The Boy (2016) [Mini Review]

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Director: William Brent Bell

Screenplay: Stacey Menear

Cast: Lauren Cohan (as Greta); Rupert Evans (as Malcolm); Jim Norton (as Mr. Heelshire); Diana Hardcastle (as Mrs. Heelshire); Ben Robson (as Cole)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #10

Note: This review will reveal the ending of The Boy in detail. Read on your discretion.

The premise intrigued me. A young American lass Greta (Cohan) is hired by an elderly couple in England to look after their son Brahms, only for her to immediately learn Brahms is a doll, kept to cope with their decades long grief of losing their son and treated exactly as if it's their living child. Baffled and not pleased at all with this, Greta when they leave immediately puts a blanket over Brahms' head and relaxes in an easy job, only for strange sounds and events to take place that suggest Brahms is very much alive. The film takes a while to get interesting from this beginning, only starting to get potentially gripping when she fully believes the doll is alive and treats Brahms caringly. For the most part before The Boy represents the blander area of modern horror with over eager music, the dragging of plot points etc., but when it gets to this point, represented quite amusingly by Brahms leaving a peanut butter sandwich outside a door she's closed out of pure terror, the offer of how the film could go is potentially tantalising.

Here is when the interesting area The Boy taps into starts to develop, the notion of the uncanny, Sigmund Freud's theory of how people react to something familiar to them but the possibility of this fact disturbing that person, the reason why dolls and in modern times realistic looking robots can still creep people out if they are made to look like us. The idea here, to pinch dialogue from Pinocchio, that Brahms is a real boy is immediately fascinating as the film looks like it's going to ditch the spooky jump scares in favour of an intelligent psychological drama, about to rift on the same tone as Roman Polanski's Repulsion (1965). The viewer is drip fed from the beginning that Greta has a troubled past she is fleeing from, an abusive boyfriend who caused her to miscarriage, emotionally attaching herself to Brahms quickly when she doesn't perceive him as a threat. In fact the film looks like it's going to subvert viewers' moral compasses when the boyfriend Cole (Robson) gets to the home and Brahms is seemingly going to stop him from taking his beloved Greta away.

Then the film shoots itself in both feet when Brahms is actually revealed to be alive, turning the film into a psycho killer story with chase scenes, Brahms evil from birth and intent on keeping Greta in his stereotypical basement lair, and destroying any worth to the movie.I became aware that something was suspicious, that there might be a non-supernatural twist, even before the film started when I noticed The Boy was a Chinese-American co-production. This is entirely speculation, with no basis in fact, the possibility likely that the creators of the film went for an exceptionally dumb plot twist instead of something interesting. But what if the film might've been catered for possible mainland Chinese release? Imagine if this is true from pure speculation, and this brings up an issue with how horror films would be made in that country. Unless it's based on Chinese mythology, or can be explained away by trickery or hallucinations in the plot, films with supernatural material or ghosts are banned in mainland China under the belief of preventing suspicion and "cults" existing, something that can be explained if one remembers its previous existence as communist China, communism anti-religion in attitude since Karl Marx called religion opium for the masses. Even the new Ghostbusters movie wasn't safe from this ban, although it does beg the question, for another day, about science fiction blockbusters and fantasy films like the Warcraft movie that do even better in China than in the USA in relation to this.

This might be completely missing the reason why The Boy decided to sabotage itself with the blandness and worst traits of current horror cinema, but if there's any semblance of truth to it, there's a potential issue that could crop up with future horror productions with mainland Chinese co-producers that could injure box office potential after a while. Horror cinema has to repeat plot tropes and clichés already, repeating ideas since Georges Méliès made spooky narratives at the start of cinema, so the idea of forcibly removing supernatural narratives from the well of story ideas could lead to some exceptionally generic films if they have to repeat what's left. That in itself is far and away more interesting than The Boy when it completely disappointed me. 

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Survival of the Dead (2009) [Mini Review]

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Director: George A. Romero

Screenplay: George A. Romero

Cast: Alan van Sprang (as Sarge "Nicotine" Crockett); Kenneth Welsh (as Patrick O'Flynn); Kathleen Munroe (as Janet O'Flynn); Richard Fitzpatrick (as Seamus Muldoon); Athena Karkanis (as Tomboy)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #9

Note - While I'll not spoil the whole film, a major plot twist is talked of. Read with discretion of this.

In lieu of witnessing Dario Argento's Mother of Tears (2007), the equivalent at looking at a roadside accident with morbid curiosity, the question of the later careers of directors famous for horror films and the quality of the work springs to mind. For myself, the issue has always been how director who made their reputations in the seventies - John Carpenter, Tobe Hooper etc. - suffered from the transition of cinema into the Millennium. An entirely different attitude to horror films in particular exists that, for every good one still made, is frankly questionable, not looking to its forefathers barring remaking the older films and not providing the necessary resources and creative control for anything interesting. George A. Romero was stuck in a situation where he could only make zombie films within the last decade but it's also a question of whether the films are any good despite the hindrances in the industry that makes them. Reassessing the Living Dead series he started with Night of the Living Dead (1968) is for another day, but with the attempt at found footage with Diary of the Dead (2007), whether it's still as bad as I thought it was or needs to be revaluated, clearly scuppered him in the public's opinion, hindering his career greatly and leaving Survival of the Dead as his last film currently over seven years.

Survival... is both an attempt to recoup from Diary of the Dead, bringing back a character from it called Sarge "Nicotine" Crockett (Sprang), his small band of soldiers trying to survive an increasingly undead American soil. At the same time, Survival of the Dead is Romero's attempt at a western, following a war between two families on a small island the soldiers eventually reach - the exiled Patrick O'Flynn (Welsh) who believed putting the dead out of their misery is the best thing to do, and Seamus Muldoon (Fitzpatrick), who believes the zombies can be taught to eat non-human flesh and will prove his belief the undead can be civilised even if his moral compass vanishes as the film continues. The result, befitting Romero's earlier films, is incredibly interesting and memorable. As these two families are morally grey and exist in a never ending and absurd feud between the central patriarchal figures, the meat of the film (pun intended) is so much more memorable than a lot of zombie films. This point is so blatantly obvious its silly to bring it up compared to all the bad ones.

