From Zombos Closet

movie review

Dead Before Dawn 3D (2012)
It Certainly Is

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Dead-before-dawn
Zombos Says: Why?

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Not often do words like lame, ill-considered, stupid, not funny, and waste of time come to mind when watching a movie, but they did as I watched Dead Before Dawn, a horror-numbedy from Canada that misfires on both key areas: horror and comedy. Some things really shouldn’t cross the border and this lacklustre paycheck-maker is one of them. Maybe if you had a few tokes before or during this zombie thriller manqué it would be tolerable, but you better have a BIG bong.

Horus Galloway (Christopher Lloyd) runs The Occult Barn (the Magic Box from Buffy it isn’t), which must never close during business hours (it’s not explained why), but no patrons ever visit because no one else is ever in the place except for him and the college-aged instigators (they look really REALLY much older) who will eventually upset the most demonish of demons stashed in the fragile urn capped off by a human skull.  That rests on the top shelf of a rickety cabinet in plain site and without any caveat emptor or protection against slippery hands and the bumbling curious reaching for it. You want foreshadowing done with the subtlety of a sledgehammer? There you go. If that wasn’t enough, a bad dream shows us how Casper Galloway’s (Devon Bostick) father dies just holding it, after he catches Casper not heeding his warning to stay away from it. (Devon Bostick’s acting throughout appears to be heavily influenced by excessive toking, by the way. Just saying.)

Here’s the setup in a nutshell.

Horus implores Casper to man The Occult Barn’s cash register so he can receive his life-time achievement award, in person, from the supernatural occultists’ society. Casper refuses. His mom insists. And after she cuts the crusty ends off his sandwhich just the way he likes, she gets her way and he’s off to confront his fear and man the register. His college friends and the requisite make-fun-of-the-nerd frat pack show up. So does Becky (April Mullen), the girl he has a crush on. She wants to see the urn. She gets her way. They drop it.

Let the curse begin.

The one really smart ploy here (and it’s the only one in this movie so enjoy it) is how everyone starts adding in their variation of what the curse will cause to happen as Casper tries to warn them of impending doom and to please shut up. Here’s what they wind up with: the “zemons” or zombie demons will cause death by hickies, but French kissing a zemon will make it your slave; and the kicker is that anyone they look at will kill himself or herself and turn into a zemon to attack them.

Rather quickly the zemons start multiplying with inexpensive but competent gory results. It starts with a football player impaling himself with the first down marker; then cheerleaders start dropping each other on purpose; Casper’s mom takes a warm bath with a hot toaster, too. Now a zemon, she chases him out onto the street where two hillbillys—yes, that’s right, I did say HILLBILLYS—run over her in their car. One jumps out of the car with a shotgun and says not to worry, he’s carrying it because they just got back from duck hunting. And yes, that’s the height of comedy brilliance achieved in this movie.

I couldn’t tell if the actors were following the script or ad libbing, but one thing I can say with certainty: if they were sticking to writer Tim Doiron’s script they should have ad libbed instead; but if they were ad libbing, they should have stuck to his script instead.

Horus returns to The Occult Barn in time to brain himself with his own award after they look at him, but before he goes all zemon-like, he manages to, cryptically of course, and with much hamming on wry, hint at how to reverse the spell. Like a Goosebumps episode that was written by 500 babboons locked in a stuffy room with iPads and only one charger, Casper with his rolling pin, Becky with her crossbow, and their freaked-out companions armed with lesser weapons, pile into a Winnebago to find the ingredients needed to seal the demon back up and stop the curse. Winnebagos are all the rage for zombie-related trips after one was used in Diary of the Living Dead.

So many wonderfully terrifying and funny horror movies have crossed the border from Canada: Black Christmas, The Gate, The Changeling, and PontyPool; just to name a few.

This movie isn’t one of them.

Cockneys vs Zombies (2012)
Guns and Gory

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Cockneys_2324135b
Zombos Says: Good

Sometimes a zombie movie is just a zombie movie. It’s at those times that a zombie movie can be most entertaining, too. There are no metaphysical inflections, no religious thought-munchies, no ulterior sociological or political motives to be plumbed, or character digressions to be dissected in Cockneys vs Zombies; just a lot of hot and heavy guns, grenades, fiesty old people, motley younger people, and lots of ravenous zombies to mix it up with, which director Matthias Hoene does with lively gore and cheeky zest and lots of ammo. The heavy weaponry and unlimited ammo supply is provided by Mickey (Ashley Bashy Thomas), the metal-plate-in-his-head, sanity-challenged, neighborhood thug who keeps his stash in a cargo container. A large cargo container.

The zombie menace begins when an East London construction crew unearths an underground vault. On the stone door is written “sealed by the order of King Charles II.” They open it. Among the hundreds of skulls and skeletons and rats are a few lively corpses. Let the bloody mayhem begin.

As the outbreak spreads, two brothers (Harry Treadaway and Rasmus Hardiker), unaware of the growing menace (and in general, not very aware of their future prospects whatsoever)  want the local bank to chip in to help save their grandad’s (Alan Ford) nursing home, the Bow Bells Care Home. They enlist the aid of Davey (Jack Doolan), a not so good alarm tech specialist who gets caught a lot: Katy (Michelle Ryan), a looker added primarily added to the script so we would keep looking (especially when she carries her handgun in her butt-crack); and Mickey, who we already know is bonkers, but still well-equipped with the hardware needed to heist the bank. What could go wrong?

