LOW-BUDGET MASSACRE: MY MONTH OF HORRORS
by
Francis Friel
I made a list of 68
horror films I had planned to watch for this month’s issue. In the end, I was
able to comfortably see eighteen of these.
Here’s the original
list of stuff I thought I’d actually be able to watch:
TOAD ROAD, BIRTH OF
THE LIVING DEAD, HOUSE OF BODIES, ASMODEXIA, THE VAMPIRE’S COFFIN, GREYSTONE
PARK, MR. JONES, BAY OF BLOOD, CONTRACTED, THE INVITATION, GERM Z, IN FEAR, THE
SLEEPING CAR, HONEYMOON, THE DAMNED, AFTER, DEAD SILENCE, THEY, CRUCIBLE OF
HORROR, YOU’RE NEXT, WOMAN IN BLACK 2, MADHOUSE, THE OUIJA EXPERIMENT, DREAM
HOUSE, NIGHTMARE FACTORY, AT THE DEVIL’S DOOR, DON’T BLINK, THE HOUSES OCTOBER
BUILT, WEREWOLF: THE BEAST AMONG US, GRABBERS, SUICIDE THEORY, THE FOG, PROM
NIGHT 2, CABIN FEVER: PATIENT ZERO, DEATHWATCH, DEVIL’S PASS, MINE GAMES, HERE
COMES THE DEVIL, FROM THE DARK, THE CANAL, WICKED LITTLE THINGS, PONTYPOOL,
STAKE LAND, WHITE GOD, OCULUS, THE LAST DAYS, FLU, WITCHING & BITCHING,
SIMON KILLER, STONEHEARST ASYLUM, THE NURSES, THE DEAD ONE, DESCENDENT,
VANISHED, SPARROW, NOBODY CAN COOL, BAD BEHAVIOR, VISIBLE SCARS, THE CELLAR
DOOR, NIGHTSCREAM, THE CRY, PELT, DOGMAN, THE EVES, MONSTERS IN THE WOODS,
SASQUATCH, PUPPETMASTER 1-9, LEPRECHAUN 1-7.
I feel that not
getting through all this madness was to the benefit of my own sanity and
physical well-being. Staring into the abyss of made-for-tv and
straight-to-netflix nightmares was fun, and I am still gonna try to get to the
rest of these soon. But in the meantime, here’s where we ended up. It’s not
pretty…
JUG FACE
Directed
by Chad Crawford Kinkle (2013)
This
is the dumbest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. This director, first of all, looks
like Chris Diamantopoulos, a guy who’s made a
career out of his phenomenally douchey face. Right away, we’re in some trouble
here. I imagine him on the set, this fucking Kinkle guy, setting up the shot
where the main character is having sex with her brother out in the woods, and him
having some specific direction to give to his actors. Making it all very
serious and very intense. I imagine him hiring the crew to dig out The Pit and
then fill The Pit with Pit Water and Pit Blood and having someone design the
Sacrifice Stump and hiring the effects and makeup guys to make just the right
throat-slitting rig for when they keep sacrificing everybody. I imagine him
agonizing over dailies, wondering if he needs re-shoots, or should he re-write
some other things to make it match what he’s already got onscreen? Which would
be easier? Which would be cheaper? Can
he even get that cast member back? Even for a day? Is Sean Young still
available or is she busy shooting a pilot for SyFy? Is Lauren Carter willing to
come back to get an insert of her getting molested by a family member or is she
busy talking to her agent trying to figure out how to get her career back
on-track? Look, all I’m saying is that this movie is a huge piece of shit
and that the director should be ashamed of himself and I’d also be fine with
him writing an apology letter to American Citizens who’ve seen his movie.
I guess one good
thing (or surprising thing, anyway) is that they actually go through with all
their ritual murders. No one’s saved at the last minute, the camera doesn’t shy
away from how fucked up all this business becomes, and it does end up giving an
air of gross creepiness to the whole thing. The problem is that I can’t tell
how much of that creepy feeling is intentional and how much is a result of the
director being a fucking psychopath.
Apparently this guy
also made some weird incest-y devil possession movie before this. So at least
he’s trying to build his brand.
I just had this vision
of Kinkle getting his hands on this issue and finding this review and him being
the type of director who gets mad at his critics and starts shit with them.