It's not a completely perfect film but significantly better than its reputation suggests. There's a jokiness here that, even if it was prevalent all the way in Dawn of the Dead (1978) with the pie throwing is likely too silly here. The soldiers are a likable group but they're tagged along with by a sarcastic Millennial (Devon Bostick) who is as good as them and brags about it, a character who brings to mind the concerns people had with Diary of the Dead with annoying youth adults being in the centre of the plot. Also there's a case to be made that, while its awesome for someone to light a zombie's head on fire with a flare gun and then light their cigar with the flame, it feels too absurd even in light of the Living Dead series'  tone, too close to the notion of being a "badass" in the tone of an action film that's plagued too many horror films within the last few decades. Others might find the Irish accents  the warring families have incredibly broad too, liable to raise unintentional titters. The only major concern in terms of the actual plot is a cheat when one of the plot twists is that O'Flynn's daughter Janet (Munroe) actually has a twin sister, not a bad plot idea as it leads to a whole issue of whether the zombies can understand and engage with their environment, but considering the fact that the Janet  is never shown with a sister beforehand causes the twist to come off as cheating in another unintentionally silly way.

But I like the film immensely. The western vibe, of cowboys and the family rivalries, is mild but adds a lot of character to the film. Also far from looking like Romero has plummeted into quality, the film looks good and there's a wit to the material through either likable or complicated characters which stands out. It's surprising actually how many view this as the nadir of Romero's career as, in light of many a overrated horror film over the years, this one at least has something of interest to it despite the flaws.

From https://alexonfilm.files.wordpress.com/2015/
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Class of Nuke 'Em High (1986) [Mini Review]

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Directors: Lloyd Kaufman, Michael Herz and Richard W. Haines

Screenplay: Lloyd Kaufman, Richard W. Haines, Mark Rudnitsky and Stuart Strutin

Cast: Janelle Brady (as Chrissy); Gil Brenton (as Warren); Robert Prichard (as Spike); James Nugent Vernon (as Eddie); Pat Ryan Jr. (as Mr. Paley); Brad Dunker (as Gonzo)

A Night of A Thousand Horror (Movies) #8

Class of Nuke 'Em High is a case of a film that feels like the watered down version of gorier, more shocking films, feeling like the version of a cult movie meant for a teenage audience rather than a film which shocks even grownups like it should. Whilst it has nudity, gore and adult humour is palatable for the most part to the point of being juvenile, a transition to more lurid work in a way that's a detriment to the film itself. Set it Troma Team's trademark Tromaville, New Jersey, the local high school next to the nuclear power plant naturally has toxic waste getting into the water supply and punks dealing weed infused and grown on the nuclear plant's grounds, causing all manner of mutation and death - a plot that, while exceptionally silly, would've had the potential to be entertaining. It's not the excess gore or crassness that disappoints with these sorts of films and that's in fact the reason I would want to see a film like this, starting off very well with a graphic "melting" incident involving contaminated drinking water. The problem arises when, skittering between high school sex comedy and a punksploitation film, emphasising a group of mutated punks called the Cretins who terrorise the campus, it's a jack of all traits but not real talent or emphasis in any of its plot points to be interesting. Even if you're not interested in the films, the type of gonzo American genre cinema from the eighties that got on videotape side-by-side with this one and other Troma movies, from Basket Case (1982) to Street Trash (1987), were far more wilder and lurid than this one.

It also feels, unlike a film like the aforementioned Basket Case, to be improvising to a detriment, not able to fully emphasis any scene after the great pre-opening credit sequence with enough gusto to keep one on the edge of one's seat and have your sides splitting in shocked laughter at what it's getting away with. Ultimately the film's more interested in the most ridiculous punks you could ever see but even the Cretins aren't enough to save the film; they're memorable - a leader with skunk-white and black hair, a member in un-PC brown face with rings in his face and a bone club, a male member with very natural and prominent breasts under his (hopefully angora) pink sweater - but unfortunately even they are underused to their potential. Even when the nuclear power plant plot line leads to a mutant in the finale, it feels like an afterthought. Production wise it's uninteresting as well, neither insanely neon or gritty as it should've been, with the terrible habit of playing the worst hair metal constantly in most scenes. Compared to the other films of this period and it's not as adventurous as it should've been. In fact it feels like one of those dull fifties teensplotation films Class of Nuke 'Em High was probably meant to parody, with more gore and sex but just as sluggish and not giving you the thrill ride it promised in the poster.

From https://i.ytimg.com/vi/td3b6EFmSoc/maxresdefault.jpg

The Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968) [Mini Review]

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aka. The Crimson Cult

Dir. Vernon Sewell

Screenplay: Mervyn Haisman and Henry Lincoln

Cast: Christopher Lee (as Morley); Boris Karloff (as Professor Marshe); Mark Eden (as Robert Manning); Barbara Steele (as Lavinia Morley); Michael Gough (as Elder); Virginia Wetherell (as Eve)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #7

It's disappointing to think that the last film in Boris Karloff's career - paired with a star studded cast of Christopher Lee, Michael Gough and Barbara Steele - is a really bland attempt at British occult horror so out of time with the more psychedelic and darker movies creeping in at the late sixties. About a man looking for his brother at a suspicious manor only to be plagued by dreams of an ancient witch (Steele in blue body paint), this represents the worst aspects of British horror in being really sluggish and incredibly behind in quality to what was happening in the USA, Japan and European from countries like Italy. It's baffling to think as well that the same year Tigon Studio released this film they also released Michael Reeve's Witchfinder General (1968) - nihilistic, rich with natural landscape photography and violent, the complete opposition of this which sadly.

