From Zombos' Closet

Jack Pierce and Friend

Monster Makeup Artist Jack Pierce

Movie Review: Husk (2011) Not All Dried Out

 

Zombos Says: Good

"Stop me if you've heard this one, but there's this movie with an abandoned farm house in the middle of a cornfield and--" I started to say. I was preparing Zombos' tax information, and my library desk was littered with receipts, scraps of paper notations, vexing forms, and two bone china cups of cold coffee. I decided to take a break. 

"--You mean Dead Birds?" interrupted Zombos without looking up from his New York Times newspaper. 

"What? No! The cornfield has this smelly, burlap sack-for-a-head decrepit scarecrow--"

"Dark Night of the Scarecrow, then? He turned a page.

"No! If you let me finish, it's a more recent movie. There are these five college people--well, really they're too old to play college kids unless they just love to hang out there, but for the sake of the movie you've got to go with it--traveling down a country road in an SUV and--"

"Oh, Hallowed Ground, then."

"No way. Their SUV crashes when a flock of crows bury their beaks deep into the windshield and bleed their guts all over the car."

"Kakashi, that Japanese horror movie?"

"Definitely not."

"Scarecrows?"

"Fun movie to watch it's so bad, but no! Can I finish? All right, then. The movie's Husk."

"Oh, one of those After Dark entries." Zombos turned another page.

"Why aren't you using the iPad Zimba bought you for Christmas? It's got the Times on it," I asked, changing the subject.

Zombos ignored me. Some old people can't seem to shake the habit of smearing black newsprint ink on their fingertips and crushing pulp paper into awkward folds, I suppose. 

"Anyway, getting back to Husk, it's one of those good After Dark movie entries," I said. "I mean, if it weren't for the careless day-for-night lighting used in every supposedly dark scene, I'd even go as far as saying it's very good."

Zombos continued to read his newspaper, but he did it with much less crinkling noise and his lips had stopped moving, so I knew he was listening. I continued.

"The crash knocks them all out, but when they wake up,  the jock (Wes Chatham) and the nerd (Devon Graye) go looking for help and their missing friend (Ben Easter) , while the cool guy (C. J. Thomason)--it's his  SUV that got slammed by the birds--stays by the car and waits. We don't know much about their missing friend, but the jock's girlfriend (Tammin Sursok) stays behind, too. She and the cool guy don't get along. One of those, she's-getting-all-the-attention-now kind of sticky buddy-buddy situations, you know?"

"I am not sure I would," said Zombos. "What is a five letter word for 'corny' and 'artificial'?

"Hokey," I answered. "Leave the Jumble alone for a minute and listen. And there's no hokey in Husk, by the way, but a few good twists around familiar characters; the nerd doesn't die first and he actually figures things out; the girl isn't kept as a screaming foil; the jock actually acts fairly smart and doesn't wuse out when the terror starts; and cool guy turns out to be not so cool.

"Natalie, the jock's girlfriend, gets antsy waiting, so she goes for a walk and finds a scarecrow lying on the ground."

"It does not sound overly taxing in the terror department so far," said Zombos.

"The scarecrow, when she pulls the burlap sack back, has teeth. That's pretty much when things perk up. The mystery involves the upstairs room with the foot-pedal sewing machine, dead people walking and sacking up, and flashbacks the nerd, Scott, experiences. Those flashbacks involve the former tenants of the farm house and what happened to them.

"Action kicks in when they try to leave through the cornfield; they can't; turmoil erupts when the jock won't leave without his girlfriend, but it's a moot point, though I won't spoil it for you by explaining why; and there's a frantic escape attempt by the formerly cool guy now acting like girly man, which leaves much blood on the ground but a clue as to the limitations of the scarecrow creeps.

"Director and writer Brett Simons, with the help of his actors and production design team, whip up a nifty ghost slash scarecrow monster slash terror-in-the-corn story with a backstory that adds familial, country-gothic depth to the mayhem. The only stretching of credulity comes into play when everyone gets so battered, you wonder how they can keep going with all their blood leaking out like that."

