I met Phantasm director and writer Don Coscarelli once. Well, “met”. It was a screening of Phantasm at the Hollywood Cemetery, where he introduced the movie. I made my way over to where he’d been buttonholed by a few fans. When my turn came, I said something about how Phantasm was a huge part of my childhood.
“Must have been quite a childhood,” he said.
I suppose it was. So I feel awful that I don’t like John Dies at the End, an obvious labor of love from Coscarelli, a guy who’s early contribution to horror is infinitely more valuable than anything Wes Craven did before Nightmare on Elm Street. But for whatever reason, Coscarelli never had his own Nightmare on Elm Street.
After the jump, balls of silver only get you so far Continue reading →
Asylum Blackout was originally called The Incident. That title could apply to literally any movie. Now it’s called Asylum Blackout. You kind of have to admire that it’s so upfront, because it’s a story about a power outage in an asylum. Imagine One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest gone horribly wrong. Well, more horribly wrong.
I wouldn’t recommend this in-your-face disturbing movie to anyone who isn’t hip to the French new wave of beyond-gore horror. Inside, Martyrs, and Irreversible don’t just stop at physical violence. You’re going to be subjected to psychological violence as well. This will not end well. Maybe you should watch something a little less unsettling.
But these movies aren’t just raw shock value. They are refined shock value. Asylum Blackout has a great John Carpenter feel to it, but with a grim modern sensibility. It’s a tightly made movie with style, characters, and seriously enduring ick factor. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. I should also warn you that although it strives mightily at Washington State grunge rockers — it’s a French production, but it’s an English language movie — the main actors can only hit the accent about 85% of the time. It’s kind of endearing. This must be what us Americans sound like when we assay English accents.
Asylum Blackout is available on DVD. You probably shouldn’t watch it.
Here’s some good ol’ boy white trash grindhouse with the slightest whiff of Southern gothic. Its starts off pretty simple. Clayne Crawford (pictured, the unlikely heart of the movie), Travis Fimmel, and Daniel Cudmore are three unbathed violent redneck brothers for hire. Damsel in distress Eva Longoria hires them to get a McGuffin from Billy Bob Thornton. But when the McGuffin happens, Baytown Outlaws takes a strange turn.
Let me digress for a moment. Did you see Hit and Run? Because you should. It’s a collaboration among Dax Shepherd, Kristen Bell, a strong supporting cast, and some truly sexy cars. In Hit and Run, the word “fag” comes up. And even though Hit and Run is a movie seriously in love with the olden days of Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw trying to get away from stuff, it’s also a movie about seriously decent people with modern sensibilities. So the movie’s reaction to the word “fag” is really sweet on a couple of levels.
Baytown Outlaws — in which the brothers freely call each other faggots, as you’d expect — does for “retard” what Hit and Run did for “fag”. What a lovely touch of dignity in a white trash grindhouse action movie. It even allows its characters to progress from shooting people in the faces to pondering the nature of God before shooting a bunch of bad guys who have climbed into trees for no other reason than to get shot out of them.
Not to give Baytown Outlaws too much credit. It’s got its share of stumbles. It’s a minor crime to squander Zoe Bell. She’s best known as Uma Thurman’s stunt double from Kill Bill who got to be onscreen and on the hood of a car in Death Proof. Here she’s little more than a body for a costume and a trigger finger for an absurd shotgun. How hard is it to do a good action scene in which a bunch of sexy whore assassins — the movie even calls them that — fight it out with the heroes in a roadhouse? Apparently too hard for Baytown Outlaws, which has been watching a lot of Terminator and Near Dark. But you’ll have to see Rza’s Man with the Iron Fists to see whore assassins done right. There’s still more ridiculousness in store as several more rounds of McGuffin chasers pile into this particular picaresque clown car of a movie.
While Baytown Outlaws might not have the budget to shoot its Road Warrior sequence with the spectacle it deserves, at least it can afford exactly the right music. And it has a few good actors beyond the three brothers. Andre Braugher and Billy Bob Thornton are slumming it, but the stars of Armageddon and Poseidon are no strangers to slumming it. Although Braugher is obviously enjoying himself, Thornton just seems annoyed he was cast. I guess it’s a character choice.
