Dark Myth (1990)

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Director: Takashi Anno

Screenplay: Takashi Anno and Tomomi Mochizuki

Voice Cast: Alan Myers (as Takeshi); Jay Harper (as Kikuchihiko); Peter Marinker (as Takeuchi); Blair Fairman (as the Narrator); Daniel Flynn (as Brahman); John Baddeley (as Hayato); John Bennet (as Jiku); Larissa Murray (as Miya)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #93

With the following, I dive into the more marred area of anime horror and fantasy. This may sound immediately dismissive of Dark Myth but, bearing in mind its far from a perfect straight-to-video anime in the first place, the review takes on a nostalgic admiration for this type of obscurer, flawed one-off from the late eighties and early nineties era of animation, one which ended up part of something called The Collection, explained if you follow the link below, which has formed an odd part of my nostalgia getting into anime in the early 2000s. Mostly surrounding more modern anime released by the late ADV Films, The Collection from Manga Entertainment was nonetheless a gateway to older anime for me in spite of only having English dubs, many of them frankly bad, a strange motley bunch of obscure titles and notorious ones like Violence Jack (1986-1990), and symbols on the DVD spines unique to each title who's meaning I've yet to understand. For better and worse, this series which included Dark Myth was as much an important part of getting into the medium as was getting second hand Manga Entertainment releases of Ninja Scroll (1993) and Akira (1988).

For more on this, and a review on this fantasy horror anime about ancient mythology, hungry ghosts and late eighties synth, click for the full review HERE. 

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Texas Chainsaw (2013)

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Director: John Luessenhop

Screenplay: Adam Marcus, Debra Sullivan and Kirsten Elms

Cast: Alexandra Daddario (as Heather Miller); Dan Yeager (as Leatherface); Trey Songz (as Ryan); Scott Eastwood (as Deputy Carl Hartman); Tania Raymonde (as Nikki); Shaun Sipos (as Darryl); Keram Malicki-Sánchez (as Kenny); Thom Barry (as Sheriff Hooper); Paul Rae (as Mayor Burt Hartman)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #92

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre marathon ends finally. You can hear the sign of despair in that sentence alone. It starts with an almighty scream, with the first film from Tobe Hooper in 1974 managing to profoundly influence horror cinema onwards as a stone cold masterpiece, and gets an underrated sequel immediately after in 1986 with part 2, but slowly starts to fall off the rails soon after. Contrary to popular belief however, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1994) with its transsexual Leatherface and Matthew McConaughey chewing scenery on his robot leg isn't the nadir for me as others think, cinematic heaven alongside Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990) compared to everything post 2000. It could be nostalgia for older American horror movies pure and simple, and I'm not defending the 1990 and 1994 films for their flaws, but the later sequels from 2003 onwards have all been painful, a toxic nature especially to the Platinum Dunes films with their grimy sheens and desire to be repugnant but with a lack of necessary reason behind them. In comparison to the 2003 and 2006 films, the innocent stupidity of the older sequels seems more innocuous as flaws.

The 2013 Chainsaw film, made in 3D, decided to be an immediate sequel to the original 1973 movie, attempting to be a far better tribute to the original and thankfully ditching the 2000 films' timelines permanently. Once the ending of the first film is replayed in the opening credits however, the film immediately takes a questionable direction by introducing an entire new lineage of the Leatherface family that gets mowed down by stereotypical, morally dubious rednecks in a shootout, instant questions of the direction this film is going raised as its erratic nature instantly appears. The point to this is to include a main plot strand that would've have succeeded without a convoluted turn, a child of the Leatherface family surviving and growing up into Heather (Alexandra Daddario), inheriting the Leatherface history and property back in Texas after a relative dies. Presumably set in the modern day, Heather is a raven haired blue eyed girl who works in the back of a supermarket where her best friend Nikki (Tania Raymonde) does, preparing meat for sale and collecting the remaining bones to use in her homemade art much to her boyfriend Ryan's (Trey Songz) bafflement. Even by the standards of logic bending in horror sequels, the film goes as far as disrupt whole time chronology and mathematics when the transition from the original 1974 film to this present day would be at least over three decades past but Heather is visibly a young woman in her twenties, the area of a Highlander sequel of disrupting previous reality.

