Chaw (2009) [Mini-Review]

From https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/
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Director: Shin Jung-won

Screenplay: Shin Jung-won and Kim Yung-chul

Cast: Uhm Tae-woong (as Kim Kang-soo); Jung Yu-mi (as Byun Soo-ryun); Jang Hang-sun (as Chun Il-man); Yoon Je-moon (as Baek Man-bae); Park Hyuk-kwon (as Detective Shin); Kim Gi-cheon (as the Village Chief)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #57

The premise of a giant man-eating boar rampaging a small Korean town - even if it's openly lifting plot structure from Jaws (1975) - is a solid one to work with. There's a blurring between guilt over the damage over the environment human beings have committed and a fear of nature which can be exploited through a film like this, the notion of nature attacking as a plot, something which exploded in the seventies, a perfect one to show our inherent weakness in the wilderness alongside the revealing our own responsibility for said punishment being handed out to us. A large problem with being able to make another film like this now is that, if it remotely veers into the area of monsters, they can easily fall into becoming comical, the result of the Syfy CGI films having a detrimental effect on taking giant animals seriously. Chaw does suffer from having to make its giant boar CGI at points but, particularly as an actual prop boar was used at other points, it's a credible threat nonetheless especially as a lumbering, tank-like entity which rampages and gores anything in its way. Following the plot of Kim Kang-soo (Uhm Tae-woong), a cop transferred from the city of Seoul and expecting to give tractor drivers speeding tickets, and the police forced to try to stop the animal, this lesser known South Korean genre movie can make a board devouring people work.

The clichés in fact help, as they justify the notion that, if something isn't broke, there's no point to fix them. The Jaws plot that the officials would rather have tourism at their harvest festival regardless of the possible deaths works as, like Jaws and if such an event happened in real life, it brings a conundrum that even to protect the lives would compromise the economy of the village as it would the coastal town of Jaws. Having the old, grizzled hunter Chun Il-man (Jang Hang-sun) helps as a dramatic lynchpin, going after the boar when it devours his granddaughter, and as a counter to Baek Man-bae (Yoon Je-moon), the celebrity big game hunter and former understudy whose magazine appearances and multi-ethnic band of fellow hunters armed with high tech weaponry aren't a match to the boar's almost bulletproof fur.

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The problem with Chaw is its strange quirks getting in the way of interesting story development. Asian cinema in general has a lot of tonal shifts so this isn't an issue for me, having become acclimatised and actually fonder of this style than with more rigid Western story telling structure, but Chaw does feel bloated with pieces which prevent the film from fleshing out its characters and plot beyond the starting clichés. For all the funny moments - the utterly incompetent and lazy police chief who demands his young police officers go to pick up maimed body parts from crime scenes, to the stranger jokes like a pair of obnoxious rappers performing at a celebratory party to mostly middle aged farmers - there's aspects, particularly characters, who make no sense and feel out of place. Kang-soo's mother, with dementia but played like a comically absurd figure out of reality, is one, and the most egregious, and actually disturbing, is a homeless mad woman who has claimed a young orphaned boy and beats him if he doesn't call her his mother, something never resolved or actually part of the plot, something that comes off as creepy in a film that's bizarrely whimsical for a great deal of its length.

The film eventually becomes predictable as well, the blend of action and monster movie starting to lose me emotionally by the end - it stresses that, as a preference, even a rollercoaster of a film about thrills needs to take time to put the characters and their interactions first even for, as here, a railway cart chase from a boar so I can worry for their situation. The reason Jaws has its legacy, in my opinion, is not just its chills but that it's a hybrid of turn of the century pulp storytelling and the drama of the then-modern seventies Hollywood cinema alongside the thrill of the giant shark. Chaw does well with moderately interesting and funny characters but by its end, when it needed an adrenaline boost of emotional drama, it merely peters out. It's certainly an odd, fascinating duck of a movie - the end credits has the cast, including those who were eaten, pop up from behind bushes and fences smiling to the camera as their name appears under them - but the full film merely does the average level of quality expected from it and nothing more.

