Midnight Movie: Southbound (2016)

A couple of men, covered in blood, are driving down an old desert highway. The passenger glances out the window and spots something sinister hovering in the distance. When the driver asks him what’s wrong, the man brushes away his friend’s concern. Whatever’s after these two guys isn’t natural, but they’ve been dealing with it long enough that they’ve grown used to its presence.

Following the conclusion of that scene, the movie shifts focus to a group of travelers. And over the course of the next hour or so, we’ll be drifting from one character’s point of view to another, on or near the same desolate highway. Although these are some of the same people who brought us the V/H/S series, to call Southbound an anthology film is misleading. I prefer to call it “protagonistically challenged.”

What a time to be alive. After a decade or so of mostly terrible horror, 2015 has been the best year for the genre since the eighties. We Are Still Here paid homage to Fulci, It Follows to Carpenter, Deathgasm to Raimi and Jackson, and now Southbound seems to be influenced by everyone from Lovecraft to Craven. The kids raised on Video Nasties are the ones making movies now. Thanks to them, the genre is successfully making up for the 2000s, when all the films either looked too shitty or too slick.

A lot of horror movies don’t make a lot of sense because they don’t have to. There are times Southbound feels like it doesn’t make sense, but it’s not to the film’s detriment. You get the feeling early on that its madness is intentional, while the jarring nature of its sudden focus-shifts gives it the qualities of a nightmare. Just short of ninety minutes, the film’s brevity also feels dreamlike. Most horror films drag on a little too long while this one gets in, gets out, and leaves you wanting more.

If you’re wondering if it’s better than V/H/S, it is. This time the tone remains uniform throughout. It doesn’t feel like a bunch of short stories with only superficial connections. This is a bonafide movie and a damn good one at that.

Dude Bro Party Massacre III is the new standard for YouTube-to-feature success

Following Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror there was a rash of low budget movies which had been digitally aged to look like overplayed film prints. Efforts like Hobo with a Shotgun and Father’s Day succeeded—kind of—but the charm of authentic older movies was rarely present. Worse, the effort to disguise digital cameras in film grain and scratches was almost always more distracting than convincing. Dude Bro Party Massacre 3, which sounds like it’s going to skewer its inspirations more than it ultimately does, is cut from the same cloth. Instead of settling for the rarely passable “film-look,” it layers a VHS “modified to fit your television set” visual style on top of its fake film artifacts. The heavy-handed effect is convincing enough that you’ll wonder if they ran the final cut through a dual-VCR a dozen times.

The movie opens with a fictional note: the film was banned in several countries including the United States. The filmmakers ask us to believe the copy we’re watching was taped from its only broadcast on public access television. This deceit allows the filmmakers, members of the Five Second Films comedy troupe, to squeeze in short films during the hastily edited commercial breaks under the guise of retro TV ads. Although the snippets are only five seconds a piece, they’re some of the funniest gags in the movie, provided you remember what late night commercials looked like back then (think: the advertisements which aired during USA’s Up All Night).

Dude Bro Party Massacre 3 uses its opening sequence to establish the story so far. We learn that in the first film, a woman “who never learned how to open doors” was trapped in a sorority house which was set ablaze during a college prank gone wrong. Horribly disfigured, she exacted revenge on her victims one by one, only to predictably meet her demise by the end of the picture. In the sequel, her daughter took up the mantle and continued the killing spree until she, too, was dispatched as these movies require. The third film, which genuinely feels like the third in an actual movie series, opens with the sole survivor from the last picture getting himself killed five minutes in. Now there’s a new killer and she’s going to pick off the latest group of expendable frat boys who decide to party at a cabin in the woods.

Having recently reviewed Space Cop, I was skeptical about 5 Second Films’ ability to produce a feature-length title. Many of Red Letter Media’s problems with the format seemed to be a matter of length even though they’re known for some of the longest popular videos on YouTube. So how could a comedy troupe known for five-second sketches make the jump to feature-length? Pretty well, it turns out.

The gore gags, although transparently and purposely cheap, are every bit as creative and distasteful as the stuff in Lloyd Kaufman’s Poultrygeist. The background music sounds as if it may be fan-submitted, garage-quality tracks. Because it’s only ninety minutes long, it doesn’t overstay its welcome. Yes, Dude Bro Party Massacre III is a pretty good movie even though I’m still not entirely on board with young filmmakers making fun of slasher films as an excuse to make one themselves.