Baytown Outlaws is available on video on demand. Support Quarter to Three by watching it from this Amazon link.
Phantoms is forty five minutes of made-for-TV-level haunted house horror, and then forty-five minutes of scientificky sci-fi hoo-ha with soldiers and the dog from The Thing, but an adorable golden lab instead of an inscrutable husky. During the scientificky hoo-ha part, Peter O’Toole — not the sad old man from the movie Venus, but an elder version of the fiery young Peter O’Toole — is yelling at Ben Affleck — not the stridently soulful Hollywood celebrity who made Argo, but the dumbass kid who stumbled into too many leading roles in the 90s.
“This thing is what wiped out the dinosaurs and they were pretty tough fucking customers!” says O’Toole, describing the monster, which is basically sentient primordial tar. Later a bunch of zombies show up to make a zombie tornado that Ben Affleck shoots. Liev Schreiber is one of the minibosses. To beat him, you have to use the shotgun to shoot the syringe into his head.
Rose McGowan sits behind O’Toole, trying various expressions. That’s one of them up there. She doesn’t have any lines during most of the exchanges, which is a shame. I’ve seen Planet Terror about a zillion times. She obviously channeled her Phantoms experience to know how to make bad horror oh-so-good. She spends a lot of Phantoms hanging out in shots where she doesn’t have any dialogue. It’s as if the director — a guy named Joe Chapelle who would go on to work on TV shows including The Wire, which I’ve been told is good — has the presence of mind to know a watchable actor when he casts one. Not that you’d know this from the amount of screen time given to Ben Affleck and someone named Jennifer Going. Miss Going, who I thought was either Joanna Whaley-Kilmer or Ally Sheedy for most of the movie’s running time, has an apt name given her credits since Phantoms.
At the opening of the movie, the title card for Phantoms comes onscreen as follows:
Phantoms
Dean Koontz’s
In that order. Like it just wants to quickly remind you that these aren’t any normal Phantoms. They’re Dean Koontz’s. Based on his book. Dean Koontz’s. Made from his screenplay. Dean Koontz’s. And now you’re about to watch a hilariously incompetent movie. Dean Koontz’s.
As boys continue to make zombie movies, the female characters will continue to be boy fantasies. Danai Gurira’s character in Walking Dead, Michonne, consists mostly of tight pants and a samurai sword. Even Laurie Holden as Andrea confesses that she loves the thrill of the kill, which we already knew from how quickly she plunges knives into zombies. The most recent [Rec] movie exists only to show a woman in a wedding dress taking a chainsaw to a zombie, even if it’s a bit more than the actress can handle. In the Canadian thriller The Day, Ashley Bell (one of two reasons to see The Last Exorcism*) plays one of the most bad-ass zombie killing chicks you’ll see in any zombie movie with or without zombies, and she makes it worthwhile sticking around for the final scene. Michonne wishes she was that bad-ass.
But what kind of bad-ass zombie killing chick do you get when a woman makes an arthouse zombie movie? The answer to that is April in the very Scottish horror movie The Dead Outside, directed by Kerry Anne Mullaney. April is a closed book behind her needlepoint, her porcelain figures, her hunting rifles, and her steely blue eyes. This last character trait is the exclusive and invaluable contribution of Sandra Louise Douglas, an actress with only this film to her credits. She plays April with a raw unfocused anger and she does a remarkable job revealing something else as the movie progresses.
You have to watch The Dead Outside closely and you have to listen carefully. If the quiet sound mix isn’t bad enough, the Scottish accents can make the dialogue impenetrable to American ears. The cinematography is deliberately dreary. A nighttime scene is, sure enough, shot at night. And it’s slow because it’s about the relationship between the characters rather than April’s prowess with firearms. But if you want a new take on chicks killing zombies, The Dead Outside reveals that a tight outfit can’t hold a candle to the fire in Douglas’ fierce bright eyes.
The Dead Outside is available on Netflix instant watch.
* The other is Caleb Landry Jones who, as far I know, has never killed a zombie.