It all goes wrong as the zombies close in and the gang that shouldn’t rob banks and the old folks at the home (Honor Blackman among them) need to survive the onslaught. And try to wake up Hamish, who’s hard of hearing and sleeping in the back yard that is filling up with zombies. The brothers have guns, the old folks have walkers. This is possibly the first time in a zombie movie we learn who is faster: an old man in a walker or the shambling George Romero-styled zombie chasing him.

Moving back and forth between the dire predicaments both brothers and the Bow Bells Care Home  occupants find themselves in, the script isn’t as witty as Shaun of the Dead or Zombie Land, but is as much fun to watch. The make up effects lean toward wet and messy, with a little CGI added to punctuate head removals, close proximity gun blasts to appendages, and de rigueur  intestinal slurpages. In dispatching one zombie chomping down on a fresh forearm, a shotgun blast to the zombie’s face leaves its lower part still firmly attached to the victim’s arm; for a long while, which is gross but funny, and that’s par for the tone of the effects.

The brothers eventually figure out how to rescue the old folks trapped in Bow Bells, but wheelchairs and walkers are a burden. Lucky the zombies are slower than the old people. But there are still a lot of them. And a lot of guns to go around. And a very sharp Samurai sword to swing for a bloody good time.

Lady In White (1988)

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LadyinwhiteZombos Says: Very Good

As the sun waned, I moved into the study and popped the Lady in White into the DVD player. After our Hostel experience, I wanted Zombos to watch a more
subtle and traditional horror movie: one that treats murder and depravity in a respectable and nostalgic way.

It’s 1962 in Willowpoint Falls, and in the opening montage, director Frank LaLoggia introduces us to the small town during Halloween, and to the Scarlatti family’s eccentricities. Told as a flashback by the older Frankie Scarlatti (played by LaLoggia), we see the story lightly filtered through his memories as the sensitive young Frankie (played by the big eyed and big eared Lukas Haas) let’s two bully boys trick him into getting locked into the classroom’s foreboding cloakroom. All alone, and a stone’s throw away from a cemetery to boot, Frankie soon falls asleep on the top shelf of the closet, by the window.

An in-camera time lapse shot, done through the half-moon window of the cloakroom looking onto the cemetery, reminded me of a similar effect used in Hammer’s Horror of Dracula, where the sunlight rapidly fades to darkness as seen through the tomb’s window. Darkness is not a good thing when facing vampires or when locked in ominous cloakrooms on Halloween night, to be sure.

When 10 o’clock rolls around, it’s quiet, darker still, and also time for the murder mystery and ghost story to begin. Right off the bat I can identify with Frankie: he’s wearing a black cape
and a Bela Lugosi mask. In a later scene in his bedroom, he also has the Aurora monster model kits displayed in all their magnificence.

That certainly brings back memories for yours truly. But I digress.

An eerie reenactment begins as Frankie wakes up from a bad dream involving his dead mother. A cold blast of air enters the room, along with the ghost of a little girl, laughing and
playing. An interesting touch here is that this is not an atmospheric haunting, where events merely play over and over again, but the ghost of the little girl responds to Frankie’s presence in the room. She seems as startled to see him as he is to see her. But past events must still play out, and soon she is callously murdered by a shadowy adult figure.

Using a black screen process to create the transparent apparition of the girl, the scene is a harsh contrast to the lighter tone presented earlier in the movie, and sets up the next, more
violent scene, where young Frankie finds himself in the unenviable position of sitting on the top shelf of the cloakroom when the real child-killer enters, looking for something that he had dropped into the floor grate after strangling the girl.

The killer realizes he is not alone and shines his flashlight onto the small black caped form, wearing the Bela Lugosi mask, sitting in the corner of the top shelf. Frankie tries to escape,
but quickly has the life nearly choked out of him. An effective out of body experience has Frankie meet Melissa Ann, the ghost of the little girl so cruelly murdered long ago. He finds out she is trying to find her mom. Frankie is brought back to consciousness and he is soon delving deeper into this mystery for us.

True to form for the 1960s thematic, the school janitor, an African-American, is found drunk in the basement and is immediately blamed for the attempted murder of Frankie and the murders of 11 other children, including Melissa Ann, who was the first.

Reminiscent of To Kill a Mockingbird, the movie maintains a good balance between the fanciful, Frankie’s adventure with the ghostly Melissa Ann against the blue-lit night scenes in the fairy tale stylized woods, and his coming of age and the painful loss of his mom. This theme of loss is borne also by the ghostly Melissa Ann who is looking for her mother, the ghost of her mother who is looking for Melissa Ann, and not to give too much away, one sister mourning the loss of another.

LaLoggia, who oddly enough grew up in an urban environment, creates a charming small town nostalgia and through the use of carefully controlled colors and lighting brings the hues of autumn inside to his interior scenes. The pharmacy window decorated for Halloween and the classroom scene where Frankie reads his monster story to the class is filled with shades of orange, yellow and the various colors of crisp autumn leaves.

In stark contrast, he uses reds and blues to denote the darker side of this story, and effectively uses dimmer panels to bring the light down or up to transition between important story
points in the scene. The overall mood of the movie changes from charming to alarming and back to charming as the story unfolds to its incendiary ending atop the cliffs by the white cottage. LaLoggia’s simple, old-time, approach using in-camera effects combined with basic process shots build his story in an economical but creative way. Like a good ghost story, simple elements combine to create an ethereal dread, making Lady in White a memorable movie.