"So what do the scarecrows do to bloody them up, throw corn husks at them?" asked Zombos, dryly.

"Don't be silly, of course not. The scarecrows pound long metal nails into each of their fingers, giving them quite a terminal grip."

Zombos put his newspaper down. "Perhaps we should do a marathon viewing of scarecrow-related horror movies. What do you think? It has been a while since we last saw something in the cinematorium."

I looked at the pile of papers waiting on my desk and thought about it. I jumped up after a brief moment of reflection. "Definitely! We can start with Husk and go backwards. I'll have Chef Machiavelli bring the coffee cart. This will be an all-nighter for sure."

Movie Review: The Woman in Black (2012)

Zombos Says: Very Good

Hammer Film Production's return to period supernatural horror is a strongly rendered traditional ghost story set in Britain's Edwardian time. While not as scary as Robert Wise's The Haunting, or as surprisingly twisting as John Hough's The Legend of Hell House, director Jack Watkins conjures cheerless environs, a foreboding decaying mansion, and a pervasive malevolence poised to strike, in this adaptation of Susan Hill's novel. Most striking are the period sets; I kept fancying Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee would tumble out of a room at any moment with Lee baring his vampire fangs and Cushing crossing two iron candle sticks together.

The oppressive atmosphere of London's oily, sooty fog, changes to the oppressive dreariness felt when Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) arrives at Crythin Gifford, a small town of frightened adults beset by a vengeful spirit murdering their children. Kipps, a lawyer still grieving from the loss of his wife, with a son to support and a job in jeapardy, is tasked with settling the immense amount of paperwork left behind by the late Mrs. Drablow of Eel Marsh House. The desolate house is only reachable by Nine Lives Causeway, a long stretch of road that, at certain points, becomes submerged under water during high tide. Surrounding the causeway are marshes filled with impassable, dark, viscous muck, and impenetrable fog.

At Eel Marsh House, Kipps finds Victorian stuffed monkeys, dusty tapestries and faded carpeting, creaking floorboards, thick cobwebs, peeling wallpaper, and lots of papers to go through. The phantom sounds of a carriage accident and cries in the fog, as well as seeing a mysterious figure of a woman dressed in black, put him on edge. Tragedy soon follows and the villagers want him to leave, except for Sam Daily (Ciaran Hinds), a wealthy landowner with the only car (a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost) for miles around. Invited to dinner by Daily, Kipps learns that Sam and his wife (Janet McTeer), have lost their son when Mrs. Daily enters an automatic writing trance she says is her son's way of communicating with her.

Kipps decides to spend the night at Eel Marsh House to finish his business. Sam lends his dog to Kipps for company. The Woman in Black makes sure he and the dog don't get much sleep. Apparitions, ghostly wet footprints, a very disquieting nursery, and the revealing letters Kipps discovers in a window bench keep his attention, and his wits, alert. The next morning more tragedy strikes, and worse still, Kipps learns his son and nanny are coming to Crythin Gifford and he can't stop them.

The ending of Watkin's movie is not the same as the novel, so devout readers of Susan Hill's work may be surprised. Daniel Radcliffe is superb as Arthur Kipps. The wind-up toy animals, monkees, and clowns in the nursery are quite creepy. The story has an atmosphere Ti West can only dream of. It isn't in 3D.

And as for Hammer Film Productions, you can rest assured that Hammer Horror is back with a vengeance.

Double Bill Pressbook: The Brain That Wouldn't Die and Invasion of the Star Creatures

I left out a few pages of poster admats. These American International pressbooks usually run around 11" x 14," and have pull-out pages to highlight the various sized posters for each movie. The Brain That Wouldn't Die was another B-movie staple seen on television during the 1960s and 1970s horror hosted and hostless shows.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Roger Corman and Vincent Price

 

Roger Corman and Vincent Price On Set

 

Boris Karloff as Hjalmar Poelzig

Boris Karloff in The Black Cat

Documentary Review: Cropsey (2009) There Are Terrors By Night

Zombos Says: Very Good

We all like to play in the discarded places, the abandoned buildings, the dark forests, pretending the devil is calling for his due, or imagining the dark shadows hide dangerous things that can't reach long enough to catch us. All this play exhilarates us, and let's us experience evils that hold no power over us. We scare ourselves with urban legends and thrice-told folktales of dreaded things, and play even harder to outrace the Boogeymen.

