel for him, even when he starts dreaming of heart-ripping murders of friends and relatives that turn out to have happened for real every time he wakes up.  He goes to flaky new age guru Karen Black for help, since she was the one who taught him the astral projection trick in the first place, but little does he know Karen is even weirder than she acts.  The killings are really the work of a demonic elderly couple who have taken astral projection to a frightening new level and are now able to hop into other people's bodies each time theirs wear out, and our unsuspecting hero is next in line to serve as one of their hosts.  The beautiful, dreamlike subjective camera shots depicting an out-of-body experience, allowing the audience to glide over rooftops and highways at night, are very effective and are the best thing ETERNAL EVIL has to offer.  The script is sloppy and illogical, basically throwing its whole plotline out the window at the end just so it can indulge in a groaner of a surprise twist of the "the evil lives on" variety.  After spending plenty of time explaining how each potential host must be psychologically worn down, isolated from friends and family and alienated from society in general before the body-hopping trick will work, the movie ends with a cheat that suggests the bad guys could really have simply commandeered any character's body at any time, a revelation that makes most of the events of the previous hour and a half completely unnecessary.   And many of them were unnecessary anyway (can anyone tell me the point of the wedding subplot, or why the guy in the elevator was murdered?).   The murder scenes feel like they were thrown in to make the project qualify as a horror movie.  A little boy who is coerced into bad behavior by an unseen spirit sometimes appears to be acting against his own will but at other times he just seems to be a total brat anyway.  The cop investigating the murders has to lock a man he arrests in the trunk of his car, so one assumes the budget didn't extend to a pair of prop handcuffs.   Those floating tracking shots (most of which come at the beginning of the film) are marvelous, but other than that ETERNAL EVIL is too confused, inconsistent and slow-paced to work.   

 EVIL ALIENS (2005)

Director: Jake West

This fairly moronic splatter movie from Great Britain tries to combine the violent action of PREDATOR with the nervous laughter of RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD.  It doesn't succeed.  EVIL ALIENS is a stupidly gross and grossly stupid waste of time in which people mostly run around screaming the F-word at each other until they get their heads, arms and legs pulled off by helmeted space invaders. The characters (unpleasant lowlifes all) consist of the crew of a tabloid TV show called "Weird Worlde", who travel to a remote farming island off the coast of Wales to cover what they think is a phony story about a girl who was abducted by aliens and had a baby alien implanted in her womb. Along for the swearing are the farm girl's grunting idiot brothers and a stereotyped UFO expert who's just what you would expect from a project like this: chubby, bespectacled and annoying, with a whiny voice and an obsession with STAR TREK. The computer generated special effects of the invaders' flying shuttle, glowing mothership and strange weapons (flying spheres copied from PHANTASM) are excellent. Buckets and buckets of stage blood fly in every direction as both humans and aliens are shredded and dismembered in a wide variety of gory ways, but this gets mighty old after a while. People are repeatedly splashed right in the face with gouts of squirting blood, presumably because director Jake West thought it would look funny. It doesn't. When Peter Jackson did it in DEAD ALIVE (a/k/a BRAINDEAD) it worked, but here it's just so juvenile and repetitious as to be tiresome.  To be fair, the acting is decent and a few of the jokes are honestly funny, like the quotes from JAWS and STAR WARS, a very funny sight gag about a dangerous banana peel in a footpath and a moment when a guy about to attempt an escape in a van looks back at his passengers and says, "Bet anybody fifty quid it won't start".  There are a few knowing references to other horror and sci-fi movies but the crude, hateful tone and overall ugliness spoils the fun. A Halloween episode of THE SIMPSONS could have done all this better and made it come off a lot funnier and more intelligent in under 10 minutes, let alone 90.  EVIL ALIENS appears to have been made for adolescent boys who are slaves to their computer games, but even those viewers would probably find 90 minutes of playing their favorite games more entertaining.

EVIL BELOW, THE (1989)

Dir: Jean-Claude Dubois, Wayne Crawford

There were quite a few underwater horror-adventure films made around this time. This is the least memorable of them. Co-director Crawford stars as Max Cash (seriously...that's his character's name), a roguish sailing man who leases his services and his boat, the Vagrant Viking, to tourists and thrill seekers. Along comes June Chadwick as an insufferable art teacher who enjoys diving for sunken treasure as "a hobby". After the annoying couple "meet-not-cute", they go off in search of the appropriately named El Diablo, a 17th-century Spanish galleon that went down in a conveniently nearby spot, complete with its cursed treasure. Some boring rival treasure hunters repeatedly get in the way while anybody who "knows too much" meets a gruesome offscreen demise thanks to the local demon, a 250-year-old millionaire (talk about an 'old money' family) who somehow landed the job of keeping people from ever finding the sunken vessel. Why is it important that no one ever find it? I'm not sure. I'm also not sure how it happens that this easily-traceable historic artifact that's been in the same spot for centuries is so quickly located by a sleazy captain and a bikini-wearing art teacher. Apparently nobody ever thought to look for it before. You might also wonder about the man-eating shark that seems perfectly capable of guarding the treasure on his own by devouring any divers who get too close. A helpful clue comes for our romantically involved heroes when a gold doubloon handily drops out of a small chunk of bright red coral lying on the coffee table at Captain Cash's dad's place. I assume the coral, which, conveniently, is exclusive to the spot where the ship went down, is red because that color shows up especially well in the underwater shots. In fairness to this tame and slow-moving attempt at an oceanic adventure, it should be noted that the underwater photography itself is excellent, and that the cast seems to have been doing their best to spice up the bland script by giving their characters some personality. But the pacing is so leaden (except of course for those points at which it is startlingly jumpy), the editing is a mess (as when it goes from day to night to day again in what appears to be the space of about an hour's time near the climax), and the supernatural elements are so vague and superficial that it's questionable whether the story needed them at all. The fact that so many bloody deaths occur at times and places at which the viewer is not present gives the impression that the filmmakers were aiming for a family-friendly feature (but if that was the case, it might have been a good idea to leave out all the swearing). There's no suspense, no scares, no effects and a thoroughly predictable plot. Which means that if this had been made 20 years later it would have been an ideal Sci-Fi Channel Movie Original.

 EVIL BONG (2006)

Dir: Charles Band

Yet another dull entry in Charles Band's seemingly unending series of creatively bankrupt camp horror cheapies. It was reportedly made in seven days, which is a little surprising. It looks like it was made in three. Like most of the director's work, this is by-the-numbers stuff with no attempts at style and nothing resembling original thought anywhere in sight.  The farcical screenplay strains for smug humor but usually fails to find it in a tale of a nerd who moves in with three stoners who buy the title object, a shabby looking thing that tries to steal the souls of the unsuspecting losers who smoke pot through it. Band's curious obsession with small inanimate objects coming to life is back, once more depicted through an immobile, expressionless prop that only barely qualifies as a puppet. The bong, which talks in a sassy black female voice, is called "Ebee" (as in "Evil Bong", get it?) and it eventually develops a stiff, crudely sculpted face that doesn't look particularly funny or scary. It would have worked better if they had just superimposed an actor's face over the prop, or applied a series of more dramatically different sculpted faces. In truth, it would have been better if they'd just given the thing a voice and left it with no face at all. The project is primarily an extended commercial for Band's other Full Moon shelf-fillers, and so we get to see props left over from DOLL GRAVEYARD and DEMONIC TOYS plus Tim Thomerson, an actor left over from TRANCERS. Bill Mosely and Phil Fondacaro make brief unfunny cameos too. The big guest star is Tommy Chong, who shows up in the last act as Jimbo Leary (why didn't they call him "Timbo"?), the bong's previous owner come to destroy it once and for all.  For fans of Cheech and Chong's legendary '70s comedy, seeing Chong in this is sort of a mixed blessing. It's sad to see him looking so shockingly old, but at least it's nice to have him back in action and his delivery of funny lines is still far better than that of any of his awkward young costars. The movie doesn't  seem to take any stance one way or the other on the issue of marijuana use. People who use the bong are repetitiously whisked off to a cheap strip club set where they are attacked by shapely dancers who wear bras with silly latex mouths glued onto the breasts. (Hey, girls! Band sells these novelty bras too! Order yours today!)  It would have been funny to state that the bong takes its stoned victims into their favorite fantasies before killing them, and then to have had a strip club be all the shallow dopey guys' number one fantasy, but again the script can't find its own jokes. A scene with a dirty old man in a wheelchair goes nowhere and isn't funny either, and the cheesy production is padded to barely feature length with repeated cutaways to a computer-generated spinning marijuana leaf in front of a smoke cloud.  Man, the whole thing is like, a bummer, man....