I’ve been disappointed that the only standard I really had to compare these fan-funded projects to was the Angry Video Game Nerd movie, not only because it wasn’t very good. Well, here’s the new standard as far as I’m concerned. These regular joes made a movie and so can you… provided you have a humongous subscriber base on YouTube to help fill out a $200,000 Kickstarter campaign. Nonetheless, the end result is a gross-out spectacle that didn’t need studio approval to get made. Very fun stuff.

(Cameos include Larry King, veteran pornstar Nina Hartley, Andrew W.K., Patton Oswalt and a few familiar faces from YouTube.)

Western Wednesday: Bone Tomahawk (2015)

For a film that shows up this quietly on VOD after a limited theater release, Bone Tomahawk is much better than it has any right to be. Twenty years ago, the same film would have been advertised extensively before dominating the box office for a week or two—maybe more depending on the competition. There’s a scene so shocking, people would have talked about it the way they talked about the big reveal in The Crying Game or the leg-cross in Basic Instinct. Nothing about its quality suggests it was made by a first-time director, either.

A couple of outlaws, played by Sig Haig and David Arquette, stumble onto the sacred burial ground of the “trogdolytes,” a small sect of inbred cannibals. The trogdolytes promptly kill Haig as Arquette flees to a nearby town. Samantha (Lili Simmons) is recruited to operate on the outlaw’s injured leg while her husband, Arthur (Patrick Wilson), stays at home recuperating from a leg injury of his own. The following morning, the sheriff (Kurt Russell) discovers the outlaw, Samantha, and even the deputy have been kidnapped in the middle of the night. The sheriff gathers a search party and sets out to find the cannibals’ cavern. It’s in the agoraphobic expanses of the wild west that this group stumbles into horror movie territory.

I can probably count the number of movies that legitimately unsettled me on one hand. Bone Tomahawk is one of them. A lot of horror films coddle the audience to the point that even a child can reliably predict who’ll be left standing by the end. No one’s safe in this film. When the hero starts out with a bum leg, you already know it’s not the kind of story in which differences can be solved by a routine shootout.

That shocking scene I mentioned earlier is something so sick and jarringly twisted, Bone Tomahawk will likely spread through word of mouth until it’s a household name. I just can’t imagine a movie this incendiary can come and go so quietly. See it today and recommend it to everyone you know so that it can obtain its cult status sooner rather than later.

Midnight Movie: Elves (1989)

“You’ve got fucking big tits and I’m going to tell everyone I saw them!” — 7 year old boy to his sister.

Three edgy teenage girls who call themselves “the sisters of anti-Christmas” convene in the woods to “bemoan Christmas as a petty, over-commercialized media event.” One of them asks, “What’s ‘bemoan?'” The ringleader replies: “It means I didn’t get any good presents last year.” I unironically love shit like this.

One of the girls cuts her hand when a candle holder inexplicably shatters. Spooked by the strange occurrence, the girls freak out and run, but not before dripping blood on what’s presumably the burial spot of a demonic elf… or something. Honestly, I’m not sure exactly what’s going on in the preliminary scenes, but it doesn’t matter. What matters is there is now a monstrous elf lose in the world. Calling the monster a puppet would be too kind. It’s more like a barely articulate torso, which the special effects crew merely shoves into frame from time to time.

Before we go further, I have to point out that the den mother’s little shit of a brother spies on her in the shower. When she catches him, he says, “I’m not a pervert, I like seeing naked girls!” Later the boy is attacked by the troll in the middle of the night. When the mother tries to convince him it was only a nightmare, he responds with poetic delivery: “No, it was a fucking little ninja troll!” The mother decides it was the family cat who scratched the kid, so she drowns the pet in the toilet.

Enter Dan Haggerty—yes, Grizzly Adams. He’s a recovering alcoholic, ex-homicide detective who just so happens to have a bit of knowledge of the occult. He falls into the role of a department store Santa after the previous one is repeatedly stabbed to death in the nards. To make matters worse, Grizzly Adams has just been evicted from his camper trailer. Soon after, he discovers a clue the homicide detectives missed and follows the trail.