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The Wizard of Gore (1970) [Mini-Review]

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Director: Herschell Gordon Lewis

Screenplay: Allen Kahn

Cast: Ray Sager (as Montag the Magnificent); Judy Cler (as Sherry Carson); Wayne Ratay (as Jack); Phil Laurenson (as Greg); Jim Rau (as Steve)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #56

It seems inappropriate to give an average review to one of Herschell Gordon Lewis's just after his sad passing in September 2016, so I'll start this review with only immense praise to him to counterbalance this, something deserved as one of the most important people of the American phenomenon of exploitation cinema. Many directors, stars and producers, including frequent Lewis collaborator David F. Friedman, are responsible for this movement but as much of its aesthetic style, which became a pop art flourish in itself and is lovingly paid tribute to with Arrow Video's cereal box sized Blu-Ray collection of his work, can be found in his pronounced emphasised on promotion and luridness, his worlds of bright bubblegum colours alongside bright red gore contributing to an exploitation cinema aesthetic that I and many others loves, and can be found in anything from fanzines to music like psychobilly. He was the inventor of the splatter genre, as important in itself to a whole size of horror cinema of obsessing over blood and using animal organs bought from the butchers. I like Something Weird (1967) immensely as a snapshot of the growing obsession with the paranormal which only got weirder, living up to its title, in the seventies and American pop culture, and whether you like Blood Feast (1963) or not it's a historically important film that has to be preserved - if not as a Video Nasty or for being one of the first gore films, at least for Fuad Ramses' giant eyebrows. His theme for Ten Thousand Maniacs! (1964) is exceptional, both composing and singing it, and I have a fondness for the monotonous drum beat, also played by Lewis, that makes up Blood Feast's main theme. Regardless of my criticisms of The Wizard of Gore, I can only have absolute admiration for Lewis and his career because of all this.

With this is mind it's a shame to find faults in The Wizard of Gore but a large part of this is really because it's an acquired taste in his filmography than like Blood Feast. This is entirely down to the very repetitious structure which can be sluggish in the slower moments - Montag the Magnificent (Ray Sager) performs a gruesome magic trick involving a female audience member, (by chainsaw, by swords, by industrial punch press), only for the volunteer when they seem okay to suddenly die of the same affliction of the trick hours later, leading to police investigation and broadcast host Sherry Carson (Judy Cler) and her sports journalist boyfriend Jack (Wayne Ratay) to suspect Montag is involved. The police procedure is entirely responsible for the weaker moments of the film. As much as I am someone who doesn't immediately like a film just for gore, with Lewis he's at his most rewarding with the sloppy, blood drenched gore scenes or with the more openly absurd and camp moments of hysteria; the police investigation and small talk, especially over ninety minutes, is out of place with what makes Lewis rewarding, particularly when his most famous film Blood Feast is a lot shorter in length. This type of exploitation cinema of the period especially, because of its ninety plus minute length, needs something to keep the viewer's attention and in this case it lacks the general weirdness of the titular Something Weird or Mal Arnold's performance in Blood Feast to compensate for the drearier scenes.

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When Montag is onscreen or the gore is split, The Wizard of Gore becomes entertaining in an incredibly sick humoured way. While his tone is comical, I've always found Lewis' gore, because its exceptionally fake, to actually gross me out, the tactile nature of his polystyrene heads and real butcher shop animal organs exceptionally disturbing at points, close-ups of Montag molesting an actual eyeball, possible a sheep's for all I know, from a very fake doll's head actually gross to see in its viscous and tangible reality. (Not surprisingly, and Lewis would've rubbed his hands in glee at this, the first of his films I saw at eighteen or nineteen, The Gore Gore Girls (1972), actually offended me with its lurid fake prosthetics and leering at their destruction, the infamous milkshake scene taking his obsession with fake gore to its inevitable conclusion, still burnt into my mind whilst having never seen the film since). When it gets to the finale as well and breaks from the repeating of magic tricks, it manages to tap into a legitimately creepy idea of how Montag is able to hypnotise everyone around the country who is watching the TV broadcast he is on; all reduced to staring hypnotised to the screen with blood dripping off the back of one hand each, the director who openly admitted he didn't make art did take into something legitimately freakish I have to commend him on.