This seems like a movie made by a guy like that. But then like he writes to me
or finds me on instagram and tries to make it a big thing and then I get
depressed and don’t want to keep going with the zine because now this idiot’s
out there trying to fuck with this nice cool thing and it’s all ruined and I
just go back to my weird day job and think “well, that was fun while it
lasted.”
I’m having anxiety
fantasies about this director. That’s how bad this movie is.
HOUSE OF BODIES
Directed by Alex
Merkin (2014)
A bunch of camgirls
work in a big house and some murders happened there and detectives are
investigating what these websites have to do with the killings and I only made
it nine minutes into this garbage movie. The opening credits sequence features
near-pornographic shots of dead women and at the nine-minute mark a young
prostitute begs her customer (who also works there?) to beat her up, which he
then does in the most brutal couple of shots I've seen in any movie in a long
time. I can only guess that things get worse from that point on. This thing
also, somehow, stars Terrence Howard and Peter Fonda. And Queen Latifah
apparently financed the whole thing. I don't fucking care. Avoid this thing.
It's also total
amateur hour from top to bottom, which, in itself, is not necessarily a
turn-off but in this case only makes things worse.
WOLFCOP
Directed by Lowell
Dean (2014)
This was not nearly
as bad as it could've been. There's this whole slew of HD low budget
productions coming out of everywhere (this is from freaking Canada) and it's
not the worst thing to give them a shot. I've written movies better than this
but you better believe I've also written worse. The effects aren't bad, the
acting is fine for what it is, and it's actually got a plot, in kind of a Troma
sense. Generational occult conspiracies, shapeshifters who want werewolf blood,
corrupt small town cops, sexy bartenders. It's not really trying to be anything
other than what it is. I'm fine with it. It's fine. Relax.
This
movie has all the top-notch camerawork and production design of a 2002 low
budget local film festival reject. Lots of shots from slightly above the
actors, harsh lighting, low-cut blouses, three-day-old stubble, bad
day-for-night, and lots of jail cell bars made of what looks like either
spray-painted cardboard or maybe just papier-mache. But, honestly, it’s like an
hour and fifteen minutes long, so it hardly matters. Again: it’s fine. But it brings
me to my real point: there’s an entire Parallel Hollywood going on that’s been
around since the 60s and we’re still not doing anything about it. There are
probably more movies coming out every year independently than are released in
Cinemas but we don’t know about them, we don’t know where they are, we don’t
know who these directors are, and we’re kind of not supposed to. And I’d say
we’re dumber because of it. We don’t really have our own Jonas Mekas anymore to
follow all these people who are out there making Wolfcop movies. But we for
damn sure know that as soon as the Monday Night Football secret Force
Awakens trailer ends that we can immediately refresh Fandango and get
tickets for the 7pm Thursday night preview show. I work for a Cinema and this
was a tightly-controlled secret operation for about five seconds before I came
into work, went online, and saw that it had leaked. Of course it leaked. Because what we have now instead of film
culture is geek culture. And it kills me that geek culture is obsessed with
getting every last drop of nostalgic glee from the shit that’s always been
around instead of trying to keep up with the new weird shit.
Don’t
get me wrong. I get it. Disney just paid Billions Of American Dollars for their
precious Star Wars and now they want their money back. I get that people care
about Star Wars. I get that people care about Civil Wars and Infinity Wars and
Wizards and Tributes and Dystopian Teen Nightmare Stuff but… ugh.
There
are directors out there quitting their day jobs and doing whatever they can to
make their movies and making No Money but they’re getting their stuff released.
Either on Netflix or straight-to-blu-ray or indie festivals or handing out
homemade dvds to their friends. And I think those people deserve our attention.
When
we’re kids we think nothing of going out to shows every single weekend to see
all our favorite bands. Bands nobody else at school has heard of. Hardcore
bands from three states away, queer vegan punk bands who don’t release cds
because cds aren’t vegan. Who hand-print their t-shirts and want to talk to
every person at the show. And when you can’t see your band in your town because
you live in some shitball backwoods garbageheap, you can probably write to them and get them to play at your house. Because they want to play. They want fans. They want to do what they
want to do because it’s all they care
about and it’s the most important thing in the world to them.