Jennifer Lynch probably hates being called out as David Lynch’s daughter. And really, it’s not very fair to her, since she’s pretty much doing straight up horror thrillers. Her best movie is Surveillance, a violent and energetic mind trip with a cast that’s clearly having fun. I particularly like how Bill Pullman seems to be in the stage of his career when he couldn’t care less whether people take him seriously. But then Jennifer Lynch made a horrible snake woman movie in India called Hisss (sic, by the way). Hisss’ only claim to fame is that it keeps the Spider-Man reboot from being the most embarrassing movie Irrfan Khan has ever made.
Lynch’s latest movie is an occasionally interesting but mostly just gross movie in which Vincent D’Onofrio plays a serial killer who keeps the child of one of his victims to raise as his own. To be a serial killer himself, natch. Maybe you haven’t seen Dexter. But to Chained’s credit, it’s not sexying up the serial killing. D’Onofrio is slow, loathsome, cruel, and — gasp! — out of shape. As Chained develops the relationship between D’Onofrio and a strikingly odd-looking actor named Eamon Farren, it has a few weirdly effective moments. But these eventually fall away, someone gets stabbed, and any goodwill Chained might have earned is squandered in a disgusting and unnecessary finale.
There’s a German movie from last year called Michael about similar subject matter. But it’s even grosser in that it doesn’t have any opinion on what the psychopath its doing. It’s neither sympathetic nor judgmental, which is an odd way to tell a story about a pedophile who holds a child captive. I could appreciate the craft of actor Michael Fuith’s disconcerting performance (check him out in the excellent German zombie movie Rammbock for a Michael Fuith palate cleanser), but I couldn’t get past how dispassionately the movie Michael portrayed a reprehensible person’s reprehensible deeds. At least Chained knows it’s gross.
Chained is available on DVD.
“Are you making this up?,” someone asks when looking at a picture of the source of an outbreak in Maryland detailed in The Bay. “This looks Photoshopped.”
Mockumentaries are a sub-genre of found footage in which the narrator — in this case a thoroughly blank actress playing a local TV reporter — explains what’s going on while the story is cobbled together from Skype calls, iPhone videos, Google image searches, text chat, police dashcams, security cameras, and web sites. The wind-up is tense enough, but like many horror movies, it falls apart as it shows and exhaustively explains the monster.
The stuff about the Coast Guard, FEMA, the CDC, and Homeland Security failing to protect or help anyone is far more relevant and horrifying than anything that creeps out of Chesapeake Bay because of waste from a chicken farm. But this is a movie where the government response and cover-up is just an afterthought. Instead, at the top of the agenda is ick factor, similar to Eli Roth’s flesh eating bacteria movie, Cabin Fever. Plus a couple of obligatory jump scares with blaring musical cues despite the fact that we’re watching found footage. Nothing undercuts found footage quite like a carefully calculated musical cue.
The Bay was directed by Barry Levinson. It was produced by Oren Peli, the director of the original Paranormal Activity who’s been slathering his name on bad horror ever since. It was also produced by the Strause brothers, whose digital effects studio Hydraulx has been instrumental in movies as diverse as Battle Los Angeles and Take Shelter. But The Bay plays like a product of the collected talent behind movies like Wag the Dog, Sphere, and Skyline, and the TV show The River.
At least it’s better than a similar movie in which Val Kilmer plays a scientist who joins his daughter to fight prehistoric bugs thawing out in the Arctic. If you guessed such a movie is called The Thaw, you win. One of the most memorable parts of Gina Kolata’s book on the flu epidemic of the early 20th century — if you guessed the book is called Flu, you win again — details contemporary scientists digging up flu victims who were buried in permafrost in Alaska. They needed samples of the 1918 flu virus and hoped to find them intact in the frozen corpses. But they had to consider whether this might unleash a new epidemic. Spoiler: it didn’t. But because disease and parasites are often unseen and misunderstood, they occupy for many of us a place where ghosts and goblins would have been centuries ago. The Bay works at this level for a while, but in the end, a microbudget movie about throbbing pustules is just a microbudget movie about throbbing pustules.
The Bay is available now on video on demand (Amazon.com link here).