The problem is more than this however, as there's plenty of popular horror films whose sequels, something that if it raises a bias in me and other horror fans, can tolerate it in the eighties films where charm and naivety is visibly found, how we accept the convoluted ways to defeat Freddy Krueger in Nightmare on Elm Street sequels that never made sense and contradicted each other over the next films. There's something though ever since the end of the eighties and the popularity of horror which made the resulting sequels less tolerable than this, the gooey effects and eighties eccentricities lost leaving films who were undercooked continuing on from popular movies. They're particularly ones which try to be momentously different from previous entries or try to be clever, only to be shown to have lazy writing which squashes any cleverness and even ideas inappropriate to the timeline unless they had the courage to be completely separate from the films before. Unfortunately, unlike the 1986, 1990 and 1994 sequels which existed in their own bubbles, Texas Chainsaw is set after the first film and, like Jason Voorhees being revealed to be a body jumping undead parasite in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993) with sudden and jarring lore, and a lack of quality writing, the gaffe Texas Chainsaw (3D) makes where apparantly Heather found the fountain of youth in the decades before isn't as problematic as her whole existence as the protagonist. A female lead whose friends go to Texas for another series of deaths in the franchise, sadly with only Leatherface and none of the eccentric cannibal family scenes of better prequels, that culminates to a plot twist so obvious in how it's going to take place, with an openly sinister Southern town major (Paul Rae) and his lackeys in the background, that its immediately signposted from the beginning as a dumb idea before its executed.

It's a film you can still have fun in, improving in quality in fact after the empty and vile nihilism of the 2000 films, sporting a greater sense of blissful stupidity to its content, but there's still a fine line between good natured naivety to completely being logically unsound for the sake of a plot idea it tonally thinks is edgy and going to be exiciting but has been seen before, isn't done well and is openly problematic in the context of the film's own initial plot in spite it drawing closer to what fans would probably want, making Leatherface the innocent and good person in spite of the fact he's still a sociopathic, mass murdering cannibal. Not only is the body count he brings into being likely to make it impossible for a certain character to side with him, still able to run at a gallop in his old age, chainsaw in hand, and living in a basement, but in context of the whole series its dubious no matter how popular and iconic he is in the context of the Chainsaw films to cheer him on unless a significantly better script was actually written on this idea. If the film had been a dumb slasher film it might've actually redeemed itself and made the finale of the whole franchise (until the shelved prequel Leatherface (20??) ever gets released) a more positive one, a silliness in tone and logic with a memorable chase scene through a funfair. However it eventually leads to stereotypically evil southern rednecks, a cop whose sense of morality in the final scene is utterly against reality, and a character changing their attitude only from having a whole box of crime scene evidence and documents from the 1974 killings left with them in an interrogation room, making the fact that the Illuminati were controlling the Leatherface family in The Next Generation more sound as a story concept just for the fact the film didn't build up to it and look embarrassing after all the prolonged setup.  

From https://ccpopculture.files.wordpress.com/2013
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Raging Sun, Raging Sky (2009)

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Director: Julián Hernández

Screenplay: Julián Hernández

Cast: Jorge Becerra (as Kieri); Javier Oliván (as Tari); Guillermo Villegas (as Ryo); Giovanna Zacarías (as Tatei)

Synopsis: After a night of passion with a mysterious woman Tatei (Zacarías), plagued by the voices of everyone she passes and connected to a mystical alter-reality, Ryo (Villegas) is pushed onwards into a passionate love triangle with two other men, Kieri (Becerra), who Ryo is in love with, and Tari (Oliván), obsessed with him, taking all three between a porn theatre where gay cruising takes place to apartments where the alter-reality can be found through a bathroom sink, the jealousies and romances culminating into an alternative reality of warriors coveting Ryo and magic in a desert landscape that Tatei presides over as an ancient goddess.

As a heterosexual man, viewing gay erotica has a very different perspective than for a gay or bisexual viewer who'd be fully able to appreciate their sexuality onscreen. It could be so easy for me to trivialise this and put one's foot in ones mouth in an area which, rightly, should be written the most about by actual gay and bisexual viewers and critics but, to bring out a personal secret of mine, I share the same opinion once made by one of my idols Alejandro Jodorowsky that I wish I was born bisexual as a whole dimension of beautiful sexuality is unavailable to me to appreciate fully, peering through a window into rooms I will never be able to walk through or welcome with the emotional depth as for a gay man. I can still appreciate the sensuality of the male form, and do everything I can to learn and improve as a person to appreciate this more, but the above will always be in mind for me having considered carefully and found my own sexuality is heterosexual.

But that doesn't mean that sensuality of any form, regardless of your sexual orientation, cannot effect you still, and be powerful and attractive erotically even if you're not attracted physically to your fellow gender. Someone open minded and without bigotry or self consciousness about one's emotions can still find sensuality when done well or with such exuberance in such films, and the best of gay cinema's decadent and experimental entries can not only wash over any viewer with their sexuality fully, but are personally for me some of the best cinema has ever made, knowing full well that many of the iconic films were made, in times where oppressive and homophobic atmospheres were rife, with the creators bravely and proudly expressing their sexuality and not hesitating to express himself with full artistic vibrancy. When it works it's not only intoxicating, the best of gay experimental cinema (Derek Jarman, Kenneth Anger) or the best of erotic and transgressive gay cinema (Jack Smith to Peter De Rome), but shows you how good cinema is in form, style and emotional connection, and with this in mind, Raging Sun, Raging Sky does deserve to be compared to luminous entries like Pink Narcissist (1971) or Jean Genet's Un chant d'amour (1950) from decades earlier, completely separating itself from the drab, wreckage of social drama which trivialises subjects like gay sexuality into dramatic points, and places within a better type of cinema where the physicality and sexuality is so pronounced, between the aggressive and sordid but also the romantic and tender, that it's probably the greater way to deal with these themes.