FOLKS:
Directors are the same way! They’re people! Why aren’t we constantly organizing
mini weekly film festivals? Why aren’t directors booking tours and selling
their own dvds? They would tour like a band, with their whole cast and crew in
a van or caravan of cars, going state to state, sleeping on floors, meeting
other directors, collaborating on future projects, making the kids in every
town go “oh shit man they came through here last year and their movie was
amazing with this OTHER GIRL who opened for them made a movie and it was like
nothing I’d ever seen! You gotta check HER out!”
WHY
AREN’T WE DOING THIS??
The
Parallel Hollywood is out there and it demands our respect. Without them we’d
have no Nouvelle Vague,
no New Hollywood, no John Waters or Guy Maddin or David Lynch or Lynne Ramsay.
We needed all those people!
Hollywood
sells us their “this world is all there is”-style of products. But we know
there are other options out there. We need to give these smaller movies respect
and pay money to see this stuff. Even if you think the Wolfcops of the world are dumb, don’t forget that making a movie
is, essentially, a near-impossible task. The amount of things that need to come
together to get one of these fuckers up and running is enough to make most
people never want to pick up a camera in the first place. But those who follow
through and get something made and have the fucking guts to actually show it to
other people need to know that there’s an audience that not only
Just wanted to get
that off my chest, though. Wolfcop
was okay.
EL ATAUD DEL VAMPIRO
(COFFIN OF THE VAMPIRE)
Directed by Fernando
Mendez (1958)
Okay, now that’s what I’m talkin’ about!
This is a Mexican
vampire story that basically says “remember that dummy Renfield? What if the
whole movie was just a bunch of Renfields!” And it totally works!
A couple of tough-guy
grave robbers are digging up bodies looking for a vampire. They know he’s there
because this is apparently a sequel to another vampire movie by the same
director feature the same vampire character (who, I guess, was killed at the end
of the first one and then buried in a normal-ass cemetery with all the other
people in that town?).
They find the vampire
(Count Lavud!) and he immediately starts brainwashing everybody around him. He
turns everyone into his slaves so he can sneak around and do what he does best:
seduce beautiful women! [RECORD SCRATCH] WAIT WHUUUUUUUUUUUT? Yep. Dude just
wants to hit on the ladies. Which, simple enough, and dumb, but it fits in with
the classic vampire mythology I guess. But it’s not the plot or even the script
that made me love this one. It’s the direction. This movie is a classic case of
doing the best you can with what little you’ve got. It’s a beautiful production
(usually… more on that later) and the gorgeous black and white cinematography
adds a lot to the atmosphere in what could have been just another cheap-o
monster movie.
My two favorite
touches are pretty basic movie-magic things, but they work every time. The
first is that whenever Lavud looks in a mirror (or a mirror is held up in front
of him) he’s not invisible like most vampires. He’s a skeleton! Has that been
done in other movies? I thought it was great and I’m probably gonna steal it if
I ever make a vampire movie. In fact I might make one just to steal that trick.
The other is a
recurring motif (in some cases they might even re-use the same footage). In Classic
Vampire Fashion, Lavud likes to fly around in the form of a bat and swoop down
to sneak up on his prey. And every time he does, what we see is a big rubber
bat, complete with almost-but-not-quite-invisible fishing wire flying the bat
around. And the bat flies right into the camera and it smash-cuts to the
vampire standing there spreading his cape and looking scary and dramatic. It’s
a cool shot, and the directors thought so too because they do it like six or
seven times throughout the movie. But goddamn it works every time. This movie really just made me so happy.
There’s
a couple of clunky moments, though. The interiors always look like brightly-lit
sets (which, yeah, that’s what they are, but they look like they are). The main location, the doctor’s office where
they keep the coffin, reminded me of Rob Petrie’s house. And an outdoor shot
looking into a café window (a really cool shot, by the way) is clearly shot on
a soundstage, and leads to the most harshly-lit scene I’ve seen in a long time,
when the woman runs from the café and out into the streets. The shot itself
reminded me of the long shot at the beginning of M., but once the camera
comes down onto street-level it becomes way too clear that the walls are flimsy
and the bad lighting makes what could’ve been really cool shadow effects look
like mistakes. But look: none of that matters. This is a great movie. I’m
definitely going to try to see more by Fernando Mendez.