Uzumaki (Spiral, 2000)

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Uzumaki_shot2a
Zombos Says: Excellent

As Shuichi’s father says, “One brings forth one’s own uzumaki!” in this dark glimpse into Lovecraftian terror and looming doom.  Uzumaki is director Higuchinsky’s cinematic distillation of in-need-of-therapy Jungi Ito’s three volume, manga-sized descent into madness and chaos. The town of Kurozu-cho is beset by spirals, spinning the lives and minds of the townspeople, and changing them in  ghastly ways.  Higuchinsky captures the grotesque and arabesque images of Ito’s manga by using tightly framed, sharply angled views, tinted  green to accentuate the weirdness. There’s a panoply of bread and butter cinematography used to contrast against the spiral terror: tracking shots, panning shots, close-ups, and hazy, ghostly faces appear and fade. CGI spirals twirling in unexpected places on the screen also appear throughout the movie.

The story begins as flashback, told by Kirie (Eriko Hatsune), a young girl who sees the effects of the curse descending on her small, isolated town by the water. A gust of wind scatters leaves around her, startling her into remembering. Or is she forgetting? The mesmerizing vortex is never-ending, and perhaps Higuchinsky is telling us Kirie is caught in a larger one of time, folding over and over on itself in repetition, trapping her and her town by its endless looping.

Shuichi (Fhi Fan), Kirie’s morose, since-childhood, boyfriend tells her of his fears the town is beset by a curse of spirals. His father (Ren Ohsugi), consumed with thoughts of them, becomes an early victim.  Kirie sees him filming a snail. He ignores her. He begins to ignore everything except the spiral pattern he seeks out. He steals the hair salon’s spiraling sign and devours spiral noodles. A startling transformation, before a more physically terminal one, shows him exerting his own uzumaki by impossibly spiraling his eyes after seeking the pattern is no longer satisfying.

More victims follow as Kirie’s classmates  succumb to physical transformations with some turning into slimy human snails, another girl vainly sports a new hairdo of enormous black spirals imbued with their own life,  and a boy committing suicide splatters at the foot of the school’s spiral staircase. Someone remarks how happy his broken, blood-smeared face looks in death.

Spiraling out of control deaths escalate: first perplexed by Shuichi’s father’s enfatuation with spirals, Kirie’s own father (Taro Suwa), a pottery maker, becomes enthralled with the swirling clay to his detriment;  Shuichi’s mother (Keiko  Takahashi) collapses at the funeral for his father when she sees his face spiraling in the sky against swirling curls of smoke rising from the crematorium. She goes mad and cuts off her hair and fingertips to eliminate looking at anything resembling a spiral; an unwanted suitor for Kirie fatally wraps himself around a moving car’s wheel; and even Shuichi finally succumbs to the twisting madness permeating the sky, the ground, and eventually everyone. Even the tunnel leading into the town becomes useless, twisting on itself so no one can leave or enter.

A news reporter hunts down tantalizing clues for the curse involving serpents, mirrors, and Dragonfly Pond, the possible source of the growing otherworldliness. These hints at the cause for the bedevilment descending on the town ultimately tease but never explain. Various elements from the trilogy are here, but the final revelation of the curse, and its more visually gruesome encounters such as Umbilical Cord ( in volume 2) and The Scar (volume 1) are missing in this evocative Lovecraftian horror. That’s a shame. Uzumaki captures the manga mood of Ito’s spiral horrors so well, to see these additional terrors onscreen would have been like tasting the rich icing on a moist red velvet cake touched with cinnamon: sickeningly sweet but damn satisfying.

Black Swan (2010)

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Print001 Zombos Says: Excellent

While other directors choose to infuriate and nauseate their audiences with outrageous human centipedes, Darren Aronofsky goes to the ballet instead to unleash Black Swan, a movie that releases the repressed demon within through restrained gore and unrestrained pirouettes.

Natalie Portman plays the emotionally crippled Nina Sayers, a New York City ballerina whose repressed sensuality and domineering mother (Barbara Hershey) keep Nina’s bedroom crowded with pink, stuffed animals, and her social life as busy as the one the little dancing ballerina in her music box has.

When offered the chance to play the dual role of the White and Black Swans in Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake, Nina’s descent into madness, and ascent into freedom, begins. Goading her on is her director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), who, like the evil sorceror, Von Rothbart, wants to control her passion. It is this transition from White Swan, which Nina dances flawlessly, to Black Swan, which requires her to unleash a sensual side long repressed that makes Black Swan almost like watching Carrie‘s Carrie White dressed in a tutu. It is an engrossing and jarring farandole macabre, one filled with horrific moments for Nina and us as her mind splinters into paranoia and hallucination, and feeds on its fears.

Much of Black Swan is filmed in uncomfortably unsteady and confining closeups. Rarely do we see beyond what Nina sees or imagines. Like the mechanical ballerina confined to her music box, Nina’s world is confined to her apartment, her bedroom, and the ballet hall where she brutalizes her body with constant practice. A real or imagined rivalry between her and Lily (Mila Kunis), an unbridled ballerina whose sensuality makes her a natural to dance the role of the Black Swan, erupts into more self-torture for Nina. Her obsessive compulsive behaviors grow into waking nightmares. In a scene reminiscent of the nasty face peeling in Poltergeist, Nina picks at a scab until the blood flows red. Her self-scratching leaves bloody tears she’s not conscious of making. Her paranoia leads to a smashed and bloody dressing room mirror.

Aronofsky doles out gore to emphasize the physical punishment Nina is going through, and lavishes it on in one queeze-inducing hallucination: a closeup of a cracked and bloody toenail; skin-peeling; blood flowing from under a door. I wonder how the older audience in the theater felt (I was in Florida when I saw Black Swan) seeing these common horror movie images in a movie marketed as a drama and thriller?

Black Swan is a triumph of technique, tension, and metamorphosis as Nina becomes the Black Swan. And it is a horror movie. Make no mistake about that.