While the reason behind the deaths are obvious, the unexplained supernatural nature of the film, from the layers of reality cut between in during the magic shows, to the multiple scenes in (naturally) blood red hue of the bodies being taken away to an unknown destination, stand out as the more interesting parts. And the final twist is hilarious in pulling the rug under the viewer and causing them to scratch their head in bafflement - it's a random turn of events, ending in a kaleidoscope image, but brilliantly its set up at the beginning with Montag's opening monologue about the subjectively of reality, forcing one to admit Lewis was purposely fucking with the viewer out of his (justified) amusement since the beginning. And it's in this where the film is rewarding, the ideal taste of low brow surrealism found in this era of American exploitation cinema eventually found by the end. If The Wizard of Gore was slightly shorter, I would've gladly recommended it but, unfortunately, I have to ask people who've never seen films of his to proceed with caution due to its bloated length. 

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Halloween 31 For 31: Halloween (1978)

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Director: John Carpenter

Screenplay: John Carpenter and Debra Hill

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis (as Laurie Strode); Nick Castle (as Michael Myers); Donald Pleasence (as Dr. Sam Loomis); Charles Cyphers (as Sheriff Leigh Brackett); Nancy Kyes (as Annie Brackett); P. J. Soles (as Lynda Van Der Klok)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #55

It'll be impossible to add anything else to the view of Halloween analytically or in aesthetic. In fact the most interesting thing from my perspective I can add is that it was an immensely slow period of rewatches before I held Halloween as beyond an okay film to one of the best horror films I've seen from the seventies. Probably the more surprisingly thing for me revisiting it, since this review is inevitably going to just going to praise it to the hilt, is how for what innovated the slasher as a fully formed genre it was followed by so many films which fell below completely in terms of quality next to it. There's plenty of fun slashers and I've so many to still see, always willing to give a chance to one I haven't seen, but the level of quality in terms of how well made and beautiful Halloween is, even if it deals with exceptionally grim subject matter, is an entire mountain higher than most of the films made to cash in on it eventually. This is something which is baffling in hindsight as in this period of the later seventies and eighties, you can find films which effectively cashed in on popular mainstream hits which are yet capable of being great movies in themselves.

Surprisingly, even in the context of slasher films and their constant repetition of plot lines, Halloween is simplistic in plot even next to its sequels, as while later films including Friday the 13 (1980) would have more complicated back stories, all there is about the first Halloween is a boy named Michael Myers who killed his older sister then, after escaping a mental asylum years later, targets three young woman (Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, Nancy Kyes (as Annie Brackett) and P. J. Soles as Lynda Van Der Klok). No folktale mythology, little in terms of an actual body count, and very minimal even in the extremely threadbare slashers of later years, only Donald Pleasance as Myers' psychologist Dr. Sam Loomis giving chase qualifies as a subplot. It was a deceptively simple, explaining why my younger self wasn't interested in the film at first, and there's little to Myers barring being a figure who stalks a couple of suburbia houses, its economy more frightening in this especially when you view it as a cinematic mirror of the serial killings starting to take place in the late sixties onwards in the USA. This reality, of a kid who kills for no reason, taps directly into then-modern idea in horror films of remorselessness, as Loomis says there's nothing behind Myers' eyes, crossed with the supernatural by making him a literal bogeyman for Tommy Doyle (Brian Andrews), the young boy Laurie is babysitting, to see outside his window at night and be terrified of. Because of Dean Cundey's awe-inspiring cinematography there are times it feels like Myers literally disappears and re-materialises from the shadows like a spectre.

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It of course helps that the people he terrorises are written and acted like real people. It's a problem with horror cinema in general, but even in fun and ridiculous movies, unless you're a great writer of esoteric or funny dialogue, I cannot stand characters who merely speak in quips and generic exposition. Even though I appreciate fans of cheese in their movies, who can cultivate and cherish it like the actual connoisseurs of cheeses made from curdled milk, only in rare cases (i.e. trying to comprehend any of the dialogue of the Canadian shot-on-video film Things (1989)) do I appreciate the random in dialogue. At least with European and Italian cinema at this period, even if the dubbed dialogue could be absurd,they kept the characters quiet for large portions of them and let the mood speak for itself,, whilst the worst stereotype of a slasher (or any horror film) is incessantly speaking and talks too much about little. The combination of John Carpenter openly admitting his influence from classic Hollywood and the unsung quality of the late Debra Hill as a writer means that, alongside great performances, you have characters you care completely for in the context of a minimalistic chiller. Jamie Lee Curtis in particular stood out this time and its baffling that people created the virginal Final Girl stereotype from the Laurie Strode character when its completely alien, feeling like a puritanical bastardisation of a more complicated and interesting figure - a sarcastic but thoughtful figure, who smokes pot but is utterly reliable as a person, merely shy around boys and has other peoples' work begrudgingly dumped on her lap including by her friends. For her first performance in a film, its great acting by Lee Curtis even when she has to play the moments of screaming and cowering from Myers before she starts to retaliate back.

