Phantasm II (1988) [31 Days of Gore]

Reggie Bannister is kind of the Robert Duvall of horror. In the first Phantasm, his character (also named Reggie) was relegated to the role of the goofy sidekick. This time he’s practically the star, getting even more screen time than the main character. You’ll see Reggie’s name oft mentioned on horror forums too. There’s just something about his unassuming persona that clicks.

Yesterday I said Phantasm II was my favorite in the series, though most of the heavy lifting was done in the previous film, which had enough world-building to spare for a sequel. But Phantasm II has the distinctly 80s horror look which really takes me back. This is the first time I’ve seen it on anything other than VHS. The film looks stunning.

The sequel picks up exactly where the previous one left off, concocting an unlikely conclusion to the cliffhanger, which has Reggie blowing up his own house to save Mike’s life. The film skips forward several years to show Mike (played by James Le Gros now) is all grown up. Reggie picks him up from the mental institution, but on his way home his house explodes (again), thereby motivating Reggie to help Mike murder the Tall Man.

So Mike’s been having visions about the Tall Man for years. Somehow, he’s been psychically linked to a blonde by the name of Liz (Paula Irvine) who shares his visions. I’m not sure how this happened, but the pair fell in love long before ever meeting. Reggie, fresh from the funeral of his wife and kids, also finds love in the form of a banging brunette they meet on the side of the road. I love Reggie to death, but this woman is way out of his league—not to mention his age bracket, so it’s disappointing none of the leads are even suspicious of her.

Once the climax begins, it’s a fine spectacle. The movie is much better paced than the original and it doesn’t blow its wad until it’s good and ready. Phantasm II makes a little more sense than its predecessor, too, and looks better to boot, but perhaps it’s not quite the milestone I remembered it being. Neither is it a pointless sequel. The first one was packed to the brim with ideas and this one feathers out the edges.

The Mist (2007) [31 Days of Gore]

The Mist is about a group of shoppers who get trapped inside a supermarket when a strange mist settles on the town. A local zealot interprets the event as the end times and quickly rallies a group of brain-dead followers to do her misguided deeds of faith, which will eventually turn sacrificial in nature. The film’s hero, played by the always likable Thomas Jane, just wants to keep the dangerously frightened shoppers placated until he finds a way to get his son home.

This is all material that I should and typically do like. Monsters? Check. Religious folk acting like fools? Love it. But when you have Stephen King and Frank Darabont providing the brains behind your movie, the result should be a little better than this. Case in point: a group of expendable characters are determined to get themselves killed by the monsters lurking around the warehouse in the back. Granted, the characters don’t know the mist has monsters in it (yet), but they also don’t know the mist isn’t harmful to humans. When Jane asks them why they’re being so dense, the small group (led by genre veteran William Sadler) makes all kinds of flimsy excuses for acting like idiots.

MINOR SPOILERS BELOW

As for the famous ending… it was certainly a shocker, but I’m wondering whether or not the movie earned it. I’ve complained about happy endings in horror movies for years—if the survivors are smiling by the time the credits roll (see: The Visit), you’ve probably done a lousy job of putting them through hell. To be sure, my favorite final shot is probably The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, in which the blood-drenched heroine is screaming crazily in the back of a truck. It’s clear she’ll never be right again and the film’s made more powerful because of it.

The Mist certainly doesn’t take the easy way out, but somehow it felt like an afterthought to me. King has stated he preferred Darabont’s ending, but it seemed like an oddly cruel thing to do to the smarter characters. I’ll never forget it, sure, but wouldn’t it have been more meaningful if there was a reason behind it, other than, “Ha, bet you never saw this coming!”? On the other hand, I’m willing to admit I might be missing the meaning altogether: that Jane’s character ultimately succumbed to the same fear that had the dumber characters acting like morons.

Look, considering how many people seem to love the film, I’m well aware I’m being harder on The Mist than most movies… but considering its pedigree, shouldn’t I be? This is my second viewing and I just can’t understand why it doesn’t appeal to me like it did for most. Just one of those things, I suppose, and I have the sneaking suspicion I’ll give it a third shot sometime in the future.

Out of the Dark (1995) [31 Days of Gore]

The goofy security staff (think: Police Academy) at a haunted high-rise are terrorized by strange happenings. The only man who can help is an eccentric ghost hunter (Stephen Chow) who lives in a mental institution by day and breaks out to fight evil every night. If you’re looking for character development, motivation, or anything else that would only get in the way of high-octane entertainment, you’ve come to the wrong place. What you’ll get here is dark humor and slapstick violence, served with a generous helping of insanity.