Skyline (2010)
Not Much to See

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Zombos Says: Fair

Print001
Here it is in a film cannister: if you’ve seen the trailer for Skyline, you’ve seen the most exciting part of this slimy-aliens-from-space pulp drama of Borg-like ( part machine, part organic, all regenerating),  Matrixy-looking, multi-tentacled creatures vacuuming up humanity through a sparkly blue light as easily as dust mites are sucked up an Oreck.

In this war of the worlds special effects opus of us losing against them big time, the kicker here is they want our brains, which they use like Energiser batteries to power either themselves or their machinery, or maybe it’s both. I will, with difficulty, refrain from making any dead battery jokes just because they’re attacking Los Angeles, but feel free to infer whatever you like, or even change the locale to suit your preference.

It looks like Independence Day, but it doesn’t have that movie’s patriotic enthusiasm or energetic characters; it looks like War of the Worlds (old and new versions), but it doesn’t have either of those movies’ overwhelming sense of decimation, growing futility, or soul-numbing despair; it even looks like 1954’s Target Earth, whose hunting mechanoids scour the city’s streets for survivors in hiding. With Skyline  mashing dramatic ingredients from many science fiction movies, the Brothers Strause fail to add any of their own sugar and spice to the familiar effects to make this more satisfying than the Coke and Reese’s Pieces I had while watching it.

I will pin much of the blame on the dialog: it’s stultifying.  None of the pretty people trapped in Terry’s (Donald Faison) penthouse speak in their own words. They bicker, they yell, but in stock, one-line sentences. Pick any two people and switch the dialog around; there would be no difference. The ugly aliens have more personality and they don’t talk.

As Los Angeles is vacuumed clean of residents, Terry’s house guests hide from the invaders with the blinds drawn. His automatic window blinds reminded me of the house shields in Forbidden Planet. They weren’t very effective either. There’s Jarrod (Eric Balfour), his girlfriend Elaine (Scottie Thompson), Terry’s girlfriend Candice (Brittany Daniel), and Terry’s personal assistant (emphasis on personal) Denise (Crystal Reed).

They disagree on whether to stay or make a run for it. Eventually they reluctantly run, but a giant alien stomps on their escape. Oliver (David Zayas), the concierge, comes to their rescue. He and Jarrod disagree on whether to stay or make a run for it. Much of the movie seems to be spent on everyone disagreeing on what to do next. A possible tension-mounting relationship between Candice, Denise, and cheating Terry is quickly stomped on, too.

They watch as the military shoots nukes at the motherships–over Los Angeles–but the blown apart ships regenerate.  A few soldiers are dropped by helicopter to fight the maruading aliens, but they lose. Jarrod takes Elaine up to the roof, hoping they can escape by helicopter. The aliens intervene and they are captured. We get to see inside the mothership, how nasty the aliens are, and the groan-inducing potential for a sequel. However, I’ll admit I do like the ending: it’s hokey but pure pulp science fiction in tone.

Skyline is a straight to DVD movie that somehow got a lot more money to add a lot more fiery special effects. Now that’s science fiction.

Ghost In the House of Frankenstein Part 4
The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)

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Ghost_of_frankenstein
Zombos Says: Very Good

The Ghost of Frankenstein is in many ways the last of the vintage horror movies. Val Lewton, The Uninvited, and Dead of Night were about to bring a new sophistication and literacy to the genre. If the Ghost is already an assembly line job, it’s a good, thoroughly professional, and entertaining one, an honorable close to a solid decade of first rate chillers. (William K. Everson, Classics of the Horror Movie)

Although The Ghost of Frankenstein may be a shade more pale compared to the first three movies in Universal Studios’ Frankenstein series, I disagree with calling it “artless” (Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas and John Brunas, Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Movies 1931-1946, 2ed). Slick, yes; budget assembly line production, yes; but artless? No. Even with Universal’s shift of the series from A to B movie status, Erle C. Kenton’s no-frills direction and Jack Otterson’s art direction still manage to spark a little magic between those electrodes one more time.

Scott Darling, needing more room to meander the Frankenstein Monster’s misadventures further, introduces the second son of Frankenstein, the more sedate Ludwig (Cedric Hardwicke). Ludwig Frankenstein (neither a ‘Baron’ nor a ‘Von’ in his name like his brother in Son of Frankenstein) is a doctor. He’s mastered the science of moving brains in-between craniums. Ludwig practices his brain surgery and psychiatry in the small and happy town of Vasaria. Oddly, Vasaria’s townsfolk do not know anything about his unfortunate family tree, or the problems his deific-prone father and brother have made for that other small and unhappy town within walking distance. But soon those problems will become Vasaria’s when Ygor and the Monster pay a visit after being thrown out of Castle Frankenstein by torch-wielding, grudge-bearing villagers (although they were giddy with happiness at the end of Son of Frankenstein).

The ghost of Dwight Frye puts in an all too brief appearance as one of the despondent villagers. After a Town Hall meeting (note the Americanization) where they pin everything from unhappy babies to bad crops on the ‘Frankenstein Curse,’ the mayor (another Americanization) gives them carte blanche to blow up the castle and pesky Ygor along with it.

Ygor conveniently survived his ‘mortal’ gun wounds received in Son of Frankenstein to continue his chief-instigator role here. He also seems to have scrounged up enough money for much needed dental work and grooming aids. Seeing Lugosi reprise his best role since Dracula and Murder Legendre in White Zombie is more than satisfying, and keeps the action moving briskly. More briskly than Lon Chaney Jr’s portrayal of the Monster—under Kenton’s direction, at least—can muster alone.