THE NIGHTMARE
Directed
by Rodney Ascher (2015)
This
Rodney Ascher is carving out quite the weird-ass little niche for himself. He’s
like the Bizarro Alex Gibney. And I’m glad he’s getting back on-track after the
fucking disaster that was Room 237. Wanna get in my face and
tell me Room 237 was good and makes a
case for all that weird shit? Cause I’ll get right back in your face and tell you to go read Rob Ager’s stuff and then come
back and tell me those fucking clowns knew what they were talking about. But
moving on…
I
fsaw Ascher’s first film online a few years ago, The S From Hell, and it
became one of my favorite short films ever. It’s a ten-minute documentary about
people who remember the old Screen Gems logo and how creeped-out they all were
by seeing it everywhere throughout their childhoods. If you haven’t seen it,
check it out. It’s Scary As Hell.
The
Nightmare takes that to a whole ‘nother level. This thing
is absolutely terrifying. It reminded me of the Time/Life “Mysteries of the
Unexplained” book series. Those books are filled with little snippets of
stories, all purported to be true, all brain-meltingly scary and weird, mostly
by how matter-of-fact they all are. They have chapter titles like “The Unquiet
Sky” and “Unearthly Fates”. Lots of Kaspar Hauser-type stuff, UFOs, bigfoots,
aliens, ghosts, crying statues, ancient and modern myths, etc. My favorite
entry is in the one I call the Big Blue Book, the one that came out after the
famous run of Big Square Black Books. The Blue Book is a sort-of compendium of
all the weirdest stuff from the other books, with little new stuff thrown in. Here’s my all-time
favorite entry:
“On August 27, 1968, blood and flesh fell on
an area of
about
one-third of a square mile between the Brazilian
towns of
Cacapava and Sao Jose dos Campos. The fall
was reported
to have lasted about five to seven minutes.”
Pretty fuckin’ weird,
right? Did it really happen? Either no, it didn’t, or yes it did, and it’s got
a really boring explanation. But the fact remains that the information in this
entry is two sentences long and is mostly going out of its way to over-describe
when and where this happened, but makes no attempt at explaining the event
itself or even trying in the slightest to corroborate it. But the point is that
it’s unsolved, and it’s weird, so we’re not looking for an explanation,
exactly. We’re just looking to be creeped-out.
The
Nightmare is proof that we don’t want these
explanations. And we don’t need the townspeople to give their accounts of what
it was like to witness flesh and blood falling from the sky. Because digging
too deep into this, assuming it’s a real event that really happened, will only
open up a can of worms that is almost assuredly some terrifying shit that’ll
keep us awake at night.
The interview
subjects in Ascher’s new film are all suffering from sleep paralysis, a very
real phenomenon that causes people to experience demonic hallucinations
combined with an inability to move or communicate. I have actually experienced
this twice in my life. The first was in the middle of the night when I was
staying at my grandparents’ house as a little kid (between 4th and 5th
grade). I was sleeping on the couch and woke up and saw the moonlight coming in
the living room window directly across from me. There was a tree right outside
that window, and I saw a large black figure drop out of the tree and look right
at me, then point towards the back yard (in my head, and in re-telling this
story, I’ve always described the figure as “Spider-Man”). The figure then
walked towards the back of the house towards the yard, then in the same instant
that he was out of my line of vision / disappeared from the window, it was now
in the living room with me and walked directly towards me way too fast. And that’s where that memory ends. I don’t remember
him getting to me, I don’t remember falling back to sleep, nothing. Just the image
of him approaching, then nothing. But I remember feeling completely helpless to
the point that I thought I had died and that this was the normal process of
what it’s like to transition from being a living person to a dead entity. It
was the scariest unexplained moment of my life until something similar happened
to me a couple of years later.