As a horror film, the languid pace is perfect. Cundey's cinematography adds a realistic, Americana look in the daytime scenes but at night gives a story almost grounded in reality a phantasmagoric edge in how Michael Myers blends into the shadows. The music by Carpenter himself is iconic, tapping into similar unease from the use of electronic music. What's also worth motioning, whilst a film about death and terror, is that it lavishes a love to Halloween the holiday itself. Old horror films playing on the televisions, including The Thing from Another World (1951) as a premonition of Carpenter's career, to the various appearances of pumpkins beyond the ominous opening credits. Barring Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982), none of the later films' references to ancient ritual and Samhain had any sense of real mythos to it, merely terrible script writing, completely out of place of a very American phantom of a killer who murders indiscriminately but also in treating Halloween as a festival as a homespun and warm holiday, of trick and treating to dressing up in costumes. This is better as there is preferably instead a sense of humanity felt, but as a result the horrible fear of a person in a white William Shatner mask stalking around becomes a real terror in a local community. Not a lot of the slashers I've seen have ever had the sense of a community, merely setting with stock types, to make the terror more disturbing, so the sense of frivolity and childhood innocence found in Haddonfield's suburbia is more startling in hindsight to what horrible things will happen in the narrative. It's a line where, when Annie's father Sheriff Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers) scares Laurie and says everyone deserves a scare on Halloween, that is the core of the namesake film over it, less the gore and big hair of the eighties which are utterly alien to the viewers, but a creepy ghost ride which is yet so close to the places its original audience would be living it that it has grounded, real chill to it. Watching it many Halloweens like many others, it's both a comfort film but, especially with its almost surreal ending where Carpenter shows shots of empty rooms after the tragedy has taken place, also a film that efficiently scrapes a primal nerve of discomfort every single time I view it now. 

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Halloween 31 For 31: The Dead Next Door (1989)

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Director: J.R. Bookwalter

Screenplay: J.R. Bookwalter

Cast: Pete Ferry (as Raimi); Bogdan Pecic (as Dr. Moulsson); Michael Grossi (as Mercer); Jolie Jackunas (as Kuller); Robert Kokai (as Rev. Jones)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #54

The Dead Next Door, if anything should be taken from this review, is an achievement in terms of an incredibly low budget production directed by a man in his early twenties, a higher sense of technical quality I have to applaud regardless of my final opinion of the entire film. Even though it was executively produced by Sam Raimi and has Bruce Campbell dubbing voices in the cast, that doesn't detract from the fact of how this incredibly low budget zombie film feels drastically better contrasted and organised than a lot of the future uber low or no budget films that would appear in the recent decades, a high water mark for quality to still follow. The prologue is a feat to have created by itself. An exceptional amount of zombified extras rampage onscreen as the undead in the first scenes, a huge number to coordinate that run after the other non-zombie extras, giving the film an incredible sense of scale. Jokes, as this is a comedy, are fewer than a rapid fire slapstick film but hit the mark in an amusing way, such as a shot of someone brining apes of the likes of The Evil Dead (1981) to the counter of a video rental store only to reveal they're a zombie, making this the perfect way to start the film with.