Tossing dynamite sticks up at the castle while Ygor drops broken stone battlements from above, the villagers manage to topple one of the castle’s massive towers, revealing—

Look! The sulphur pit’s all dried and hardened since the last movie! And there’s the Monster nestled in it like a bug in a rug! Wait a minute. Wasn’t the pit in the laboratory and both lying adjacent to the castle in Son of Frankenstein? How did the pit and the Monster wind up under one of the castle’s towers for this movie?

—his only friend pickled in the now dried sulfur. Or so surmises Ygor, who is delighted to see the Monster still kicking. He pulls him out of the pit and both make a hasty exit while the villagers blow up the rest of the castle to their heart’s content and much needed venting.

The village mob hysterics may be patent Universal artistry, now economically packaged for filming—I can’t fathom why Universal’s theme parks haven’t picked up on such a great role-playing idea—but Kenton’s artistic flair still comes through and is first seen when a lightning storm erupts and Ygor, trying to persuade the Monster to seek shelter, is pushed aside as Frankenstein’s creation reaches toward the heavens. A bolt of electricity strikes the Monster’s outstretched arms and he welcomes it. Still covered in dried sulfur and surrounded by the desolate nightscape and gnarled trees, he looks like a ghost defiantly rising from his grave.

“The lightning. It is good for you! Your father was Frankenstein, but your mother was the lightning!” says Ygor, who decides to seek out Ludwig, residing in the nearby town of Vasaria, for help.

More becoming to his familiar costume, along the way to Vasaria the Monster loses his Go Go-styled fuzzy vest worn in Son of Frankenstein and dons a dark jacket. When the overly cricked neck Ygor and his overly tall friend walk into town—yes, they simply stroll into town in broad daylight—Ygor stops to chat with a girl to ask directions.

As Ygor talks with the girl, the Monster wanders off when he sees a little girl (Janet Ann Gallow) being bullied by the little boys. He helps her retrieve her ball, which the boys had tossed onto a nearby roof. In the process he manages to panic Vasaria’s townspeople and break enough bones to quickly make Vasaria as unhappy a town as the one he recently left. Low angles with the camera looking up at the towering Monster—showing the little girl’s point of view—increase his menacing presence.

From this movie onward the Frankenstein Monster becomes a scene prop of immense proportions. By the time Glenn Strange takes over the role in House of Frankenstein and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, the Monster is relegated to being a creepy, big, dummy-like figure; usually strapped to an operating table, around which, indirectly, much of the action occurs. It is this mute, inert body, with arms outstretched in front of him when he does occasionally walk (attributed to Lugosi’s blind Monster performance in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man) that gives us the iconic image of Frankenstein’s Monster prevalent in the 1960s up to today.

The plot device of restoring the ailing Monster’s vitality by electrically recharging him, introduced in Son of Frankenstein, now goes one step further here, where it becomes a matter of recharging him before exchanging his abnormal brain with a normal one. Re-energizing and brain-swapping will continue as the main modus operandi for the Monster in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein, House of Dracula, and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, as well as the du jour blueprint for countless future spookshow skits involving mad scientists and Frankenstein Monsters—or plain old gorillas. (For a deliciously goofy example of the gorilla variety see the Three Stooges 3D short, Spooks!)

This shift from Boris Karloff’s misunderstood Monster yearning for acceptance and companionship to Lon Chaney Jr’s mute, lumbering Monster, now weak and semi-conscious, lessens the complexity of the storyline for easier reuse and allows any actor of the right size to mimic the role since it has few emotive requirements, with both conditions important for keeping the budget low and the production simple.

 

The brain-swapping routine is a hangover from Curt Siodmak’s Black Friday script, facilitating a startlingly gruesome moment when Bohmer wheels a bottled brain directly into the camera lens. (Jonathan Rigby, American Gothic: Sixty Years of Horror Cinema)

 

There is also a more important thematic shift in the Monster’s relationship with his world. This theme, begun in Son of Frankenstein and developed further here, either accidentally or subconsciously, as a result of Universal moving the series to B production status, contains layers of meaning not usually discussed when The Ghost of Frankenstein and House of Frankenstein are mentioned.

And what is this theme, pray tell?

Zombie’s Halloween II (2009)

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Michael myers Zombos Says: 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.

My surprise comes from how Zombie’s bizarre imagery grates against my expectations (and probably those of most of the audience): a mad-hatter’s kind of tea party in Hell; Myers’ adult skeleton–its skull wearing his scarecrow-like mask–eerily hanging in the background as young Michael and spectral mommy chat about the future of the Myers family; and then the final jarring image that completely displaces Halloween II from its slasher underpinning by invoking the psychologically terrifying hallmarks of Samara from The Ring and The Grudge’s unstoppable curse of violence. I am more than surprised: I did not think Rob Zombie capable of such creative impudence.

Halloween II 2009Teasing with a beginning that makes us believe he is comfortably rehashing the hospital mayhem from 1981’s Halloween II, Zombie instead drops us off in Haddonfield a year later. Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) now lives with long-haired–and burned-out–Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif) and his short-haired, more healthy-eating, daughter Annie (Danielle Harris). Laurie suffers from horrific nightmares and attends therapy sessions. She is a wreck physically and mentally, and cannot get her life–after that night Michael came home–jump-started again. Meanwhile, Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) is doing smashingly well. He is promoting his succcessful book on Myers. Zombie alternates between showing Laurie’s ongoing struggle with her trauma and Loomis’ unsympathetic attitude to the fallout from Myers’ serial-killing as he tours the book-signing circuit. More and more, the limelight reveals Loomis’ callousness in contrast to Laurie’s growing despair when she cannot find forgetfulness in the shadows.