Here you have something only catching up to LSD acid-trip dream sequences that it was already beaten to in the early sixties by Roger Corman's Poe adaptations. While it includes the physically striking Barbara Steele, the reoccurring dream sequences where the protagonist is continually pressured under duress offers such absurd sights as a woman with plate steel pasties as a torturer, a farm goat stood around meant to be menacing and Gough sweeping the floor as if the trial the hero is put under continually in the dream, to sign his soul away through a blood signature, is like a regular one rather than that of a Satanic kind. I also suspect a lot of my grievances with many British horror films from the sixties and the seventies is that their structure and extensive use of dialogue is directly lifted from the dramatic tradition of British cinema including older films from before this period such as the forties and so on. This could still work but only if the dialogue is up to a high standard like with the best of British drama, and if the films aren't willing to invest at the same time in the more phantasmagoric than it's a case that I missed the opportunity to grow up with these films as a child and not be as damning of them as I am. Even the most talented actors, and Lee and Karloff especially have to be amongst the best for the charisma they have, need a film here that should've taken a page out of the atmosphere of their continental cousins in Europe and had more teeth or flair. The more rewarding parts of the film aren't the supernatural story  we're meant to invest in but small touches such as Karloff's face when the hero gulps a rare brandy and merely says its swell, the sense that it's in the characters of the actors rather than the story itself that's going to be of any reward for viewers, unfortunately not enough to sustain as a bland movie. 

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Mother of Tears (2007) [Mini Review]

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Director: Dario Argento

Screenplay: Jace Anderson, Dario Argento, Walter Fasano, Adam Gierasch, Simona Simonetti

Cast: Asia Argento (as Sarah Mandy); Cristian Solimeno (as Detective Enzo Marchi); Adam James (as Michael Pierce); Moran Atias (as Mater Lachrymarum); Valéria Cavalli (as Marta Colussi); Philippe Leroy (as Guglielmo De Witt); Daria Nicolodi (as Elisa Mandy)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #6

Kim Newman - the (rightly) acclaimed horror academic, film reviewer and fiction/non-fiction author - stated that the wait for Mother of Tears, the final of supposed triptych of films by Dario Argento about the Three Mothers he created in Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980), was like following up the first two Lord of the Rings films with Krull (1983). I find that the experience of Mother of Tears is significantly worse. Later Dario Argento films are an issue that plagues fans of his classics, but for me there was significantly less of a problem willing to accept their flaws as long as some personality was alive in them. Baring the nineties¹, and one or two pieces from the seventies and noughts², I've seen almost everything. Sleepless (2001) for its flaws is still strong, only the flatness of its look marring an interesting giallo. The Card Player (2004), in need of a revisit, was a film that was utterly ludicrous and somehow made cinematography master Benoît Debie create a flat looking palette, but it was certainly not the train wreck it's been described as. Giallo (2009), while laughably bad and clichéd  to an extreme level, was fun and had a great twist ending. It was only with Dracula (2012), for how entertaining I still found it, that I showed any real palatable concern as Argento not only made a silly film but sacrificed his trademarks on it. In hindsight however it's a great film next to the Mother of Tears, the last film I needed to see of the noughts which is the black stain in his career, making even Giallo look credible in quality.

The issue with Mother of Tears is that, even if it wasn't connected to the Three Mothers films of before or even to Argento, it would be terrible. There is a discrepancy to films after the Millennium where ultra schlocky, gory movies can come off as tawdry, repulsive and tedious whilst the older films can be charming and fun unless they are diabolically bad; but a lot of it here is to do with how lifeless and bleak the result is in the newer films like this. Without any of the hallucinatory look of Suspiria and Inferno, without the fairy tale and dream logic, this is a more straightforward story, about an outbreak of murder and chaos in Rome when the Mother of Tears claims a mythical artefact and gets her followers to create anarchy. With Rome becoming a pit of violence, infanticide and mass rioting on the streets, archaeology student Sarah Mandy (Asia Argento) finds she is the only one who can stop the Mother of Tears, her late mother Elisa Mandy (Daria Nicolodi) returning from the grave to inform her of latent abilities as a white witch inherited from her parent. The entire execution of this narrative, barring one or two moments, is terrible and is a completely style-less dabbling into pondering exposition and ultra-violent gothic horror without any grace to it.

Admittedly there are Italian horror films (from the eighties especially) that can be accused of this, but the layer of gloss and kitsch to them is lost here with the post-Millennial look and realistic palette, squandering the Catholicism of Rome as a location and the occult trappings of witchcraft. Instead the result looks cheap and delves into the kind of Gothic symbolism that would embarrass Goths with any sort of taste: the Mother of Tears is a model who lives in only her birthday suit and the apocalyptic riots in Rome are partially signalled by what appears to be a worldwide Goth conventional, people coming in on airplanes saying boo to the people within the terminal buildings. The earlier films, even if they were tasteless schlock, still had class even in poverty row in terms of style, this film meant to have a grandeur to match the first Three Mothers films but instead looking like a lot of bland American genre films from the same decade, Asia Argento looking lost as a protagonist while Nicolodi is re-enacting the ghost of Obi-Wan Kenobi in green hued CGI.

The worst part is that in its attempt to still be a competent horror film, it becomes the most violent film in Argento's career but manages to just be grim and too violence artistically for the tone. I would defend far more violent and disturbing films that this (Baise-Moi (2000), Ichi The Killer (2001) etc.) but there are cases of films that are far too violent for their tone, the result when they merely become desensitising and numb me rather than cause me to feel shock, revulsion or illicit laughter. The perfect spectrum for gore in horror is either in the absurd camp (literally) of a Herschell Gordon Lewis film or one that illicit shock and disgust; desentisiting violence exists completely outside of this spectrum and illicit no emotion whatsoever. CGI aided, it feels like Argento is trying too hard here and is creates an off-putting work in terms of how it was put together. Children are killed numerous times and it's not shocking, merely crass, and the film also has the lowest point in Argento's career in a scene involving a lesbian couple and a pike that is arguably misogynistic, not something to be debated like criticisms of his older work but completely offensive in its place in the film, tone and how the pike is involved. The result is disgusting but eye-rolling, this type of violence ultimately pointless, neither transgressive in real revulsion or ridiculous but merely a pointless escapade.