Meanwhile, the teenage main character and her airhead friends decide to have an after-hours party in the department store, which is coincidentally where Grizzly Adams is sleeping nowadays. They invite their born-to-die-in-a-movie-like-this boyfriends who arrive shortly before three Nazi goons appear, who’re hunting the elf for reasons you won’t fully understand until later on (if it at all).

Not only is the plurality of “Elves” bullshit, it’s hardly about the singular elf, either. The film is so thoroughly messed up on a technical level, the laughs are frequent. My biggest complaint is the film’s insincerity: there are several hints that indicate the filmmakers were trying to make a bad movie, including a Chinatown parody, an obvious Mommy Dearest reference, and the pulpy integration of Nazi mythology (“The Fourth Reich,” as Grizzly Adams calls it). It’s not quite as obnoxious as modern attempts at self-aware cheese, which makes it entertaining enough to watch with an audience, especially when the wheelchair-bound grandfather professes… eh, best not to spoil it.

I love Elves. Haggerty may not have been the best actor, but he’s got a unique screen presence, which makes me wish he had ended up in more movies like this. Sure, it’s a gimmick, but gimmicks can be fun, too.

Several internet sources claim this film is rated PG-13. There’s no way the version I saw would get a PG-13 rating, so there may be a censored version floating around. There’s a good amount of blood, a close-up of a cokehead getting stabbed repeatedly in the crotch, full frontal nudity, and a kid who cusses roughly as much as a comic on Def Comedy Jam. If any of those elements are absent in your copy, you might as well just turn it off and find a better source wherever you can. Who knows, maybe the full movie is on YouTube?

31 Days of Gore: The Demons series

It’s Halloween. This year’s 31 Days of Gore closes with an Italo-horror trilogy.

Demons (1985)

Several people mysteriously receive tickets to an untitled movie. Shortly before showtime, one of the attendees finds a mask in the lobby and tries it on, goofing around for her friends. Somehow, the mask cuts her cheek. Such wounds are rarely minor, especially in films co-written by Dario Argento and director Lamberto Bava.

Later, one of the characters in the movie-within-the-movie finds a suspiciously familiar mask and cuts his cheek. It’s not long before he turns into a demon, much to the disgust of the squeamish audience. Meanwhile, the woman who cut her cheek “in real life” wanders off to the theater’s bathroom where she begins to transform into a demon as well. Some time later, a friend comes to check on her and ends up brutally murdered. Then, as the saying goes: all hell breaks loose.

The women’s boyfriend (or a pimp… probably a pimp) doesn’t seem too heartbroken when he discovers his companions have been turned into demons. In fact, he’s the first person to announce, “We’ve gotta get outta here!” Heartless? Maybe, but it’s sensible and he’s the best character in the entire movie. Played by Bobby Rhodes, he’s like a black Hugo Stiglitz, kicking and switchblading his way through every problem that comes his way.

When the survivors become trapped on the balcony level, Rhodes commands them to rip up the seats and use them as barricades. When they find dead bodies among them, which can turn into demons at any second, he makes his impromptu army toss them over the side immediately. Someone says some nonsense about “respecting the dead,” but Rhodes isn’t having it. He’s too experienced, too crafty to get himself killed over boring bullshit.

In too many horror films, characters make one boneheaded decision after another. In Demons, there are a few characters who’d be perfectly willing to fulfill that role, but there’s always another character, like Rhodes, who’s willing to step up, slap ’em across the face, and keep the pace exhilarating. Agency as rare as this is always entertaining.

The camera never cuts away from the good stuff, there are plenty of killings (and victims) to go around, and music by Billy Idol, Go West, and Mötley Crüe gives it all a fun yet aggressive energy. The climax is splatter-filled and frantic, and the glowing eyes of the demons are used to wonderful effect. Gems like this are why so many horror fans (myself included) would sit through one shitty rental after another.

Major spoilers for the first film follow….

Demons 2 (1986)

I hoped Demons 2 would pick up where the original left off. The sword-wielding survivor of the first film was just becoming interesting when the credits rolled. Last time we saw him, he’d slayed a theater full of demons with the help of the unlikely appearance of a helicopter. Although Demons 2 technically takes place after the events of the first film, it’s little more than a beat-for-beat redo.