Interestingly Raging Sun, Raging Sky begins with a woman and a man having a sweet, playful one night stand after getting caught in the rain together, deliberately starting with a pan sexuality as that man becomes part of a romantic triangle between himself and two other men. Over three hours long, two hours in sumptuous black and white, the last hour in colours, express its theme of desire with this in mind, a urban set realistic drama which yet, almost entirely without dialogue, does so almost entirely from then on from the perspective of an all homoerotic world where the various interactions, sexual rendezvous and moments of conflict raise the characters' passions above merely being gay sensuality but a universal form, sexy and erotic for any viewer whilst proudly embracing its sexual identity, openly fetishizing and artistically painting the male form and various fantasies of men meeting mysterious strangers, from wide eyes youths with backpacks on to the older, confidant individual who sticks out amongst the crowd, with pride. The first two hours pass quickly, managing to convey enough drama with minimal dialogue whilst feeling like a continuation of Pink Narcissist, an erotic film which for many years had an anonymous director and is set in a hyper fantastic world of gay fantasies, of imaging countless different sexual interactions and romances within a world of its own, a film set in real life urban Mexico, but a monochrome alter reality within a porn cinema presided by an older, beautiful female projectionist who lets male customers in to participate in orgies in the aisles to dark, night set streets and chain fences and warehouses where other meetings take place.

The third and final hour takes a different turn, briefly alluded to throughout the film in flashes of the characters' psyches and conceived as an alternative reality fed from the ancient Mexican mythology by way of a Jack Smith glamorous fantasy, found fully through a character leaving their head in a full bathroom sink of water and seeing it reflected in the bottom by way of muted, full colour photography. It's the section that's the more difficult to adapt to on the first viewing because, while the film  is formidable in length, a drastic tonal shift is felt to a more deliberately slow and avant-garde one in this final act. A lot of the final act's mood is, in honesty, that of normal actions being stretched on purpose to minutes long, such as a character as a lizard-man hybrid awoken from under dried out sand and rock walking from one end of a the screen to the other in a desert, evoking Michael Snow's Wavelength (1967) in terms of deliberately stalling time until its distorted. It'll be a challenge for some viewers, when the first two hours whilst without a lot of dialogue are sensual, breezy passages, but it's ultimately saved, making sure the film is still great, because it evokes a side of gay cinema of glamour and fantasy even on a low budget, that of the aforementioned Jack Smith with Flaming Creatures (1963) or Derek Jarman at his more openly decadent where gay/bisexual/transgender desire is made into grandiose drama by way of old forms sadly dismissed as kitsch or out of date, from old Hollywood b-movies to classical art, here in this case the old world of Mexican myths and fairytale plotting where one character has to rescue his love from the third with the woman Tatei as a goddess figure helping the first in his quest, something becoming rarely evoked in modern erotic and pornography regardless of sexual orientation of making sexual desire more than baseness and having monumental by metaphor to make it mean more than just that.

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Technical Detail:

The monochrome cinematography is gorgeous. This isn't the effect of, for example, Noah Baumbach's Frances Ha (2012) which is black-and-white to seem artistic but feels utterly pointless and pretentious, lacking any point to the lack of colour visually, but has the appropriate sense of deep greys, blacks and whites which encloses the film's first two hours in a magical sheen, enough to show the stark reality of real life urban Mexico but also turning it into a place with secrets, where every street corner or the entrance of a cinema covered in film posters could be a place to have a carnal interaction with a stranger both participants with enjoy before walking away. An orgiastic communion of men between underground building pillars or sexual activity in a public toilet cubical that's passionate, claustrophobic and ultimately humorous when the concern someone will hear the individuals involved is dwindled when said person in earshot is more interested in wanking into a urinal in his own blissful state of sexual freedom. The sense of artistry, alongside its deliberate pace, evokes the films of the past in LGBT cinema in its elegance.

Abstract Spectrum: Expressionist

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

The mix of fantasy and realism from Julián Hernández is immensely intoxicating, managing to convey a Dionysus hedonism where while conflict, jealousy and aggression take place, everyone involved ends up happy and content with their various successful sexual encounters with strangers and those they love, all done with the main cast mainly using only their body language to depict this by a glance or a small physical gesture. Whilst not as elaborate as a fantasy like Pink Narcissus or Flaming Creatures, Mexico is depicted  as a place of countless secrets, where the sexual interactions between all the figures we see is fluid and beyond monogamy, confrontational in terms of having sex scenes which have a violent eroticism to them but against others which are also gentle and loving. A lot of the film is subtly abstract, where one is allowed to enter a world within a world, where everyone interacts without fences between every person centre stage onscreen, a casualness to the erotic tone that's breathtaking and affecting regardless of one's sexual orientation, particularly as the film succeeds in fleshing out the characters, able to breather away from sex scenes constantly, and that there's a complete disregard of puritanicalism here, where characters, whether their number, exist in their world where sex is fluid and allowed to thrive.