This entire tone can be felt throughout the film, the sense Mother of Tears was merely created to finish a triptych that really didn't need to happen, the duo of Suspiria and Inferno perfect as they are by themselves. As if to make things worse a terrible metal song scored by Claudio Simonetti, who should have known better, plays over the end credits, reminding me of a bad Cradle of Filth knock-off only to realise Dani Filth of the band, he of some questionable decisions in terms of films he's involved with, is actually singing the vocals. The ultimate disgust I have with Mother of Tears, when there's plenty of older Italian schlock I can still find entertainment in, is that this is a colourless, characterless and cynical work to have been created, less about continuing the Three Mothers trilogy but all the worst aspects of gothic horror and the legacy of the first films, misinterpreted and abused, dumped on screen. It neither feels tasteless in a fun way or something ridiculous, merely an exercise. It feels less like a b-movie equivalent of the first two films, to reference the opening Kim Newman quote, but a dreadful c-level cash grab.

From http://www.horreur.net/sites/default/files/upload/motheroftearspic4.jpg

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¹ The films made in the nineties is the huge gap in terms of his horror films for me barring seeing Two Evil Eyes (1990) and The Stendhal Syndrome (1996). Revisiting the two mentioned films and catching up the others will be an interesting experience in lieu to what I think of his work in the noughties.

²Mainly the TV work. There is also the one non-horror film in his career, the exceptionally rare historical drama The Five Days (1973), which I still need to see but the prospects of seeing it considering how commercially unsuccessful it was will be difficult. 

Incubus (1966)

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Director: Leslie Stevens

Screenplay: Leslie Stevens

Cast: William Shatner (as Marc); Allyson Ames (as Kia); Eloise Hardt (as Amael); Robert Fortier (as Olin); Ann Atmar (as Arndis); Milos Milos (as Incubus)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #5

Synopsis: In the village of Nomen Tuum, a well exists that if drank from is said to heal the sick and the lame. Succubi, who lore sinful men away with their beauty to drown in the nearby sea, have taken advantage of the region's popularity surrounding this well to claim souls. When one succubus Kia (Ames) tries to temp a good man away by the name of Marc (Shatner), a wounded war veteran living in the area with his sister Arndis (Atmar), her soul is tainting by the love that develops for him, leaving her senior succubus Amael (Hardt) to get revenge by calling the Incubus (Milos) from the bowls of Hell to corrupt and break Marc.

As films go, Incubus practically screams for cult film status which it's still in dire need of despite the Syfy Channel preserving and restoring it. A film designed to promote Esperanto, a manufactured language designed to be universal and known for myself for its continuous references within the Red Dwarf TV series.  A supernatural horror film in fact, spoken entirely in the language, starring pre-Star Trek William Shatner in a central role. The film gains further cultish reputation because of both its obscurity, thought to have been lost until a surviving print with French subtitles was found in the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris and the rather gristly "curse" surrounding it, one like Poltergeist (1982) where either a series of unfortunate coincidences or real effects took place that led to film being pulled into obscurity and possible loss from existence.

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The best thing about this packaged cult movie premise is that Incubus is not only a good film but an eerie supernatural drama fully entrenched in the world of Ingmar Bergman movies, one which doesn't come off as a pastiche but an admirable riff of the same sort of existential horror territory. Shot in black-and-white by future Oscar winner Conrad Hall, the film is set in a non-existent European world that's completely out-of-time od the contemporary world it was made in, a coastal and forest region set during a solar eclipse that's completely isolated from civilisation. Incubus perfectly gets the mood of Bergman in its religion soaked narrative where character drift along with concern for their souls, not only the mortal man in Shatner's Marc but even the succubus Kia who is tainted by empathy and love and pulled to pieces internally by it. This is mixed with the tone of European horror cinema with the film's distorted day and night time atmosphere, the type of cinema where mood is the greatest importance, the plot points closer to fairytales in aspects such as the sister Arndis losing her eyesight during the eclipse briefly.

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The Esperanto dialogue causes the film to feel like it exists from an unknown European country, close to how post-dubbing can drastically effect the tone of the Euro-horror films of the decade later with a ghostly effect. The fact William Shatner is playing a meek, honourable man with no ounce of camp while speaking in the language does immediately catch one off guard as well, the most known person and a pop culture entity by himself, the serious tone alongside a theatrical kind of alienation from the language barrier having a drastic effect on how the viewer gauges with all the performances including his. The moments which show unconventional plot hints adds to this, not only the religious themes but the clear implications of incest between Marc and Arndis occasionally hinted at, flirting when they're first introduced around the healing well and setting up their strange chemistry together. Even before the film becomes more gothic and ominous - black robed figures straight out of a Sunn O((( photo, Milos Milos' thin figured demon writhing out of the earth, a Satanic goat - the tone is out-of-synch from conventional reality already in its scorched look and magical tone.

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Technical Details:

Despite the surviving version of the film being the best possible from a less of well off surviving print, with French subtitles burnt on the screen, Incubus is still exceptionally gorgeous in its European influenced look. It's entirely shot as a mystical quasi-Euro landscape which feels both of the sixties but completely alien to reality, evoking Jean Rollin and Bergman, whilst also mixing Christianity and pagan iconography into its aesthetic look. The entire aspect of the film being in Esperanto does give a lot of unique character to the material alongside the distinct atmospheric look. Naturally the first inclination is to ask how well Shatner is able to actually speak it on camera, hearing the occasional abrupt pronunciation, but in reality the alternative language places as much a strange air in general for the entire cast.

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Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

If the film had entirely been a horror film entirely in Esperanto, then it might've been merely a gimmick. One film I also desperately want to see is Deafula (1975), the only vampire film made to promote American sign language, thought whether it's any good or just a promotional tool for the language is up to debate, whether the only delight is to see Dracula use sign language or that rare case of something being more than a future gimmick to entice viewers to dig it out.

