Time to catch up on some of the stuff I should have written about when I was taking a break from this blog.

IT

You already know the story: a group of kids—The Losers’ Club—descend into the sewers in search of a missing boy. What they find is a clown that’s anything but funny. I find the clown a lot creepier in theory than in execution, but I genuinely like clowns so maybe that’s a personal problem.

IT looks great and it rarely bores, but I almost get the feeling it thinks it’s better than what it really is: a monster movie. Don’t get me wrong, I went for pulp and I certainly got it, but then there’s oddly placed pieces of character development—or under-development; it’s obvious the stuff from the book wasn’t designed for a brisk two-hour movie, and there are so many characters you couldn’t possibly spend enough time with all of them, so it feels a little weird to see it all truncated. I don’t think IT is a great movie as is, but if another hour of it ever shows up in a director’s cut some day, it very well could be great.

Early on, it’s established that one of the kids freezes up when it comes to slaughtering lambs at his job. You think this is setting up important character information, but it turns out it’s merely setting up the cattle-gun itself, which the kid will eventually use for protection. The town bullies, too, sort of feel like an awkward detail now; The Losers’ Club wouldn’t exist without ’em, but the resolution of the subplot seemed utterly rushed and ultimately pointless to me.

I usually love stuff like this, but this time I’m left feeling a little underwhelmed. Decent horror movie with great performances, but I think I need to see it again when the sequel comes out.

Alien Covenant

Life

Life stars Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, and Ryan Reynolds as astronauts who intercept an extraterrestrial sample on the International Space Station. This is no spoiler, though it takes too long for the movie to get to it: the biological sample rapidly evolves and begins killing them one by one. In a matter of days, it’s smart enough to understand the inner workings of the ISS and forms a plan to reach Earth.Okay.

I like this movie on paper, but it’s a little too obvious about what it’s trying to do. It’s nice to see astronauts appropriately reacting to their amazing surroundings with awe (an oversight in Alien Covenant), but these heavy-handed scenes drag on. In one scene the crew is having dinner in a scene that’s reminiscent of the original Alien, but it’s lifeless and unbelievable. I’m not sure the cast was firing on all cylinders.

I think there’s a fun story here, it just isn’t executed particularly well, and I’m getting a little bored with “rapidly evolving” monsters. (2009’s Splice handled this trope much better, and you can read that review here.) Life’s not a bad movie, but it’s not a good one, either. Like Alien Covenant, the ending’s the best part because it doesn’t want to reassure us that everything’s a-okay in the world.

Still, I’m glad we’re getting movies like these in theaters. I think it’s a good sign for the future of horror. It’s been a long time since mainstream movies had any bite.

The problem with Body Parts, at the time of release, was the marketing: the TV promos gave away the film’s biggest surprise and a wonderful (if not unlikely) moment involving a pair of handcuffs. The scene I’m referencing really requires you to suspend your disbelief, but it’s unexpected and wild enough you won’t mind. If you haven’t seen the movie or the trailer yet, I envy you.

I won’t talk about the last third of the movie. I’ll just say that, even though it’s completely different than the two-thirds proceeding it, it’s every bit as good. It involves the kind of turning point which usually breaks these kinds of movies. Body Parts pulls it off expertly.

Jeff Fahey plays a criminal psychologist who loses his arm in a car wreck. When he wakes up he discovers he’s the beneficiary of a revolutionary limb transplant. The new arm takes getting used to, but he tells his family that it’s even better than the old arm in some ways.

The catch? His control over the arm is only tenuous. When curling a dumbbell, the arm lashes out of his control for no good reason. When shaving, he has another malfunction which ends up gouging his face with the razor. When he makes love to his wife and the new hand slides between her legs… well, that’s about as good as suspense gets. The main character can’t run away from the horror, can’t hide from it in a closet. It’s always there, wherever he goes.

After Fahey begins having nightmares which he believes are a direct result of the transplant, he goes to the police station and has his new fingerprints taken. It turns out the hand belonged to a recently executed death row inmate who murdered over thirty people with his bare hands. When Fahey fails to get answers from the doctor who did this to him, he seeks out others who got the killer’s parts. One of the other beneficiaries is played by Brad Dourif, who’s just as compelling as Fahey. In fact, the entire cast is a cut above most horror movies, which is one of the reasons it’s so damn good.