 EVIL BREED: The Legend Of Samhain (2005)

Dir: Chirstian Veil

It has beautiful night photography and first-rate gore effects, but this by-the-numbers teen body count movie is a big disappointment. It was made (as SAMHAIN) four years before it finally got released. The situation (you can't really call it a 'story') has a teacher who looks the same age as her students taking a half-dozen completely disinterested pupils to Ireland so they can stay in a remote house in the middle of the woods and do not much of anything. You'd think that a trip planned as a cultural learning experience would be full of major sightseeing stops and that the kids would be excited about being in a foreign land, but the clunky script makes it seem like the group doesn't have much in mind beyond just hanging around and the kids all act like they couldn't care less. They basically just want to find opportunities for sex in between making cynical remarks. For college kids, most of them act more like 8th-graders. The script makes the mistake of going the hip postmodern SCREAM route, as characters talk about slasher movies and how predictable and cliched they are, after which this movie proves it's just as unimaginative, bumping off its cardboard characters just as mechanically as the weakest Jason or Myers sequel. The (true) story of Sawney Bean, an infamous 14th-century insane cannibal who lived in a cave in Scotland with his brood of inbred murderers, provides a slim excuse for how, just maybe, some of his clan might have escaped the authorities, migrated to Ireland, and have been living ever since in the exact area where the kids are staying. Nothing happens during the first two thirds of the movie, so the filmmakers have to rush around and hurriedly kill everybody off in the last few minutes.  The monsters are among the ugliest creations ever seen, with horrible bumpy noseless diseased faces, but they get very little screen time. Not only do they get to slaughter the tourists, but for some reason they pick the same night to invade the nearby home of a brother and sister who have been living right there for years. Stupidity reaches an all-time high as a man is torn to bloody shreds in a bathroom, screaming his head off, while a character on the other side of the door hears nothing. The cut-off heads and other body parts look very convincing.  The cast includes several porn stars, including Ginger Lynn Allen, who plays a local resident with a terrible fake Irish accent.  The role of the Irish forest is played by a Canadian forest.  The film's sole clever idea is that when the kids watch a HALLOWEEN style horror movie on television, the mad slasher in the film-within-the-film is wearing a white mask of Patrick Stewart, Jean-Luc Picard on STAR TREK!  It's a great inside joke for fans who know that the original HALLOWEEN had its trendsetting killer wear a white mask of William Shatner as Captain Kirk. Too bad you can't tell in the film who it's supposed to be. With the slasher movie scenes shown only as a grainy TV broadcast, they might as well have put a bag over the killer's head. The gag was entirely lost. The ending is senseless, as the lone survivor of the cliched massacre (and by the way, you'll know she's going to be the only survivor within 5 minutes after you first see her) picks up a knife herself. I couldn't tell if the crazy old lady who shows up in this scene was supposed to be in cahoots with the deformed killers and needed to be dispatched or if the surviving student was just supposed to have completely flipped out. Does it matter?

 EVIL SABBATH (1988)

Dir: Marco Bellochio

One of the most tedious, empty Italian movies I've ever seen.  Beatrice Dalle is Magdalena, a surly, defensive, cynical mental patient who looks 20 but claims to be 358 years old. She says she's a witch looking for the perfect man to be her lover. A young psychiatrist is given the daunting task of getting to the root of her delusions and determining who she really is. As soon as they meet, he seems to fall under some kind of mental spell. He begins to see lengthy, dull visions of 17th-century inquisitors and witches dancing around a fire. He loses interest in his wife and even gives the witch-girl his wedding ring. He starts seeing the girl everywhere, has more uninteresting visions (cue the blue lighting and more people dancing), and then (of course) has sex with her.  After that he sees some more of the very same type of visions he'd been seeing before. That's all there is to the story, but director Bellochio takes an hour and 45 minutes to tell it. Many portions of the film are so quiet and motionless as to induce sleep. The conversations that do take place are exasperatingly inconclusive and the dialogue is a blend of the banal and the pretentious, as when Magdalena claims to have sewn a button onto Napoleon's coat right before he turned into a snowman and melted.  Oooh my, how thought-provoking.  When characters in this movie are asked questions, they usually don't answer at all.  Long stretches are devoted to people walking around silently thinking about deep, meaningful matters but the viewer is seldom given any insight into what these matters might be. EVIL SABBATH seems to be making some kind of point about the way unthinking, wide-eyed males are easy prey for the near-hypnotic powers sexually active women can wield over them, but the precise nature of this point isn't clarified.  Every scene seems to go on far too long, there's no resolution to any of the puzzles presented, and most of the character interaction feels vague and unfinished.  This excrutiatingly dull project will probably only impress the most pretentious of the international art film crowd.  Others will most likely find it insufferably slow and painfully self-conscious.

 EVIL'S CITY (2005)

Dir: Tom Lewis

Amber and Courtney are ruthless rival TV reporters out to beat each other to an alleged scoop about a ghost town that everyone else in the vicinity already seems to know about anyway. Amber and Courtney are both young and pretty, are interchangeably self-centered and insufferably snotty, and Amber has a dark past that includes the plot of I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER.  Together with their spineless doormat cameramen, they both end up in the dark deserted town of Acheron (named after a legendary river in Hades), a community in which the inhabitants--- all of them, it would seem--- were so downright ornery that God Himself got fed up and abandoned the whole town, leaving behind nothing but shadows, ghosts and fog machines that run 24 hours a day.  If the bad acting and confusing plot weren't enough to turn you off, the fact that the film plays as though it was edited with a buzzsaw and the terrible sound quality should be sufficient to kill any remaining interest. The leading women are unsympathetic, the guys are non-entities, and none of them ever get around to doing anything that makes a lot of sense.  Brief cameos are made by the inevitable post-RING Creepy LItle Girl With Long Hair, an unidentified guy in a BUFFY-style prosthetic vampire forehead, and a murderous white-gowned she-ghost played by an actress who reminded me of "Lady Frankenstein" herself, Rosalba Neri.  The hurried ending borrows from CARNIVAL OF SOULS and I guess the moral was supposed to be that wicked godless people are drawn to wicked godless places.  Some of the flaws in the acting and pacing might have been forgivable since this is obviously a low-budget production, but the story's lack of focus and the fact that it's often hard to hear what the cast is saying are surefire deal breakers.  Instead of always doing remakes of good movies (KING KONG, WAR OF THE WORLDS, PSYCHO, etc.), someone in Tinseltown needs to start remaking flubbed features like this one, which started with a reasonably interesting basic premise and then wasted any potential it may have had through poor execution.  

 EXORCISM (1974)

Dir: Juan Bosch

 EYES OF FIRE (1983)

Dir: Avery Crounse

 FEAST (2002)

Dir: Mike Tristano

This ramshackle gore item features some nice realistic looking cut off body part props (heads, arms, fingers, brains, etc.) but is so incompetent and mentally deficient that it's almost unwatchable. Peter and his buddy Leroy like to kill people, cut their bodies up and have barbeque-style "feasts".  For no apparent reason, Peter tells his skanky masculine-looking woman psychiatrist (aging porn actress Sharon Mitchell) about his cannibalism but passes it all off as dreams.  But the doc is a closet pervert who is unable to feel physical pain and is turned on by the idea of being chopped up and eaten. This movie is so hopelessly stupid it's unbelieveable. The sound quality is the worst, with unwanted voices occasionally heard in the background, including the director's giving instruction like "OK Margaret, look up at me" right before an actress raises her head.  As in many no-budget and no-talent productions, the cast acts inexplicably agitated and cranky the whole time. Supposed comedy comes in the form of airhead actresses, simplistic gag ideas for movies and a chubby guy who talks in a high-pitched voice. Poor old William Smith plays an unnecessary detective character. He looks like he's either extremely ill or pumped full of meds (or both), which makes it a little sad and creepy when he says "Guess I've been around too long".  The whole tired mess, which is no better than the rubbish Herschell Gordon Lewis was cranking out in the '60s, ends with the guys slicing a woman's breasts off.  Sick, stupid, and completely worthless.

 FEAST (2006)

Dir: John Gulager

There's more irritation than entertainment to be found in this smug, painfully self-aware gorefest.  A group of life's losers (one-dimensional ciphers all) in a scuzzy bar in the middle of the desert are torn apart by a gang of unexplained monsters. That's all there is to it. The whole film tries to be its own climax, with nothing but running around, screaming and splattering from start to finish. The script goes out of its way to be as offensive and repugnant as possible, expressing contempt for its characters and disdain for its audience and gleefully cramming in as much childish gross-out content and vulgarity as the filmmakers can find time for. As such, it might be appreciated by disenchanted 14-year-olds who have never seen a horror film made before the 1990s, but mature viewers are almost certain to be bored by the one-note nonstory.  The movie gets off on the wrong foot with freeze-framed pauses on each character accompanied by a few lines smirkingly identifying them and rating them according to "life expectancy", which is a good indicator of this movie's video game mentality. The onscreen jokes that accompany these pauses are the kind of quips most people could think up on the spot, and they mostly lie about who's going to live and die anyway.  It doesn't seem funny or hip, just pointless. It's the kind of self-conscious humor that settles for simply identifying genre cliches, as opposed to finding anything funny about them.  This kind of lazy writing can then be explained away via the excuse that the filmmakers were deliberately trying to make a "bad" movie, allowing them to tell themselves that anybody who noticed what a bad movie it turned out to be in other ways just didn't "get it".  The gore is plentiful but uneven, with some excellent dismemberment effects showing up in between amateurish toss-a-bucket-of-red paint-onto-the-wall stuff. The script's ugly attitude toward sex and women is deplorable, as is the lack of any real story structure.  None of it makes any sense, either. The monsters seem to have the mentality of wild animals but they cover themselves in big shaggy cloaks and wear cow skulls as masks (why?). Underneath, they look like shiny wet blob people with no discernible eyes and oversized mouths full of giant fangs.  They can sometimes spit green acid, but they seem to forget that they have this power when they really need it.  Maggots crawl out of a guy's eye socket after they rip his eyeball out in a truly embarrassing FX moment (his optic nerve absurdly stretches out to about a foot long), but that, along with almost everything else in FEAST, seems to be in there for no reason other than to try and make audiences vomit.  The attacks are nonstop, but the extra-shaky camerawork and speeded-up jittery image makes it impossible to see exactly what's happening most of the time. After a while, you just wait until each new rapid-fire montage of squirting blood and blurred movement settles down enough for someone to provide exposition letting you know what was just supposed to have happened to whom. You can thank the geniuses behind the Project Greenlight TV show for this insult to your intelligence.  Most of the acting is pretty amateurish, but Henry Rollins and Clu Gulager (the director's father) at least contribute some watchable moments with their campy performances.  Both of them deserve to be in better films than this mindless gorehound tripe.