Throughout there's many things to constantly applaud in the film - about an anti-zombie group, set up after the undead apocalypse has passed five years earlier, going to retrieve a serum for the infection only to encounter a cult of zombie worshippers -  which I admire Bookwalter for pulling off. Dolly shots created through ingenuity (and possibly some duck tape). The rubbery prosthetics reminiscent of Peter Jackson's Bad Taste (1987) with its gore mixed with humour, from a zombie allowed to talk by way of vocal tampering, as interested in singing the American national anthem as he is wanting to eat people, to another zombie with its head split in half and still moving, a nice touch (but not fully used to its advantage) that the zombies can survive even headshots and being chopped into pieces. Bookwalter even goes as far as shooting extras posing as zombies clinging to the outer rails of the White House in Washington DC, footage that's incredible for him to have acquired if anyone had noticed them coordinating the scene. It also has a lot of amusing side characters who stand out away from the main plot thread, from a cult henchman with a blond mullet called Carpenter (Jeff Welch) to Dr. Moulsson (Bogdan Pecic), a mad scientist with the anti-zombie group who always has a hat on even if its yellow clashes with his white lab coat.

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The Dead Next Door however, after the initial energy of the prologue , slows down incredibly when it reaches the main plot, a very economic but ultimately uninteresting narrative. As the film follows anti-zombie member Raimi (Pete Ferry, voiced by Bruce Campbell) and those with him to get the serum, it starts to suffer from a lack of whit and invention in spite of its low budget, boiling down to a large portion of listless dialogue scenes. It presents an interesting, and potentially fun and gory, notion that the anti-zombie group are up against worshippers of the undead, lead by the fanatical leader Reverend Jones (Robert Kokai), who has herded countless zombies in the basement of their headquarters and who is willing to let people be sacrificed to fed the zombies, but it's never taken advantage of. Instead its bogged down by plot points which usually lead to more extrenious dialogue, worse when these threads are ultimately discarded, such as the daughter of the scientist who started the zombie outbreak being a brainwashed member of the cult. Only in the side jokes and quirks does the film stand out, from Dr. Moulsson just being a mad scientist, wanting to help humanity but not above injecting an experimental serum into a soldier who's turning into the undead, or any jokes about his completely incompetent assistant Dr. Savini (Joe Wedlake); next to them the soldiers are ultimately bland and the main thread of the plot is disinteresting, a problem which effects any film both high or low budgeted, but sad when something like The Dead Next Door has the ambition it has. I admire it for the technical quality it has against its limitations but it needed more personality as well.

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Halloween 31 For 31: Don't Go In The House (1979)

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Director: Joseph Ellison

Screenplay: Ellen Hammill, Joe Masefield and Joseph Ellison

Cast: Dan Grimaldi (as Donald Kohler); Colin Mclnness (as Young Donald Kohler); Robert Osth (as Bobby Tuttle); Ruth Dardick (as Mrs. Kohler); Ralph D. Bowman (as Father Gerritty)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #53

As a perfect example of the golden age of American independent genre movies Don't Go In The House does emphasis that, warts and all, they can be compelling in their attempts to tackle incredibly difficult subjects like abuse and serial killings in the tone of incredibly gritty, low-fi exploitation films. Very much in the lineage of films following Psycho (1960), about men with traumatised histories with their mothers, Donald Kohler (Dan Grimaldi) is one such man visible disconnected from reality, in the opening scene witnessing a co-worker accidentally get set on fire and merely standing in the spot watching them blankly scream in pain burning. Having been constantly burnt on the arms as a child, his punishment according to his mother to get rid of his sins (likely conceived out of wedlock from her obsession with the sin of desire and how the father is never mentioned at all), Donald has developed into an isolated human being with deeply problematic views of women. These views become dangerous the moment his elderly mother dies in a chair in their family home, developing a desire to create a steel plated, fire resistant room in the basement and kidnap women he picks up to touch them within using a flamethrower, collecting their remains afterwards as company to talk to.

While an exceptionally lurid film in premise, synonymous as a Video Nasty especially for its disturbingly realistic first death by fire done with optical trickery, this is however easy to categorise alongside a brand of other low budget, run down and incredibly serious films from this period in the seventies and early eighties usually about damaged individuals and/or grimy urban locals, such as Abel Ferrara's The Driller Killer (1979), films which even when they are blackly comedic or even splatstock had a nasty sense of reality to them difficult to shake off from mind. Don't Go In The House has moment so levity, the cheesy music and an extended sequence in a disco club time stamping it, but it's an incredibly dark film in tone. It also shows its rawness as a production as well, particularly in the acting as it was post dubbed and has a strange disconnect to the performances, but it has a deeply unsettling presentation in the midst of this.