What worked well for Evil Dead 2 doesn’t work as well here. Nonetheless, it’s a pleasant surprise that Lamberto Bava cast familiar faces, particularly Bobby Rhodes who stole the original picture for me. Although his new character lasts a little longer this time, Rhodes isn’t quite as fun or energetic as he was the last time we saw him. Why they didn’t just make him the main character of either film beats the shit out of me. Were they afraid of too much awesomeness?

This time Bava trades the movie theater setting for a high-rise apartment building. Everyone who lives there seems to be watching the same horror film on television. A narrator informs us the events of the first film “convinced the world that demons can exist.” That’s an intriguing premise that ultimately has no bearing on this film whatsoever. They could have at least told us how the outbreak of demons was stopped, but that’s never answered.

The original film managed to introduce its large cast of victims in the first twenty or thirty minutes. This one takes over forty. The characters are a little dumber, the glowing eyes of the demons aren’t as effective, and—for reasons incomprehensible to me—the demons are as scared of fire as Frankenstein’s monster, even though they presumably come from hell. The biggest sin is it’s just not nearly as fun.

It’s almost a great horror movie when you consider it on its own merit, but it’s impossible not to long for the original.

No more spoilers from here on out.

The Church (1989)

So now the pedigree of the series becomes a little more complicated. Lamberto Bava went on to direct The Ogre, which Italian distributors tried to pass off as a sequel to Demons 2 even though it certainly wasn’t. Meanwhile, Umberto Lenzi made an unofficial entry to the series called Black Demons. I don’t know who the hell is enforcing Italian copyright law, but my guess is nobody because filmmakers there have been making unofficial sequels for decades.

Dario Argento, on the other hand, intended to produce an official Demons 3, but that movie morphed into The Church, starring Dario’s daughter, Asia Argento. Although it shares similarities with the first two films, the tone of The Church is such a radical departure, there’s no point in comparing them at all.

That’s not a bad thing. Demons 2 disappoints because it hits so many of the same notes as the original. The Church succeeds because it takes the original premise (that demons can spread like a viral outbreak) and scraps almost everything else, including the movie-within-a-movie angle. The Church unfolds at a much slower movie than its predecessors, but the atmosphere, enhanced by Philip Glass and Goblin music, keeps it captivating.

Teutonic Knights massacre a village of cursed people, bury them in a mass grave, and build a church to cover it up. The church’s architect installed secret features straight out of an Indiana Jones movie, which will activate only if the seal to the tomb is someday broken. Fast forward to modern times and even the clergymen are unaware of what took place there so many years ago. It won’t be long until they find out.

Par for the course, there’s some stilted dialogue and nonsensical WTF moments. The leading woman, pursued by a grotesque demon in her own home, calls the cops, dives through a window, runs across her yard, and finds herself trapped in a flannel blanket. Naturally, you assume she ran through a clothesline, but it turns out the cops—who she called twenty seconds ago—have already shown up to throw a blanket over her head for being hysterical. In America, you couldn’t get that kind of response time even if you lived inside a police station.

I’m not one to grade an Italian horror film on logic as flaws like that are simply inherent with their dreamlike filmmaking sensibilities. Everything else—and I do mean everything—is pure perfection. The Church is one of the most flavorful horror films ever made. I know I said it can’t be compared to the original, but I like it a lot more. In fact, it’s the best movie of the thirty I reviewed this month. Watch it now and watch it often.

That’s all for 31 Days of Gore this year, but don’t wait eleven months to come back!

31 Days of Gore: Tales of Halloween (2015)

It’s October. Time to talk horror. This year I’m reviewing a different horror movie each day of the month.

With Adrienne Barbeau, Lisa Marie, Stuart Gordon, Lin Shaye, Barbara Crampton, Joe Dante, and a couple of Troma regulars, the cast of Tales of Halloween reads like the guest list at a horror convention. My only complaint about the casting? Nobody gets any more than a handful of minutes on screen.

