From Zombos' Closet

Les Monstres

Even though this booklet is in French, the pictures are all you need. Fascinating, frightening, mesmerizing: Les Monstres, Une Collection Extraordinaire Et Unique D'etres Humains  Bizarres.

Movie Review: Chernobyl Diaries (2012) Short a Few Entries

Zombos Says: Good

The cleverest moments in Chernobyl Diaries come early: scenes of young American tourists enjoying the sites of London, France, and eventually Russia as seen through the digital camera recording them. But director Bradley Parker and scripter Oren Peli are just teasing us. This isn't, thankfully, a through-the-lens or found footage movie, although more professionally handled handheld cameras do follow the six Americans as they head to Prypiat, the ghost city near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant.

Their tour guide is Uri, a beefy entrepenuer with special forces training,  offering "extreme" tours through the abandoned, desolate buildings and less radioactive areas of ground. The cleverness stops somewhere between their boarding of Uri's rundown van and a little after its breakdown as night approaches, leaving them stranded in Prypiat. 

Given this real and eerie environment, suspense builds for us while concerns mount for Uri and the six adventurers. Their this-is-cool mood, filled with playful banter and a few false-start scares that leave them acting giddy, filled with the sense of doing something special and naughty--like American youth traveling abroad, in horror movies anyway,  are supposed to act--changes to recriminations, fears, and blame-gaming. The change is on a dime, so it surprises me; where do all these pent-up feelings come from?  Not from the script: it doesn't pinch harder than necessary to line up the usual suspects for this phase of the movie, shifting everyone into last-one-standing mode. 

Uri pulls a handy gun from the glove compartment as stray sounds and vicious, starving, dogs frazzle nerves. I would have put my money on Uri (Dimitri Diatchenko) to bring this story up a few notches. He looks tough, acts tough, and is built like a brick wall. Perhaps it was too much to expect that the story would break out of the mold for parts unknown, but Uri, the biggest and baddest of the group is still written out early, leaving six bickering, frightened, American numbnuts to go find him or, at least, his gun while they figure out what to do next. 

It's the figuring part that wears this movie like yesterday's fashion (which admittedly, for the majority of the horror movie industry,  is worn everyday);   shaky-blur "found footage" of an attack on the van; darkened interiors punctuated by flashlights to disorient us and tease at possible terrors lurking outside the light; phantom assailants we never see clearly, and a lot of screaming, shouting, and running away from them, leading deeper into ever tighter passageways, a maze of claustrophic, bunker-like rooms, and the Chernobyl Power Plant, still hot with radiactivity. If you've ever screamed through a haunt attraction with your friends (or a bunch of strangers), the overall effect is similar to watching Chris (Jesse McCartney), Michael (Nathan Phillips), Paul (Jonathan Sadowski), Zoe (Ingrid Berdol), Amanda (Devin Kelley), and Natalie (Olivia Dudley) be terrorized, although more usually happens in the haunt attraction.

Chernobyl Diaries is well acted, atmospheric, loaded with promise, but leaves a bland taste. Some people will find some scares (or recognize them from the trailer), but seasoned horror fans will find a well-worn roadmap to boredom with too few interesting stops along the way.  

Interview: Brian Corder Talks Carnies

Director Brian Corder was kind enough to chat about his  film Carnies, which follows the denizens of the Knuckles Brothers Show and their travails as a sinister force stalks the midway, leaving a bloody trail of "crumpled, torn, soulless bodies in its wake." With a talented cast that includes Reggie Bannister, Doug Jones, and Denise Gossett in a setting that automatically screams 'creepy'.

Carnies is set in the 1930s. What challenges have you experienced in directing the action and characters for a film set in this time period?

Thanks to my wonderfully talented cast, I don't recall a problem with direction when it came to it being a period piece. There is certain Carny terminology, like the words Rangy and Grouch Bag that had to be worked out in prior to the shooting, but it really wasn't any problem.

ZC Note: A grouch bag (circa 1908) was a hidden purse used by a performer to carry money, and was usually strung around the performer's neck. It is reputed that Julius 'Groucho' Marx got his nickname from using one to carry his poker money. BC Note: Rangy or wrangy (rhymes with "tangy") — Worked up, usually in a vulgar sense (possibly a variant of 'randy'). A show could be rangy ( a really 'strong' kootch show), or the patrons might be in a rangy mood (a very hot Saturdaynight, or being able to afford too much beer 'cause it's payday) or a patron may be rangy or ranged up (drunken, disorderly, disruptive, spoiling for a fight). "He's wrangin' the joint" would mean the customer is giving the jointee a very hard time. May also apply to an aggressive animal. From what I understand, the word 'rangy' is derived from the word 'orangutang'.