Grimaldi in the lead certainly helps give the film a greater sense of thought. Whilst his post-dubbing can lead to moments of odd line pronunciation, his manner as a visibly disturbed man forces you to have to deal with its subtext about cruelty against children, eventually culminating by the end of the film in a final scene of the camera passing its eye onto another young boy who could develop the voices in his head Donald does. When his own mother dies, after the initial grief, said voices in Donald's head encourages him to act like a liberated and mischievous young boy, turning the music on his record player up as loudly as possible and jump up and down on the seat of one of the chairs, moments which suggest a strange levity in the bleakness of the moment until the voices turn and decide he should burn his mother's corpse as revenge. The character and Grimaldi's performance creates a compelling figure, a mix of a grown up man child, gestures suggesting psychotic glee as he has to prepare himself to kill an innocent woman, including ritually dressing up in a fire retardant full body suit, and sympathy especially as his demons take on literal form in the growing number of dead women start to move around in the house tormenting him.

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Don't Go In The House is also helped by a common thread amongst independent genre films from this era that they as much compelling dramas, regardless of whether the acting is perfect or not, as they are genre films and the fact that, as low budget productions, the results usually mean an entire world of interesting faces and locations you rarely find in higher budgeted Hollywood movies even in this time period where interesting faces and sights were possible to see in large scale movies, a home grown quality that adds to the grit to the material. Baring one strangely dubbed priest Father Gerritty, this adds a lot of emotional connection alongside Grimaldi's performance. This can be the amusing and thoughtful, from the amusing scene inside a fashion store where the clerk gets Donald the perfect threads for a disco club to his only friend Bobby Tuttle (Robert Osth) who cares for Donald incredibly, but especially helps with generating a horrible discomfort with what Donald commits, with all the actresses who play the women victimised looking and acting like women who would've lived next door to the audience of this film at the time, emphasising a greater sense of agony when it gets to their eventual demises. The music by Richard Einhorn, who'd go on to have a healthy career in genre cinema and acclaim for his tangents into artistically high minded scores and those for cult films alike, injects the film with a further sense of dread with his use of atonal drones, the electronic noises adding to the ill-ease Donald lives through.

Not surprisingly, Don't Go In The House was seen as too grim and disturbing to be immensely popular, a chilling effect felt when witnessing it now with its stark tone and incredibly bleak out view of life. However because of this reason, the film has a greater reputation and I for one can absolutely see why in terms of its virtues.

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Halloween 31 For 31: Beetlejuice (1988)

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Director: Tim Burton

Screenplay: Michael McDowell and Warren Skaaren

Cast: Michael Keaton (as Betelgeuse); Alec Baldwin (as Adam Maitland); Geena Davis (as Barbara Maitland); Catherine O'Hara (as Delia Deetz); Jeffrey Jones (as Charles Deetz); Winona Ryder (as Lydia Deetz); Glenn Shadix (as Otho)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #52

My interest in obscurer films means I ignore most mainstream cinema out of priority and disinterest. Of course there are directors like the Coen Brothers that I love but many that I don't put forward in concern next to films unfairly neglected and more interesting in premise to me. This can be to a detriment sometimes and there are a few cases now where, when I take interest in certain directors and films, I find myself surprised by how good the films are. There are other cases, as with Tim Burton, where I grew up with his films and am only now returning to them with greater admiration. I won't comment on Tim Burton the current filmmaker of the 2010s, a debate that has exasperated many as they ask what films are good or not, because baring his throwbacks to his old style in Corpse Bride (2005) and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007) I've only seen films within adulthood from before the Millennium. Naturally his gothic aesthetic style wins me over but what has made films like Beetlejuice or Batman Returns (1992) far more rewarding to now as an adult is that, even when making blockbusters, his obsession with a macabre or heightened aesthetic isn't mere window dressing, as is a huge problem with "stylish" Hollywood films, but filtered entirely through to the performances and themes he has obsessed over in his career as well adding a greater texture to them and adding more to love within the films. (And it's not merely in horror and fantasy either, as with Ed Wood (1994) Burton managed to take one of the least effective and rewarding genres in cinema, the biopic, and make a movie that was actually good from it).