 FEEDING, THE (2006)

Dir: Paul Moore

What sets this low-budget werewolf movie apart from the pack?  In a word: nothing.  It's like watching any third-rate slasher-in-the-woods quickie but with a big hairy monster instead of a crazy guy with an axe. Depressingly unimaginative, it takes a standard gang of idiots out to a  mountainside hiking area so they can argue, smoke pot, have sex and die.  As is often the case in poorly written independent features, the guys are mostly defensive lust-crazed jerks and the girls are sleazy tramps. The dialogue doesn't ring true and the characters do stupid illiogical things when they're in danger.  People who get splashed in the face with blood never think to wipe it off, which leads to an unending series of continuity flaws as the splatter patterns keep changing from shot to shot.  None of the acting is very good, but I thought Dione Updike as Forest Ranger Aimee Johnston came off especially embarrassingly.  The one genuinely good idea in THE FEEDING is that the monster, equipped with human intelligence, is clever enough to have devised a workable plan to allow him to get away with his rampages. He's been traveling to different forests across the U.S., chowing down on the deer and other fauna until such time as a hunting party takes notice and cluelessly kills some other predator. Then, after the local yokels in each region think they've bagged the beast that had been decimating their local wildlife population, the creature moves on to his next target area with nobody being the wiser.  An awfully good concept, I thought.  I only wish they had constructed a better script around it. If you're not put off by the bad acting, painful dialogue and unlikely action, wait until the werewolf arrives.  This is one of the shabbiest lycanthropes ever, standing about 8 feet tall and looking like a homemade plastic knockoff of the ones in THE HOWLING. He has strange unnatural patches of hair hanging awkwardly from his arms, a stiff gigantic head that looks clumsy and clunky when he runs, and not nearly enough hair on his big shiny immobile face.  He can somehow transform at will, so the full moon isn't a factor here. For some reason the writers go to great pains to avoid using the word "werewolf", so everybody has to keep talking about how "they aren't real" and the ways "they can be killed in the movies".  When he finally stands stock still long enough for somebody with very bad aim to shoot him with a silver-tipped arrow, he changes (mostly offscreen) into an unidentified bald guy with big teeth, and that's that.  Even the werewolf sound effects are disappointing: this monster sounds more like a bear than a wolf.      

 FERRYMAN, THE (2007)

Dir: Chris Graham

A typical gang of good-looking young people on a boat trip run afoul of an ancient entity of evil currently housed in the body of a Greek sailor (the always excellent John Rhys-Davies, who must have been desperate) in this ugly, disagreeable horror entry from New Zealand.  The demonic dead guy carries a magic dagger which enables him to transfer his spirit into the body of anyone he stabs with it.  The mythology surrounding the exact powers of the cursed knife doesn't make much sense.  Not only fresh stab wounds but burn scars from twenty years earlier disappear while other physical problems like cancerous tumors are unaffected.  The acting in this sick cheapie is excellent but the videography is hideous, with everything kept in an annoyingly murky fogbound haze that gets tiring to squint through after a while.  The characters have to behave pretty stupidly, making a lot of bad calls and ignoring some obvious supernatural phenomena in order to give the killer a chance to repeatedly isolate and butcher them.  Despite the constant brutal stabbings, there isn't much visible blood or gore on screen, as director Graham devotes most of his attention to people gasping and sobbing in excrutiating pain as they die slow, agonizing deaths.  All a horror movie has to do to impress some fans in the post-SAW and -HOSTEL era is express extreme sadism and hatefulness against its characters, so this is likely to please some jaded sesnsation seekers in spite of its shabby technique and storytelling.  But where THE FERRYMAN goes too far is in its unnecessary and offensive animal cruelty.  An innocent dog has its back sadistically broken and then spends an incredibly long time whimpering in agony and trying to drag itself around the boat until it is finally thrown overboard, which is what I'd recommend doing to any copies of this lousy movie that come your way.  Eventually the grim reaper (who looks like a Freddy Krueger mask covered with mud) shows up in search of the body-hopping bad guy, after which you get a competely predictable coda complete with yet another unnecessarily cruel and prolonged murder.  One character has a backstory involving a tragedy that is never fully explained but has something to do with a little girl getting set on fire.  For a while I thought this subplot was going to have some sort of point to make, but at the end it seems to have been thrown in just to make things that much more unpleasant. Don't pay to see THE FERRYMAN.  

 FOREST OF THE DAMNED (2005)

Dir: Johannes Roberts

Flat, flavorless and entirely pointless horror in the weak post-BLAIR WITCH tradition.  The usual vanload of disposable cardboard teenage snots gets themselves lost in the usual spooky backwoods where they are bumped off one by one until the usual ending sees the usual sole survivor driven mad and turned into the usual next-in-line to carry on the evil business.  This is the blandest stuff, with the lack of any real plot made obvious by the meandering, random nature of events. The demons haunting the woods this time are some sort of fallen angels, beautiful naked women who hypnotize and seduce the usual dull-witted guys and then bite big bloody hunks out of their throats. Tom Savini is the violent hermit who attacks and captures people, presumably to feed them to the succubi just so he can continue to watch them run around the woods naked.  There are a few brief gore effects and one extremely realistic severed head prop, but most of the film is just people stumbling through the woods, arguing and looking bemused.  Viewer frustration is likely due to the fact that the characters never say the right things or ask any of the right questions, and by the awkward and implausible staging of the (few) action scenes.  A more accurate title for this would have been BLOODY UNLIKELY.  Every now and then the film jumps into herky-jerky sepiatone night vision footage of people running around and closeups of their wide-open eyes, but this material ultimately means nothing and only adds to the movie's irritation factor.  Nothing is adequately explained and the filmmakers' attempts to keep you watching through the end credits will only frustrate you further, as you wait in vain for something clever to occur and end up with only one last flicker of empty, supposedly atmospheric sepiatone sloppiness that adds nothing to the so-called story. The instantly forgettable production was made in England.   

 FRAGILE (2005)

Dir: Jaume Balaguero

 FRANKENSTEIN (2004)

Dir: Marcus Nispel

This tedious made-for-TV disaster has a lot of problems, but the worst two are the fact that they called it FRANKENSTEIN and that they really didn't have enough footage completed to make anything releasable but stuck it all together and put it out on DVD anyway.  Parker Posey and Adam Goldberg are two wisecracking cops on the trail of a killer nicknamed 'the surgeon" for his habit of deftly removing various organs from the bodies of his victims.  The other part of the plot is about Dr. Victor Helios (really, that's the character's name), a dour 200-year-old mad scientist who has devised some ill-explained method of creating life.  His first creation is a guy who resembles popular artists' images of Jesus except that he has a scarred face and prowls about in the long dark overcoat that was de rigueur for dramatic characters in 2004.  He was supposedly assembled from parts of dead bodies just like The Monster in Mary Shelley's novel, although he looks more like a guy who lost a knife fight than a being patched together from bits of different donors.  Vic's more recent creations are pathologically insane people with two hearts and "bones like cement".   The script (based on a concept by Dean Koontz, who asked that his name be removed) tries to have it both ways, vacillating between the brooding mad doctor plot and the boring police procedural.   Strangely, it evokes both the literary and cinematic legacies of Dracula by naming supporting characters "Harker" and "Fry".  A police psychologist is named Kathleen Burke, after the actress who played Lota The Panther Woman in THE ISLAND OF LOST SOULS in 1932.  "The surgeon" is one of the doc's projects gone haywire, a whackjob whose motivation and behavior defy logic, a killer who we're told only wants to die but who clearly enjoys tormenting and mutilating people.  The very sloppy, obviously unfinished feature (an unsuccessful series pilot) includes plenty of images worthy of an '80s rock video (a goblet of red wine shattering, false eyelashes floating in a tank of water, and so on) set against the same homely, washed-out greenish-gray look of the director's previous projects (which include the disappointing 2003 TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE remake).  There are heavy shadows everywhere and many of the shots were very carefully planned and set up, but the weak characterization and schizoid editing make it difficult to care about where the story goes.  Which is just as well, because it never goes anywhere.  Just when it looks like the plot is finally going to get rolling, the end credits roll instead, leaving everything unresolved and letting you know you've just wasted the time it took to slog through this pretentious and senseless clinker.  Truly unfit for release, the way this mishmash turned out is an insult to Frankenstein fans. 