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This is also an issue with this being a film with William Shatner in it as that's the other major drawing card for many to see it. While he made interesting films before he became James Tiberius Kirk - such as the Roger Corman anti-racist film The Intruder (1962), this could've easily turned out to be something cheap and cheerful. What cements Incubus as an abstract film is a combination of these two factors against the decision to not merely make a promotional work for Esperanto but have actually artistic aspirations that could be pulled off exceptionally well, an unconventional art movie soaked in the vibes of European cinema and occult horror that's trippy and absolutely riveting to sit through.

Abstract Spectrum: Expressionist/Fantastique/Weird

Abstract Tropes: Use of Unique Language Specific for Film; Occult Imagery; Slow, Methodical Pace; Christian Versus Satanic Imagery; Existential Tone

Personal Opinion:

Finally able to see Incubus, it lifts itself beyond merely being a gimmicked horror film that its surface may suggest into being a little gem. 

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The Fog (1980) [Mini Review]

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Director: John Carpenter

Screenplay: John Carpenter and Debra Hill

Cast: Adrienne Barbeau (as Stevie Wayne); Jamie Lee Curtis (as Elizabeth Solley); Janet Leigh (as Kathy Williams); John Houseman (as Mr. Machen); Tom Atkins (as Nick Castle)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #4

It's pretty much established how legendary John Carpenter is in genre cinema, so there's little point in overturning heavily covered ground already. What's worth repeating, especially as I view his late seventies and early eighties work, is the importance of how classic Hollywood cinema has influenced his work. His later work, such as The Ward (2010), is immensely bland but the golden period which he is beloved for is heavily indebted to slow, atmospheric world building usually pictured by Dean Cundey and carefully managed to pull a viewer into the stories. The first ten minutes of The Fog are completely alien to how most modern horror films set themselves up, particularly its 2005 remake which still haunts me for years onwards for other reasons; a ghost story on a beach establishing the plot, about the ghosts of men wrecked at sea getting their revenge on a coastal town, followed by snatches of different characters going about going about their lives as a series of ghostly circumstances take place at the witching hour. It's the hundredth university of the town and from this night onward through the film, a supernatural fog envelops the region and anyone caught within its prescience is under threat from the ghosts within it.

The film altogether has the tone of a short ghost story in its simple, sharp sense of forboding. Despite a complicated production history involving additional material being shot and the spectre of gorier horror movies of the time possessing it in places, the resulting film feels expertly put together as a classic chiller, bolstered by its short running time and the incredible sense of mood which sends shivers down one's spine. As with Jaws (1975) the coastal town both evokes a quaint and peaceful community with rich personality but also fears of the unknown connected to the sea, ancient lore of the ghosts of the shipwrecked in this case where the malevolent figures, with their shrouded faces and ragged clothes, evoke more the Knight Templers of the Tombs of the Blind Dead films from Spain than the ghosts that would appear over the decades from the eighties. Were it not for the brief moments of gristly death, aspects of the new slasher films Friday the 13th (1980) would bring in appearing in characters trying to escape the ghosts, than The Fog would entirely by closer to the films of Val Lewton, drenched in the environments of fog shrouded sea banks as easy listening jazz plays on late night community radio.

The cast as well adds to the class of the film. There's probably too many characters, meaning the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis as a young free spirit doesn't get as much as she deserves in screen time, but having even small characters like the priest Father Malone played by someone like Hal Holbrook who can add gravitas to exposition is a virtue a lot of horror films would actually benefit from. Curtis, her own mother Janet Leigh as the wife of the town major Kathy Williams , Tom Atkins as the male hero, and people from Nancy Loomis to Holbrook all raise the bar by being interesting in their appearances. The individual who stands out the most, with the most screen time and with a role delicately written for her, is Adrienne Barbeau; exceptionally beautiful, and her voice as the radio host havig been canonised by horror fans, she is also completely believable as a single mother who, in the midst of this supernatural fog, has to turn her concerns in protecting her young son. A simple character as the mother fearful of harm to her son not turned into merely one note but, for a straightforward ghost story, done with character to it , an example like with the best of short form storytelling that simplistic characters don't have to be one dimensional but sympathetic.

In general the reason why The Fog stands out as well as it is, like Halloween (1978) to The Thing (1982), is due to the high standard of quality felt in the film. It explains why the likes of Village of the Damned (1995) are so lifeless in that, closer to his idols of classic Hollywood cinema, Carpenter even though he innovated and was part of the more explicit horror and action genres of the seventies onwards had feet firmly entrenched in the past where the importance of character actors and production style were incredibly important. The result of this, like other American directors who innovated in the seventies but were firmly influenced by older cinema, is that he's able to bring the best of classic Hollywood cinema but invest it with new ideas to create visceral and moody films like The Fog.

From http://deadshirt.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/fog-still.png

Emanuelle In America (1977) [Mini Review]

From https://www.movieposter.com/posters
/archive/main/116/MPW-58148

Director: Joe D'Amato

Screenplay: Ottavio Alessi, Maria Pia Fusco and Piero Vivarelli

Cast: Laura Gemser (as Emanuelle); Gabriele Tinti (as Alfredo Elvize and the Duke of Mont'Elba); Roger Browne (as The Senator); Riccardo Salvino (as Bill); Lars Bloch (as Eric Van Darren)

A Night of A Thousand Horror (Movies) #3

It sounds strange that an Emanuelle softcore sex film is being covered here as a horror film but for anyone like myself who knows of the most infamous of the Emmanuelle cash-ins, when producers realised they could knock off one "m" from the name and get away with having the title, it's appropriate because of the moments which led to Emanuelle In America getting this infamy. What's meant to be a softcore film meant to titillate, in the beautiful Laura Gemser in the lead role and the other women, maybe even some of the beefcake men in the cast, turns quickly into the fictional cousin of the Italian mondo documentaries. Mondo films, already part fiction with suspect fact, were a catalogue of both the grotesque and the scintillating, between moments of humour and sex to actual death. Emanuelle In America, following the titular Emanuelle (Gemser) as a journalist photographer who sneaks undercover into the sordid lives of the rich and powerful to uncover front page material, is a mondo film in tone from the various scenarios it gets into, from a man who pays women to be his sexual harem to older women going to a secret club to pay for sex. As this is helmed by Joe D'Amato, one of the more notorious and lurid directors of the Italian genre boom of the seventies and eighties, who could go from Anthropophagus (1980) to zombie porn hybrids like Erotic Nights of the Living Dead (1980), the film is even more willing to get grimy.