With this in mind, Beetlejuice is a film that feels from a completely different time in Hollywood alien to the present day from how gleefully morbid and anarchic it is as a mainstream horror comedy. The premise is simple - a couple Adam and Barbara Maitland (Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis) die and attempt to haunt the Deetz family that move into their home, Jeffrey Jones as the father Charles, Catherine O'Hara as the mother Delia who sculpts modern art, Winona Ryder as their daughter and Burton stand-in Lydia who can see the ghosts - a prop to lead to utter chaos and an incredibly twisted sense of humour when Adam and Barbara consider hiring Betelgeuse (Michael Keaton) to help them get rid of the family, a vindictive and perverted entity who can escape the prison imposed upon him from the offices of the afterlife if someone says his name three times. The result is an excuse for countless moments stop motions, jokes and various ghoulish incidents, the cinematic equivalent to a carnival ghost ride, but why it succeeds is how idiosyncratic Burton's style is and how much character as a result the film has.

He is an openly fantastical director in his early work who gladly has exaggerated, aesthetically distinct worlds onscreen. This is something already said many times before by others, yet it's worth mentioning again as he's able to contrast various tonal references into his films through this style of his which greatly influences the type of stories he made and their tone. He was able to get away with the out-right German Expressionist influences in Batman Returns through his ability to take material which would allow him already to do so but also bring a carefully considered production and tonal aesthetic as well, something visible here in Beetlejuice as well with its juggling of its overtly macabre content with various tones such as Americana, slapstick and modern art parodies. An entire film, for example, could be made of the Afterlife as depicting in the film, an administration office with extremely long queues where, as Adam and Barbara were lucky just to drown, others remain as they died, including an explorer caught by a head shrinker and, amongst the more bleak moments of humour, office staff including a female suicide victim and a man flattened like a pancake from a vehicle who travels along rooms on a pulley system. That this style is as much part of the personality of the film, neither able to be separated as it influences how the plot goes along and the sense of humour, there's a greater sense of imagination onscreen because its more than gloss. Considering as well how dark and adult the film is in humour, when very adult jokes could be snuck into what is not really a film that would qualify for an American R rating, does allow for the story to be more playful in its content, bordering between the disturbing and the fun in moments such as the Betelgeuse snake attack the Deetz family.

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The use of practical effects, as much for their visible seems as with the accomplishment behind them, adds to the gleeful tone, a distorted reality to when the actors are involved with them or transformed themselves by the effects onscreen,  such as seeing Geena Davis hung on a noose in closet rip her own face off, or the Skullmonkeys -like desert landscape where the iconic sandworms live, processors for the stripy sock snakes of The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) only significantly bigger. Whilst the film in all these scenes is meant to have a humorous streak to it, it's still significantly macabre and it's the kind of cinema which would gladly feed the imagination of any teenager for the better, amazing me as an adult viewer now with what Burton could both get away with and how inspired it feels at the same time.

Musically as well its inspiring what was done for the film. Danny Elfman's exquisite music, including his obsession with the horn section, does evokes as a more knowledgeable person his days as part of Oingo Boingo but the decision to use two calypso songs by Harry Belafonte also evokes the importance of using classic tunes in the Oingo Boingo film Forbidden Zone (1980). Even when I hadn't seen Beetlejuice for decades since I was a child Belafonte's take on the Jamaican folk song Day-O (The Banana Boat Song) had been in my thoughts permanently since then, and revisiting this film, the use of this type of music as a contrast to the gothic influences is one of the best aspects to it, suiting the humour to have actors mime to the songs and also showing the little brushstrokes that make Beetlejuice more entertaining.

Another great aspect of the film, and something which is a key virtue to Burton as director and why he's able to balance his exaggerated aesthetic style with depth, is how the cast are clearly taking the material seriously whilst clearly relishing it. Geena Davis is charismatic and lovely in her role. Alec Baldwin, before he got strange with his politics and calling his real life daughter a little pig, is also charming as Davis' nerdy husband obsessed with his giant model of the town the film is set in. O'Hara's modern art sculptress is more than a one-note joke because of how the actress is able to make her irritated inflections and parody of an urban middle class personality humourous. Ryder, in a very early role, is a great stand-in for the outsider who is fascinated with the macabre that would appear in many of Burton's films. The late Glenn Shadix, as he does in the fun Sylvester Stallone film Demolition Man (1993), steals scenes as Otho, a gracefully voiced but obnoxious specialist of feng shui and exorcism. And then there's Michael Keaton who stands out the most in the film as Betelgeuse - you would think he was a completely different actor from the man who would an incredibly suave Bruce Wayne in Batman (1989) a mere year later, here perfectly playing a hyperactive and charismatic scuzz ball who dominates the film, both hilarious and utterly detestable as the titular figure.