This time I was in 6th
or 7th grade and I was taking a nap in my house in the afternoon. We
lived in a large old farmhouse in rural Indiana for a few years when I was
growing up (in between stints of living in Philly). The big front bedroom off
the side of the living room was my mom’s workspace but it also doubled as a
guest bedroom, so it had a big bed in it. I was sleeping in there one afternoon
when I woke up suddenly and realized I was trying to scream but couldn’t make a
sound. I tried for what seemed like five full minutes to make a noise but
nothing would come out. I realized that I also couldn’t move my body and when I
was finally able to move, I rolled over and saw what looked like a small figure
sitting on the bed, who then rolled off the side of the bed the instant I saw
him. As soon as the figure was gone I was able to scream. So yeah, this shit is
completely fucked-up and scary. And it takes you completely by surprise.
It’s funny how many
of the interview subjects seem completely at peace as they describe the most
disturbing scenarios. These are people living pretty ordinary lives, except
that sometimes they are terrorized by demons in the middle of the night who scream in their faces and threaten them over the phone. The total
randomness and lunacy of some of their recounted
experiences often reminded me of the strangeness of the first wave of Whitley
Strieber’s grey alien/“visitor” books, with their lines like “my parents didn’t
believe me when I told them, but… they were coming out of the stove.” It’s
weird, unsettling details like that that will often make me even more of a believer in certain instances.
And
these interview subjects, while being for the most part laid-back, are
definitely unsettled by their experiences. At one point a guy is telling his
story and hears a noise coming from somewhere in the house and he stops cold,
turns his body to look behind him, and stops the interview dead in its tracks,
he’s so suddenly afraid of… something. Or someone. His story in particular
actually involves alien-like creatures who have visited him since he was an
infant (his earliest sleep paralysis episodes occurred in his crib). His
creatures are probably the least-threatening we get to see in the film, but
that’s only because the rest of them are truly, pants-shittingly crazy.
It’s
almost not worth it to try to describe some of this stuff, because a lot of it
is presented (expertly, I’ll say) in such a dull, matter-of-fact way that makes
them all the more real and unnerving. The demon hissing threats into the phone,
the quick cut to the witch-looking thing screaming into the woman’s ear, the
Freddy Kruger hands ripping the one dude’s balls apart, the little kid who
discovered that the demons had actually prepared him for the hallucinatory
visits via news broadcasts… it all sounds bizarre, and it is, but these people,
as far as I can tell, are all telling the truth about what they experienced.
Whether these things could be said to have “happened”, in the more traditional
sense, is beside the point. These events were real enough to have altered these
people’s lives in a profound way.
The
directing by Ascher, in his usual style, works better than in any of his
previous films. The intimate lighting, the dark, abstract recreations of the
visions and the late-night conversational nature of some of the interviews
lends the entire film an air of intimacy that made it even scarier. It’s a very
quiet film, almost calming in some cases. But the silence is broken in an
instant, and nothing can save you now.
GOING CLEAR: SCIENTOLOGY AND THE PRISON OF BELIEF
Directed
by Alex Gibney (2015)
On
the one hand, this is basically just a rip-off of The Master, the PT
Anderson joint about the 1950s self-help cult that turns into a gang of
brainwashed lunatics and uses their guard dog Joaquin
Phoenix to beat up their “enemies.” On the other hand, this movie takes a
pretty ingenious tactic: it stages its story as a sort of mocumentary, in the
style of Forgotten Silver or the celebrity interview segment of Being
John Malkovich. They even got Alex Gibney, who is an actual Hollywood
political documentarian, to attach his name to the Director’s credit (IMDB
lists him only, and doesn’t indicate who the real director was). And they call
in some heavy-hitters to play wacked-out versions of themselves in this
alternate-universe version of Hollywood.
So here’s the plot
(again, it’s pretty much the plot of the second half of The Master): in the early 1950s, a science-fiction novelist named
L. Ron Hubbard publishes a book called “Dianetics”, which purports to be a
bible, or manual, for a belief system/religion called Scientology. What they
believe is that humans are capable of transcending their normal “imprisoned”
state of being and “going clear”, which means to attain enlightenment. We do
this by psychically travelling back in time to experience a past trauma (either
in this life or in a past life), learn from it, eliminate it, and move beyond
it. If we do this enough times, we become free from stress and are able to
accomplish extraordinary things. We basically have super-powers. And it sounds
amazing.