In the twee hipster-than-thou comedy Saftey Not Guaranteed, twee hipster Aubrey Plaza comments on someone’s laptop.
“Why do you have flames on your laptop?”
“It’s a gaming laptop. It’s really fast.”
Then hipster Jake Johnson picks them up for some putative time travel shenanigans. It’s like Looper, but more hip. Guess where such a hip movie is set. If you guessed Oregon, you’re close enough. A dude makes Aubrey Plaza fall in love with him by playing a zither. That’s right, a zither. Not since The Third Man has a zither been used so effectively.
Safety Not Guaranteed is mostly just an appeal to people who think Aubrey Plaza is hot. Which, sure, she is. But for any sort of convincing emotion, you’re left with Jake Johnson trying not to cry while driving a go-cart, smoking a cigarette, and swigging whiskey from a bottle. Dig it. There. I just saved you ninety minutes. It’s enough to make a guy want to catch up on The New Girl.
At least Mark Duplass as a mentally unbalanced time traveller — or is he? — lends the movie some sincerity. To see Duplass in a better movie, I cannot recommend strongly enough the hilarious Hump Day, which exists completely outside the usual studio conventions and the typical twee indie vibe. And for the non-grating version of Safety Not Guaranteed, see Happy Accidents with Marisa Tomei and Vincent D’Onofrio.
Safety Not Guaranteed is out now on DVD and VOD (here’s an Amazon.com link to support Qt3).
Bait is everything wrong with modern horror movies. It doesn’t know how dumb it is, the cast is terrible, and the CG is soulless.
The premise is, in fact, not supposed to be a joke. A tsunami floods a supermarket. Then a shark swims into the supermarket, trapping some survivors on top of shelves and in a submerged car in the parking garage. In a way, it reminded me of Tremors, which I’ve just rewatched. In both movies, people are trapped while something unlikely swims around beneath them (Bait and Tremors both have the besieged survivors attempting a fishing trap for the monster). Unlike Tremors, which was mostly a comedy, Bait has no idea that it’s dumb. Except for a few scenes of unfunny comic relief, Bait takes itself entirely seriously. If Bait doesn’t let me laugh with it, I will instead laugh at it.
The cast of Bait isn’t so much a cast as an intended demographic. Lead actor Xavier Samuel, who was perfectly cast as a lobotomy victim in another Australian horror movie called The Loved One, is certainly pretty and pretty vacant. He is exactly the wrong actor to establish the backstory and to carry the emotional weight. Yes, Bait thinks it has emotional weight. Don’t ask. At some point in the last twenty years, horror movies were overrun by dumb good-looking teenagers. Tremors, released in 1990, has no teenagers. In fact, its supposed college student was played by a 30-year-old actress.
But everyone in Bait is forgettable and disposable, even when they’re played by good actors like Julian McMahon (one of the leads in Nip/Tuck and the villain in the Fantastic Four movie) and Dan Wyllie (hilarious and memorable as the family lawyer in Animal Kingdom). Tremors is mostly carried by Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon goofing around. But I’d forgotten how adorable it is watching cute little Reba McEntire shoot guns, especially the way she screws up her face like she’s never fired a gun before. Or maybe she’s just trying to look grim. Whatever the case, it’s adorable. And you can’t beat a line like, “You didn’t get penetration even with the elephant gun!” I can listen to Reba McIntyre pretend to talk about guns all day. But I couldn’t wait for the models/actors in Bait to get eaten so they’d stop talking. Not that they do. Too many modern horror movies are too unwilling to kill many of their victims.
The CG in Bait is entirely divorced from the filming. The underwater scenes have no sense for how much room is actually in the flooded supermarket. Instead, it’s just random footage of a CG shark in deep water. Consider that image up there of the shark breaching to eat one of its victims. How is it supposed to leap that far out of water that shallow? Bait doesn’t care. And even though Tremors looks cheap, it comes from a whole different era when you could almost see the love that went into practical effects. Tremors almost literally uses sock puppets for its monster. I find it tremendously endearing to imagine some guy sticking his hand up into a latex tentacle puppet. I don’t find it so endearing to imagine the employees at a contracted visual effects studio at their keyboards.