Out of the Dark is all about style over substance. Its furious editing and camerawork homages everyone from Martin Scorsese to John Woo. It’s apparent, too, that the filmmakers had just seen Pulp Fiction and The Professional. I started the movie an hour after I should have been in bed and found myself unable to turn it off. It’s the kind of movie that hooks you so immediately that attempting to hold it at arm’s length will only exhaust you. Just relax and let it happen to you.

Early on, one of the security officers scoops a dying man up into his arms with the intention of racing him to the hospital. But when a slasher shows up the officer instinctively uses the victim’s body as a shield against the repeated knife attacks. Keep in mind, this is all shot like a Three Stooges bit and it’s no less funny. Later, when the hero of the film bursts onto the scene to save the day, he accidentally shoots the victim.

I’ve always been a fan of Stephen Chow, often loving parts of his films, but rarely embracing them as a whole. Here’s one I endorse wholeheartedly… as long as you like politically incorrect horror-comedies with the physics of a Chuck Jones cartoon. (At one point, a refrigerator falls on a man’s head; he survives with little more than a headache.) It’s a wonderfully unpredictable film.

HP Lovecraft’s Necronomicon: Book of the Dead (1994) [31 Days of Gore]

H.P. Lovecraft (Jeffrey Combs in heavy makeup) sneaks into a crypt beneath a library, Indiana Jones style. There he finds The Necronomicon, the book of the dead. The design of the grimoire is intricate, ancient-looking, and creepy—just as it should be. The other props and special effects are a cut above most horror films, too; there’s a lot of miniatures, reverse photography, and even some shots filmed upside down so that blood and goo appear to rise from the floor magically. This story is the container for the other short films in the anthology, which are directed by Christophe Gans, Shusuke Kaneko, and Brian Yuzna.

I’m an absolute sucker for movies like this. I love dangerous books and the characters who’re obsessed with them. As much as I should dislike this movie—and it gives me plenty of reasons—this is at least my third viewing since its limited release in 1993. It isn’t a great movie, but it’s highly watchable… two-thirds of it, anyway.

The first tale is The Drowned. This is the best story in the movie. Bruce Payne plays a grieving widower who has just inherited a cliffside hotel. He discovers his benefactor uncle (Richard Lynch) left a suicide note, which recounts how he acquired the Necronomicon from a mysterious fish-man and used it to resurrect his dead family with tendril-laden results. Payne resurrects his own dead wife, failing to heed his uncle’s warnings. Despite a stupidly rushed ending, The Drowned manages to create one of the most Lovecraftian moods ever put on film.

Let me suggest fast-forwarding through The Cold, the uninspired second tale of the movie. David Warner is so understandably bored, you can almost hear him wondering how his costars got into movies at all. This is low-effort filmmaking at its worst. The less said about it the better.

The third tale, Whispers, is alternatively boring and insane. You would expect Brian Yuzna to produce the best story of the bunch, and while he certainly supplies the most notable creature effects, the main character is a monotonously loud policewoman who—get this—has a melodramatic discussion about motherhood in the middle of a car chase. She pursues her suspect into a cavernous lair beneath an abandoned warehouse. There she encounters creatures who crave bone marrow, which sounds metal as fuck, but the action is needlessly interrupted by a pointless dream scene. The segment’s message is about as hammy as the church propaganda in a hell house.

Overall, Necronomicon’s biggest sin is its inattention to detail. Lovecraft is supposedly reading these stories sometime in the 1920s, yet each of the short films are set in contemporary times. Sometimes you think the costumes are reflecting olden times, then suddenly you see a modern car drive by in the background. I’m sure there’s a magical explanation for this, but it’s still wonky and distracting. Nonetheless, this is one of those movies I love even though my brain tells me “no.”

Over the Top

My partner and I were channel surfing. When I passed Over the Top, she asked me to go back. Reluctantly, I did. I was in the mood for literally anything else, but whenever I’m dead set against watching something, Starla goes all in. I tried to explain it’s an embarrassingly sappy film about arm wrestling. This only enticed her.

Several minutes in, she asked, “Wait, are you sure this is about arm wrestling?” The movie takes forever to warm up, but once it does: whoa boy. You’re going to need a serrated blade to cut this cheese, maybe even an electric carver. Sylvester Stallone plays Lincoln Hawk, a truck driver who just reunited with the son he walked out on a decade earlier. See, the mother is dying. Although her wealthy father (Robert Loggia) is gunning for custody, she wants the boy to be with his deadbeat father. Long story short: complex emotional conflicts will be resolved with arm wrestling. As God intended.