When Raging Sun, Raging Sky does get overtly fantastical it's also subtle but director-screenwriter Hernández clearly embraces the change fully. It's in the camp of modern directors like Albert Serra (Story of My Death (2013)) and Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Tropical Malady (2004)) who come from the realistic, minimalistic school of art cinema but in their various personalities absorb bouts of the fantastic and imaginary into their existing materials, the unreal depicted onscreen with a muted but undeniable magic to them, especially in Raging Sun, Raging Sky when you have characters floating down an actual cave with what appears to be old Hollywood b-movie wires helping them down, a grit covered fairytale plot representing the volatile emotions between Ryu, Kieri and Tari built up, and vast and atmospheric desertscape and hills used as the locations.

Personal Opinion:

Patience, or a night free to fully embrace it, is needed with Raging Sun, Raging Sky but it's the kind of poetic, openly artistic cinema that's worth this, gay cinema which even for a heterosexual man is powerful and erotic, an extravagance that feels like it's actually taking risks and succeeding.

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The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006)

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Director: Jonathan Liebesman

Screenplay: Sheldon Turner

Cast: Jordana Brewster (as Chrissie); Taylor Handley (as Dean A. Hill); Diora Baird (as Bailey); Matt Bomer (as Eric Hill); Lee Tergesen (as Holden); R. Lee Ermey (as Sheriff Hoyt); Andrew Bryniarski (as Leatherface)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #91

Nearing the end of the Texas Chainsaw series, it's become a miserable marathon at this point, carbon copies now which feel out of touch to their source material entirely. In comparison, even the Rob Zombie Halloween films feels more rewarding next to what happened with the 2003-6 remakes of Chainsaw as, whilst they may have had ill advised decisions within them, Zombie was at least attempting something thoughtful within them even if they failed for many, whilst the Chainsaw films feel like cynical cash grabs meant to be nasty for the sake of it without any emotional connection to the material. The Beginning is utterly redundant in itself as it's a prequel, only clearly made because the 2003 film which started this new version of the series also technically ended it. An irony can be found in this knowing that in the eighties such an ending, with a character losing an arm, wouldn't have halted a sequel being made, and even the Chainsaw series wasn't above making sequels in spite of major characters being visibly unable to return, making the point of The Beginning suspect or absurd.

One wishes, after the empty grimness of the 2003 film, that this had some levity like a character returning with a chainsaw for a hand, if they decided to completely ditch this tone in an alternative reality and get back to even the slapstick tone of The Next Generation (1994), looking like gold next to The Beginning. Like the others throughout the series a group of young adults, in this case two men about to go to Vietnam in the midst of the war the US was in the midst of and their girlfriends, ending up enduring the terror of the Leatherface family, the prequel nature in showing the origins of the family in the late sixties. The issue with this is twofold. First, that it skips through most of the back-story in the opening credits. Thankfully the viewer avoids suffering through the adventures of baby Leatherface, already over-the-top with him being born in the midst of an abattoir conveyor belt and discovered in an outdoor bin, but everything it discloses afterwards is entirely worthless, only interesting in terms of if the film was actually going to disclose these details (Leatherface learning to wear a flesh mask of someone else's face, the decision of the family to become cannibalistic) in a far more dramatic, character based story, especially as the premise of depicting a family living in a town without any economy and people leaving that could've been a compelling one, an undercurrent that you can find in Tobe Hooper's original film already. Sadly the film even by the standards of a slasher plot is lacking in being compelling by itself, let alone in any subtext.

Secondly, because this is a prequel, the Leatherface family will not get their comeuppance as a result, the characters we're meant to support put against them already bland but further reduced to nothing knowing they won't be able to end the cannibalistic family, merely figures to be harmed and maimed through violence for the sake of violence that's grim rather than horrifying. A lot of the film as well is also just to have R. Lee Ermey shout and cuss throughout, Leatherface reduced to a side figure, Ermey's character now just tedious to see in this prequel and whose only moment of new character building to him where he got the sheriff's shirt from. This is also a film that attempts to be set in the late sixties, and even for someone like myself born in 1989 Britain, feels completely unlike the period and already dated as a 2006 film, a strange music video grim with the type of figures, like a female biker welding shotgun while she's moving, that you'd find in neo-grindhouse films rather than a period accurate movie in aesthetic and presentation. The film is so lacklustre and dour to withstand - none of the weird humour of the Hooper films, none of the nerve shredding music or visuals, not even cinematographer Daniel Pearl and the style of the 2003 film - and without any sense to its ending baring empty nihilism that its only worth a short review, the real low point of the entire franchise.