In 1987, the Boogeyman reached long enough to snatch 12-year-old Jennifer Schweiger into the darkness. She wasn't the first. From the 1970s to the 1980s, six mentally disabled children and one older one went missing. Jennifer would be the only one found, partially visible in a shallow grave, in a place, strangely enough, already searched extensively, in the Staten Island Greenbelt woods surrounding the Willowbrook State School's abandoned and dilapidated buildings. Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio's investigative documentary, Cropsey, takes us into those discarded places of Willowbrook and the darkness radiating from them into a mystery, at the center of which lies a drifter, Andre Rand. Sometimes the Boogeyman is real.

Through old newspaper clippings, interviews, black and white photographs, and archival news footage, Zeman and Brancaccio begin with Jennifer's disappearance, which leads to Rand, a former orderly at Willowbrook, which leads to his eerie presence at locales where other mentally-disabled children have disappeared over the years.

In videotape of Rand being taken into custody he appears entranced and wild-eyed, like Charles Milles Manson, and drools as he stumbles along in handcuffs. In the hand-written letters he writes from jail to Zeman and Brancaccio, in response to their interview requests, he mentions how "evil sells," his legal concerns, and what's-in-it-for-him in-between the sentences where his thoughts drift into quotations from scripture. It's noted how his handwriting changes through the course of his correspondence. Rand's mother was committed to Pilgrim State Hospital, but the documentary does not delve deeper into Rand's past. It doesn't provide answers, so don't look for them. What it does provide is a sense of how urban legends like Cropsey (the slasher killer at camp, on the road, who lurks nearby) spring up in communities. This horror-veneer makes the documentary appear at first glance like a mockumentary. But as each disappearance is added, and Rand is shown, the reality sets in and you wind up wishing it weren't true.

Zeman and Brancaccio slowly move the camera through the abandoned, graffiti-sprayed buildings, interview the aged detectives, the still grieving families, the defense and prosecution lawyers, and the community without getting in the way of what anyone has to say or feel, then bring us back to the 1970s and 1980s by showing us the historical videos from Channel 7 and Staten Island's local news. There's Geraldo Rivera's investigation of Willowbrook, the shocking videos of neglect, filth, the warehousing of human beings no one else wanted; the trajedy seems to stem from those buildings and what took place there.

Slowly zooming into news articles from various New York and Staten Island newspapers hammers you even more with apparent connections between disappearences . A chilling synchronicity comes when 22-year old Hank Gafforio is seen standing in the background of a news video shot a few years before he went missing; the news video was about Holly Ann Hughes disappearance and its lack of clues. The documetary's morose pace, not cheered by the sombre, horror movie-style background music, lays out the details, the coincidences, the suppositions, and the guesses, but connecting them provides tantalizing questions and a template for creating an urban legend.

Did Rand work alone? If he did, how did Jennifer's body wind up in an area of ground already searched after he was encarcerated? From somebody trying to frame him? Is he guilty of the disappearences?  Is he guilty of murder? Did his time as an orderly at Willowbrook unhinge his sanity? Why did he live on the grounds and in the tunnels of Willowbrook State School after it closed? What do the rumors of devil worship and the Farm Colony have to do with the disappearences? Are they just more urban mythmaking by the community's bored teenagers.

Those teenagers show up on a walk-through at night, playfully looking for the boogeyman, leading to a lighter moment as Zeman and Brancaccio prowl around looking for the possible occult activity rumored to be happening in the area. Maybe the urban legends are there to warn us; to tell us some places must be avoided because the Boogeyman lives there. And he's real.

Movie Pressbook: Man Beast (1956)

The "SEE:" promotional gimmick is in high swing on this movie.They missed the SEE: A poorly dressed barefoot woman with an open blouse daring to take on the icy snow . Maybe she thought the Man Beast was a wool blanket. 