Because of all these factors, what  is mean to be a fun popcorn film is actually a great movie too, tapping into a corpse humour with elaborate spectacle which is utterly irresistible and ultimately something I have found in almost all the Burton films I've revisited. 

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Halloween 31 For 31: The Terror (1963)

From https://alfredeaker.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/
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Director: Roger Corman (with Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill and Jack Nicholson)

Screenplay: Leo Gordon and Jack Hill

Cast: Boris Karloff (as the Baron von Leppe); Jack Nicholson (as Andre Duvalier); Dick Miller (as Stefan); Sandra Knight (as Helene); Dorothy Neumann (as Katrina); Jonathan Haze (as Gustaf)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #51

Not all Roger Corman films are created equal, and in the period of his legendary Edgar Allen Poe films The Terror was spawned from still having Boris Karloff after The Raven (1963) and deciding to take advantage of resources he already had from the Poe films he'd already made. Surprisingly, despite the ridiculous and illustrious list of people meant to have directed parts of the film unofficially with him, it's a surprisingly coherent and curiously woozy supernatural chiller, but the real issue is how undercooked in parts it is against the moments which do succeed completely. Jack Nicholson is a very unconventional choice for a French soldier, Andre Duvalier, who has lost his way from his regiment and into countryside where the alluring and mysterious woman Helene (Sandra Knight) is. Her existence, denied as merely his hallucinations, leads to the castle of Baron von Leppe (Karloff), an elderly lord who claims the woman is his long dead wife, causing Andre to try to get to the bottom of who is right.

Even if it suffers from being in the public domain, and lacklustre versions of the print, The Terror even if it looks like you're viewing it through a dirty sock at least has the same decadent, Technicolor style of the Poe films. Corman's films of this time aren't historically realistic in the slightest but, even on a small budget, are some of the only true examples of the baroque in American cinema, bright colours against dark shadows an irresistible combination in these films of his. As a result, everything from the dark woodland that Helene leads Andre to near danger to the sunny beach coast von Leppe's castle looks over, an opulent castle in itself which naturally has a dank underground family crypt which can be flooded, The Terror certainly has the look and style that made the Poe films so rewarding.

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So much so you forget even as tamer films from their era how nasty and macabre Corman's gothic horror stories actually are. In terms of violent content, The Terror has a far more violent scene than many of the films from this period of his in a character having their eyes gouged out by an eagle and then falling off a cliff. Aside from this the plot is as appropriately morbid for a gothic story as you could get as it deals with murder, adultery, a woman getting revenge through witchcraft and bodily possession. If anything, especially with Karloff as strong a charismatic individual as always to safely support his scenes on, The Terror would've worked without being a Poe adaptation with its unconventional original story.

The issue is that Karloff is only in a few scenes and the film drags without a clear magnetic prescience to support it during the plodding periods of dialogue. Even when he wasn't the lead, Vincent Price still was the glue that makes a great deal of the Poe films successful alongside their other virtues. The Terror suffers from a lack of Karloff and how Jack Nicholson is very young and green behind the ears here, perfect to play the bumbling son of Peter Lorre in The Raven but still stepping forwards awkwardly as a lead here, before he became a more charismatic actor, dealing with less than perfect dialogue without enough relish to it. Barring Karloff, the film is deflated in terms of charisma, needed to prick its spirit up but only standing out in its more colourful and macabre moments. Likely the reason The Terror is lesser known is that it's quite a flat, sluggish story in spite of its short feature length and moments of sparkle. As much as Corman is an incredibly talented director and shrewd producer, his tendency to recycle and take advantage of resources didn't necessary always work, and there's moments to The Terror that are fun but does suffer from this.

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