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Beyond the Gate (2016)

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Director: Jackson Stewart

Screenplay: Stephen Scarlata and Jackson Stewart

Cast: Barbara Crampton (as Evelyn); Brea Grant (as Margot); Chase Williamson (as John); Graham Skipper (as Gordon); Jesse Merlin (as Elric); Justin Wellborn (as Hank)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #90

Beyond the Gate is admirable for not going for the easy nostalgia buzz of eighties pop culture, deciding to do something more personal in spite of the initial premise starting with two brothers Gordon (Graham Skipper) and John (Chase Williamson) having to close their father's video store, full of giant shelves like an archive for the medium, when their old man has been missing for weeks. It still reveals in the appeal of this era, as their cataloguing of the stock leads them to finding a strange VHS game, where one has to play a tape alongside the actual game, with a mysterious female figure (Barbara Crampton) as the host who is an emissary to a hellish place, but the trip to the actual gates and onwards, with Gordon's girlfriend Margot (Brea Grant) in tow, is by way of Gordon having to come to terms with the emotional vacuum since he left the town on bad terms, his brother, sleeping from couch to couch, to reconnect to, and the hallucinations, ghosts and sinister gates appearing in their father's basement all with the subtext of the past having to be exorcised for both brothers whilst real people are dying.

In Beyond the Gate's favour, it takes its drama serious. The usual set-up, where Gordon is the calmer and softer of the brothers at first, John the layabout slacker who still lives in his hometown, is done well and the film goes further in having more layers onto this, more of an achievement when the running time is less than eighty minutes, fleshing the characters out more than other films in this short space of time. I have to compliment this further as, what I initially expected to be a retro love-in, had more of a heart and the notion of human interaction being an important part of the horror itself, how this VHS board game of the damned is really a series of supernatural events for Gordon to reconcile with his father and his childhood. The nostalgia for the medium becomes as much about the person who grew up with it rather than just drooling over a pop cultural item.

I have to admit however in terms of being a whole, the ending does let the film down after its admirable start because, whilst it thankfully ignores the cheap nostalgic, I wished it would've stuck to the more fantastic nature of the story and, after starting as a slow burning horror movie first, would've embraced the side the VHS horror board game evokes even if on a low budget. The closest thing to phantasmagoric horror that it needed to dip its toe into for the finale is how the same basement that the gate to enter the underworld is becomes said underworld by the vaporwave colours of various shades of purple and dark blue, but nothing else. This is a shame as, building up to said ending, Beyond the Gate was promising to be a character drama but with a taste of a weird tale, with a creepy owner of an occult antique giving ominous warnings and deaths by way of unconventional voodoo dolls. The ending does come off as a blank squib sadly after this, consisting of only a few zombies trying to maul people, when even what turns out to be a slow burn character drama could've used a more fantastical conclusion for metaphor and be able to embrace the eighties aesthetic fully for once for a justifiable reason. 

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Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky (1991)

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Director: Lam Nai-choi

Screenplay: Lam Nai-choi

Cast: Fan Siu-Wong (as Ricky Ho); Fan Mei-Sheng (as Assistant Warden Dan/Cyclops); Ho Ka-Kui (as The Warden); Yukari Oshima (as Rogan); Tamba Tetsuro (as Master Zhang); Gloria Yip (as Anne); Kwok Chun-Fung (as Lin Hung/Andrew); Frankie Chin (as Oscar); Koichi Sugisaki (as Tarzan); Wong Kwai-Hung (as Brandon)

A 1000 Anime Crossover

Abstract Spectrum: Psychotronic/Grotesque

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

Riki-Oh, a notorious tale of a man sent to prison who's martial arts ability not only allows him to recover from life ending wounds easily but knock a person's jaw off with one blow...and yet if I was devoting a blog entirely to comic books, it would be the original manga by Tetsuya Saruwatari that would get on the Abstract List at with a "High" rating. Instead I'm talking about the film adaptation which has had a legacy since its release in the early nineties, one that only adapts the first few chapters of the manga. They're pretty strange in themselves, but it's more of a splatter martial arts movie than actually weird, a living cartoon which is not as exaggerated and strange as the original source material gets, as its only the prologue effectively which was adapted onto screen, and so is more known in reputation for its full blown gore.

