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"I met him, fifteen years ago. I was told there was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong. I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face and, the blackest eyes... the *devil's* eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply... evil. "

And so begins another Halloween Horror Movie challenge. The objective: watch 31 horror movies over the 31 days of October with 16 of those viewings, or half, being movies that are new viewings. Here's how my month went. New-to-me movies in blue. Some of these have longer reviews linked to them.

October 1:

I kicked things off with an old friend: The Island of Lost Souls from 1932, which contains my second-favorite Charles Laughton performance (after Quasimodo) and enough sadism to satisfy the most rabid fan of the day. There's a fascinating dichotomy between the movie's critique of the colonial impulse to "civilize" native populations and the frankly racist intimations that natives want to carry off blond white women. This is on top of its prescient examination of vivisection and genetic engineering. I never noticed the way Laughton has been filmed when expounding his theories to Richard Arlen before this viewing. He's framed so that he talks directly to the camera, making direct eye-contact with the audience. It's...a little unsettling, but effective. I love the chant of Dr. Moreau's beast-men, as led by Bela Lugosi's Sayer of the Law: "This is the law! Are we not men?"

Tom Tykwer's adaptation of Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) was a real surprise. I've long thought that Patrick Suskind's novel was unfilmmable, but not only does Tykwer prove me wrong, he demonstrates a cinematic potential in the material I hadn't even dreamed existed. A serial killer movie recast as a perverse fairy tale, this film stands as a rebuke to anyone who thinks that the gothic horror movie is dead. This is the kind of movie that would have starred Peter Lorre in 1935 or so, directed by Roy William Neill, perhaps, or Rouben Mamoullian. Ben Whishaw is superb as our grim anti-hero, and Rachel Hurd-Wood is already a beauty of the first order.

October 2:

Equinox (1967) is an interesting exercise in kitchen-sink filmmaking, notable because many of its principle creators later became big-time movers and shakers in the movie business (notably director, and later special-effects maestro Dennis Muren). But don't let that fool you, there's a fine cinematic intelligence behind the film, even if the screenplay is interminably silly. One wishes that the filmmakers had utilized actor Fritz Leiber as a screenwriter instead (the man was one of the great fantasy writers of the last century, after all). Bears a striking resemblance to The Evil Dead.

October 3:

I never know what to make of Jack Arnold. On the one hand, he was the consumate hack television director, sliding in comfortably into every mediocre television show you can imagine, from The Brady Bunch to The Love Boat. But when presented with a crackerjack screenplay, his work comes alive. He's almost an anti-auteur, or at the very least a director whose best work is completely dependent on his writers. His best film, in my own humble opinion, is The Incredible Shrinking Man from 1957, and it only fuels this argument. This is Richard Matheson's movie through and through. The film acts on a number of levels, and all of them derive directly from Matheson's novel and screenplay. A fantastic Freudian pun, an examination of the diminution of the individual in a post-industrial society or in the face of the medical profession, a crackerjack adventure of pure survival, and, ultimately, a meditation on pure existentialism, this is one of the richest SF allegories of the 1950s. On a purely visceral level, Scott Carey's grim battle against the spider in his basement is one of the great horror set-pieces of the decade.

October 4:

Roman Polanski's The Tenant (1976) is haunted by the rest of the director's work. We have the meek apartment dweller slowly going mad from Repulsion, the ominous geriatric neighbors of Rosemary's Baby, a more naturalistic version of Alfie (Polanski himself) from The Fearless Vampire Killers, the kink of Bitter Moon, and even the terrible fear of making a noise to disturb the neighbors in The Pianist. By the time this film was made, Polanski had been through the ringer. He'd survived the Holocaust, seen his wife and unborn child murdered by Charles Manson, and seen his position in Hollywood come unglued by his conviction for statutory rape. This is the first movie he made after fleeing to Europe, and you can see him synthesizing his own paranoias into his work. The end of the movie is both droll and ridiculous after a slow, creepy build-up. Taking on the persona of the previous tenant, he throws himself from the same window, but survives. What is he to do but crawl back upstairs and try again? That's the droll part. The ridiculous part is the twist of the tail at the end, which can be seen as a Lynchian mind-fuck or as an E.C. comics twist. Either way, it's pretty funny.

October 5:

The Man Who Changed His Mind (1936, directed by Robert Stevenson) is a movie I've only ever read about. I've never missed it on television, never seen it shown in a theater, and, ultimately, never saw it on video before now. It's always been a rumor to me, even when I was moving heaven and Earth to find as many of Karloff's films as I could. Ultimately, it's a minor film, but it's a fun minor film, with Karloff in full, "...and they called me 'mad'" off his rocker scientist mode. Karloff was capable of very subtle performances, but this isn't one of them. The way he chews the scenery here is worthy of Vincent Price at his most over-ripe. The story involves a mind-transfer device designed by Karloff. His nemesis in the film is Anna Lee (who would later face off against Karloff in Lewton's "Bedlam"), who show a tremendous spark of intelligence as his questioning assistant. The whole thing is absurd, of course, and ripe for parody. Still and all, director Robert Stevenson keeps things moving briskly, which is more than can be said of similar Karloff movies from this period.