Bait is available for video on demand, including Amazon Instant View.
I was surprised to see this show up on Amazon’s Instant Video and iTunes as new releases, since I’d already seen it a few years ago and didn’t really care for it. It’s not that I don’t enjoy a little horror in my Westerns. Josh Brolin was good enough as a zombie cowboy, even if he did have to talk around that silly scar make-up. But it was ultimately too goofy, too poorly paced, and too cheap looking. Speaking of which, Meghan Fox was in it. She wasn’t nearly as memorable as the horse with twin mounted gatling guns.
But then I realized I was confusing my Biblical Name + Laconic One-Syllable Name movies. It turns out Solomon Kane is not a comic book, but a lesser known character from Conan creator Robert E. Howard. Who knew?
The movie opens and ends with sequences that any Diablo player will appreciate, but it’s got an awfully muddled midsection as it traces Solomon Kane’s journey from ruthless pirate (!) to reluctant monster hunter to avenging lawful good paladin. It takes a few suitably grim turns, but the script is too obvious, with an all too predictable third act twist. Furthermore, it mostly looks like the cheap Czech production that it is.
However, it is much better than Jonah Hex, and the similar Season of the Witch, and the shamefully bad Conan movie with Jason Momoa. Solomon Kane even has a little Postlethwaite, a touch of von Sydow, and a solid performance from James Purefoy in the lead. Purefoy knows how to scowl Jackmanly under the brim of a Puritan hat, tuck a flintlock resolutely into his belt, swoop his cape, and stride off into a flurry of CG snowflakes. Overall, he lends Solomon Kane a lot of its endearing dopey earnestness, which reminds me of 80s fantasy fare like Conan, Beastmaster, and Warlock. I can’t help but think that Robert E. Howard would be pleased.
From a solid zombie movie to an inexplicable demonic possession retcon, the [REC] series of Spanish horror movies went from great to “huh?” in short order. Now the third movie plunges deeper into “huh?” territory by veering further from what made the first movie good. [REC] 3 opens as a wedding video, which sets an ornate stage for a zombie apocalypse. But when it arrives, it’s mostly just a big gory goof, played weakly for laughs. Perhaps the biggest laugh — and I can’t tell if it was supposed to be funny — is how [REC] 3 decides to stop being a found footage movie shortly after the zombies arrive. After all those found footage movies when you wonder why they don’t just drop the camera, someone finally decides to drop the camera.
What should have been the signature scene (pictured) as well as a cool reveal is splayed out on the box cover, so you know it’s coming. When it finally arrives, it’s not nearly as gratifying as it should have been. As the bride, the lovely Leticia Dolera doesn’t have the physicality necessary to make the scene work. The poor woman can barely lift the chainsaw. Furthermore, it doesn’t really go anywhere. If you want to see a blood-spattered bride slicing up zombies with a chainsaw, you’ll have to visit a wedding chapel in a Dead Rising game and go to town. [REC] 3 will just disappoint you.
[REC] 3 is available on video on demand.
V/H/S is an example of how horror can live comfortably outside the usual narrative structures. This is an anthology, but it’s also a cool variation on the found footage concept. The idea is that a single tape has accumulated and sometimes overlapped footage of various horrific events, starting with a Halloween fun house (?) in 1998 and working its way in reverse order to a wraparound device involving the tape itself, which starts the movie. Cloverfield played briefly with this idea of a reused tape where you learn something when the old footage bleeds through. V/H/S is based entirely on it. And given how everyone uses digital storage these days, it’s a concept with a limited shelf life, like phone booths and television snow.
These stories are mostly morality plays that would be right at home in an R-rated splatter version of Twilight Zone, but with a latter day YouTube aesthetic, where the video artifacts, poor resolution, blurred lights, and bad sound are an asset. The best segment is “Amateur Night”, contributed by David Bruckner, one of the three directors of the brutal and brutally funny The Signal. “Amateur Night” unfolds like some sort of Girls Gone Wild gonzo porn segment, rolling along during a night of partying, accumulating hangers on, and eventually winding up in a motel hell of overthrown sexual power. It’s a nearly perfect example of how horror can combine nudity, gore, and shocks. Amateur Night, I like you. I like you.