There are some moments which will test your intelligence. In one scene a bar fight breaks out and a gaggle of policemen show up in seconds—including the homicide detective who’s pertinent to the plot (Zakes Mokae). The fact that Fahey’s character is a psychologist allows him to come up with all kinds of cockamamie hypotheses about what’s going on, but the monologues come off as flimsy technobabble at best. Still, these moments aren’t nearly as insulting as they could be and they’re few and far between. To mention them at all is nitpicking because this is a remarkably mature and entertaining horror film, the middle section of which kind of plays out as a detective story.

I’m often annoyed when movies keep teasing what we already know, but that’s because most movies feel so artificial and contrived in the way they go about generating suspense. Fortunately, there’s something inherently unsettling—and thrilling—when the source of that suspense is a physical part of the hero. I’d go so far as to say it’s a great movie, with good music and solid camera work. And even if the trailer was misleading about the movie as a whole, it eventually gives us exactly what was advertised.

I think it’s a rare movie that, potentially, could be just as appealing to non-horror fans as it is to gore hounds. The gore, when it finally arrives, is both tasteful and utterly satisfying.

Welcome to 31 Days of Gore Part III! I’m running on fumes at this point, so next year it’ll be set in space!

Movies like Blood Rage are the reason slasher fans slog through one miserable rip-off after another. Despite being made in 1983, it didn’t come out until 1987. If you saw it back then, there’s a good chance you saw a heavily censored version called Nightmare at Shadow Woods. Curiously, the title card on the new(ish) Arrow Video release calls it Slasher. Why? No clue.

Here are the goods on display:

Also at the drive-in is Louise Lasser’s character, the mother of twin boys, who’s on a date. While she’s making out with her suitor, the kids sneak off and roam the grounds. One of the kids discovers a hatchet in the back of a pickup and, for reasons no more complex than simple insanity, murders a naked man in the back of a car. The psychotic child hands the makeshift weapon off to his innocent brother, who’s so paralyzed with shock he’s convinced he really did commit the murder.

Fast forward ten years later and the innocent brother has a breakthrough in his therapy: he remembers it was his brother, now gleefully living the life he should have had, who committed the murders. Realizing that his mother is living with a deranged psychopath, he escapes the mental institution… which means that the psychotic brother now has an alibi for a killing spree.

Mark Soper does a fantastic job playing the grown-up twins. No, his performance wouldn’t win an Oscar, but it’s not supposed to, either. What he does is perfect for this kind of movie: insane, but not too far over-the-top, and he makes one of the most memorable slashers I’ve ever seen. Also good here is Louise Lasser, who thankfully knows exactly what kind of movie she’s gotten herself into.

I see so many irredeemably routine slasher movies that I can’t help but jump for joy when I find one as entertaining as this.

This is probably the longest break I’ve taken from this blog in something like nine years, but if 31 Days of Gore doesn’t happen this year it’s because I’m dead. (And I’ll haunt whoever reads this… I ain’t got nothin’ better to do in death.)

I can’t tell you exactly what to expect this year, but I tend to feature at least one shot-on-VHS horror flick, a melt film, a Full Moon movie, and a Troma movie. I also plan to feature an entire trilogy or series each Friday of the month. The rest of the month I like to play by ear so I don’t get bored.

The only thing I can say for sure: it’s going to be the best one yet. Catch up on the last two years here.

Would You Rather looks like the kind of movie I usually despise. But recently, Bloody Disgusting’s YouTube channel give it a recommendation so I decided to check it out because I haven’t covered many newer movies this year. I must say I’m impressed.

Iris (Brittany Snow) is a wholesome young blonde who’s had to put her life on hold in order to care for her sick brother. One day she meets the super rich Shepard Lambrick (Jeffery Combs) who invites her and a handful of others to a mysterious dinner party. Iris reluctantly accepts, but when she makes it known she’s a vegetarian, Lambrick offers her a deal: if she eats all the meat on her plate, he’ll give her ten thousand dollars, cash. When Lambrick notices another dinner guest (John Heard) hasn’t touched his wine because he’s sixteen years sober, the charitable host offers the ex-alcoholic a similarly fucked up deal.

And that’s only the appetizer. What the guests soon learn is they’ve been invited to play a twisted version of Would You Rather, which goes something like this: Would you rather stab the person next to you in the leg, or give the person at the end of the table three lashes with a whip? The problem with most movies with built-in candy bar scenes is they find trouble topping the previous ones. Would You Rather manages to top everything that came before it time after time. This is one diabolically entertaining movie with a lot of gruesome surprises. The pleasure Lambrick gets from orchestrating the game is some darkly funny stuff to see.