October 7:

It's always good to be reminded of just how annoying Hong Kong comedies can be. The first thirty minutes or so of My Left Eye Sees Ghosts are a hard slog. Unpleasant characters all act like twits. Not completely intolerable, but close. The only think keeping me going was the fact that there are a couple of other Johnnie To movies (he directed this one with his occasional directing partner Wai Ka-Fai) that start out annoying and mutate into something very different by the end (Running On Karma is the most extreme example of this, but there are others). And sure enough, at about the 40 minute mark, the annoyance factor dissapated some (but not entirely). Be that as it may, it didn't turn into the horror movie--or even the horror comedy I was hoping for. The movie itself plays like a mash-up of The Eye and The Sixth Sense as filtered through Beetlejuice. Meh.

Plot and character development have never been the strong point of Eye-Talian horror movies. These movies are all about style and ultraviolence. So it comes as no surprise that someone decided to dispense with all those pesky weaknesses and focus on the strong points. That it was Mario Bava shouldn't surprise me, but it does. His Bay of Blood (1971) is what you might get if you gathered up all the murder sequences from Dario Argento's early career and made a highlight reel, while omitting those pesky mysteries. The result is a proto-typical slasher movie, though, I should note that I don't think this IS a slasher movie, per se, because the "rules" of the slasher film are not in force in this movie. There is no sense of moral retribution here. In slasher movies, the bad kids die. In this movie, EVERYONE dies. The makers of Friday the 13th should be ashamed of what they stole from this movie. Bava wasn't filming in technicolor by this time, and it's amazing how much of his personality is stripped from him because of this. Not really my cuppa joe, for the most part. I'm sure everyone in the film deserved their fates, but I didn't really care. I prefer the title, The Twitch of the Death Nerve, I should add.

October 8:

Mike Nichols's Wolf (1994) doesn't work very well as a horror movie. Its throwback version of a werewolf only serves to underline how inadequate most old werewolf movies actually are. The movie does work pretty well as a satire, though. When its depiction of the corporate struggle of fang and claw turns into a literal pissing contest between Jack Nicholson and James Spader, I had a pretty good laugh. Pity it wants to be a horror movie in its last act. Michelle Pfeiffer is largely wasted.

October 9:

I used to love The Wolf Man (1941, directed by George Waggner). At one time, I even owned a 16mm print of the film. Unfortunately, it's a film that hasn't aged well for me. When three separate characters repeat the werewolf's rhyme ("Even a man who pure in heart...etc., etc.") over the course of five minutes of film, I begin to tune out. This is NOT a subtle movie, and it even goes so far as to tell the audience outright how to feel about poor, doomed Larry Talbot ("There's something very tragic about that man… and I'm sure that nothing but harm will come to you through him") without earning that sentiment. Still, I enjoy Bela Lugosi in the film, brief though his role may be, and I can watch Claude Rains in anything. But the thrill is gone.

October 10:

There is valuable new information about the habits of vampires in John Landis's droll vampire comedy, Innocent Blood (1992). For instance, not only are they orgasmic, their eyes glow and change colors as they are coming their brains out. A word to the wise for anyone who has picked up someone in a bar without being too sure of their vampiric status. I shouldn't grouse. I like this movie a lot, in spite of my aversion to sympathetic vampires. The conflation of Interview with the Vampire and Goodfellas tickles the hell out of me and the scene where Don Rickles turns into a great big cigar ash is hilarious.

October 11:

It only takes two words to recommend Arthur Crabtree's Fiend Without a Face (1958): Flying brains. I mean, really, what more could you ask? To its credit, the film looks back to Forbidden Planet for its plot and anticipates Night of the Living Dead with its denouement. A pure delight, or, at the very least, a great cheap thrill.

October 12:

I was having a hard time getting into the movie I picked for this slot, so I bailed and decided to put Eyes Without a Face (1959, Georges Franju) in the machine instead. It's been a while. I was mesmerized from the first frame. When Edith Scob finally snaps and stabs Alida Valli with a scalpel, signalling that the end is nigh, it felt like hardly any time had passed at all. The best horror movies unfold like waking dreams, and this is one heck of a dream fugue. I had forgotten how beautiful this movie is. And how horrifying.