 FRANKENSTEIN REBORN (2005)

Dir: Leigh Slawney

 FREAKSHOW (2006)

Dir: Drew Bell

This unacknowledged remake of Tod Browning's FREAKS features fine production design, good acting and top-notch gore effects in its final moments but it can't overcome a sloppy script filled with logic problems and a feeling of wearying over-familiarity.  A few character parts have been changed around but it's still just FREAKS told with less intelligence, more vulgarity and no heart.  Instead of the original's sexy trapeze artist, the golddigger this time is a member of a gang of thieves who land jobs with the circus so they can make off with the profits.  Instead of an adoring midget, the victim of the plot in this version is the show's owner, a disgusting old warty boil-covered git. As played by Christopher Adamson, he's a believable character but I have no idea why it was decided to make him a diseased-looking derelict who's more unwholesome than any of the freaks in his menagerie. The beautiful con artist easily convinces him that she could fall immediately in love with such a grotesque figure of a man and, not being overly bright, he buys it.  Credibility goes out the window when the movie reaches its version of the famous "one of us" scene. The thing that makes the evil blonde babe finally explode and tell the freaks how repulsive she finds them is merely that she is asked to take a drink from the same bowl of beer as all of them.  I realize this is probably unsanitary and it isn't something I'd be eager to do, but this sick chick has already performed various sexual acts with her ill-looking, boil-covered patsy, which would surely be a lot more revolting than simply drinking a swig of alcohol after some people with physical abnormalities. They may not be attractive, but their deformities are simply that-- deformities-- and it seems unlikely that any of them would be carriers of disease, whereas the circus owner is so covered in horrible red bumps and sores that I can't imagine any woman would want to even touch him. (Try not to shudder when he takes his shirt off to reveal his hideously disfigured, lump-covered back.)  This is a major problem in the script and makes the whole story harder to believe than in the old version.  When the gang kills a deformed little girl who catches them stealing, they actually leave her dismembered body right on the grounds in a car of the ferris wheel for everyone to find, demonstrating that they have the combined I.Q. of a donut.  The final reel features a long, gory mutilation for the evil young woman. Although I have to give the effects team an "A+" for super-realistic makeup, the prolonged torture sequence actually robs the supposedly shocking final shot of its impact. The original FREAKS cut from the villainness being surrounded by the vengeful freaks to a scene taking place some time later, effectively horrifying audiences by creating a quick transformation from a beautiful woman to a nightmarish half-woman/half-chicken thing. This hamfisted version spends 10 minutes at the end showing GUINEA PIG-style close-ups of the evil gal having her body sliced, sawed and otherwise mangled, so that when the last shot reveals her in the sideshow as the "Worm Girl", the supposedly horrifying moment actually offers less than what you expect. After watching the freaks cut her up and peel the skin off her face, it's not exactly a surprise to see her afterward all cut up and with no skin on her face, but the freeze-frame on this image and the accompanying bang on the soundtrack makes it clear that this shot was supposed to be a shocking revelation.  The bloody, extreme gore effects are among the most realistic I've ever seen but they really don't work in this context, serving to water down the ending rather than enhancing it.  What she ultimately gets turned into doesn't look like a freak at all, just a victim of a horrible accident.  Any nurse or doctor who comes to this sideshow will want to rush this hacked-up person to a hospital rather than gawk at her.  And it's too much to swallow that anyone would even survive so much severe trauma all at once and performed by people who aren't exactly master surgeons. The reasons for this remake seem to have been to retell the old story with the warmth and human interest angles replaced by coarse, ugly dialogue and to re-create the look and feel of HBO's CARNIVALE series.  Most of the human oddities here are the real thing, as in the old version, although a few are makeup creations, including one that looks like The Elephant Man.  The soundtrack is made up of songs from the 1920s and before but people use terms like "perks", "loosen up" and other modern expressions, so I was never sure of when the story was supposed to be taking place.     

 FREDDY VS. JASON (2003)

Dir: Ronny Yu

This surprise hit was announced more than a decade before it finally went into production, with many story ideas and scripts discarded before a plotline was finally settled on. Sort of a 21st century answer to 1943's FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLFMAN, it pits the two top-grossing horror villains of the 1980s --namely, Freddy Krueger from the NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET series and Jason Voorhees from the FRIDAY THE 13TH movies -- against each other in a fun thriller loaded with clever ideas, effective scares, witty dialogue and great action scenes. 2003 might seem like an awfully late date for this to have come out, but it proved to be worth the wait. Dreamkiller Freddy has been unable to manifest his evil presence in anyone's nightmares in years because the people of Springwood have agreed to stop mentioning his name. Now virtually forgotten and helplessly trapped in his own corner of hell, he schemes to get himself back in the news (and people's thoughts) by causing a series of murders to occur in Springwood which, he assumes, will be attributed to him and help him begin a new reign of terror by making him "real" again for a new generation. He can't appear in the dreams of human beings any more but he is able to psychically contact equally dead serial killer Jason, awakening the long-dormant slasher by pretending to be his mother and giving him the order to arise and commit more killings, this time in Freddy's hometown. Jason awakens and goes on another bloody rampage, all right, but when he won't stop killing, Freddy faces the problem of folks being scared of Jason rather than giving him the credit as intended. Some teens caught in the middle try to survive the danger of their community becoming the battleground for two deranged supernatural serial killers and try to communicate to Jason the fact that he's been manipulated. When the Big J finally figures this out, he gets even madder than usual and the two monsters have a long, brutal, effects-filled battle that shouldn't disappoint fans of either character.  What could have been hopelesly silly is played just right by director Ronny Yu, with enough of a straight face and macabre style to draw you in. The battle of the maniacs takes on a mythical quality with the two ghouls filling the roles of elementals as burned fire spirit Krueger uses his arsenal of infernal mind games against the drowned Jason's watery-themed nightmares. Some of the visuals are breathtaking as the killers do battle in the real world and in the dark underworld of nightmares, and there's plenty of material on the personal history and mythology of each monster obligingly (and wisely) included for the fans.  The only parts I didn't like were the death of a girl whom Jason should have recognized as being "on his side" and one dumb pinball machine sight gag which seems about 25 years out of date.  (Then again, Freddy is supposed to have originally lived in the 70s, so I suppose he might have fallen behind a bit when it comes to technology.)  Strangely, Jason isn't played by longtime FRIDAY series star Kane Hodder this time, reportedly because it was felt by the producers that he looked "too big" next to Robert Englund as Freddy!  I can't understand the problem there. So Jason is a huge guy and Fred isn't.  What's wrong with that?  For one thing, Krueger is far smarter then his opponent, giving him some advantage, and when you consider that both of them are superhuman monsters with strange inhuman powers, size doesn't really seem to be a crucial issue in staging a "fair" fight. If they were mere mortals, sure, Jason could break Freddy in two, but since we know they both have hellish powers to regenerate after even the most grievous injuries, it doesn't make sense that Jason would need to be any smaller than he usually is. Someone else must have thought this too, because the finished film presents Jason in Frankenstein monster boots that add a few inches to his height anyway!  The slightly redesigned Jason now wears an open suit jacket and a more squared-off hockey mask than before, so his new resemblance to Frankenstein must have been deliberate.  It's great to see Englund back in action as Krueger again (he's at his evil, scary best here) but it would have been nice to have seen Hodder and Betsy Palmer return as Jason and his crazy old mama. That said, this is still the best movie in which the Jason character has ever appeared. The fast pace, clever plotting and first-rate effects and direction make this a must-see for anyone with the slightest interest in either of the franchises or pop culture horror in general.  When the next sequel comes along, I'm there.  

 FRIDAY THE 13TH PART VIII: JASON TAKES MANHATTAN (1989)

Dir: Rob Hedden

The movie that promised to take the creatively desperate FRIDAY THE 13TH series in a thrilling new direction turned out to be the one that very nearly killed the franchise once and for all. This one was such a boxoffice dud that Paramount dropped the series afterward, with further Jason movies being released by New Line.  It's a shame this turned out so badly, because the idea of taking hockey-masked undead serial killer Jason out of the woods by the lake and plunking him down in the middle of a dirty, chaotic metropolis sounded quite promising. TV ads and posters for the film were clever but the movie itself is an embarrassing stew of amateurish dialogue, weak shocks and terrible continuity. Instead of depicting Jason's attack on NYC as the ads promised, the sluggish sequel is mostly set aboard a cruise ship full of the kind of one-dimensional teen stereotypes that were making '80s slasher films a laughing stock by this time. Jason sneaks around the ship and kills the unrealistic teens in various gruesome ways during the trip to New York, echoing the famous slaughter aboard the Demeter (or the Vesta) in DRACULA. Good graphic gore effects were always the FRIDAY series' main attraction, but by 1989 onscreen bloodletting was being heavily censored, leaving most fans disappointed by the relatively restrained nature of the murders seen here. Knowing they couldn't get away with extreme gore at this time, you'd think the filmmakers would have tried all the harder to go for suspense, but the death-dealing situations are mostly very hackneyed and mechanical. There are a few good sequences during the last 15 minutes or so, when Jason finally rampages through the neon-lit streets of a modern city, but Toronto made a poor substitute for The Big Apple and cleancut teenaged punks with shaved heads made poor substitutes for real inner-city thugs. The worst problem, though, is the appalling stupidity of the advancements in the Jason saga. Throughout the film, a girl whose insufferable jerk uncle (Peter Mark Richman) once threw her into Camp Crystal Lake in an especially cruel effort to force her to learn to swim keeps seeing visons of young, pre-zombie Jason due to the brief underwater contact with him all those years ago. Since Jason hates all living humans and is generally determined to kill every single person he meets anyway, there's no real tension added by having him stalking a specific character. He also stomps right past literally dozens of city folks without even reacting to them, or resorting to simply shoving them aside or scaring them off by showing them his ugly mug, when you'd expect him to be eagerly swinging his trusty machete in all directions. Things get even dumber for the muddled climax, in which we are asked to accept the idea that New York's underground sewers are flooded with some unspecified kind of green toxic waste at exactly the stroke of midnight every night. When Jason gets conveniently drenched in the stuff, he not only drowns-- again-- but illogically turns into a dead, slightly chubby little boy with a normal face and a full head of hair, looking nothing like the scrawny, bald, deformed, lumpy-faced kid seen in the heroine's flashbacks (or at the climax of the first film).  The fight scenes and attacks look so staged and rehearsed that it's surprising some of them were deemed good enough for a major release like this. (Watch the scene in which Jason reaches through a window to grab a victim from behind.)  When Jason takes off his hockey mask near the end, the monster face underneath has no continuity with those of previous installments and resembles nothing so much as a rotted jack-o'lantern in an advanced state of inebriation.  It is to stuntman Kane Hodder's credit that he still manages to make the deranged killer a thoroughly intimidating, nightmarishly scary presence in spite of the technical ineptitude and crummy scripting surrounding him in this installment. Say what one will about the movie, the Jason character is pretty frightening.  If you're a big Jason fan you'll get a kick out of the handful of good, mildly scary scenes this offers, but on the whole it's no big surpsise that this uninspired ripoff was the first movie in the series to be a financial flop.

 FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE FINAL CHAPTER (1984)

Dir: Joseph Zito

By the time this came out, everyone already knew the title was a lie.  This fourth entry in the popular slasher series is probably the worst of the lot.  Shockingly primitive for a major studio release that actually played theaters, it's a virtual catalog of everything that was wrong with horror movies of its time.  Whereas the trio of previous FRIDAY films at least offered some shocking gore effects and a few good scares, this one is boring and muddled beyond belief. The girls are pretty and all look good in various stages of undress, and that's all that is required of them. The male performers don't fare so well, as they were evidently intended to show some signs of individual characterization, but the lack of direction and watered-down script leaves them all too bland even to qualify as stereotypes. (The goofy guy is only a tad goofy, the jerk is only a slight bit of a jerk, etc.)  They're not quite empty spaces in the screen, but very nearly. The dialogue is mostly random, meaningless stuff that isn't the least bit interesting and never sounds sincere, despite the presence of some name actors (Crispin Glover, Peter Barton). Jason (Ted White, who had his name removed from the credits after seeing how the film turned out) awakens in the morgue (offscreen, a typical example of this movie's laziness) and clumps around occasionally killing terrible teen characters in between what plays like weeks of the lamest (ad-libbed?) dialogue of the '80s. Jason has less personality than ever here.  He's just a rarely-seen big dumb bully who periodically crashes through various doors or windows. There isn't any suspense and none of the kills are scary, although a few of them at least benefit from Tom Savini's help in setting up some fairly elaborate stabbings.  Even this is scant consolation, however, as the murders are seen so briefly as to be almost subliminal and, as usual, they don't feature enough blood to look really convincing. (One that's seen only in shadow is a highlight.)  A young Corey Feldman plays a kid who collects monster masks.  In the mind-meltingly stupid climax, the young horror fan inexplicably gets the idea to go shave his head while Jason is chasing his older sister around downstairs.  For some reason, the sight of a bald-headed kid freaks Jason out because it supposedly reminds of him of his own unhappy childhood, when he was a bald-headed kid.  Of course Jason was born a lumpy-headed freak with a big lopsided mouth and mismatched eyes while Corey Feldman simply looks like Corey Feldman in a baldcap, but no matter, as this installment would have us believe that the Big J. can be very easily fooled.  A shot of Jason's head sinking to the floor as it slides along the blade of a machete wedged into the side of his face is a great, squirm-in-your-seat moment but it's not worth sitting through 90 minutes of sheer tedium to get to it.  For some reason, hack (pun intended) director Joseph Zito bragged in interviews about how clever he was for taking the FRIDAY series in bold new directions by introducing such brilliant new elements as having the film take place at night and having one character owning a dog.  Was he kidding? 

 FRIGHTMARE (2001)

Dir: Ash Smith

 A skin-crawling, supremely creepy soundtrack full of weird squeaks, whistles and groans establishes a chilling mood, but that's about the only saving grace this pointless SCREAM wannabe has.  It's generic teen slasher time again as a gang of personality-challenged high school seniors set up a (great looking) Halloween Haunted House to raise money for their class trip. The various fluorescent sets and cool props and monsters look marvelous but you don't get many looks at them. The bullk of the film is devoted to the most stale of cliche' situations as cars break down in the woods next to the Spooky Old House, a masked nutcase stabs people for no reason, and the police are once again depicted as useless, stupid, disbelieving jerks.  Some of the stalk-and-slash setpieces are effectively staged and edited, making them reasonably scary and even honestly suspenseful, but their effectiveness is somewhat offset by occasional lapses into pompous slo-mo during the most mundane scenes (why??) and the whole thing is so artificial in story terms and woefully derivative that it's difficult to care.  Director Ash Smith even restages the scene from HALLOWEEN in which the killer tries to smash his way through a closet door to get to the heroine in a nearly identical set-up. (The broken closet door then disappears but we never find out how.)  Like other killers in dull-witted third-rate slasher movies, this psycho writes stupid prose that's supposed to sound all demonic and powerful but really just comes off as pretentious drivel, and also draws meaningless satanic symbols with the blood of his victims.  The ending is totally inadequate and annoyingly confused. To let you know the filmmakers are familiar with the subgenre they're imitating, the male characters are named after well-known movie serial killers like Jason, Michael, Norman and Freddy. One guy is even nicknamed Hellraiser, presumably because he refused to be referred to as Pinhead.  Too bad such a potent and nightmarish soundtrack was wasted on this otherwise empty paint-by-number package of worn out old slasher standards.  It's hard to believe, but this is the third movie to use this title.

 FROM BEYOND (1986)

Dir: Stuart Gordon

If you can forgive some phony looking makeup effects and unlikely situations, you'll find Gordon's followup to his cult hit RE-ANIMATOR to be one of the most enjoyable monster fests of the late '80s. Ted Sorel (the nephew of legendary makeup artist Jack Pierce) is the evil Dr. Pretorious (named after a character in THE BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, on which Pierce handled the makeup). He has invented the Resonator, a device that resembles a hot water heater with a glass ball and several large tuning forks on top. The machine was supposedly intended to stimulate the pineal gland in humans, but its vibrations also cause a breach between the natural world and another dimension, enabling floating worms and jellyfish creatures to attack nearby humans. Pretorious' assistant, RE-ANIMATOR star Jeffrey Combs, knows how the machine works and wants to destroy it before it leaves the whole planet open to invasion by the hungry flying beasties. To Combs' credit as an actor, his nervous and twitchy Dr. Tillinghast is a very different characterization from his better-known role as Dr. Herbert West, the cold and egotistical RE-ANIMATOR. He is aided here by his RE-ANIMATOR costar Barbara Crampton as a psychologist-turned-S-&-M-slut and opposed by the now monstrously deformed Pretorious himself, who keeps coming back in ever more mutated forms.  The amazingly ambitious story is fast paced and agreeably unpredictable but sorely lacking in internal logic. The various incarnations of Sorel are suitably weird but none of them are really very visually inventive and most of them are nondescript blobby messes. Along with its other effects, the Resonator awakens a repressed desire for kinky sex in people who get too close to it, leading to an exploitation plot detour that adds a note of giggling schoolboy campiness, seriously weakening the fascinating horror scenario. (The film is loosely based on another H.P. Lovecraft short story, but the silly black leather and chains sexuality is a far cry from anything that ever occured in Lovecraft's mostly sexless writings.)  Even with its many liabilities, FROM BEYOND is so loaded with bold ideas, extravagant effects and sudden appearances of assorted monsters that it's kind of irresistible.  It doesn't hold together quite as well as RE-ANIMATOR but it's an outrageous feature that offers a nonstop parade of creature effects from a time when the movies' strange beings were created by means of real, on-set props, puppets and other sculptural artistry, back before computer-generated cartoonery took over the movie monster business. For that reason alone FROM BEYOND is worthy of attention from any fan of the horror genre.  Check it out. 

 FROM HELL IT CAME (1957)

Dir: Dan Milner

 FROM THE GRAVE (2002)

Dir: Charles Buchanan

 FUNGICIDE (2002)

Dir: Dave Wascavage

 GALAXY INVADER, THE (1985)

Dir: Don Dohler

Dohler's worst film, comparing unfavorably even to the dull FIEND.   A crummy optical effect representing a spaceship deposits a man-in-a-suit alien in the woods near Baltimore.  We never see the ship, presumably because it would have cost more than $2.99 to construct one.  Murderous rednecks stalk the poor thing and argue about how to divvy up the money they expect it to bring them, occasionally killing each other just to break up the monotony.  There isn't any plot to speak of, only a situation, as nothing ever progresses beyond going from A to B.  The dialogue is so unimaginative and painfully phony that the amateur cast's dreadful performances only stand out that much more as examples of cringe-inducing ineptitude.  Among the film's many deficiencies is the monster himself, a curious step backward from Dohler's previous NIGHT BEAST, another alien-in-the-woods clunker.  That one at least had a good monster, but the so-called "Galaxy Invader", who could more accurately be christened "the backwoods bumbler", sports a crude papier-mache' mask that would probably be the last one sold at your local costume shop on Halloween and a body that looks like a guy in baggy coveralls who dipped himself in glue and then jumped into a box of styrofoam packing popcorn.  He looks like something left over from a movie made in 1957, and an inferior one at that.  His impractical weapon, which would be difficult to use even if he didn't have enormous floppy two-clawed hands that can barely hold onto a gun obviously designed for human hands, is powered by a grapefruit-sized plastic ball with a blinking light bulb in it.  Why any race would elect to carry a gun that draws its power from a huge glowing orb worn on a belt instead of simply attaching the power source to the gun itself is one of many unanswered questions.  Another is the alien's motive.  Despite being set up as an aggressive presence by the film's title, he never does much of anything but stagger around the forest trying not to fall over and only starts blasting people after they've attacked him first.   The leader of the rednecks is a perpetually drunk, laughably ornery old coot in a white T-shirt with a large, strange square hole in the middle of the chest.  He's so mean that he regularly tries to murder his own daughter.  Ah yes, the evils of alcohol.  Nobody reacts belieavably to anything, including when a few local men are killed during a hunting trip and their surviving buddies decide to simply return the next day to bury them in the woods where they fell.  With its aggravatingly slow pacing, poorly-staged action and nothing characters, this indifferently made snoozefest isn't worth suffering through unless you're a diehard fan of rubber monster suits.  Richard Dyszel, better known as beloved TV horror host Count Gore DeVol, shows up as an astronomy professor.  