Brittany Snow’s presence makes you suspect this is yet another mindless horror movie aimed solely at the kind of teens who’ve never seen a legitimate horror movie in their lives, but it feels more like a Twilight Zone episode or a Richard Matheson story. I think I would have preferred it more if the dinner guests were voluntarily playing the sick games, rather than forced by gunpoint, but that’s a superficial complaint. (I mean, come on, isn’t it sicker when good people do fucked up stuff when they don’t actually have to?)

I made three predictions during the movie and two of them (including the end) turned out to be right. Even so, I hesitate to call this movie predictable. “Predictable” suggests I disliked the movie, yet I really, really liked it. No, I don’t think it’s predictable, just that it’s a certain kind of a story that has to go the way it did. The more I think about Would You Rather, the more I like it.

Strap in, folks. It’s another “Who needs bathing suits for swimming?” movie which manages to show absolutely no nudity whatsoever. I mean, why even have that scene at all if everybody’s just going to be bobbing lazily up to their necks? No playful splashing? No erotic horsing around? What the actual fuck, guys?

The teens of Tourist Trap, which I happen to think is a great generic title for a horror movie, go skinny dipping after their Volkswagen Type 181 breaks down in the middle of nowhere. Chuck Connors, playing an overall-wearing good ol’ boy, happens upon the kids and warns them about the moccasins who nest in the very water they’re swimming in. Cut to: everybody fully clothed and miraculously dry, at which point Connors offers them a ride to his home. His home, as it turns out, is a “museum” full of all manner of junk. The overwhelming majority of his collection consists of mannequins, which the movie calls “wax statues,” but I know department store mannequins when I see them. One of the mannequins looks suspiciously like his dead wife. Its “wax” feels a lot like flesh. You can see where this is going, right?

I’m usually careful with spoilers, but it’s hard to extend that rule to anything so shamelessly derivative of Psycho. Tourist Trap thinks it’s pulling a fast one on the audience, but anyone who’s ever seen a movie will know, almost immediately, that Chuck Connors is the killer. It’s as obvious as a punch to the face. Yes, The Rifleman is the killer. The movie initially wants us to believe the strange happenings are caused by Chuck Connors’ unseen brother, but come on, guys. We all know it as soon as we see him. Hell, my fucking dog called it, too.

Once they get that reveal out of the way, we get a perfectly fine horror movie along the lines of the wonderful Motel Hell. You get to see Chuck Connors dressed bizarrely, playing with dolls as he chews the scenery in the best fucking way possible. The only reason I can’t give it a recommendation to everyone is the good stuff happens too late and only leaves you wanting more. They have such a great gag here, I just wish there was more of it.

Oh, boy. I may have hit my limit. I feel like I’ve blown my fucking mind out on bad movies this year. Here’s one so egregious I don’t even want to talk about it. You might accuse me of being too hard on this movie. Clint Howard is one of my favorite faces in the industry. This blog attests to the fact that horror-comedy is my favorite type of horror and comedy. I originally saw it when I was twelve years old, which should have been the perfect viewing age for something like this. Try showing it to a two year old and you might be able to dazzle ’em… maybe.

In its 85-minute running time there are about fifty seconds of awesome. The rest is slow, plodding, and boringly shot, not to mention entirely illogical. It’s like one of those “rad” children films that frequently turned up in video stores in the early-to-mid 90s, only there’s just a little bit of gore, which feels shoehorned in only to ensure a journalist from Fangoria showed up to take pictures on set. (The severed heads, by the way, look absolutely amazing. Everything else… oof.)

Clint Howard plays the titular ice cream man. When he was a kid, he witnessed the so-called Ice Cream King get gunned down during a drive-by shooting. His mother found her trauma-stricken boy sitting on the curb, eating an ice cream cone, mere inches from the dead body. He glanced up at her and asked, “Who’s going to bring me ice cream, Mommy?” That part was kind of funny, actually.

That’s the problem: a lot of the movie is kind of funny. It would have been much funnier if they weren’t trying so hard. It would have been a lot more watchable, too, if most of the killings didn’t take place off camera. Despite the subject matter, the movie’s so tame I don’t think they would have edited very much to show it on the USA network twenty years ago.

Anyway, now that he’s all grown up, the ice cream man kills children, grinds them up, and mixes their remains into the ice cream he sells around town. Three neighborhood kids uncover his evil scheme and take matters into their own hands. Armed with giant model rockets, they decide to finish the ice cream man, once and for all. I mean… fuck. Haven’t we seen this too many times before? It’s the same old shit, a decade too late.