A Horrible Way to Die director Adam Wingard contributes a lot of the movie’s connective tissue. Ti West’s segment, “Second Honeymoon”, has one of V/H/S’s strongest single moments, but it doesn’t have much payoff. Joe Swanberg’s “The Sick Thing That Happened to Emily When She Was Younger” applies the found footage concept to people connected over videochat, an extra layer that ironically makes it even more intimate. And if you’re going to slaughter a bunch of teenagers in the woods, “Tuesday the 17th” (get it?) has just the video trick to do it.
These are mostly well written vignettes, and the directors are good enough to know they need good actors. Hence Hannah Fierman’s bird-like succubus, Helen Rogers’ frail girl-alone-in-a-dark-house, and an assortment of believable victims. Found footage like this is the new cinema verite, and it gives horror a distinctly relatable touch. This isn’t just a movie. This is people going about the business of taping their daily lives. And you’re gazing into the mundane, waiting to glimpse something fantastic and terrible. V/H/S will oblige you.
V/H/S is currently available on video on demand.
Co-directors Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez have had a tough time following up on what made Blair Witch Project so good. Myrick has come closest with The Objective, which has a lot in common with Blair Witch Project. But Sanchez’ latest movies were the wretched Seventh Moon (Amy Smart gets chased by Chinese ghost people) and the uneven Altered (“Hey guys, look! I found an alien!”).
However, Sanchez’ has finally found firmer footing with Lovely Molly, a creepy horror movie that shares some important elements with Blair Witch Project. Lovely Molly flirts with the found footage concept, but it doesn’t really go anywhere. In fact, I can’t help but wonder if it’s a bit of an inside joke for Sanchez. Like Blair, this movie has a strong female lead. As Molly, a recovering heroin addict who may or may not be afflicted by supernatural goings on, Gretchen Lodge is 110% committed to what she’s doing. Is she a good actress? With this sort of absolute conviction, that’s beside the point. The movie wouldn’t have worked without Lodge’s focus, commitment, and fearlessness.
Lovely Molly can be pretty aimless. It takes its time. It meanders. It’s slow. But it will not deny you a payoff. As with Blair Witch Project, you’re in for a memorable finale. The problem with so many horror movies is that once everything is revealed, once the cards are on the table and the monster is out of the closet, it all falls apart. Any crappy horror movie can get mileage out of something lurking in the dark. But it’s a rare horror movie that can shine a light on its lurker and still be scary.
Lovely Molly is available on DVD.
Dead Season is one of those rare no-budget zombie movies that gets it right. You can forgive the production values given it’s solid script and mostly effective cast. The hero, a dead ringer for Anthony Edwards named Scott Peat, isn’t your usual zombie movie hero. Instead, he’s a convincing enough everyman. Except for his godawful sledgehammer skills. Someone show that man how to hold a sledgehammer or he’s never going to level up. The heroine, who happens to the be the only character in the movie to wear shorts and I think I know why, is the weakest link. Imagine if Shelley Duvall was a hot redhead who couldn’t act.
One of Dead Season’s strengths is its use of Puerto Rico for a Dead Island style Caribbean zombie apocalypse. When it’s not trying so hard to be a Danny Boyle zombie movie with a John Murphy score, Dead Season has the downbeat conviction of an arthouse movie. It’s more concerned with the harsh reality of survival than the lurid fantasy of headshot special effects. If you’re going to make an amateur zombie movie, this the way to do it.
Dead Season is out now on DVD and video on demand.
“Heist meets horror”. Surely I’m not the first person to come up with that phrase? It’s a subgenre of horror, where a bunch of characters doing a heist accidentally stumble onto the stuff of a horror movie. I’m not sure how or why it started, and I’m not sure why it’s a formula. As near as I can tell, it’s more established than “romantic comedy meets horror” or “buddy cop movie meets horror” or “historical epic meets horror”. I can think of an example of all of those three things, but not enough examples to consider them subgenres.
After the jump, what if a bunch of bank robbers got possessed by a demon while fleeing a slasher? Continue reading →