For the full review of this film, follow this link to my 1000 Anime blog HERE.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003)

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Director: Marcus Nispel

Screenplay: Scott Kosar

Cast: Jessica Biel (as Erin); Jonathan Tucker (as Morgan); Erica Leerhsen (as Pepper); Mike Vogel (as Andy); Eric Balfour (as Kemper); Andrew Bryniarski (as Leatherface); R. Lee Ermey (as Sheriff Hoyt)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #89

Twenty nine years on from the first film, the Chainsaw series began again in what's arguably the first major horror remake of the current few decades. There were remakes before, films being remade in Hollywood back in the forties, in the eighties especially with horror cinema, and House on Haunted Hill (1999) deserves a mention, but when I was growing up with mainstream film magazines like Total Film, it did feel in hindsight that the 2003 Chainsaw remake was the beginning of the horror remakes we have now, including the baggage where, until fans got tired of complaining, the green lighting of such films got negative heat every time. As someone, in the folly of youth, made an embarrassing online petition to stop the Let the Right One In remake in English without seeing the 2008 Swedish film first, I can attest to how the fans could be as bad in these sorts of grumblings of these horror remakes, but there's as much fault in those too blinkered to think the 2010 A Nightmare on Elm Street remake was a good job, so it's a vicious cycle as the fans have justification to roll their eyes. We've been stuck in this scenario for at least over a decade still, and seeing the 2003 Chainsaw film for the first time, which did well enough alongside Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead (2004) to help push this trend onwards in the first place, it's kind of amazing its lasted as long as it's done since Chainsaw is poor, something barring the initial box office weekend which couldn't have sustained a franchise for a lengthy period of time, even without the pretty closed ending this remake has.

The film's very different from the original. A van of five young adults including Jennifer Biel are travelling through Texas like the first film, going to a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert here, only to pick up a disturbed woman who shoots herself in the back seats. Distressed, their search for a sheriff leads them to meeting a deranged cannibalistic clan in the southern countryside, the result even in context of the original film being very ghoulish, (just around the time of Rob Zombie and his film debut House of 1000 Corpses (2003)), but a mess in terms of wanting to be an extreme horror movie but being a Michael Bay produced Platinum Dunes production with music video slickness and little else. So effectively it's a remake of Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1990), where here a character can have their leg hooped off and be hung on a meat hook over a saloon bar piano in a ridiculously waterlogged basement, but the whole thing comes off as a theme park ride that would've been closed down by health inspectors. It's a production, consistent in all the films so far in the series, that you have to admire the design of in all its rancid glory, including cinematography from the original DP of the original 1974 film Daniel Pearl, but find the result breeze past as a movie with no bite.

The film tries its hardest but completely forgets to be actually scary or disturbing, the only real fright in realising at this point, whilst the first two films had the sense of pure Southern Gothic to them, how bigoted this particular film feels depicting southern rednecks, as disturbed, visually ugly cannibals caked in dirt makeup, everything else so stylishly murky and swollen in mess without coordination for effective shocks that it feels stuck between glossiness and goofiness instead. Its attempts to be repulsive feel like dangling fake entrails at the viewer without the shock or viciousness required to make it so, and since it's so serious it can't have fun like a Herschell Gordon Lewis movie, and the casting of R. Lee Ermey as a sinister sheriff doesn't lead to an iconic new horror figure but R. Lee Ermey repeating his role Full Metal Jacket (1987) but as a perverted sociopath you see at one point, as a much older man, without no trousers on. Worse, Leatherface is merely a figure in the background who appears with his chainsaw but has little beyond this of interest, none of the interactions between the Leatherface family members from previous films to keep the worst parts buoyant, merely stereotypes of white trail trash that are crass and with little personality between them to latch onto. The only piece of emotional pull that film has, which shows how this is still clearly a horror film made by committee, is that there's a baby for Jessica Biel, a non-entity with the lack of character to go from beyond a cowboy hat and love for Lynyrd Skynyrd, to rescue. Because of this even Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1994) looks great in comparison.

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Starry Eyes (2014)

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Directors: Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer

Screenplay: Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer

Cast: Alex Essoe (as Sarah); Amanda Fuller (as Tracy); Noah Segan (as Danny); Fabianne Therese (as Erin); Shane Coffey (as Poe); Natalie Castillo (as Ashley)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #88

Watching Starry Eyes evoked Nicolas Winding Refn's The Neon Demon (2016) greatly, actually to a detriment as, whilst there's things to admire in Starry Eyes, the comparison between them in tackling similar themes - of young women trying to make it big in the cutthroat, male gaze dominated worlds of fashion and Hollywood, electronic neo-synth scores, extreme violence - shows up the problems in Starry Eyes I find constantly in modern American horror films for neglecting the importance of the visual nature of horror and the bandying of tired clichés of drama as a better emotional depth compared to being highly artistic and arch in tone.