Barbeau, riffing on her role in The Fog, gets the most screentime in this anthology. Her narration serves as the glue for the ten stories, the subjects of which range from aliens to psychopathic children. At worst its stories are pointless, but never boring. More often than not, the segments are gleefully entertaining.

In the first segment, a child wonders why his joyless parents confiscate his Halloween haul every year. When he’s supposed to be in bed, he sneaks out of his bedroom and discovers his parents pigging out on the treats perversely. That’s when he decides to carve them up with a meat cleaver. In another segment, a couple of idiotic criminals kidnap the son of a wealthy man. When they call to make their demands, the father says, “Not interested.”

What’s admirable about Tales of Halloween is how seamless it all is. While I liked The ABC’s of Death just a little bit more, that series was a quilted showcase for twenty-six different filmmakers whose varying styles sometimes clashed with one another. Tales of Halloween, on the other hand, is a genuine collaboration, having actors from one segment walking through the background of the next.

If it’s cartoonish black comedy you’re looking for, Tales of Halloween brings the goods. You could do a lot worse on a Friday night.

Come back at midnight Central Time for the next (and last!) movie.

31 Days of Gore: Head of the Family (1996)

It’s October. Time to talk horror. This year I’m reviewing a different horror movie each day of the month.

Lance (Blake Adams) is the redneck owner of a small town cafe who’s fallen in love with the wife of a dangerous biker. Her name is Loretta (Jacqueline Lovell) and, in perfect B-movie dialogue, Lance says, “It’s like fucking a firecracker whenever I’m with her.” Lance isn’t very bright, Loretta isn’t either, and her husband is probably dumber than them both combined.

Then there’s the Stackpools, an alien-like family of weirdos. They consist of a giant man-child, a geek (in the circus sense of the word) with bulging eyes, and an unnaturally endowed woman played by a real-life pornstar. The titular head of the family is the fourth sibling, Myron, who’s little more than an over-sized head in a wheelchair. (That’s right: the title of this movie is literal.) Stranger still, Myron controls his quadruplet siblings with his telepathic mind.

Myron’s a mad scientist who longs to find a proportionate body that can support his massive brain power. Like something out of a Roadrunner cartoon, the Stackpools barricade the rural highway with a sign that detours motorists to the front door of their mansion. Once there, the brute of the family knocks them out so that Myron can experiments on them in his basement.

When Lance accidentally uncovers the family’s dark secret, he decides to blackmail them. He won’t turn them into the authorities as long as the family offs Loretta’s husband. The head of the family reluctantly agrees. When Loretta’s husband turns up missing, she and Lance could live together happily ever after… or at least until Loretta tires of Lance and his cheating ways. Unfortunately, Lance gets greedy and tries to blackmail even more out of the Stackpools: an allowance of two thousand bucks a week, which Myron isn’t keen on paying.

This isn’t Shakespeare, but compared to a lot of the movies I’ve watched this month, the dialogue goes above and beyond the bare minimum required for a flick like this. The acting is as good as it needs to be and sometimes a little better. It’s a fun film that I can only recommend to people who smile when they see a giant head rather than roll their eyes.

Come back at midnight Central Time for the next movie.

31 Days of Gore: Tormented (2014)

It’s October. Time to talk horror. This year I’m reviewing a different horror movie each day of the month.

In Tormented (aka Berkshire County) a teenage girl named Kylie goes to school one day to discover the chad she reluctantly went down on at a costume party not only recorded the entire thing, but shared the video with all of her classmates. Although the boy said he and his girlfriend had broken up, it turns out they hadn’t (shocking, right?) and the girlfriend’s more pissed at Kylie than her douchebag boyfriend (again, shocking). The bullying doesn’t stop at school. When Kylie gets home, it turns out even her mother blames her.

So what does this subplot have to do with the rest of the movie? I’m not entirely sure. I guess it’s about a young woman having to choose between facing her fears or… dying horribly? Kylie’s already been through too much by the time the movie brings in its horror elements. Having a family of masked psychos break into the house while she’s babysitting a couple of kids seems artlessly cruel. Maybe they were trying to make some kind of statement, but it’s little more than an after-school special tacked onto the beginning of a slasher film.

