Zombos' Closet of Horror

The Silent Scream (1980) Ti West Should Have Remade This One Instead

ZC Rating 3 of 7: Good

With the revelation of the identity of the murderer some time before the film's climax, its relatively low body count and avoidance of gory pyrotechnics, Silent Scream is by no means a typical teenagers-in-peril movie given the subject matter and date of release. Also untypical are the strengths of the performances, and the fact that one actually cares whether the intended victims survive or not. (The Overlook Film Encyclopedia: Horror)

Scotty (the impossibly thin Rebecca Balding) needs an apartment badly. She's late to the college semester and the college dorms are filled. At the end of an almost fruitless day of apartment hunting (shown in humorous vignettes of crappy places and dubious renters), she finds a small, comfortable room in a big, brooding, beachside house at the top of a hill. Three other college latecomers join her: there's the spoiled rich Peter (John Widelock), the feisty, bosomy, fun-loving girl Doris (Juli Andelman), and the hunk--who makes sure to keep his shirt off or unbuttoned as much as possible because he's the hunk--Jack (Steve Doubet). Living in the house are the brooding Mrs. Engels (Yvonne De Carlo), up in the attic; the quiet and ill at ease Mason Engels (Brad Rearden), in the bedroom across the hall; and a family secret about to become known. Violently. Now guess which one of the college kids gets killed first.

Movie Review: Zombie's Halloween II (2009) Michael Myers' Grudge Takes Shape

Rating 4 of 7: Very Good

I did not expect Rob Zombie to surprise me with Halloween II. Beyond his unavoidably repetitious metal-rockers, hippie-hillbillies, and tattoo-punkstering of Laurie Strode and Haddonfield Illinois' social set, miring Halloween II in a seedy glaze of grunge, strip joints, and Alice Cooper and Frank Zappa posters, he surprised me.

Probably many horror fans are surprised, too, and will be dismayed or downright violently annoyed with this bold mashing of J-horror's quintessential rage-filled imagery into Myers' endless angst-driven slashing ouevre.

In this brilliantly audacious diversion from John Carpenter's classic bogeyman, Michael Myers (the towering Tyler Mane) becomes a deadly juggernaut guided by a mysterious other embodied in the white gossamer spectre of his dead mother and her majestic white stallion. But to what purpose? Is she a vision of Shiva the Destroyer? Or is she a demonic chaos seeking succor? Or is she simply a confabulation in Myers' tortured mind? Zombie builds mystery by confounding us with this and an unexpected folly a deux between Myers and his sister, which now takes the Halloween franchise into a strikingly new direction.

The Last House on the Left (2009) To What Purpose?

This film, for example, which as I write has inspired only one review (by "Fright"), has generated a spirited online discussion about whether you can kill someone by sticking their head in a microwave. Many argue that a microwave won't operate with the door open. Others cite an early scene establishing that the microwave is "broken." The question of whether one should microwave a man's head never arises (from Roger Ebert's review of The Last House on the Left, 2009).

Of course, whether one should turn on the kitchen garbage disposal to mangle a person's hand into bloody pulp, accompanied with stereophonic screams of agony, could be another philosophical question to ponder in this vicious--yet, oddly, less terrifying--remake of Wes Craven's gut-wrenching 1972 interpretation of Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring. But philosophical ponderance is not often measured into horror movies as much as sadistic inhumanity. So to what purpose do I bathe in blood, along with the innocent and the damned, on this hellish, stormy, night of vengeance?