 GARDEN, THE (2006)

Dir: Don Michael Paul

Mindless action can be fun, but it's nice to see a horror movie that's actually about something once in a while.  This one not only contains an actual story with a beginning, a middle and an end, it's also courageous enough to devote a good amount of time to character development and scene-setting before letting any gory violence kick in.  A troubled little boy and his well-meaning but selfish and wishy-washy father are injured in a car accident caused by a bloody-faced ghost standing in the road.  They are found and taken in (in more ways than one) by farmer Lance Henriksen, who had been in so many genre films by this time that he deserves some kind of horror lifetime achievement award.   Henriksen's seemingly helpful old Ben is actually Satan himself, incarnated in human form and seeking a patsy to help him usher in the end of man's rule of earth.  His creepy garden contains the original tree of knowledge described in the Bible, and if he can coax the right kind of person into eating a bite of its fruit, it will bring about an apocalypse that will put him in charge of mankind's destiny.  It's great to see the devil depicted as an intelligent, patient, calculating adversary instead of the usual drooling, cackling, latex-augmented boogeyman.  Henriksen is outstanding in the role and it's easy to see how a man as weak of character as the boy's dad could be manipulated into just about anything by a guy who appears so calm, confident, and helpful.  It would be an easy decision to oppose a horrible screeching monster or over-the-top supervillain, but a quiet older man who is basically likable and who seems to have all the answers makes a far more intriguing antagonist.  The boy gradually figures out what's going on, but not before a number of deaths and other tragedies.  A sequence in which our young hero is attacked for no reason by the school bully seems like a detour into Stephen King territory but even this subplot manages to go somewhere.  Clever editing and overt use of religious symbolism abound and the climax, while it may confuse some viewers, is actually quite satisfactory if one has been paying attention to the movie's details and is willing to give the situation a little thought.  Lighting and photography are excellent, and scenes of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse crashing out of a barn and various sad-faced ghouls with their mouths sewn shut (an effort to keep God from hearing their screams) wandering in and out of shots are pretty memorable.   There are still a few unanswered questions at the end, and a bit more exposition here and there would have been nice (and probably would have earned the film a broader audience), but what's here is more interesting, more original and more intelligent than the vast majority of 2006 horror cinema.    

 GARGOYLES (1972)

Dir: B.W.L. Norton

This CBS-TV production ranks with THE NIGHT STALKER on the very short list of good made-for-television horror movies.  An anthropologist and his daughter investigate reports of attacks by strange creatures in the Arizona desert. They meet a grizzled old desert rat who shows them a weird semi-human skeleton, supposedly that of a beast known in Indian legends as nakatakachinkos. There then follows a harrowing attack on the old geezer's shack as a group of the creatures arrive to take the skeleton back. The old man is killed but the two heroes go on the run, pursued across lonely desert locales by the intelligent, determined, deadly monsters. A scene in which a winged gargoyle lands on the roof of a moving car and tries to claw its way inside still holds up today and was virtually recreated in JEEPERS CREEPERS in 2001. The creatures often move in blurred slow motion, giving them a dreamlike quality, and have their headquarters in a nearby cave full of huge eggs tended to by the females. Once their eggs hatch, they plan to supplant mankind as the earth's dominant species. Other characters include the usual disbelieving cops and a biker gang wrongly accused of the recent assaults in the area.  Tension and suspense are carefully built up with the living gargoyles kept eerily in the shadows for some time. Then, once you've been given a good look at them, they're all over the place. The many rubber monster suits look way too good for a TV movie (especially one from the seventies) and each one looks impressively different. They're all scaly and vaguely reptilian but some have various kinds of beaks, horns, bumpy ridges, bugeyes, wings, tufts of fur and other unique qualities. The amazing monster effects won an Emmy for the Burman Studios. Bernie Casey, unrecognizable in a demonic green gargoyle suit with huge bat wings and creepy white-on-black contacts, is excellent as the creatures' leader, who can talk and demands that a kidnapped girl read to him. His character is unforgettable and easily qualifies as a classic modern monster. The plot isn't exactly complex but millions of American TV-watching kids had nightmares after this aired. Look for it. A model of brisk efficiency and low-budget imagination, it puts the typical made-for-TV monster flicks that premiere on the Sci-Fi Channel to shame.

GEEK MAGGOT BINGO OR THE FREAK FROM SUCKWEASEL MOUNTAIN (1983)

Dir: Nick Zedd

If you've ever seen an episode of a cartoon or a wacky comedy series in which the characters make their own movie, the inevitably disastrous results usually look a lot like this, i.e., monumentally incompetent. Peter Steele of the band Type O Negative was once quoted as saying, "Don't confuse lack of talent with genius", but in the case of so-called "underground filmmaker" Nick Zedd, nobody is likely to ever make that mistake. A tedious would-be comedy, GEEK MAGGOT ETC. is a homemade feature from people who believe the only thing necessary to generate hilarious comedy is a complete lack of professionalism. Thus, you get deliberately chintzy sets and special effects, terrible acting, sub-amateur camerawork and atrocious editing, but precious little that would qualify as actual satire. Mad scientist "Dr. Frankenberry" (played by someone named Robert Andrews, the only cast membert who seems to be trying to deliver an inspired, witty performance) hires a cliched hunchback lab assistant to help with his monster-making experiments. The doc's daughter is a whiny, obnoxious Rubinesque blonde whose character seems to be a spoof of the kind of roles Regina Carroll played in the '70s (a rather obscure reference). A girl credited as "Donna Death" stands around in a few scenes as a mute female vampire. Influential NYC punk rocker Richard Hell, acting like he's in a school play for third-graders, plays a stereotyped cowboy who's basically like watching an unfunny version of the character Lawrence Fishburne would soon play so much more charmingly on PEE-WEE'S PLAYHOUSE. TV horror host John Zacherle, who appears more drunk and disinterested than ever, delivers a lengthy, pointless introduction. He laughs when nothing is funny and he can't think of anything much to say, but watching him is still infinitely more entertaining than watching the rest of this movie, even when he is shown later sitting in a chair sleeping through it. Most of the sets are painted on plywood or cardboard, but the potential that opens for humor is only touched on in one or two instances. The soundtrack is taken from old '70s Halloween and monster movie soundtrack LPs. One gore effect depicting a vampire's smoking, melting head is (somewhat jarringly) elaborate and decently done, looking like something that could have been used in a real movie. Near the end, a surprisingly imaginative three-legged, four-armed, two-headed monster (one head looks just like a Martian from the Mars Attacks! trading cards) with formaldehyde for blood comes to life, clomps around and knocks stuff over. He's played by Tyler Smith, who went on to work as an art department assistant on SID & NANCY (1986) and Quentin Tarantino's DEATH PROOF (2007). A briefly-seen mixed-up face mask was also used in the music video for The Jacksons' song Torture, and a resculpted version (both created by the underrated Ed French) was later released as a collector mask called "Geek" by Death Studios. If this project had been released as a five- or ten-minute short it might have been at least mildly entertaining, but at an hour and 14 minutes it wears out its welcome long before Zedd finally finds something else to do and wraps it up.

GHOST DANCE, THE (1980)

Dir: Peter F. Buffa

Anthropologists working in the Arizona desert dig up the body of a sinister Indian named Nahalla, a member of the dreaded Ghost Dance Cult, whose angry spirit possesses the local crazed misanthrope and turns him into a murderer with vague mystical powers. As in many ghost and vampire tales, the female professor in charge of the excavation just happens to be the evil one's mate from a previous life. The personality-free individuals involved with the dig are stabbed, slashed and hacked up, but it all takes place in the dark so don't expect anything like makeup effects. THE GHOST DANCE is a justifiably forgotten trifle in which characterization is nil and what little plot there is takes forever to crawl along. Some of the desert photography is nice, which means the DP put must have more effort into the film than anybody else did. If you're still awake by the end, you can roll your eyes and groan at the standard-issue inconclusive and senselessly downbeat early '80s ending. This agonizingly dull flop has to be one of the most uninvolving, undistinguished, instantly forgettable features since...er, wait, what movie was I writing about?

GHOST LAKE (2004)

Dir: Jay Woelfel

 GHOST OF THE NEEDLE (2005)

Dir: Brian Avenet-Bradley

 GHOST RIDER (2007)

Dir: Mark Steven Johnson

GHOST SON (2005)

Dir: Lamberto Bava

Don't worry, it's not a sequel to Bill Cosby's 1990 flop GHOST DAD. It's actually a fairly interesting semi-remake of the director's late father (Mario Bava)'s final film, SHOCK (1977), released in the U.S. as BEYOND THE DOOR II (even though it had nothing to do with BEYOND THE DOOR). As in SHOCK, a young mother fears that her infant son is possessed by the spirit of its deceased father. She becomes increasingly hysterical as the child exhibits strange behavior that only she can see. That's about the end of the similarities between the two films, however. Whereas the original film was a creepy horror tale aimed squarely at scaring its audience, GHOST SON concentrates more on the problems of dealing with overwhelming grief and how coping with heartbreaking loss can cause a person to lose all objectivity. Thus this is a much more sad and depressing movie than the elder Bava's film, and while it has its share of grotesque moments, few will ever consider it frightening. For the first two-thirds of the film the baby threatens its mother's fragile sanity with incessant pointless screaming, a stubborn refusal to stay put and a habit of vomiting a torrent of horrid greenish slime directly into her face. In other words, it behaves exactly like any normal, ordinary baby. It's only when the little tot bites her breast hard enough to leave what appear to be teeth marks only days after its birth and starts periodically appearing as the image of its full-grown dad that the audience realizes something supernatural is going on. The heroine experiences frequent intense flashbacks to happier times and at one point imagines she's making love to a demonic version of her late husband. Were it not for a couple of isolated incidents, as when a little girl sees the baby speak in the father's voice (achieved via a superimposed moving mouth that gives the scene the unfortunate feel of the funny "talking baby" Etrade commercials), the entire spiritual possession might be seen as a mere figment of the heroine's imagination. The family doctor tries to help but his main contribution to the plot is his participation in the most uncalled-for "slap the hysterical female in the face" scene I've ever seen. The husband's sickening bone-crushing death in a road accident is almost unbearable to watch and the story's denouement, which requires the heroine to treat her lost love's spirit in a callous, borderline cruel manner in order to rescue their child, is far more tragic than scary. Still, it's nice to see anything like an Italian horror movie made in 2005 and Bava deserves a lot of credit for daring to give his story an honest-to-goodness ending instead of submitting to the illogical cheap shock conclusion that was tacked onto the vast majority of genre films of this period. Experienced horror viewers won't find much new in GHOST SON, but people who aren't accustomed to movies about ghosts and demons will probably find it intriguing enough.