Hawk, with his muscular physique and rust bucket of a truck, is portrayed as an everyman whose home contains one-arm exercise equipment. Loggia’s character, who may be perfectly justified in his assessment of Hawk, is portrayed as the villain. Loggia represents The Man who despises his son-in-law because no college-educated sophisticates could possibly understand arm wrastlin’ and truck drivin’. It’s always bizarre and highly entertaining to view American culture through the eyes of Israeli director Menahem Golan, co-founder of The Cannon Film Group, whose unpretentious productions greatly shaped the pop culture of my formative years. Here he cranks his unique patriotism up to eleven… or perhaps “jumps the shark” is more accurate.

Nonetheless, Over the Top is a fun ride through the cheesiest depths of the 1980s. This remarkable artifact even films its climax during a real life arm wrestling tournament. I know what you’re thinking: “Arm wrestling tournaments really exist?” Well, sort of. This one was created specifically for the film, and two guys actually got their arms broken. One of the gruesome incidents ends up in the obligatory sports movie montage.

In typical Cannon fashion, Over the Top is vapid but impossible to turn off. It’s interesting how Golan spins sport-movie clichés to make them fit arm wrestling instead of ball games. In case you’re wondering about the curiously apt title, Over the Top refers to a special move Stallone’s character has incorporated into his matches. I suspect the physics have no basis in reality, but this movie isn’t directed by a man who lived in reality, so who cares?

Don’t Breathe (2016)

There’s a scene in Don’t Breathe that people are going to talk about for a long time. It’s a rabbit-in-the-stew kind of moment. Think along the lines of what Kathy Bates did in Misery… or maybe the “hair gel” scene in There’s Something About Mary is a more apt comparison. Either way, I haven’t seen such a memorable WTF moment since Bone Tomahawk. I guarantee the scene is fueling Don’t Breathe’s runaway word-of-mouth.

On the way out the theater doors, I overheard just as many people praising the scene as lambasting it. But at least the audience was electrified. Most of the movies I’ve seen this year evoked little more than a shrug as attendees quietly collected their belongings and shuffled outside to remember where they parked. Don’t Breathe knows the secret to making a story stick: you can try to please everyone, but nobody falls in love with movies that play it safe.

Have you ever seen The People Under the Stairs? Don’t Breathe reminds me of that one. A trio of good-for-nothing burglars break into a house, knowing full well the Gulf War veteran who lives there (Stephen Lang) is blind. They expect the guy to be a pushover, but once he shuts off the electric to his fortified home, they come to realize the odds are in his favor. You’ll probably be rooting for him until you discover… well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Although I wasn’t the biggest fan of Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead remake, I was interested to see what the guy made next. Now he tries his hand at an original horror movie which doesn’t comprise on scares. Unlike his previous film, this one is quiet—so quiet you can hear a pin drop in the theater. You’ll notice the people around you holding their breath, tensing for the next jump-scare, which are few and far between. It’s just a straightforward (and gross) horror film that works.

My biggest complaint is the Rottweiler in the film. That dog is one of the shittiest actors I’ve seen in years.

Doctor Mordrid (1992) [Midnight Movie]

Doctor Mordrid entered production as an official Doctor Strange film until directors Albert and Charles Band let their option expire. That didn’t stop them from making the movie anyway (I wouldn’t expect any less from Full Moon Pictures). The character names have been changed. The filmmakers are legally obliged to inform you that absolutely no part of their movie takes place in the Sanctum Sanctorum. This is a film about an alchemist—not a wizard, not a magician, and certainly not a sorcerer. Any similarity to Marvel characters, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

The “alchemist’s” name is Anton Mordrid (Jeffrey “The Re-Animator” Combs) and he’s in charge of protecting the film’s MacGuffin: the Philosopher’s Stone. He and his brother Kabal (Brian “Cobra” Thompson) were taught all manner of wizardry—er, I mean alchemy—when they were children. Kabal is breakin’ bad now that he’s all grown up and he plans to unleash demons from hell… or something. I didn’t really follow that part, but if he succeeds, Earth is all kinds of fucked. He leaves a rash of murders in his wake, which begs the attention of Samantha Hunt (Yvette Nipar), the policewoman who just happens to live in Mordrid’s apartment building.

What develops between Mordrid and Samantha is one of the mildest romances in movie history. You won’t even know they’re attracted to each other until the last scene in the movie—and even then you won’t know for sure. What Mordrid suggests to her, out of the clear blue, is the equivalent of popping the question to a neighbor you occasionally see when you go for a walk. I love Combs to death, but his chemistry with actress Nipar is nonexistent. Considering they appear quite at ease with one another in this behind-the-scenes video, I’m not sure how the ball was dropped, but I suspect it had something to do with Full Moon’s speedy production schedule.