 

 

 

 

 

Movie Review: Grave Encounters (2011)

Zombos Says: Fair

You can sum up Grave Encounters by saying "the joke's on them." 'Them' would be the Grave Encounters ghost-hunting team, a band of charlatans bolstering their television show with bought sightings of ghosts and the melodramatics of a pretend psychic (Mackenzie Gray) hamming it up for effect. After five bogus shows, they unexpectedly meet the real deal in the Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital, an abandoned structure harboring a dark past and soon to be discovered irritable inhabitants. Or is there just one joker tricking them, like the evil Emeric Belasco in Hell House?

Initially starting out with the usual furnishings moving ever so slightly and unnoticed, the team experiences more aggressive activity, then physical atacks by a demonic force. This is where the movie breaks down, abandoning the more traditional--and demanding--scares of ghostly fright that rely on subtlety and vagueness for in-your-face phantoms with CGI facial ticks and a building that refuses to let them leave.

If you recall the terrors in House on Haunted Hill (1999), the time trap of The Sick House (2008), and the standard modus operandi seen in Ghost Hunters on the Syfy channel, you already know what to expect. Like 2006's The Gravedancers, the story loses credibility by pushing its special effects beyond the story's required contextual belief, then ziplines J-horror-styled attrocites in and out of night-vision camera views, sending the Grave Encounters team screaming and running in all directions, and us watching it all collapse into the standard divide and conquer scenario. The mystery of the open window only tantalizes us with possibilities that never transpire; the room tucked away in the tunnels hints at black magic, but to what purpose? And the force stalking the Grave Encounters team never bothered the solitary caretaker, so why pick on them now?

Even if you aren't already exhausted by the cheap to produce found footage, point of view, movie schtick, this one would have been better filmed without the handheld shakycam pyrotechnics. It's a classic story: a group of unbelievers are trapped in a haunted house, teach them a lesson they won't forget (or survive). It's also the type of storyline you can fritter away when you overstep the reality-pretense of POV by squeezing it to bridge sub-genres. Grave Encounters starts as a haunting, then veers into demonic stalking, where the rules of engagement require more visual frenzy, setting up a plot contretemps that skewers the more suspenseful, understated unfolding of ghostly phenomenon. Oddly enough, when the sinister force in the hospital exerts its influence over time and space, there is no religious counter within the Grave Encounters team, a fault many horror movies that play the occultism card fail to take into consideration. Atheist or believer, when confronted by demonic activity and the breakdown of natural laws, there's a natural tendency to become very religious, very fast.

Sean Rogerson as Lance Preston, the team's leader, self-consciously chews up his role  instead of allowing it to digest. White (Juan Riedinger), the tech expert, wears a KICK ME  sign early on, so we know he's going down first. Sasha (Ashleigh Gryzko) is the token screaming female; not much hope for her, either. The camera guy, T.C. (Merwin Mondesir), acts like every other black camera guy character named T.C. is supposed to do--anger, frustration, despair, and done. Mackenzie Gray's psychic is the only character to play it evenly. He looks like a psychic should look, a little weird, a lot of Hollywood groom. He should have had more to do.

Grave Encounters should have had more for its characters and story to do, too.

Book Review: Juggernaut

Zombos Says: Good (but lacks finesse and character depth)

A body sat in the driver's seat. A charred skeleton, fingers welded to wheel plastic. No hair. Empty sockets. Lips burnt away, giving the corpse a mirthless smile.

Huang turned his back on the carbonised corpse. He reclipped his belt. He clipped the holster strap around his thigh.

Behind him, the driver of the sedan began to move.

 

There is one thing that has always bothered me about stories of deadly viruses and the crazy people looking to exploit them for mass destruction: glass cylinders. Think about it. From Resident Evil's T-Virus to every other movie where a deadly contagion is stored in a glass cylinder just begging to be cracked, shattered, or suspensefully mishandled, does it really make sense? Who in their right mind would put an unstoppable, world-destroying biological agent in a GLASS cylinder? So they could look at it and gloat dramatically? I'm thinking only movie script writers do it for 'easy tension' because we can see it and we know the glass is fragile; or maybe an author would do it, one who's seen too many of those movies written by those script writers.