Strangely the film does live up to its notoriety but is also incredibly naive and innocent at others points in its view of sexuality; even when there's actual real sex involved between actors, its strangely innocent at times with its interest in free love and orgies compared to modern pornography. A lot of the film is incredibly dated, blurring the line between being a film about a sexually liberated woman and being misogynistic, Emanuelle only a fantasy for men who want a woman who wants to have sex a lot but without the feminist emancipation behind women owning their own sexuality and bodies. I will state flat out however that this is a hell of a lot better in quality and morality than the original Emmanuelle film from 1974 starring Sylvia Kristel. In terms of the gender politics, the blatantness of Italian genre films like this in cashing in on popular films is the lesser of two evils than the incredibly problematic politics of the original French film, where to be a free woman in her passions Emmanuelle has to follow the orders of an older man and is even raped by his command by others to liberate her. In terms of quality, the seventies aesthetic is shared between them but the flares and funky soundtrack by Nico Fidenco is a lot better than the bland soft focus of the original film or it ripping off King Crimson in the soundtrack. Also Sylvia Kristel is not a good Emmanuelle; she was far more beautiful and interesting in Claude Chabrol's surreal Alice, or the Last Escapade (1977) and having her as a weak, childlike figure in the original's script is like clipping the wings off as a character who could be more interesting if she took to her desires like a dolphin to water. For all the gross, eyebrow raising content I'll get to with Emanuelle In America, Laura Gemser is both unbelievably gorgeous and more physically charismatic, something far more appropriate to the character that she can even cope with a puritanical sociopath pointing a gun to her head by caressing his crotch through his jeans and scaring him away through her sexual charisma.

When things get strange is when the tonal shifts come about. Most of the film is light hearted and ultimately not as shocking as it would have been back in the seventies. Even the brief moments of real sex just evoke when Tinto Brass in softcore comedies like All Ladies Do It (1992) did the same thing, sometimes with prosthetic members. In fact moments in this, such as Emanuelle and her boyfriend in Venice having sex next to an orchestra practicing in the next room, do evoke Brass. The issue with the film and why its notorious is to the more shocking things added for extra spice. The first is excised from any British release of the film, be it streamed or on DVD, involving a woman giving a horse a friendly handshake. Not in the realms of the Kenneth Pinyan case documented in Zoo (2007) but something which could only come from the seventies, a period of cinema that's actually becoming even more problematic for us in the now-future to think about because, for every transgressive film that's celebrated, there's works like this even in one scene which is now more problematic to deal with in terms of historical retrospective. The other aspect that's even more infamous about the film is fake but completely out-of-synch with the generally light-hearted tone.

Just as you think the film's going to be about cheesy orgies where actors lay writhing naked on each other, and you see men woo older women dressed as Tarzan and Zorro, there's the snuff film subplot. Set up at the older women's club and becoming the finale narrative pull, it's not depicted in a cheesy titillating way, with bright orange blood and rubber torture devices, but completely straight as snippets of scenes from a torture horror film, a completely different film entirely accidentally spliced in at first until it becomes a plot point. In the realm of this type of Italian genre cinema, it's  bizarre and tasteless even by the industry's standards, knocking one off the rails of how to deal with the movie. How can it still be a softcore sex film if it's going to be intentionally grim with the snuff film content? The silly and morbid gets confused and, when the film ends back with the comedy with Emanuelle amongst a jungle tribe, it's like being chewed up and spat out. Only if the film was trying to be like Japanese ero-guro would it make sense to a modern viewer's mind and even then, that's in the context of knowing there were films like this from countries like Italy and Japan that did the same thing but weren't necessarily going for the deliberately provocative. It was worth covering as a horror film from this because this kind of disarming of the viewer, even a mistake here, is the kind of thing many creators always wanted for their films but suddenly sucker punches you viewing Emanuelle In America. Even when you're openly aware it was there like I was its like being punched in the stomach.

From http://iv1.lisimg.com/image/3720770/640
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Teenage Hooker Became A Killing Machine (2000)

From http://images.moviepostershop.com/teenage-hooker-became-killing-machine
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aka. Teenage Hooker Became A Killing Machine in Daehakroh

Director: Gee-woong Nam

Screenplay: Gee-woong Nam

Cast: So-yun Lee (as the Teenage Hooker), Dae-tong Kim (as The Teacher)

Synopsis: A schoolgirl prostitute (Lee) is caught having sex with a client against the wall of a woman's apartment. The woman's son, the schoolgirl's teacher (Kim) gets his three brothers to dispose of her gruesomely as punishment...only for a secret organisation to bring her back as a biomechanical assassin.

Teenage Hooker Became A Killing Machine is an eye-catching title but the results, only sixty minutes long, are a lot more unexpected than anyone could expect, especially from those hoping for a film like Noboru Iguchi's The Machine Girl (2008); while it belongs in the same camp as it, the result is far and away more confounding to sit through. I openly admit, years ago when the title catch my attention in a DVD review magazine and I went out of my way to see it, I absolutely hated this film to the point I held it up as one of the worst films I ever saw. This review is not a critical reappraisal on the grounds of, for example, Baise-moi (2000) for me - (a nihilistic and controversial film I once held as the worst film I'd seen but have come to reapprise drastically) - but amongst the garbage that circles the pan, of some of the worst material I've ever seen, this is so much more interesting even if it's a complete mess at points. It's been very rare for me to ever say a film is so bad it deserves to be on the grounds of a 1/10 on a rating system, which Teenage Hooker Became A Killing Machine was once, but in comparison to other rare films that I've marked that way it's a bar above so many average movies as well in being compellingly weird¹.