Look, Full Moon made tons of movies. They’ve managed to produce more memorable features than you would expect from a fledgling studio, so you can’t be surprised whenever they make a dud like this one. The directors, at that point in their careers, were such experienced filmmakers you can’t even laugh at the movie in a so-bad-it’s-good way. Technically, it’s a well-made film, it just happens to stink. Even if you go into it seeking the “so bad it’s good” factor, you’re bound to be disappointed.

Midnight Movie: Starship Troopers (1997)

“If I tell the world that a right-wing, fascist way of doing things doesn’t work, no one will listen to me. So I’m going to make a perfect fascist world: everyone is beautiful, everything is shiny, everything has big guns and fancy ships, but it’s only good for killing fucking bugs!” — Paul Verhoeven

At first glance, the cast looked like it belonged in a television drama for teenagers. The jingoistic satire didn’t translate well to newspaper ads and 30-second TV spots. The goofy marketing made it look like a straight-to-video movie had somehow wormed its way into a theatrical release. And yet, I still went to see Starship Troopers on opening night, shuffling into the theater with the lowest of expectations. There were maybe six other people there including, I think, a local film critic who occasionally shone a penlight on his notes and impatiently touched the illumination dial on his wristwatch.

In Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop, the narrative is frequently interrupted by satirical advertisements and news segments, as if the film has commercial breaks baked right into it. Likewise, Starship Troopers opens with over-the-top war propaganda, simultaneously establishing its irreverent attitude and the premise: in the future, humans really hate bugs: the arachnid alien combatants who’ve thrown a wrench in humanity’s plan to colonize every nook and cranny of the galaxy. In fact, humans hate bugs so much that young men and women everywhere can’t wait to give up everything and fight the bastards.

Enter Johnny Rico (Casper Van Dien) and his dimwitted high school friends. Amusingly, the first act plays like a futuristic teenybopper drama before jerking the rug out from under the heroes’ feet. Rico has a hot girlfriend (Denise Richards), a hunky rival (Patrick Muldoon), a dangerously flirty gal pal named Dizzy (Dina Meyer), and an ultra-nerdy best friend played by Neil Patrick Harris, whose appearance in an R-rated romp was mildly scandalous at the time (Verhoeven had employed similar stunt casting with Elizabeth Berkley in his trash-masterpiece Showgirls, two years prior).

Rico’s girlfriend is sent to the space navy, his brainy best friend gets absorbed by the military’s science sector, and Rico ends up in the most elite squad of ground troops in existence. His drill sergeant is played by Clancy Brown, who always takes genre projects seriously and the same can be said of Michael Ironside (Total Recall’s Richter), who plays the lieutenant of Rico’s group. There Rico makes new friends for the first time in his adult life, including Jake Busey, whose maniacal appearance instantly washes away the Dawson’s Creek vibe from the earlier portion of the picture.

Just when Rico’s finally begins to gel with his new life, who of all people will suddenly transfer to his squad? Dizzy, the hot little baddie who’s been pursuing Rico since high school. Here’s something I really love about Starship Troopers: in practically every movie in which the leading character is pursued by two love interests, he or she inevitably ends up with the sickeningly wholesome, less attractive option. Not my boy Rico. Soon after his boring girlfriend dumps him via a video call, Rico hooks up with the considerably more exciting Dizzy.

The score by Basil Poledouris is as rousing as anything he’s ever done while the early CGI is somehow much more convincing than most digital effects today. As for the action, it’s exciting, well-paced, and comically bloody as per Verhoeven’s style. If you held a gun to my head and asked me to choose my favorite film of Robocop, Total Recall, and Starship Troopers, I literally couldn’t do it.

I had friends in high school who were even bigger science fiction readers than I. Two of them were dead-set against the idea of a Hollywood adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s source material. There are still critics who assert Verhoeven “ruined the book” by choosing to parody its values (though a lot fewer of them exist today as the general consensus of the film only seems to improve with time). Yes, Isaac Asimov wrote in his memoirs that Heinlein grew more conservative and militaristic with age. Though this is certainly true, Heinlein has suggested he was merely exploring such a society as a possibility, not necessarily promoting it.

Then you have modern SF writers like John Stalzi, who are about as liberal and anti-war as they come, writing military fiction in nearly the same vein as Heinlein. Long before the Sad Puppies (an extreme right-wing group of close-minded assholes who attempted to manipulate the Hugo Awards) I used to enjoy reading science fiction from a wide swath of political and philosophical backgrounds. To like Heinlein’s version and Verhoeven’s isn’t contradictory, but exemplary of what I loved about the brainy genre in the first place. In fact, Joe Halderman’s The Forever War, itself a direct counter-argument to Heinlein’s novel, is among my favorite SF novels of all time.