A lot of Starry Eyes' drama should already be known to any film fan who at least poked their heads into the culture around Hollywood. That in real life wannabe actors, bright eyed and optimistic, have to work like Sarah (Alex Essoe) does in places like a family restaurant around Los Angeles whilst waiting for auditions, at work in ridiculous gold spandex and away from it with friends like Tracy (Amanda Fuller) who she is disconnected to all of. If I give the film credit, it touches upon something more universal beyond Hollywood in terms of a period many find themselves going through in between low paying jobs, dreams and aspirations of something big in the distance with the sense you're going to go nowhere. It's a credible emotional core that anyone can attach to when the Faustian notion of Hollywood discovering talent takes place, Sarah getting an audition for a horror film with sinister, strangely behaving staff involved, has been done over and over. Unfortunately it's depicted in an entirely muted style of mumbled dialogue and close-ups of small rooms which doesn't work due to the lack of expanding on these emotions further. What should be the main dynamic drive for the whole film isn't eventually interesting, the frustration of Sarah being stuck in her position, coupled with aspects such as trichotillomania, a habit of pulling her own hair out in moments of stress, not fleshed out enough to be more interesting. It sadly also means Essoe really doesn't stand out in the lead in this drama for the first half, the plight lacking the necessary sadness after the initial sympathy petered out for me.

So instead it's the horror clichés that I hoped change the pace to bring life to the film. And when it gets to the finale, Starry Eyes doesn't hold back either. Some may complain of the drastic tonal change into the gruesome and almost hyper violent equivalent of an old horror comic book, when the slow burn young adult drama gets pushed to the side, but it's when Starry Eyes' pulse actually starts to beat finally. Nasty body horror, throwing up maggots, openly embracing the kind of ridiculous seventies films about Satanism that it truly is by way of a bald head, painted fingernails and a pentagram necklace. Stuff that draws the film briefly away from its murky tone to a campiness actually more befitting a lead character out of a Millennials drama from the current decade who yet worships classic actresses like Joan Crawford and Lauren Bacall on her bedroom wall, the kind of actress even in the most realistic performances were as much able to get into pure melodrama and heightened emotions, a glamour that's in dire necessity for a film like this that's stuck in a lo-fi tone for a large part of it for no dramatically good reason.

It's here though, even if arguably The Neon Demon is a more vacuous film, where the gaudier and more artsploitation side trumps Starry Eyes. I've become tired of so many new, potentially fresh voices in horror cinema like the director-writers of Starry Eyes squandering their good ideas for a post digital cinematography that's a faux cinema verité rather than using the look for atmosphere and to add to the sense of dread, or how even for a low budget film like this it doesn't attempt higher ambitions to escalate its sense of emotional horror further. It's only when it gets more ridiculous at the end where it gets some real emotional heft because it doesn't pull its punches and embraces the fantastical nature of the story against realistic characters and locations. Not only is the camp, the bedroom full of black candles, actually more scarier but mixing it in actually helps add to the realism and give it the necessary reality to work, where the late night neon haze of Los Angeles is actually appropriately dreamlike and nightmarish when Sarah's body starts to rebel against herself and break down, and how the rundown environments and apartments take on the Repulsion (1965) like tone finally I wanted the film to get into. It's not enough to save the film but at least Starry Eyes ends with a bang.

As much of this issue with Starry Eyes is knowing how critically acclaimed it was when it was released, only finding that for a film that was praised for its emotional powerful storytelling it's a whory old cliché in the centre of the tale whose lead only really gets interesting as an actress and character in the finale when she's made up in gross practical make-up and drifting to the evil side. That its score by Jonathan Snipes is generic and exhibiting the danger of this neo-synth score becoming tired in modern cult cinema, and that as much as I enjoy the ending Starry Eyes eventually becomes a cycle of almost pornographic gore scenes such as a character's practical effect head being turned into pate with a dumbbell. In comparison something like The Neon Demon is so much more effective as a weird, deliberately provocative movie, whilst saying Starry Eyes is more emotionally resonant is calling the kettle black. It shows promise in its creators but they need to hammer out of themselves the generic tropes of modern American horror filmmaking as soon as possible so really great films could actually come from the pair together or separately.

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Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1994)

From http://www.michaeldvd.com.au/
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Director: Kim Henkel

Screenplay: Kim Henkel

Cast: Renée Zellweger (as Jennifer); Matthew McConaughey (as Vilmer Slaughter); Robert Jacks (as Leatherface); Tonie Perensky (as Darla Slaughter); Lisa Marie Newmyer (as Heather); Tyler Shea Cone (as Barry); Joe Stevens (as Walter Slaughter)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #87

In the last of the original four films of the Chainsaw series, the only phrase you can think of is "what the hell were they smoking?". And yet, whisper it, it's a lot better than Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990) in terms of having an actual personality to it. What was originally called The Return of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, with co-writer of the original film Kim Henkel directing and penning the script, is more compellingly memorable for all that crap I'll still throw at it. Whilst Leatherface inexplicably has had critical reappraisal, what you get here, as a group of preppy students on prom night bump into the new Leatherface family, is a slither of weird John Waters gutter culture, which is all the best parts, couple awkwardly with illogical, baffling plot twists and, unfortunately, some of the worst tropes of horror at this point in the early nineties, when Michael Myers was about to get stuck in pagan cults and Jason Voorhees was turned into a body swapping hell slug. The best parts of this film, some of them in air quotes as "best" as well as legitimately entertaining ones, make the lunacy of what took place as a sequel at least distinct.