So the main character, whose name is Tuna, is supposed to be fat kid. Instead of casting a tubby kid, the filmmakers cast a photogenically skinny kid and stuffed his hooded shirts with what appears to be ordinary bed pillows. The movie-long effort seems pointless until the payoff at the very end of the film: with the ice cream man dead, Tuna no longer eats so much ice cream and therefor loses all his weight. Excellent character arc, that.

George C. Scott plays William Kinderman, a grizzled police lieutenant whose best friend was Father Karras from the first film. (Kinderman was briefly portrayed by Lee J. Cobb in the original movie, but in the novel the character had a much larger role, providing an alternative viewpoint to Karras’s already shaky faith.) The cop is investigating the gruesome murder of a twelve year old boy who was decapitated and crucified. The killing fits the MO of the so-called Gemini Killer, who was shot dead by police the same night Regan was exorcised. What does this have to do with anything? Well, it’s a stretch, but the film is so well made it’s perfectly believable within the context of the story.

The Exorcist III came on TV when I was home sick from school one day and I unexpectedly enjoyed the hell out of it as it did not garner warm reviews at the time of its release. In the years since, I’ve always wanted to see it again. Cue Scream Factory’s re-release of the movie, which is now the best way to see it at. I watched it last night long after I should have been in bed. The improved sound mix alone is better than most of the movies I reviewed this month; the subtle use of surround speakers increases the creepiness as you never quite know if it’s a rustling leaf or a demon whispering in your ear.

The trailers in 1990 gave away one of the film’s biggest twists. I bet most reviews did as well so this one won’t. If you haven’t seen any of the marketing material yet, don’t. That way the mid-movie reveal about the man in Cell 11, who’s played by Brad Dourif, won’t get ruined for you. Dourif’s performance here is something special. I’ve seen hundreds of actors go for broke in their depictions of insanity, but few have hit the mark so well. He fulfills a role similar to Hannibal Lector in the sense he may be even more dangerous when he’s locked up (incidentally, this film preceded Silence of the Lambs by one year).

You can tell writer/director William Peter Blatty wanted to protect the secret of Cell 11, too, because the reveal is executed with great care and attention to detail. Blatty battled the studio on a lot of unnecessary changes. For one, he didn’t even want the word “Exorcist” in the title at all because he wanted to distance himself from the laughably bad The Exorcist II: The Heretic. His instinct was correct because the movie has largely been overlooked until horror fans reevaluated it relatively recently.

This isn’t a cash-grab. It’s an organic continuation of the original story. It happens to contain what many believe to be the most effective jump-scare in history. It’s remarkable how masterfully quiet the moment is when you analyze it the second time around.

In the cold opening of Splinter, a gas station attendant is attacked by what appears to be roadkill (Is it a rat? A possum? A rabid squirrel?). Then we’re introduced to an attractive young couple (Jill Wagner and Paulo Constanzo) who suck at camping and a couple of drug addicts (Shea Whigham and Rachel Kerbs) who are running from the law. The couples’ paths cross in the middle of nowhere and the fugitives take the would-be campers hostage. When the getaway car overheats, the four of them have to make a pit stop at the very gas station we saw in the beginning of the movie, which now seems abandoned.

That’s when things get predictably weird… just a little too predictable, in fact, which is one of the film’s few flaws. The writers even bring in a nifty biologist character who makes huge leaps of logic while spouting technobabble nonsense. They don’t bother to explain the origin of the monster, so why did they feel the need to explain how it functions on a cellular level? All I’m saying is I could have used a little more peer-reviewed research.

I certainly wouldn’t say this is a cheap-looking film (the trailer is a different matter), but it feels like the poor man’s Splice. Taking cues from John Carpenter’s The Thing, the creature effects are fantastic, if not fleeting, while the acting is better than most of the movies I feature. In fact, my only complaint about the acting is it breaks down whenever the performers interact with the special effects; I suspect the actors had nothing physical to react to.

I don’t want to spoil what, exactly, is attacking the characters, but it’s sufficiently hideous and the title is certainly relevant. The characters are trapped inside the gas station, which forces them to resort to desperate measures, some of which reminded me of the amusing solutions employed in Tremors. Unfortunately some of these solutions are a little too goofy for the film’s otherwise serious tone. (I’m reminded of The Blob and Jurassic Park, but I’ll let you discover why on your own.)

I tend to dislike movies that try too hard to be creepy. This one tries when it’s at its worst, but more often than not it’s effortless. It’s not too loud, not too spacey, and not too boring. The sweet spot, I’d say.