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbgfKLMKrhQsUX0bVltHlbhV5gQqXD1YrQkvmuJYrfia9UdhELkgGOhBZ_IAymmzU6NgXEz6q13RFEkbdgX2t6ybAeUnjTP8SI1l0xe5HMNJXfJ3yezYkRFdaF_WxH5TOwVwoFJ_kEOWNs/s1600/
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The result revisiting it feels like an attempt to cross mutate an avant-garde film with lurid genre cinema, the sixty minute length both causing a great deal of the problems but also the more compelling aspects of the film especially in how director Gee-woong Nam emphasises and lengthens minor parts over major plotting. Having such a small space of time at hand should force one to be economic but this film takes a different attitude completely to this notion, deciding to have five minutes or so taken up by just the opening credits for example, the titular schoolgirl stood still in the middle of a Korean urban street as music plays. Immediately drastic tonal shifts are found where, after the serious presentation of the opening credits, the film starts with the female protagonist asking a potential client if he wants to pay for "voluntary date-rape", leading to (dry) humping against a wall where she's bored and texting on her phone mid-coitus. The film goes even further with going to an older female widow losing her mind hearing them having sex against her building wall, clearly meant to be humorous but quite disturbing in how she rants immediately into a phone in the middle of the night with a deranged tone to her voice.

From http://film.thedigitalfix.com/protectedimage.php?
image=KevinGilvear/teenagehooker2.jpg_07112007

This introduces the viewer to the main antagonist, the putty faced and giant chin welding school teacher, who leads the schoolgirl to her demise but not before you get a prolonged few minutes of the two, when she asks for forgiveness by offering free sexual services, of them recreating a mating ritual animals do by swaying on the spot to non-diegetic music. To truncate this narrative description down, it's as the film goes along from here that the mix of styles the film has becomes incredibly chaotic - avant-garde pretensions, a lo-fi visual look comparable to Bill Viola's Hatsu-Yume (1982) in terms of lighting but shot in digital, an uber low budget movie tone with the slow pace and emphasis on dialogue and minor actions, and splat stick prosthetic effects driven content close to Japanese film company Sushi Typhoon. The result is unpredictable and leaves a viewer thrown between tones wildly, from a heartfelt and serious monologue, post-coitus and done directly to the camera, from the schoolgirl about her life and how she wants her newly conceived baby to grow up into a theatre actress to a bizarre gore scene in a bathroom where a foetus still attached by the umbilical cord is floating in the air. These tonal switches get further fudged by the brief inclusion of an assassin subplot with sci-fi trappings where the schoolgirl, now a biomechanical cyborg, has to kill a person in a restaurant. The further genre changing does pull the film fully into the lurid genre cinema of the aforementioned Sushi Typhoon films but the artistic leanings causes a stranger viewing experience as there's not enough time to cover all these plot points in great detail before the film reaches its climax. Especially as it leads to a genitalia gun appearing out of nowhere Gee-woong Nam's decision to keep the lo-fi artistic leanings becomes even stranger.

From http://i564.photobucket.com/albums/ss87/eddieyang888
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Technical Detail:

What was once an off-putting aspect of the film for me, the DV photography,  actually contributes a great deal to the film for me in how its muddy image appeals to a disdain for clean digital photography in films nowadays. The imperfect can have a beauty to it even if it's in the eye of the beholder,  and the lo-fi aesthetic sticks out for me on this viewing because of its murkiness and distorted colour lighting. Particularly with the shots in the open streets or an empty night road, it evokes the aforementioned Hatsu-Yume, an experimental film which shows Japan by way of a video camera which distorts the lighting and the colour, in how the failing image adds to the sense of environment that crisp photography might not do well with all the time. Even the moments of scenery consuming colour lighting adds to the distorted sense of reality the film has where everything is out-of-whack to suit the messy visual look.

The music is surprisingly strong as well and anyone who hates the film would still appreciate the choices immensely. The director has a good taste in classical music and remixes by the likes of Massive Attack, where even in scenes that might frustrate people, such as an opera singer inexplicably stood on a pier, masked by the bright white light in front of the camera above them, you still have good music being played that has a grandeur to it.

From http://mondoexploito.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/
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Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

The experience of Teenager Hooker Became A Killing Machine is an acquired taste, a lot of its strange tone ultimately failure in its original intentions as it creates a disjointed viewing experience in its combination of ideas. It's the blurring of the artistic and the lurid that causes a lot of this, with pretentions but slowly becoming more and more lurid without the grace of filmmakers like Takashi Miike to prevent the sides from jutting against each other; especially when your antagonists are a high pitched voice man with rubber putty all over his head and three strange brothers by his side, one calling himself a girl and their method of dismemberment being a comically large saw a magician would use for a magic show, the artistic aspirations clashes continually with these creative decisions. The result for me, getting used to the juxtapositions, does develop its own tone but it's not surprising some may find this even too weird for them.

Abstract Spectrum: Mindbender/Psychotronic/Weird

Abstract Tropes: Body Horror; Genre Blending; Prolonged Sequences of Nothingness; Prolonged Scenes of Dancing; Strange Eliptical Dialogue; Prosthetic Effects; Genitals as Weapon; Cyborgs; References to Other Films; Memorable Film Title

From http://i564.photobucket.com/albums/ss87/eddieyang888
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Personal Opinion:

A film like this and Ringu: Kanzen-ban (1995) - [Reviewed Here] -  does belong to the region of films covered on this site where their artistic qualities can be under question but honestly, after many of the films I've covered, do belong as some of the memorable entries on the blog for how strange and out-of-synch with other genre films they are.  Especially when cult cinema can be predictable and tedious in worse case scenarios, a film like Teenage Hooker Became A Killing Machine lives up to the notion of this type of cinema being unpredictable even if it's for an extremely tiny audience, most of which may gladly reply back like I would that the virtues as matched by incredible problems. As someone who originally hated this film I completely understand this fact fully.