At least Adam Baker doesn't waste words over that easy tension as his glass cylinder changes hands and he doesn't let anyone gloat over it. In his novel, Juggernaut, the tension comes from Black Ops looking for the mega-weapon they, of course, can't control, contained in that glass cylinder,and from mercenaries looking for gold, but being played as dupes, and from the parasite controlled revenants (what Baker calls the infected) looking to bite fresh flesh off in chunks.

You would expect a lot of tension to be generated from the mixing of all these plot elements, but Baker lacks the finesse to hone his paragraphs into razor sharpness to build it up. His overuse of clippy paragraphs (around the three sentence length), and clippy sentences (terse, grammatically-trouncing descriptives strung together), lessens the action's impact more than it peps it up. Instead, Baker pepper and salts his knowledge of military and covert operation jargon heavily over everything. Cryptic communiques appear here and there mentioning SPEKTR and the ongoing aftermath of a clandestine operation. SAW, the squad automatic weapon, sends bullets flying in droves, thermite grenades explode, and black SUVs carry people through dark narrow streets into ambush. But remove his razzle-dazzle army intelligence and spy veneer and what's left is a non-commissioned read, good for summer because it's fast moving, easy on the eyes and light on the story's soul, but still 'basic training' , not hardcore zombie or thriller fiction.

It's also the prequel to his Outpost, but self-contained. Had Baker put in more effort with his characters beyond a token lesbian relationship, buddy-buddy soldier of fortune cutouts , evil doers and mad scientists doing evil in the usual ways, and a derivative parasitic organism taking over soldiers, messing them up with metallic-like spines throughout their bodies, this would have been an excellent actioner. More attention to his people would have grounded them beyond their stereotypical roles, and the dialogs you would expect them to speak, and the acting in ways you would expect them to act. Not entirely a bad thing, as Baker makes full use of their actions and our expectations of them (with one key exception). His people don't surprise us, or grow smarter, or wet their pants when the revenants show up. Where Baker excels is his use of 2005 Iraq locations and real-life psycopaths like Uday Hussein to anchor his characters and situations around.

It starts with roughed-up mercenaries Lucy and Amanda found on a locomotive in the dessert, and unfolds with how they got there. It's about missions going bad but still ongoing, a promise of gold as lure to the Valley of Tears, and the revelation that something deadly and hungry is waiting in the dessert. Baker's one exception to our expectations is Jabril, sprung from Abu Ghraib, tour guide for Lucy and her mercenary crew. His unsavory backstory is told by him at key times when a flashback instead of his exposition would have been more exciting to read. Baker uses a character's exposition of past events to explain important details and the present, but at times it unexpectedly switches into flashback, then back to exposition. An arguably  stylistic faux pas on Baker's part, but it doesn't disrupt the story's flow. The expositions are too well written, however, for spoken remembrances and serve only to tighten up loose ends.

Many of today's horror novels are written like movie adaptations before the movie comes out. That's not a bad thing in Juggernaut's case, but it keeps the novel from moving beyond a surface level of entertainment to find its depth in internal motivations and machinations like the ones older novels relied on to set themselves apart from the rest. 

A courtesy copy was provided for this review.

Double Bill Pressbook: The Brain From Planet Arous and Teenage Monster

The Howco International Campaign Kits are wonderful examples of high class print marketing for low class movies (hey, I still love them). These folder-styled pressbooks, around 11" x 17" in format, are colorful and simple, but the paper quality is high and the impression of the overall presentation is impeccable, especially when you consider  they were targeted to drive-in venues. The main attraction's marketing sheets--poster admats and publicity information--were placed in the left side pocket, and the second attraction's sheets were situated on the right. 

(And...The Brain From Planet Arous is one of my guilty pleasures, especially because of John Agar. For me he epitomized the 1950s and 1960s B-move wave of science-horror.)

 

 

 

 

 

Movie Pressbook: Carrie (1976)