Though I wish the movie version had gotten the jet packs that Heinlein imagined in the novel, I’m going with Verhoeven’s version all the way.

Green Room (2016)

You could argue Green Room is more thriller than horror, but bones are broken, throats are torn out, and faces are mauled. The camera rarely cuts away as the imagery shocks and awes. There’s no supernatural element—not that that’s a requisite for horror—but the skinheads here are effectively monsters because they’re depicted not as cannon fodder, but three-dimensional humans. The things that happen in Green Room are, to put it mildly, horrific. And if I were to make a list of the best movies of the twenty-first century, I’d rank it extremely high.

A wandering punk band is hard up for cash. They reluctantly end up taking a gig at a rundown neo-Nazi joint in the middle of nowhere. In true punk fashion, the band decides to rile up the crowd with a cover of “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.” That goes over about as well as you might expect. Fortunately, the rest of their set is played hard enough to win the skinheads over by the end. After the show, the band heads back to the green room and accidentally discover the venue’s operators are covering up the murder of a young woman.

While the skinheads scramble to come up with a plan, the band is locked in the green room with a psychopath. He subtly mentions his revolver only holds five cartridges, “because they’re so fucking big that’s all that can fit in the cylinder.” Meanwhile, the neo-Nazis outside the room call Darcy Banker, their leader and the owner of the property. Banker is played by Patrick Stewart, whose performance is neither too cold or too hot. He’s not a man who relishes his villainy. His only motivation is to get the witnesses off his property as quickly as possible so he can murder them elsewhere.

The simple plan complicates quickly. Banker, who’s always failing to keep the situation from escalating, comes up with one idea after another to flush the band members out of the green room. He approaches the problem matter-of-factly, as if coordinating the extermination of rodents. To him, it’s just another problem in the life of a businessman, albeit an amoral one. Another interesting choice is the skinheads aren’t caricatures; when Banker loses his cool and humiliates one of his men, he promptly apologizes for his transgression. His henchmen aren’t expendable in his mind, they’re family.

There’s no fantasy violence here. There are no characters who do unbelievably heroic or villainous things. The good guys are gonna take a licking. Some of the bad guys are gonna take a licking, too. We all hate movies in which stupidly written characters do stupid things, but here’s a rare example in which smartly written characters do stupid things. After all, they’re young, immature, and panicking in a realistic way.

New Year’s Evil (1980)

“Shhhh… I can hear your heart beating. I don’t like that.”

Roz Kelly (Pinky Tuscadero from Happy Days) plays Blaze Sullivan, the VJ-like host of a televised New Year’s Eve bash. During one of the show’s call-in segments, a modulated voice promises to kill someone very close to her. The police quickly discover it’s not just a prank call: someone’s already dead. The man responsible refers to himself as Evil and he intends to murder someone every hour, on the hour, as each timezone in the United States welcomes the new year.

As per Cannon Film Group’s philosophy, everything in New Year’s Evil has been cranked up to 11. This ensures even the mundane scenes are sensational as absolute anyone in the picture might be packing a switchblade. Right off the bat we see a group of punk rockers drinking and driving down a Hollywood street in a convertible that’s pushing capacity. The televised party they’re heading to hosts a gaggle of similar delinquents as one presumably real life band after another plays fantastic-shitty 80s music.

Meanwhile, the killer paroles mental institutions and bars for his victims. Remember: his plan is to kill someone every hour on the hour until the clock strikes twelve. He’s capable of getting an awful lot done between attacks, including: finding his victims, arranging their dead bodies for cinematic reveals, changing disguises, sneaking into guarded buildings, and calling into the TV show. At one point he even gets into a traffic accident with a biker gang that leads to a foot chase through a drive-in movie. Yet he still manages to get to his next appointment on time.

Unless you’ve never seen a movie in your life, you’ll figure out the twist ending: the killer is actually Blaze’s oft-mentioned but curiously missing-in-action husband. Even if the repeated “Where’s Dad?” line doesn’t clue you in, you’ll start to suspect it the moment their son pulls his mother’s pantyhose over his head and pierces his ear with a needle. Here’s the best part: during a wonderfully cheesy soliloquy he looks into the mirror and tells himself, “I think I have a mental disorder.”

Don’t worry: there’s yet another twist at the end which I won’t spoil. Unfortunately, you’ll see that one coming from a mile away, too. Oh well, it’s still a fun picture.