GHOST, THE (1963)

Dir: "Robert Hampton" (Riccardo Freda)

The director of the previous year's THE HORRIBLE DR. HICHCOCK returned with this semi-sequel. It's not quite as demented as its predecessor but it's stylish, well-made and extremely morbid, a great horror-mystery in the gothic tradition. The backdrop of a faded, drafty old mansion with high ceilings, shadowy rooms lined with dusty bookshelves and billowing curtains is used to good effect. This time Dr. Hichcock is a depressed, paralyzed invalid and his wife (the always wonderful Barbara Steele) is a greedy, unfaithful schemer who's having an affair with the family doctor. They do away with old Doc H but his spirit refuses to leave the mansion, and one problem after another crops up to get in the way of the wicked couple's plan to get their hands on the dead man's hidden fortune.  The housekeeper (Italian horror fixture Harriet White Medin) seems to periodically become possessed by Hichcock's ghost, his music box continues to play its beautiful melancholy tune when there's nobody around to wind it, and Steele even sees her late husband materialize in her bed chamber as what appears to be a bullet-proof spectre. Naturally, Barb gradually loses it in grand style. There are several surprise twists at the climax and enough helpful exposition to make sense of everything that's come before. Both Hichcock and his wife are seen paralyzed by curare at different points in the story but ironically it's the traitorous family doctor whose surname is "Livingstone".  Despite an ending that puts a non-supernatural spin on the ghoulish goings-on, this is strongly recommended to fans of atmospheric old-fashioned gothic horror. 

 GHOSTKEEPER (1980)

Dir: Jim Makichuk

GHOSTS OF GOLDFIELD (2007)

Dir: Ed Winfield

This corny, unmercifully slow cheapie started out as part of the URBAN LEGENDS franchise but ended up losing that connection due to shifting studio ownership of the UL title. It starts off with the grammatically awkward claim "Based on true events", which should tip you off that it isn't going to have anything like a complete story or a point. All the cliches are in place, including the carload of college youths with a video camera, the car that inexplicably breaks down in the middle of nowhere, the needlessly unfriendly smalltown hicks, the bitchy girl who came along on a ghost hunt even though she seems to have no function other than to complain, the vengeful spirit of a woman wronged, and other trite haunted house traditions that would be almost like video comfort foods to horror fans if only they were presented with the slightest believability. The kids in this stale tale spend most of the movie walking around the dim corridors of a haunted hotel, but you'll spend it struggling to stay involved with the nothing plot. After a full hour has been devoted to characters walking around reciting reams of snooze-inducing empty dialogue, a ghost named Elizabeth, who roams the halls whispering cornball lines like "Come with me, if you dare!" and "Where's my baby?", develops a puffy face, after which she finally gets around to killing off the intruders in badly edited slasher style scenes. Unexplained mysteries include why a hotel that's been closed since 1935 is equipped with latter-day fluorescent light fixtures and up-to-date fire extinguishers, among other anachronsims, why bright light can be seen streaming in through windows during the middle of the night, and why an establishment called the Goldfield Hotel would have huge "M's" on its doors. Not to mention why the 1935 flashbacks look more like they're taking place some 25 years earlier than that. Or why Roddy Piper and Joe Bob Briggs even bothered to show up. Zzzzzzzzzzz............

 GHOSTS OF HANLEY HOUSE (1968)

Dir: Louise Sherrill

 GIANT BEHEMOTH, THE (1959)

Dir: Eugene Lourie

 GODMONSTER OF INDIAN FLATS (1973)

Dir: Frederic C. Hobbs

 GOLDEN COMPASS, THE (2007)

Dir: Chris Weitz

A crushingly disappointing fantasy from Hollywood moneyspenders.  The financial success of the HARRY POTTER and LORD OF THE RINGS films made it possible for this lesser-known work containing a number of similar elements to be greenlighted for production. There was some controversy surrounding THE GOLDEN COMPASS because the author of the book series upon which it was based was an atheist with an anti-Catholic, anti-Vatican agenda.  One point of view is as valid as another, however, whether one agrees with it or not, and in order to judge movies fairly they must be taken on their own terms as works of motion picture entertainment.  In this case, the original story's socio-political messages are largely lost, buried under mountains of empty visual displays and hamstrung by murky plotting and dreadful pacing.  The movie tosses plenty of offbeat concepts at the screen but they're all so underexplained, underexplored and underdeveloped that the result is a stew of incomplete internal logic and characters who are of no real interest.  In a cold, dreary, nearly colorless and desperately unconvincing parallel universe inhabited by Brtis, Gypsies, Cossacks, talking polar bears and a cowboy, people's souls are contained in the bodies of talking animals who follow them around and share a strange symbiotic relationship which, as presented here, doesn't make much sense and only serves to make the human characters seem less than human.  These spirit animals are referred to (rather illogically) as demons (spelled "daemons").  The use of a term that is closely associated with evil on our earth just adds to the confusion, as does the fact that "nice" people have "nice" animals (i.e., cute and furry) while members of the corrupt ruling class are stuck with daemon counterparts from species that are commonly perceived as bad or unpleasant, like bugs and snakes. Apparently our understanding of the term "demon" is flawed, but our choices regarding what makes a particular species "evil" is right on the money.  A little girl named Lyra is the main character, but what with knowing her so-called soul is partially contained in a talking ferret-bird-mouse shapeshifter, it's hard to see her as a complete or knowable person.   Lyra's pre-ordained, inescapable destiny is to lead the fight for free will, a concept that invites more questions.  She is the only person who can use the ancient mystical tool known as the golden compass, you see, although exactly how it works is glossed over in favor of a display of sparkly images that swirl around each time she uses it.  There's potential for some fascinating fantasy here, just as the whole scenario invites interesting discussion of how certain fantasy concepts in our world may have spilled over from another one, but this movie is too busy heaping one pile of computer-generated effects onto another to bother explaining any of it in an intelligent way.   I spent much of its running time wondering how this or that might really work or asking why the characters do the odd things they do, but none of it is ever sorted out beyond the most superficial treatment.  A good villain would have helped, but there isn't anyone you can relate to or even fully understand on the side of the bad guys either, and the higher-ups among the sinister organization seeking to control society are barely featured at all and never say anything that gives the viewer any real insight as to exactly what is at stake. Since this was planned as the first part of a trilogy, you don't even get the satisfaction of an ending after sitting through two hours of garbled action and a distractingly awkward balance of alien technology and shallow mysticism.    Ian McKellen is the voice of the main polar bear, Sam Elliot plays his usual cowboy character, Nicole Kidman is a one-dimensional villain who works for the evil Magisterium, Christopher Lee shows up seated at a table in one scene to claim a quick paycheck, and everyone wears lots of dark lipstick.  Give this soulless enterprise the cold shoulder.

 GOREGOYLES (2003)

Dirs: Augustine Arredondo, Kevin J. Lindenmuth

This isn't what you would expect from the title, because there aren't any monsters called "Goregoyles" and the only gargoyle that shows up is a little foam prop one commonly sold in Halloween Depot stores.  Two simplistic, undernourished little tales of the supernatural are crudely duct taped together with a wraparound device consisting of a foul-mouthed host sticking two different discs into his DVD player. The filmmakers seem to have been trying to construct something like real stories, but the project is sunk by unimaginative, adolescent-minded plots, lame dialogue and horrible, horrible acting.  In the first story, a guy thinks he's being possessed by a demon. His friends and family are in on the plot, and from time to time he tears somebody apart. The head of the devil coven is a guy with such a severe head cold that his voice will either amuse or irritate you as he tries to come off as imperious and aloof, which isn't easy when a person sounds like he has corks shoved up both nostrils. The possessed guy has an injured elbow on which much time is wasted but I never did know what that had to do with anything or how he got his elbow torn up in the first place.  This is the kind of movie in which a girl is mangled and disemboweled in front of other characters and the hero isn't bothered by the fact that nobody is upset by the incident or even discusses it later on. The photography is too dark, the editiing is laughable, and the ending is predictable.  The second mini-feature is by Kevin Lindenmuth, a diehard horror fan who has made a number of previous low-budget monster/gore flicks. People are chased around in the woods by hungry zombies conjured up by the spirit of an ancient Viking warrior called a Berserker. Typical of the lack of care shown throughout all of GOREGOYLES is the fact that the person in charge of the titles can't even spell the name of the episode correctly, getting Lindenmuth's story off to a laughable start by misspelling "Berserkers" as "Berzekers"!   Some of the ambitious skull-faced zombie masks are cool (although others are too cheesy looking for your local Kiwanis Club's Haunted House), but the masks and hands show a severe stage of decomposition while the zombies' suits look relatively clean and practically new in comparison.  Lindenmuth's episode does manage a few suspenseful moments and one really good witty scare, which I won't spoil, but the characters' reactions are never believable in the least and the acting is as bad as you'll ever see.  The overall effect of GOREGOYLES is that of watching amateurs clumsily film their own extremely derivative horror fantasies without any sense of pacing or any endings to work toward.  Some zombie fans might dig the brief footage of the rotting undead shambling around the woods but other than that there's nothing new or interesting going on here. 