There is no suspense generated from this shifting focus between Laurie, Loomis, and Myers’ continuing killing spree, even after Zombie gives Myers a shiny new knife, one Jim Bowie would be proud of, and sends him off, guided by his visions, to bring Laurie home. I wondered how all this carnage leading up to another Halloween night with Michael Myers could leave no room for suspense. I will pin it on Zombie paying greater attention to his imagery, which is wonderfully macabre and wicked and filled with malevolent long-haired spectres (although in a Zombie movie just about everyone has long hair), to the detriment of his more perfunctory treatment of Myers. He is big, he is bad, he is unstoppable; yes, we get that. Having Myers kill and eat a dog, uncooked, also seems a gratuitous gorehound moment, which Zombie seems to relish. Missing from this Halloween movie is the signiture music, which only comes into play at the end for the revelation that, ironically, changes everything. Carpenter’s music would have been out of place here anyway. This is no longer Carpenter’s classic vision: it is Zombie’s.

There is a sad flashback involving young Michael at the sanitarium. Michael wants to know when he can go home, while we know he can never go home; making him a lost soul who will stay lost. The gift of a toy white horse figures prominently in adult Michael’s visions. But the ultimate meaning and significance of those visions will have to wait until Halloween III.

Which leads me to another surprise: I never thought I would be eager to see a new Rob Zombie movie. If he directs Halloween III, I will be. Hopefully he can put the suspense back into the next one.

Coraline (2009)
Sweet Without Sugar

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Coraline Zombos Says: Excellent 

The cat dropped the rat between its two front paws. “There are those,” it said with a sigh, in tones as smooth as oiled silk, “who have suggested that the tendency of a cat to play with its prey is a merciful one–after all, it permits the occasional funny little running snack to escape, from time to time. How often does your dinner get to escape?” (Neil Gaiman in the novel Coraline)

Right after seeing Coraline, an urge to read the novel drove me straight to the bookstore. I needed to know more of Neil Gaiman’s tale of Coraline Jones and the bizarre neighbors and ancient wickedness living in her new home. I needed to know how much of the literary story was captured in Henry Selick’s stop-motion animated screenplay. With a dad-playing piano, glowing flowers and snapdragons that really snapped, and a peculiar room where giant bugs are the furniture, I was curious. Gaiman might be that odd individual with sleeping dust in his side-pockets, a razor-sharp, barely chipped axe in his hip pocket, and a candle flame floating to and fro behind his eyes, but the visual tone of Coraline, the movie, is dark but strikingly peppered with color, making it festive and morose and desolate and cheerful all at once. There is no brave little mouse, no fumbling robots, no dancing zoo animals to liven up culturally proscribed moral lessons because there are no moral lessons. Coraline, without the usual spoonful of sugary-animated, paternally medicinal Hollywood characters, is a Halloween treat in February that goes down smashingly well without the sweetness.

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Coraline (2009)
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The Uninvited (2009)

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The Uninvited (2009) Zombos Says: Excellent

The mind is a poor host at times, bringing in uninvited nightmares when least expected and most unwanted. In this American remake of A Tale of Two Sisters, those uninvited, bake-eiga-styled nightmares haunt Anna’s dreams and waking moments, whether in her darkened bedroom or in the sunlight-bright hallways of her nooks and crannies shorefront home. And while that may be disconcerting for Anna (Emily Browning), it certainly is a good thing for us. Directors Thomas and Charles Guard’s The Uninvited is deftly handled with splendid and unexpected–for a horror movie– photography, real acting, and suspenseful pacing that places it well above the usual horror affair of blood spatters, screams, and more bloody spatters. This is classy horror at its best.

Mystery surrounds Anna’s release from a psychiatric hospital. Ten months earlier her invalid mother died in a fiery explosion and Anna has no memory of that night, but she does have a recurring dream in which the spectre of a red-haired girl, very fresh-from-the-grave looking, tells her “not to go out.” Her therapist, not entirely sure of what it all means, still considers Anna well enough to leave the hospital. While you already have an inkling this may not be the best therapeutic course of action for her, it does set up the frights when she returns home. (Hint: pay close attention to Anna’s friend in the hospital who complains she will have no one to tell her stories to when Anna leaves.)

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The Uninvited (2009)Read More »

Zen and the
Art of Ghost Rider (2007)

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Ghost rider
Zombos Says: Good

“Why’s he staring at you like that?” Lea Persig asked. Her raven-black hair moved softly in the light breeze coming off the water. As our perky garage mechanic, she keeps the numerous vehicles Zombos never rides in tip-top shape. She turned again to look at Zombos sitting on the veranda, sipping his coffee while glaring at us.

“Oh, that’s his Penance Stare. He’s just sore I went to see Ghost Rider while he had to take Junior to see Bridge to Tilapia, or whatever it’s called,” I said.

“That’s Bridge to Terabithia, you goof,” she laughed. She has such a wonderful laugh. “Tilapia’s a fish.”

“Whatever.”

“What’s the Penance Stare?”

“That’s the Ghost Rider’s main weapon against evil-doers. He forces you to look deep into his empty eye-sockets and soon you feel all the pain and suffering you inflicted on others.”

I smiled and waved at Zombos. He glared more intensely, took a sip of coffee, and glared some more. I still didn’t feel any pain.

“So what did you think of the movie?” she asked as I handed her another wrench. She was working on the 1960 Harley-Davidson Glide motorcycle to smooth out its ride. “I mean, was it any good?”

” ‘Any good’ is a broad range that can cover a lot,” I said. “I would say there’s some good in it.”