A lot of the pain with Part IV is entirely with trying to replicate the original. It's the early half that's the real problem for me because of how bad the main characters you first follow are. Renée Zellweger, as with another future star, stands out positively and another female character, Heather (Lisa Marie Newmyer), changes from an obnoxious figure to a strangely likable and self-aware airhead who asks morbid questions out of mere curiosity, but it's a dreadful group especially with the male characters to suffer through until the villains appear to knock them off one-by-one. Neither was it particularly clever to recreate exact parts from the first film like the door gag or the entire meat hook hanging, painting a target on itself it didn't need. The music is also dreadful in large parts, a peculiar mix which establishes why post-grunge (or even just-post-grunge music since this was made in only 1994) is probably one of the worst things to have happened to horror cinema since censorship.

Beyond this, it's a compelling mess of dysfunction which entirely gets entertainment value from the Leatherface clan and how far over into the deep end it goes. I was immediately aware that Henkel from the beginning wanted to create an off-beat film that was intentionally humorous when, at the first start at the prom, a random background female character comes in frame and turns out to be talking to an imaginary person aloud in her own cloud of thought. The film is quirky to an extreme and with this in mind, the Leatherface family being entirely different even in how Leatherface himself is depicted in each film is far less an issue for me when its instead a way for screenwriters to add their own idiosyncrasies to them. There's one failure who isn't even fun in a bad way, Joe Stevens' Walter Slaughter who quotes famous figures all the time, another failed attempt at capturing lightning in a bottle that was both Edwin Neal's Hitchhiker and Bill Moseley's Chop Top. Aside from this, what redeems this film greatly is how deliciously bizarre this menagerie is. My personal favourite is Darla (Tonie Perensky), a trashy female figure who's proudly charismatic and no nonsense with a tendency to flash honking cars outside her office.

Of course there's Matthew McConaughey too, and contrary to the agent who tried to shelf this film permanently in case it damaged his reputation, it's clear like with Viggo Mortensen that he was destined for a lengthy career, even a film as shambolic like this in his early career an excuse to outshine almost everyone else onscreen. Randomly assaulting every other character, having an improvised mechanical device to allow him to walk on a permanently crippled leg, with apparently over a hundred TV remotes at hand charged to power said contraction, it's not a role for him to be embarrassed about because, like Mortensen, he's clearly a young actor giving over a hundred percent and showing a visible talent in how mad as a box of frogs he comes off as here. It's kind of sad, knowing full well that The Next Generation is understandably a disaster, that McConaughey was paid for his clear acting talent with a lot of A-list Hollywood films, for every good one, which are usually not as impressive as they could've been when, if he could salvage a film as notorious as this one with just his screen time, more horror films could've benefitted from him being cast in them.

Then there's the decision to have a transsexual Leatherface (played by singer-songwriter Robert Jacks). One the surface, there's far more of a concern for me now about it coming off as transphobic rather than caring whether its blasphemous to the original version by Gunnar Hansen or not. Take it as it is, a character who decided to dress like a woman to the point of both wearing a woman's face and breasted torso flesh, it's a fascinating direction to go with in gruesome implications. What actually happens onscreen thought is that the character turns into the most John Waters like part of the movie, a wordless drag queen-like figure who coos and holds his sat posture regally at the dinner table very nobly, beneath the makeup and Liz Taylor hairdo a songwriter whose interactions with Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers should've been a sign of where the film, let along this performance, would go in terms of the weirdness stakes. It's the most inspired aspect of the film, even if it means Leatherface is no longer a threat here, with less time onscreen menacing people with chainsaws when McConaughey is foaming at the mouth and doing most of the sadism.

The film eventually stops making sense, one of those rare films that phrase can be justified for. While hyperbole is a dangerous place to go, this whiffs of the same weirdness a Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966) only with a higher budget and technical quality, but the exact level of irrationality taking place when it reaches the finale, asking myself what exactly I was witnessing. The entire reveal of an Illuminati group being behind the Leatherface clan, the most notorious decision, is when this turn into nonsense starts The entirety of this plot twist is dumb but the result is that the final act is completely deranged to the point McConaughey suddenly becomes detracted from the rest of the film for maybe ten minutes or so, a suited man with body modification and giant piercings on his belly abruptly appears, random old people in a camper van take part in the escape sequence, alongside death by aeroplane and an inexplicable cameo from Marilyn Burns from the first film. The result isn't a good film in the damned slightest but when most sequels to horror films are known to be lazy and predictable, the weirdness here is at least admirable even if it feels like your eyes have been spiked with a hallucinogen. 

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