Movie Review: The Funhouse (1981)

Zombos Says: Very Good

Director Tobe Hooper, who did the unsettling Dance of the Dead episode for Masters of Horror on Showtime, as well as the family classic, Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)—insane family, that is—presents a not so pretty picture of carnival life, and a somewhat pathetic, definitely homicidal, disfigured monster with a penchant for temper tantrums.

The opening of the movie is a nod to Halloween and Psycho, and from there builds into a creepy story revolving around teen lust, sleazy carnival characters, and a ‘man-made monster that has needs like everyone else, but simply cannot satisfy them in more socially acceptable ways. A fascinating subtext running through the story is that it is a variation on the tragedy of Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. Here, the monster is one born of genetic mutation, as foreshadowed by the Freak Animals Alive tent exhibit, where the fetal brother of the monster floats in a jar as an abominable attraction for the hoi polloi.

In the movie’s opening sequence, the Frankenstein Monster is shown, first as a poster showing the Glenn Strange characterization (my favorite!), and then as a Mego doll—oh sorry, action figure—carried by the young Joey, whose sister soon curses him because of his bizarre prank that scares the wits out of her. Joey’s actions are also another subtext running through the movie: he dons a mask to become a monster that frightens his sister, and the actual monster wears a Frankenstein Monster mask to become less frightening to others.

It’s interesting to note that, unlike the current spate of horror movies that feature eye (popping)-candy and little else, in this movie the characters are presented with choices, yet consistently make the wrong ones. And as we all know, in a horror movie when you make the wrong choices someone—or more likely everyone—winds up dead.

Amy, Buzz, Liz, Ritchie, and Joey consistently make the wrong choices, and suffer the dire consequences. In the tale of Dr. Frankenstein and his monstrous creation, wrong choices led to death and disaster; at least here we have the funhouse; iconic abode for numerous urban legends and rustic tales told over and over again around camp fires and sleep-over parties.

The funhouse is surrounded by the carnival, a seedy, grimy affair filled with seedy and grimy denizens. There is a bag lady that looks very much like Grandmama from the Addams Family spouting “god is watching you!;” a homeless man that wanders around like a zombie from Night of the Living Dead; a few bums; the past-her-prime fortuneteller and palm reader (Sylvia Miles); and the not so magnificent Marco the Magician and the carny barkers (three of them played by Kevin Conway as if he were a natural).

Properly toned by John Beal’s score and Andrew Lazlo’s moody cinematography, the loud and brightly lit carnival facade hides a darker, more primitive underbelly of murderous anarchy, repressed emotions, and dark secrets, with the funhouse as its nexus. Hooper’s use of two tracking crane shots, one at the beginning and one at the ending of the mayhem, emphasize this emanation of evil flowing first toward the funhouse, and then outwardly from it.

Our hapless group of victim fodder soon regrets their decision to stay the night in the funhouse, and Joey soon regrets sneaking out from his bedroom—down the trusty-trellis-by-the-window to visit the carnival. We also learn that the father of the monster has regrets about letting it live, in a scene that contains a wealth of hinted at backstory. Because of his decision he must share responsibility for its murderous actions, just like Dr. Frankenstein must share responsibility for his Monster’s subsequent actions.

Priming the coming mayhem, the fun-seeking and frisky teens decide to spend a night in the funhouse after closing time, and after the requisite fun-that-must-be punished-for scenes, they witness a murder, and promptly wind up stepping deeper and deeper into a big pile of no return. One of them makes another spur-of-the-moment bad decision, letting the wrong people learn about their presence in the locked funhouse. Scenes of carnage follow as one by one the teens meet their untimely and grisly death in 1980s horror fashion.

A particularly harrowing moment has our heroine calling to her parents through a large, wildly-spinning exhaust fan, but of course they can’t hear her because she is too far away—in the funhouse, where they specifically told her not to go. But they aren’t there for her; they are looking for their errant son Joey, who also disobeyed them. People who disobey or don’t listen or don’t read signs well in horror movies suffer dire consequences for their actions, and little Joey is no exception. His parents meet the shady and perhaps too-interested carnival handyman that found Joey sneaking around the tents. His actions are never quite clear, and Joey is strangely out of it so we never really know what happened between him and the handyman, but whatever it is it's hinting at unsavory.

The climactic confrontation in the mechanical belly of the funhouse is suitably horrific yet uses little gore, and unlike the requisite sequelization-antics of many fright movies today provides a definitive and satisfying closure.

Unlike the simplistic snuff-horror by the numbers approach in today’s movies, The Funhouse explores dark themes and provides a story depth that is worth experiencing, along with the thrills and chills.