I know many horror movies require teenagers to be dumb, but there’s a part where Kylie gets a chance to get away. She’s sitting behind the wheel of her car, keys in the ignition, when the 911 dispatcher tells her, “You’re better off staying where you are.” Kylie agrees. Then she gets out of her car and walks back into the house with the masked maniacs. I was dangerously close to throwing something at my TV.

I think that’s the biggest problem with Tormented: you’ve got fine direction, a good actress, and competent filmmaking, but a lousy script. There are few surprises, many boneheaded decisions, incompetent cops, and a twist ending which will surprise no one.

Come back at midnight Central Time for the next movie.

31 Days of Gore: Dead Heat (1988)

It’s October. Time to talk horror. This year I’m reviewing a different horror movie each day of the month.

Dead Heat, which stars Treat Williams and Joe Piscopo, begins like any other buddy cop film. The problem with all the Lethal Weapon copycats is they could never quite nail the balance between action and well-written humor. Dead Heat attempts to throw another genre into the mix: horror. It’s not very good at any of them.

As goofy as it is, Dead Heat has an energy that immediately drew me in… at arm’s distance, anyway. Early on, Williams and Piscopo have a shootout with a couple of jewel thieves who just won’t die until one steps on a grenade and Williams rams the other one with an unmarked car. When the cops visit the bodies in an autopsy room, the medical examiner informs them the bodies have been on her table before.

Early on in their investigation of the zombified crime ring, Treat Williams is killed and resurrected himself. Williams discovers he doesn’t have a heartbeat and doesn’t breathe even though he (initially) appears to be in good health. He only has twelve hours to nail the bad guys, at which point he will decompose completely. After one action sequence, a woman comments, “You’re hurt!” To which Williams deadpans, “Lady, I’m dead.“

The makeup effects aren’t bad. The movie itself is, and maybe this goes without saying, but it’s a good bad movie as long as you can stomach mediocre action and lazy one-liners. Just be warned that the filmmakers seem to think Joe Piscopo is a decent substitute for Eddie Murphy, but he’s not… obviously. I’ve always wondered why Treat Williams (playing a character named Roger Mortis… hardy-har-har) was never a bigger star.

Come back at midnight Central Time for the next movie.

31 Days of Gore: Feast (2005)

It’s October. Time to talk horror. This year I’m reviewing a different horror movie each day of the month.

There’s a bar in the middle of nowhere. It’s just an average night until a blood-drenched man with a shotgun bursts through the door and orders the patrons to fortify the place. “Who the hell are you?” the bartender asks. “I’m the guy who’s gonna save your ass,” the stranger replies in heroic confidence. A split second later, a monster bursts through the window rips his head off.

The monsters in Feast are draped in roadkill coats and cattle-skull masks. They’re gnarly-lookin’ creatures who rip and tear with gruesome panache. In a misguided act of desperation, the bar patrons attempt to scare them away by dangling a dead monster baby from a stick. In the gory aftermath of that scene, Henry Rollins’ character admits: “Yeah, that was a bad idea.”

I don’t know why I closely followed the development of Feast on Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s Project Greenlight, but never watched the movie until now. In case you’re unfamiliar with Project Greenlight, it was a reality TV show in which the famous actors plucked an unknown filmmaker from obscurity to make a feature length film. The first two movies that came out of Project Greenlight sucked so bad, Affleck and Damon decided to go for broke and make a balls-to-the-wall horror film.

Feast would be improved if the shots were just a little longer and the director didn’t try to be so damn cute in the first act. There’s an exhausting amount of wink-wink, nudge-nudge bullshit in the beginning, in which the filmmakers practically announce they’re going to give us the unexpected. Unfortunately, when you’re expecting the unexpected, you get exactly what you expected. If the film had lured us into believing it was a by-the-numbers horror picture (You’re Next comes to mind), the unexpected stuff would have been more rewarding, not to mention not as self-congratulatory. Never mind that. Everything else about Feast is great.

Most of these actors you’ll either know by name or recognize from other movies. Not only does it feature western actor Clu Gulager, it was directed by his son, John Gulager, the third season winner of Project Greenlight. After a success like this, John might be relegated to horror pictures for the rest of his life. I hope he’s comfortable with that because it’s clear that’s what he was born to do.

Come back at midnight Central Time for the next movie.