October 13:

Another stab at Calvaire (2004, Fabrice Du Welz), a film in the tradition of Deliverance and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, one that mistakes the torture element of those films as the engine of their horror. Reminded me most of a Gaspar Noe film (that's not a compliment), one that's a big ol' bundle of homosexual panic. The back half of the film indulges in several varieties of crucifixion imagery, putting the film's title ("Calvaire" = "Calvary"?) into some question. What the hell is Du Welz getting at? Is this a coded version of The Passion of the Christ? A needlessly obscure movie.

October 14:

My first reaction to Lucio Fulci's A Lizard in a Woman's Skin (1971) was "WTF?" The first ten minutes or so are pretty disorienting, and Fulci gets right to the exploitation elements from the outset. The movie is barely three minutes old before we get a lesbian fantasy scene between Florinda Bolkan and giallo favorite Anita Strindberg. After the first act, it settles into a standard giallo mystery, in which Bolkan dreams of murdering Strindberg only to have it come true. Is the key to the mystery in her dreams? The set-pieces here are pretty striking, from Bolkan's Spellbound-style dream sequences to a razor-sharp stalking sequence in an abandoned cathedral. The solution to the mystery is pretty transparent from about the 40 minute mark, but I doubt the director much cared. Easily the most attractive of Fulci's movies--the first twenty minutes are as visually arresting as anything in Argento's output--and one that doesn't quite throw narrative to the four winds. Pretty good, all things considered.

Rowland V. Lee's Son of Frankenstein (1939) is the most baroque of the Frankenstein movies. The sets are lavish and the cast of characters is more expansive than in the previous films, including memorable turns from Lionel Atwill, Basil Rathbone, and Bela Lugosi. If the movie has a fault--and it's a minor one--it's that it is almost impossible to watch it without thinking of Young Frankenstein. But that's not this film's fault.

October 15:

The Golem (1920, Paul Weggner and Carl Boese) remains the prototype for the fairy-tale horror movie, and stands the test of time as a delight for the eyes. Caligari gets all the press, but The Golem is every bit the expressionist masterpiece. The great cinematographer, Karl Freund, cut his teeth on this movie, and seems to be inventing the look of the next two decades of horror movies right before our very eyes.

October 16:

The Fly (1986, David Cronenberg) is an acting tour de force. Jeff Goldblum gets most of the acclaim for a difficult part under a ton of prosthetics (interesting that this movie and the similarly performed The Elephant Man were both produced by Mel Brooks of all people), but it's Geena Davis who always catches my eye when I watch this movie. Cronenberg has always been a good director of actresses, but he rarely builds his movies around them. This is an exception. The Fly is told from Davis's point of view. The first shot is from her POV and we mostly see Goldblum's Seth Brundle from her perspective. Tellingly, we are privy to her inner life--and only her inner life, not Brunde's--through the agency of her nightmares.

October 17:

The Screwfly Solution (2007, Joe Dante) is a startling variant on Night of the Living Dead, where the world isn't torn apart by zombies, but is torn apart when men suddenly decide to kill women. This is an allegory, of course, and a political one at that, but if it were only that, it wouldn't hit as hard as it does. Beneath the surface of its critique of male agression and the inherent, though latent misogyny of our culture is a bitter critique of how women are treated in horror movies and the central horror that many battered women experience when a man who they thought was good and kind turns out to be a monster. When one character who relates her experience to a women's shelter says that she's the norm and her counsellor is the exception, it's a bitter, horrifying commentary--more so because we aren't so sure she isn't right.

October 18:

Imprint (2006, Takashi Miike) seems like a second cousin to Audition. Perhaps it's what you'd get if you filtered Audition through Mizoguchi or Naruse. In any event, it's a nasty piece of work. The director sure does love his torture sequences, and he seems to have taken the lead of Fruit Chan's "Dumplings" from 3 Extremes when it comes to using foetuses for effect. One gets the feeling that Miike is not one to sit idly by when he gets upstaged. Takes a left turn into ridiculousness at the end, but be that as it may...

October 19:

I got nothing.

October 20:

The Pit and the Pendulum (1961, Roger Corman) is a close twin of Corman's previous Poe film, House of Usher, though one that has an infusion of red meat. Not only is the film's "lost Lenore" recast in the mold of "la belle dame sans merci" (the deliciously wicked Barbara Steele), but it has Poe's diabolical pendulum. The film's last image is indelible.

Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967, aka: Dance of the Vampires) is such a merciless parody of Hammer's vampire films (particularly Kiss of the Vampire) that it's easy to overlook the fact that it has some crackerjack set-pieces. The film's use of mirrors is as clever as anything in the genre. And...wow...Sharon Tate was gorgeous.