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¹For anyone curious, there's plenty of dreadful films I'd give a 2/10 or 3/10 but there are currently only five films with 1/10, a sign of how worthless they are even to exist let alone so bad to sit through. In reverse chronicle order -

1. Transmorphers: Fall of Man (Dir. Scott Wheeler, 2009) - Dreadful Asylum Pictures Ltd rip-off of Transformers.

2. 2012 Doomsday (Dir. Nick Everhart, 2008) - Dreadful Asylum rip-off of Roland Emmerich's 2012 (2009) which is actually a pedantic Christian apocalypse movie that shamefully tries to trick Christians into buying it as much as those wanting a film like 2012.

3. Death Tunnel (Dir. Philip Adrian Booth, 2005) - Bottom of the barrel horror movie sold on the actresses in skimpy underwear and nothing else.

4. Blood Thirsty (Dir. Jeff Frey, 1999) - Exceptionally low budget vampire drama film shot in someone's kitchen that was painful to sit through and offended me in how it dealt with self harm, the later tipping it over the edge into this category.

5. Spawn (Dir. Mark A.Z. Dippé, 1997) - The one mainstream film, so egregious a comic book adaptation even my taste for bad nineties pop culture gave up halfway through. Only redeemed by Melinda Clarke eating the scenery and wearing figure hugging leather.

Contrary to what some might say, the worst in cinema is usually tedious or life draining rather than so bad it's actually entertaining. The wobbling tombstones and wonky dialogue of Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959) is actually a virtue to appreciate rather than to dismiss. There are plenty of films which I might dare revisit - A Nymphoid Barbarian in Dinosaur Hell (1991) - if I am suicidal enough to see if they're 1/10 films like I had them originally, but even stuff that offends me usually has something of worth even in the most dire of consequences. I call 1/10 "Worthless" and I even feel like it's too cruel to damn a dreadful movie with the rating even if the viewing experience was awful.

A Bloodthirsty Killer (1965) [Mini Review]

From https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-KYKc486otUY/Vxu2PJDaY7I/
AAAAAAAALww/xvNI7S-8pgMpl9ZBLzpXJAL2kxdSzzzJQCLcB/s1600/DEM005.jpg

aka. A Devilish Homicide; Salinma

Director: Lee Yong-min

Screenplay: Lee Yong-min

Cast: Lee Ye-chun  (as Lee Shi-mak); Do Kum-bong (as Ae-ja); Jeong Ae-ran; Lee Bin-hwa; Namgoong Won; Ju Seok-yang

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #2

Thanks of an immeasurable kind have to made to the Korean Film Archive who, in lieu to few older Korean films being available on DVD in the West, have restored the filmic heritage of South Korea and placed them for free, with bilingual subtitle options, on YouTube in their best quality. That the choice is both art driven but with an eye for genre is also applaudable in the diversity it shows up, A Bloodthirsty Killer a melodramatic ghost story in rich monochrome and rich in style in general. At first the film reminded me of a Japanese genre film of the period in artistic quality - the mood and eerie tone similar to many sixties Japanese cinema - but the film soon after is very much its own unique case when the plot gets under way.

Immediately it starts off without build-up towards the first eerie prescience, a middle aged business man entering a gallery only for the exhibit to be closed already and only a portrait of a woman to be left on the wall. The film from this first scene onwards immediately ditches any sense of doubt for the protagonist about a supernatural force being after him, and for the viewer immediately the world set up is beset by ghostly acts taking place in the background or directly in the character's eyesight. Soon the businessman witnesses the murderer of a painter, a woman of ghostly origin being the real killer, and his family being terrorised by this same figure, a woman out of revenge on those who murdered her. How this haunting is done is as unpredictable as you can get, from paintings melting in a person's hand to a doctor finding himself in the perplexing position of finding a woman's corpse that's been dead for a while on the coroner's slab but is completely spotless from rigor mortis or decay. As the businessman's family is haunted, the film goes into further directions as well as the oldest daughter is taken away in a supernatural void and the grandmother starts acting in strange ways, the family unit falling apart as the truth the ghost's death is revealed; as this happens the best thing about The Bloodthirsty Killer is that from an older generation of horror cinema there are no cheap jump scares but plenty of creepy and strange images witnessed allowed to be felt slowly, the techniques available at the time adding to the ghostliness of the sights even in their datedness.

The film feels like a stylish art movie from the decade in its sense of interior and exterior space, floral wallpaper rooms and woodlands all having a sense of depth to them because of the monochrome look. Rather than let constant exposition kill the mood created by this, the greater acceptance of spirituality and the supernatural within Asian countries, alongside a passion for dramatic storytelling shared between countries like South Korea and Japan, allows this mood to be greater. The music feels like it's from a fifties US sci-fi b-movie and when the ghost woman's revenge is justified it takes on a further air of a Douglas Sirk melodrama, a type of film style not seen today but for the better in context of this film's plot, refreshing in how ghoulish it is without losing its elegance.

The film also has moments which stick out for how creepy they still are in a film about a family becoming undermined by the guilt of the past, particularly when the grandmother possessed by the ghost woman's beloved cat starts acting sinisterly and licking the remaining children's' cheeks and necks as they sleep. The tone could've easily become silly but the heightened style of the movie in emotions and visual content makes sure this type of content works perfectly. What caused the vengeful ghost to exist is as bleak and damming of humanity as the kind of back stories found in a lot of modern horror films but significantly this never becomes pretentious or sluggish in presenting the story; instead, with a willingness to become exaggerated in the melodrama as with its aesthetic style, it feels as much a story that could be found in an old folktale as it is a modern story. Even with a happy ending the film feels timeless and could've easily been transposed to a medieval Korean setting without none of the jealously, betrayal and weird poisons feeling out of place. 

From http://fims.kofic.or.kr/common/mast/movie/2015/
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