“Like what?” She wiped the grease mark from her pale cheek, with a handkerchief she always carried in her back pocket, and took a breather.

“For one thing, the story’s a nice departure from the usual slasher and cannibalistic-serial-killer or psycho-mutants-among-us storylines coming out of Hollywood these days. It’s always nice to see a return to the more supernatural underpinnings modern horror grew from. A well done good-versus-evil story can be inspiring.”

“Was it inspiring then?” she asked, putting her handkerchief away.

“Well…no. Not very much so. I suppose because the movie lacks sufficient emotional punch.”

“All right, then, what’s it about?”

“Bloody, sell your soul to the devil pacts, an errant son whose evil can plunge the whole world into Hell, and a stunt motorcycle-riding, demon-possessed, flaming-skull, blazing-chain wielding innocent rube named Johnny Blaze, played by Nicolas Cage, who’s tricked into playing bounty-hunter to bring back Hell’s stragglers to ol’ two-horns himself. But he must play truant officer first.”

“And that’s not inspiring to you?” Lea laughed.

“Why are Zombos’ eyes bugging out?” Zimba’s Uncle Fadrus asked as he walked up the path to us. He enjoyed taking early morning walks before breakfast, especially in the desolate woods surrounding the mansion. “Oh, wait. I seem to recall Zimba forcing him to take Junior to the movies last night. Never mind. What’s this about, Ghost Rider?”

“We were discussing how uninspiring it was,” I said.

“Yes, it does lack that essential emotional connection that would have made it a better movie. Certainly no lack of budget for the special effects, though. They were fairly good.”

“So you’re saying a movie is good if it has good special effects?” asked Lea.

Fadrus shook his head. “No, no. I’m just saying part of what makes a movie good is the way in which special effects are handled, if the script calls for them, of course.”

“The opening scenes in the Old West, with Sam Elliott’s narration, are good,” I said. “Computer-enhanced images embellish the action nicely. Then there’s the scene between Johnny Blaze and Peter Fonda’s Faustian Mephistopheles. One bit of visual genius has Meph’s shadow appear as a gnarled, bent-over creature in a flash of lightning—his true self. Another is a drop of blood from Blaze’s finger as he signs the devil’s pact. It falls to the ground and splatters into a crimson glimpse of souls suffering in Hell. Very artistic use of CGI, especially with faces as the hideous demon appears briefly with more comely features, revealing the evil within.”

“The blazing skull and flaming motorcycle are well done, too—uh, no pun intended,” smiled Fadrus. “Changing the colors of his cranial flames to reflect the Ghost Rider’s mood, blue for sadness, for instance, is a thoughtful touch. And that transformation scene as Blaze becomes the Ghost Rider for the first time, it’s painful to watch as red embers sear his flesh from underneath!”

“But in his characterization though, Nicolas Cage’s toning down of the original bad-ass comic book character is probably due more to merchandising needs than any artistic expression,” I added. “Just look at all those Ghost Rider toys in the stores. You wouldn’t be able to sell them with an R-rated Johnny Blaze, would you?”

“So you’re saying the movie isn’t very good because it worried more about merchandising toys than it did about telling the story?” asked Lea.

“Yes and no,” I replied. “Merchandising toys works for movies like the Fantastic Four because the original characterizations are more family-friendly to begin with. But Ghost Rider was not, originally, a family-friendly kind of character.”

Fadrus added, “And Cage’s eccentricities for the character like eating jelly-beans from a martini glass and watching skits with monkeys dressed as humans, are too contrived. I mean, really, he’s signed a pact with the devil for heaven’s sake.”

“Probably the strongest weakness in the movie is how the four elemental demon-boys summoned by Blackheart, Mephisto’s errant son, are so easily brushed-off by Ghost Rider,” I said.

“Yes,” Fadrus agreed. “After Blackheart shows up at that Hell’s Angel’s biker-bar in the middle of nowhere, happily turning everyone to dark muck, and then summoning those nattily-dressed Goth demons to take care of Ghost Rider, not much action happens between him and them. So little screen time is devoted to their battles, and when they do fight it’s a simple, unimaginative, knock-out punch that sends them back to oblivion.”

“The love-interest also wasn’t very strong, either,” I said. “Roxanne, as played by Eva Mendes, just doesn’t smolder.”

Lea laughed. “Any more puns and I’ll take a wrench to the two of you.”

“What pun? Oh, I see what you mean. Anyway, she’s a reporter, but doesn’t do much reporting, and when she confronts Johnny Blaze and he explains his hellish predicament, there are no sparks, there is no intensity in the revelation. You’d think a man living on the edge of damnation, well, you would think there’d be more fear, more emotional trepidation.”

Fadrus said, “And the dialog didn’t help, either. Come to think of it, the dialog was fairly poor throughout the movie. Here you have Lucifer, his crazy son, demons galore, and a quintessential fight between good and evil, and I can’t recall any dialog stood out or was inspiring. Even Peter Fonda here—in the movie Race with the Devil he’s more energetic against evil—does little to hype his Lord of Hell role. He’s too sedate. There’s no seduction to his evil.”

“So…so far, from what the two of you have said, the movie is not that good,” said Lea.

“I wouldn’t say that. There are some good points to it,” I said. “For instance, while it lacks emotional-pull, has no witty dialog, and needs stronger fight scenes, the story is coherent enough, the acting sufficient, and the promise of a sequel provides a second chance for improvement. I think of it more as a work in progress. There’s also something endearing about the Wild West origins to the story, especially in the beginning and at the end. Sam Elliott brings it out and his presence lifts the movie up a notch.