As you move “up the
bridge” or further up the food chain of the religion, slowly you are given more
pieces of the puzzle, such as the Scientologist creation myth: thousands of
years ago, the world was just like it is now, and we had all the same
technology as now (rather, as the 1950s, when all this stuff was written). The
only difference was that we were a part of a huge intergalactic political
system, and planet Earth was essentially a prison planet. All the evildoers
were transported from their home worlds to Earth by way of massive jumbo jet
spaceships then dropped into volcanoes. The volcanoes erupted and spewed the
evil souls all over the planet, where they then would possess other living
things. Fast-forward to today and these evil spirits are now inhabiting us!
Where the plot kind
of falls apart is where it gets into all this business about how they went
after a bunch of Hollywood celebrities to lend more credence to their cause. It
leads to some pretty funny sequences, especially for what’s essentially a horror
movie, but still a weird sidetrack in a movie with almost way too much plot
crammed into just over two hours.
The funniest sequence
actually derails the plot completely for ten solid minutes, detailing how the
cult, eager for some way to make themselves look legit to the American public,
started recruiting actors from shitty network sitcoms like “Welcome Back,
Kotter”, and actually scored John Travolta, who then spent the rest of his
career secretly working Scientologist propaganda into all his future roles. It
makes no real sense in the larger context of the story, but it’s an interesting
enough place for the story to go, I guess.
But boy, the movie
makes up for this particularly weak plot-point by pulling out its biggest guns:
major movie stars actually playing themselves as brainwashed cult members. Tom
Cruise makes the most notable appearance, acting absolutely manic at one point
in a shitty-looking “training video” for the new cult members. It’s like his
entire career was leading him towards this one weird extended cameo as a
wacked-out lieutenant in a seafaring space cult. And apparently not only do
these actors play themselves, but it seems like they’ve been shooting this
thing Boyhood-style over the course of their entire careers. We see
footage of Travolta and Cruise and even garbage director Paul Haggis throughout
their lives doing Scientology-related things. Obviously, it’s simple enough to
superimpose their faces into old (or old-looking) footage, but it looks
completely convincing. Some Zelig shit, right here.
In high school I read
the book “What They Don't Teach You at Film School:
161 Strategies For Making Your Own Movies No Matter What” by Camille Landau
& Tiara White, and in their book they say that the biggest hurdle when
making a film is getting anyone to actually see it. They stress getting the
word out by any means possible, even if you think
you’re maybe going too far sometimes. Well, “Alex Gibney” (or whoever directed
this thing) really took that to heart because the big thing in the news related
to this film’s release were the protests by “real-life” Scientologists claiming
the film was a smear campaign, didn’t get the facts straight, etc. I’m into all
that kind of stuff. If you have a weird little high-concept arthouse movie and
you somehow managed to squirrel Tom Cruise into it, for goddamn sure you’re
gonna do whatever it takes to get asses in seats. And apparently Cruise is an
extremely good sport, because the movie even makes the claim that this
fictitious religion was partly responsible for the breakup of his marriage to
Nicole Kidman.
Again,
it’s an original way to tell a story like this, but we’ve seen this particular
story before. It even takes the Master plot-point
about changing a line in the book and recycles it almost wholesale.
The
one interesting stroke the film takes is that the Hubbard character is actually
long-dead by the time the film begins, and the movie really follows his successor,
a weird little penis-man from Philly (naturally) named David
Miscavige. I’ve never seen this actor before but this Miscavige character is
seriously creepy. Like, Duplass in Creep creepy. It’s this weird mix of
cult leader, corporate CEO, and game show host. Or a not-quite-as-intense
Patrick Bateman. Or a serial killer Michael Scott. There’s a scene where he’s
addressing a stadium full of believers and he salutes a gigantic portrait of
Hubbard that made my skin crawl. I don’t know what it is about religious fervor
that gets under my skin so intensely, or religious horror, but it gets me every
time. The Exorcist does the same thing to me. And The
Sacrament, to a lesser extent.
So check this one out. It’s a weird little piece of work, and it
doesn’t always hold together, but it goes to some strange places towards the
end, and ends up being a critique, I think, of what happens to people who
believe way too strongly in things they have no hope of really understanding.
And of people who want nothing more than to lead and control other people. And
it’s one of those “alternate universe” movies that sometimes hits a little too
close to home. You can almost see how this shit would go down in real life. Tom
Cruise and all.
No comments:
Post a Comment