 GRAVEDANCERS, THE (2006)

Dir: Mike Mendez

The director of THE CONVENT helmed this solid entry in the After Dark Horror Collection.  He loses control near the end and allows the film to degenerate into a CGI-driven effects showcase, but up until that point THE GRAVEDANCERS is one of the scarier American ghost films made around this time.  Encouraged by a strange printed card found on the grave of a recently killed friend, three college pals make the egregious mistake of literally dancing on the graves of three psychos in the "undesirable" section of the local cemetery.  This might seem like an awfully minor offense, but since the dead were crazy evil people in life, their malevolent spirits follow the trio home, determined to take them back to the beyond by the time of the next full moon, when their power will be at its apex.  The hauntings start out as subtle signs like creaking doors and creepy whispers, but as the full moon draws nearer the evil ghosts are able to make their presence known in increasingly frightening ways. Some professional ghost hunters try to help but for some mysterious reason their prescribed method of stopping the hauntings doesn't seem to work.  This movie contains some of the most hair-raising spirit manifestations and possession scenes since the legendary J-horrors RINGU and JU-ON, which probably provided inspiration.  The suspense builds gradually as we see the doomed characters' sense of dread and desperation growing as the truth of their predicament slowly dawns on them.  The evil ghosts (an axe murderess, a child pyromaniac and a sadistic pervert), who eventually materialize as nightmarish skull-faced apparitions with huge grinning mouths, are only after the trio who disturbed their resting places, but after a while it becomes apparent that anybody else nearby is in danger too.  The makeup and gore effects are first-rate and one throat-slashing is particularly horrifying.  There are a few minor continuity flaws but they're not intrusive enough to detract from the movie's effective aura of doom.  It's a shame things go wild in the closing minutes.  Be warned: After accomplishing so much impressive, authentically scary storytelling throughout its first hour and fifteen minutes, GRAVEDANCERS throws believability out the window with the appearance of a silly King Kong-sized flying zombie head that looks like it belongs in a GHOSTBUSTERS sequel instead of a serious horror story.  It's one more example of how too much emphasis on computer-animated effects can ruin otherwise good horror films.  So be prepared for a disappointingly over-the-top finale.  Prior to that point, however, Mendez's movie is far above average in most departments, offering an unpredictable and cleverly thought-out story, some truly funny dialogue and a high number of effective shocks.  Most of the time it's re-e-eally spooky, so I'm giving it a recommendation despite misgivings about the lack of restraint in its last five minutes.

 GRAVEYARD OF HORROR (1971)

Dir: "Michael Skaife" (Miguel Madrid)

 GRIM REAPER (2007)

Dir: Michael Feifer

This lackluster cheapie combines FINAL DESTINATION with ROOM 6 to little effect.  Yet another shabby horror film with a stripper for a main character, this one follows the confused plight of Rachel (an actress called "Cherish" Lee), a very pretty blonde dancer with a great figure. She gets hit by a cab in one of the most amateurishly staged accidents you'll ever see, rolling over the car in slow motion.  She was supposed to have died, but apparently the Grim Reaper (depicted here as slightly less competent than the one in THE GRIM ADVENTURES OF BILLY & MANDY cartoons) was busy elsewhere and missed his appointment.  He misses an awful lot of them in the city in question; so many, in fact, that he needs an evil doctor to round up all the people he failed to "reap" and lock 'em up at an abandoned asylum on a regular basis until he can get around to whacking each of them with his scythe.  There's a germ of a good story in there somewhere but this movie never explains anything satisfactorily, failing to make the situation seem plausible. I've watched so many independent horror films now that I'm beginning to think every town must have a decrepit closed-down mental hospital with working electricity still standing in some convenient location. The sinister Dr. Brown (surely no relation to Christopher Lloyd's Doc Brown character in the BACK TO THE FUTURE movies) is a chainsmoker who made a deal with old Grim to save himself from death by lung cancer. For some reason, he still suffers from some other illness, possibly heart disease, which causes him to fall down gasping and trembling every so often until he can swallow one of his unidentified lifesaving pills.  He spends the whole movie lighting up one cigarette after another, using matches which he then casually tosses onto the floor. Then at the climax, when he's holding the dancer's med student boyfriend at gunpoint, the absent-minded doc actually forgets to drop the lit match from his hand, so that when it burns his fingers he is sufficiently distracted to be lunged at and clobbered by the kid.  Imagine his embarrassment. This all looks at least as silly on film as it sounds when you read it.  The Reaper stalks the corridors of the hospital looking for his intended victims but he seems to have none of the supernatural qualities one would normally attribute to Death himself.  Rather illogically, when he loses his robe (after being hit by a car!) he looks like a rotted mummy.  The traditional skull normally associated with the Grim Reaper, a literal death's head, would have made sense but this G.R. has a rotted zombie/mummy face, which implies that he must have been human at one time.  He's too inefficient and easily fooled to be scary.  The editing is very choppy, with some scenes either missing or shortened to near-incoherence, and the big finale involves a drug which not only induces a near-death state but also conveniently facilitates time travel as well.  The very end is so needlessly mean-spirited, stupid and depressing that it will only make you hate the movie that much more.      

 GRINDHOUSE (2007)

Dirs: Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino

I'm not usually a Rodriguez or Tarantino fan but this bold, ingenious double-feature is simply amazing. It's crammed with fresh ideas, clever dialogue, great gags about low-end cinema and outrageously violent action. The concept is that we're watching a 1970s style double bill in a sleazy "grindhouse" theater.  In keeping with that theme, the "movies" we see appear well-worn, suffering from scratches, burns, splices and pockmarks from too many years on the drive-in circuit. The one-dimensional characters are perfect icons of '70s exploitation and the noticably poor condition of the "prints" make this a unique experience.  The first "movie" is Rodriguez's PLANET TERROR, an incredible fast-paced sci-fi/ gore adventure about a weird toxin that turns people into flesh-eating maniacs with oozing, melting flesh.  The star is a sexy go-go dancer who loses a leg in a car wreck and has it replaced with a high-powered rifle with which she can blow away the gooey killers as she dances around!  Not a frame of it is remotely believable, but that's the fun of it. GRINDHOUSE is a loving tribute to a style of moviemaking that's changed so much over 30 years that it now seems downright alien.  In drive-in tradition, the action-packed first feature is followed by coming attractions previews. Many viewers will embrace the mock trailers more than the main features.  Eli Roth, Rob Zombie and others who made financially successful trash flicks came on board to provide wonderful trailers for late-70s style shockers like WEREWOLF WOMEN OF THE S.S., the HALLOWEEN slasher spoof THANKSGIVING and a hilarious trailer for an all-over-the-place haunted house movie titled DON'T!  The second "feature" is Tarantino's DEATH PROOF (if you don't blink during the opening, you might catch the fact that it's an "older" film that's been retitled, a once common drive-in tactic used to dupe patrons into paying to see the same movie again). Kurt Russell is Stuntman Mike, a psycho who kills women with his special "death proof" movie stunt car.  There's eye-popping stunt driving and pulse-pounding chases, but since Tarantino wrote it, it's weighed down by his usual brand of meandering, self-indulgent scripting.  Awful people prattle on about nothing of any consequence, but since Quentin has them all use the F-word every five seconds he's confident that his babbling will pass for clever.  Q.T. still exudes the "I can do no wrong" attitude that made him famous but it plays well here since it's in the context of a preposterous old drive-in flick.  Although the events don't quite pass muster as a story, the violent ending works nonetheless.  The finale seems abrupt almost to the point of being incomplete, but that's how they made 'em in the '70s.   Constant scratching and speckling, obvious reel changes and other intentional damage keep viewers mindful of the project's '70s roots, which may have alienated younger fans, thus accounting for the film's undeservedly poor boxoffice. There are references to recent developments like text messaging and Osama Bin Laden, indicating that the stories are taking place not in the '70s but in the world of 2007.  So this isn't an attempt to make a double feature that could realistically pass for a relic of the '70s. It's more like an example of what movies might be like today if the freewheeling, credibility-straining style of beloved old trashy drive-in films hadn't changed since then. The filmmakers occasionally go too far to this end, like having an entire reel missing from both movies. (In reality, although crude splices and choppy dialogue were common, for a whole reel to have gone missing would have been extremely rare. The first time it happens, in PLANET TERROR, it's hilarious because of when and where it occurs, but when it happens again in DEATH PROOF it just seems like a desperate effort to get a second laugh out of the same joke.)   And there are effects sequences showing things that never could have been depicted realistically in the '70s, from the dancer's missing leg (try to imagine how crudely that would have been brought to the screen in, say, 1976) to a scene in which a helicopter is used as a weapon.  But all in all it's a satisfying package, full of manic energy, brutal action, gross-outs and a wicked sense of humor behind it all to make it palatable.  It's all very self-indulgent and lacking in any sort of restraint, but that's what makes it work.  Some parts are downright brilliant.  It's over three hours long, but well worth sitting through for those old enough to be in on the joke.