October 21:

Corridors of Blood (1958, Robert Day) places the venerable Boris Karloff in the Henry Daniell role from Karloff's earlier The Body Snatcher. The Karloff role, the villainous resurrectionist, goes to a superbly menacing Christopher Lee. I was having deja vu while I was watching this one. It's practically the same film as The Flesh and the Fiends from two years later (Peter Cushing gets the Henry Daniell role in that one), though Corridors of Blood adds a salting of drug addiction to Karloff's character, enabling him to go off his nut. Pretty good for what it is, but minor.

Silent Hill (2006, Christopher Gans) is based on a game I've never seen. Maybe that explains why I have no bloody idea of what the movie is about. Lots of interesting images, but, Jesus-tap-dancing-christ! I've seen Dario Argento movies with more comprehensible plots. Docked lots of points for wasting Sean Bean. Crap.

October 22:

I got nothing.

October 23:

Plague of the Zombies (1966, John Gilling) is an interesting second-tier Hammer offering from their most productive period. This is a pre-Night of the Living Dead movie that takes its conception of zombies from the traditional Haitian zombie, and sets them loose on yet another of those inhospitable small English towns that doesn't cotton to outsiders. Leavened considerably by an impish performance by Andre Morell as the doctor looking into things, and by a sense of play on the part of the director when it comes to tweaking the staid Hammer formula.

October 24:

Black Sheep (2006, Jonathan King) desperately wants to be Peter Jackson's Dead Alive. There are worse role models, I suppose. The plot concerns a rampaging herd of genetically engineered were-sheep, which tells you how seriously one should take the movie. When the earthy-crunchy hippie chick walks into a mad science laboratory and exclaims, "Oh my god!....The feng shui in here is terrible," I realized that I'm probably buying this movie.

October 29:

I wanted to like 30 Days of Night (2007, David Slade), I did. But if there's something I can't stomach at the movies, it's the "run and gun" style favored by a lot of action films these days, in which the camera is almost always hand-held or "shaken" in post production, and the average shot length is maybe 15 frames long. It's not even a matter of being able to follow the action--this style of filmmaking makes me physically nauseous. There's a lot of this style of filmmaking in this movie. Worse, the style of filmmaking didn't distract me from the various stupidities perpetrated by the screenwriters. The crux of the movie is the isolation of the inhabitants of Barrow, AK, as a band of vampires lays seige to the town during the long winter night. Okay. But the notion that nothing can get in and out of Barrow because it's dark is stupid. The notion that no one in the outside world--friends, family, oil execs--is going to ignore that the town has stopped communicating is stupid. And when I start inventorying a film's stupidities, that film has lost me. A longer review here, though it says more or less the same thing in more space.

The original story upon which Jenifer (2006, Dario Argento) is based is one of my favorite comic book short stories. It's a small nugget of nastiness drawn for Creepy Magazine by Bernie Wrightson at the height of his powers as a horror illustrator. Argento's film version, expanded from the merciless economy of the original, loses almost everything in translation. Instead of something alarming and grotesque, Argento's version is merely tasteless. I keep hoping to see a glimmer of the old Argento in his newer works, but he continues to disappoint. Alas.

October 30:

The Howling (1981, d. Joe Dante) is a lot more deadpan than I remembered it being. And a lot meaner. I had forgotten the nasty porno loop that Eddie is watching in the film's opening. I had forgotten how attached the viewer gets to the Belinda Belaski character (as "Terry Fisher," natch), only to see her horribly murdered. And I had forgotten just how cool the werewolves are in this movie. The werewolf and werewolf transformation that Rob Bottin concocts for this film completely upstages his mentor, Rick Baker. Love that double twist ending. Love Dick Miller saying, "Werewolves? They're like cock-a-roaches!"

October 31:

Körkarlen (1921, Victor Sjostrom) is pretty moralistic--a common failing in some silent exercises in le fantastique, and certainly a common failing in movies following this narrative pattern (think certain holiday classics). But the images are strong. Did Mario Bava swipe his phantom coach from this film? Did Tod Browning? Possibly. The story is a kind of Flying Dutchman yarn, in which the last man to die at the end of the year is fated to drive death's coach for a year, collecting souls. For some reason, I link this movie to the first dream sequence in Wild Strawberries. It's probably the presence of Sjostrom.

The War of the Worlds (1954, d. Byron Haskins) is the first movie I ever owned. As such, it has a certain sentimental value. It remains my favorite fantasy of destruction, in part because I love the elegance of the Martian war machines in this film, and I love the sinister ticking that accompanies them. It's interesting to see this turned into an ode to patriotism and America when the original story was a scathing critique of colonialism. But be that as it may...

The end for this year.

Final tally: 31 movies. 17 new to me. Well, crap. I came in one behind last year's tally in both categories. Still and all, I did finish, even if the last week was like dragging myself through a field of broken glass.









11/01/2007