“Don’t forget this movie was done by Mark Steven Johnson, who also did Daredevil and Elektra, which were both disappointments. Even directors deserve second chances.”

I corrected Fadrus. “Third chances, you mean.”

“Quite!” he laughed.

Zombos ran up to us. “I’ve got Fandango tickets for Ghost Rider, matinee show. Who’s with me?” he gasped in between breaths. We all said “I am” at once, and were soon off to see it again.

Even movies—and Zombos—deserve second and third chances.

Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural (1973)

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Lemora A Child's Tale of the Supernatural movie sceneZombos Says: Excellent

Thanksgiving Day is always an interesting time for us. The Zombos and Zimba families, including those above and below ground, crawl, hop, fly (usually by plane), and drive to the mansion for the eagerly anticipated holiday festivities. Each year Chef Machiavelli outdoes himself, and this time prepared the three-tentacled octopus and turkeys with a wonderfully seasoned shrimp and yak-eye stuffing.

Speaking of stuffing, Aunt Vesta and Uncle Tesla were in their usually supercilious moods at the dinner table, spicing the repartee to new heights. Afterwards, dessert was taken in the grand ballroom and the conversations continued.

“I must agree with Zombos,” said Cousin Cleftus, adjusting the thick amber-colored monocle over his one good eye. Uncle Tesla raised his brandy, sniffed it with disdain, and sipped a little.

“Lovecraft’s premise that mankind’s oldest and strongest emotion is fear,” he continued, “while essentially correct, is incomplete. Fear is merely the emotional energy. You must define those elements that instill fear, and once you do, you will find what makes us fearful today is greatly different from what made movie audiences frightened years ago.”

“And today,” continued Zombos, “one fears not the supernatural unknown, but the loss of one’s authority over life. That theme is reflected more and more in this current Cinema of the Helpless. To have one’s life and death inevitably at the whim of forces beyond one’s control is essentially the basis of all horror, but those forces are no longer cosmic or alien in nature, but mundane and co-existing with us, and conspiring against us until they strike, leaving us helpless, or in pain, or dead. We live with the
monsters and they are us.”

Uncle Tesla sipped his brandy as he listened. He looked very much like Renfield in Dracula; not as portrayed by Dwight Frye, superb as he was, but Bernard Jukes in his stage portrayal. He glanced toward the desserts buffet with longing.

“When would you like to screen Lemora: A Child’s Tale of the Supernatural in the cinematorium?” I asked.

“Lemora?” said Uncle Tesla, ecstatic. “Why, I’ve not seen that movie since the seventies.”

“It is a wonderful anamorphic version,” said Zombos.

Cousin Cleftus’ monocle popped out and dangled across his vast circumference.

“No, no,” said Zombos, “anamorphic, as in taking the wide-screen movie aspect and retaining it for the home screen. You get to see all the detail of the movie as it was shown in the theaters without losing anything on a smaller screen.

“Oh, I see,” said Cousin Cleftus, popping his monocle back in place.

“It is a wonderfully unpretentious southern Gothic, set in the 1930s South. From the blue-tinted night scenes to the zombie-like cancerous decay makeup of the wood ghouls, it is a movie that surmounts its low-budget limitations,” reminisced Zombos.

“And let us not forget the beautiful vampiress, Lemora, herself. Her Lizzie Borden appearance, paired with her pallid, Countess Marya Zaleska look from Dracula’s
Daughter is superb,” said Uncle Tesla.

“And what about those irrational actions of the rat-like bus driver during the frightful night ride to that vampire-infested town of Asteroth,” added Zombos, “wonderfully Lovecraftian in conception as the wood ghouls claw at the bus. The whole affair harkens to Lovecraft’s story the Shadow Over Innsmouth.

“Yes,” continued Uncle Tesla, laughing. “How on earth any sane man, knowing that he’s surrounded by murderous vampires, gets out of a stalled bus after saying he can just coast down the hill to the town—to fix the engine, no less—boggles the mind.”

“And he leaves the rifle on the side of the bus, of course, losing it,” I added.

“Of course!” said Zombos and Uncle Tesla together. “He deserved to be attacked.”

“The scene with the witch holding the red lantern and singing that weird folklorish song in close-up is unnerving,” I added.

“What’s even more unnerving is the sexual undertones running throughout the movie,” said Uncle Tesla. “What with Lemora’s amorous posturing toward Lila, the “Singin’ Angel,” and the ticket-taker’s provocative “what do you like best now, soft or hard centers?” comment when he holds the box of chocolates up to Lila as she buys her bus ticket.”

“The Catholic League of Decency condemned the movie, didn’t they? That probably ended its limited distribution in theaters prematurely,” said Uncle Tesla.

“Yes,” said Zombos. “I hear it became a cult movie in France, though. They tend to appreciate the artsy fare more than we do.”

“They restored the longer scene with the ticket-taker,” I said. “The actor’s wonderful, unctuous delivery, in close-up to show his creepy Peter Lorre eyes peering over the box of chocolates at the girl, is quite striking.”

“The choice of vibrant colors is also striking, especially when contrasted with the shadows and dark lighting in the movie. It gives a dream-like air to the story as much as the slow pacing, and languid performance by Cheryl Smith as Lila,” said Zombos.

“Let’s see it,” said Uncle Tesla. “I can’t wait any longer.”

Zombos told everyone to grab their desserts and follow him into the cinematorium. Uncle Tesla took his usual three and I pushed along the coffee and tea station behind him. As soon as everyone was settled comfortably, I began the movie; and enjoyed another helping of Chef Machiavelli’s Turkish Delight.