Horror Film Review: The Plague of the Zombies (dir by John Gilling)

Posted on October 19, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

One of the best (and scariest) zombie films of all time came to us from Hammer Studios.

The 1966 film, The Plague of the Zombies, takes place in a small, fog-filled English village. The village has been hit by a plague, one that is wiping out all of the inhabitants. Unable to combat or even diagnose the mysterious illness, Dr. Peter Tomlinson (Brook Williams) calls in his friend, Sir James Forbes (Andre Morrill) for help. Sir James arrives with his daughter, Sylvia (Diane Clare) and suggests that the graves of the recently deceased should be dug up so that he can examine the bodies himself.

Sounds like a reasonable idea, right? There’s only one problem. ALL OF THE COFFINS ARE EMPTY! Now, before anyone asks, they weren’t empty when they went into the ground. There were dead bodies in them when they were originally buried. But now the coffins are empty, the bodies are missing, and that can mean only one thing — ZOMBIES!

And since this is a Hammer film, that also means that a squire is to blame! Seriously, if there’s anything that I’ve learned from watching British horror films, it is to never trust a squire. Squires always seem to end up practicing some sort of black magic. In this case, Squire Clive Hamilton (Jack Carson) has just returned from Haiti, where he apparently spent some time researching the art of zombie creation. Squire Hamilton has a tin mine to manage and undead workers are apparently far less demanding than living workers.

(Of course, today, Squire Hamilton could have just automated the mine and brought in robot workers, who would probably be even less demanding than zombie workers. In fact, with the march of progress, there may soon be no need for zombie workers at all.)

This is a Hammer film so, needless to say, Sylvia eventually gets kidnapped and it’s up to Dr. Tomlinson and Sir James to put an end to the Squire’s evil plans before Sylvia is transformed into a zombie herself. That’s not going to be as easy as it seems, because there’s zombies everywhere!

The Plague of the Zombies is one of Hammer’s best films and it’s also one of the few that, even to a modern viewer, remains frightening. The village is a wonderfully atmospheric location, mixing all of the usual gothic tropes that we’ve come to expect with Hammer films with a very real feeling of decay. Even before the whole zombie plague started, one gets the feeling that the village was already dying a slow, economic death. The tin mine may be the only way to keep the village alive but, at the same time, killing the village is also the only way to keep the tin mine open. The Plague of the Zombies is a moody and rather sad film, one that has a bit more on its mind than just supplying the usual Hammer combination of cleavage and blood.

Speaking of blood, Plague of the Zombies has one of the scariest zombie scenes of all time, in which one of our heroes finds himself wandering through a mist-covered cemetery while the dead rise around him. At one point, he literally steps over a pool of blood. Of course, the scene itself turns out to be a dream but it’s still effectively frightening. Also frightening are the zombies themselves, with their pasty, decaying flesh and their blankly hostile faces. It has been suggested that Plague of the Zombies was an influence on Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and you can definitely see that in its portrayal of the zombies as being a threat not because they’re fast but because they’re so relentless and pitiless.

The Plague of the Zombies is one of the best Hammer films out there so watch it this Halloween!

Horror on the Lens: Dante’s Inferno (dir by Henry Otto)

Posted on October 19, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today’s horror on the lens comes to us from 1924! In Dante’s Inferno, a businessman visualizes Dante’s trip to Hell while little realizing that his behavior is going to lead him to the same destination.

There’s a lot different prints of this film floating around. The original version ran for 60 minutes. The version below was a 49-minute version that was released on VHS. At the time of its release, it’s vision of Hell was considered to be so frightening and definitive that clips of this film were actually used in other films that depict Hell. In fact, Ken Russell used clips from this film in 1980 to depict a drug-induced hallucination in the film, Altered States.

The quality of the upload is not the best (again, largely because it was taken from an old VHS tape) and it’s impossible not to cringe at the character of the butler (whose portrayal, sadly, is typical of how African-Americans were regularly portrayed in films up until the 1960s) but this is still a bit of cinematic history.

Insomnia File #41: Elektra (dir by Rob Bowman)

Posted on October 19, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!

If, around 2 in the morning on Saturday, you were having trouble getting to sleep, you could have turned over to Cinemax and watched the 2005 film, Elektra.

Elektra (Jennifer Garner) used to be dead but now she’s alive again. She was killed during the 2003 film, Daredevil, but, two years later, she was resurrected by a blind martial artist named Stick (Terence Stamp). Stick taught her how to not only fight but also how see into the future, which I guess is helpful if you have to decide whether or not to throw one of those little knife things at someone. (As you can tell, I’m definitely the expert when it comes to martial arts and ninja assassins.)

Elektra uses her training to become the world’s most deadly assassin, which is probably not what Stick had intended but what’s he gong to do, right? However, when Elektra is ordered to kill a totally hot guy and his 13 year-old daughter, she starts to have doubts about whether or not being a murderer-for-hire is really for her. And can you blame her? Not only do you not get to make many friends but I imagine that you’re also constantly having to buy new arrows for your crossbow and that has to get expensive at some point.

So, Elektra decides not to kill the hot guy or his daughter but it tuns out that an evil group of ninjas called The Hand are determined to kill the guy anyway and apparently his daughter is perhaps destined to maintain the balance between the forces of good and evil. (Don’t ask me, I didn’t write the script.) Elektra has to take it upon herself to defeat the Hand and hopefully ensure that the hot guy’s daughter gets to enjoy her adolescence without having to worry about balancing killing people with school work.

Elektra was released with a lot of fanfare back in 2005. It didn’t do particularly well at the box office, which apparently led to Marvel getting into their head that no one would pay money to see a comic book film with a female hero. (This belief was disproven 12 years later, with Wonder Woman.) Today, in the wake of the MCU and whatever DC calls their cinematic universe, Elektra feels almost like a relic. It’s a film that lacks of the self-awareness of the later comic book films but it also never matches them in their scope or their ability to make us feel as if we’ve entered into a separate, fully functioning universe. Elektra is from the age when comic book movie didn’t want to admit that they were comic book movies.

It’s a silly film but, at the same time, it can be kind of fun if you’re in a particularly undemanding mood. Watching it last night, I was shocked to be reminded of the fact that there was a time when Jennifer Garner actually kicked serious ass. The fight scenes are fun to watch, mostly because it’s a woman who gets to beat everyone up. The dialogue is fun to listen to because it’s all so terribly written. (All of the bad guys refer to the title character as being, “the female, Elektra!,” as if it was felt that there was some sort of danger of the audience forgetting who the star of the film was.) It’s an enjoyably dumb movie, which makes it perfect for insomnia-fueled viewing.

Previous Insomnia Files:

International Halloween Review: All Monsters Attack! (a.k.a. Godzilla’s Revenge) (dir by Ishiro Honda)

Posted on October 18, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Godzilla says that I have to learn to fight my own battles.”

Well, good for you, Minilla, son of Godzilla. It’s good to see that Godzilla’s raising you well! But can your monster advice possibly contain any useful life lessons for the human world? Let’s watch 1969’s All Monsters Attack and find out!

You may have noticed that I’m specifically calling this a “Halloween review” as opposed to a “horror review.” That’s because it’s just not Halloween without a Godzilla movie or two but, at the same time, it would be really stretching things to describe any of the Godzilla films of the 60s and 70s as being horror films. Certainly, the original, black-and-white Gojira was a horror film, even if it no longer scares audiences. But, by the time the 60s rolled around, Godzilla had gone from being the living equivalent of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to becoming a cuddly friend of children everywhere.

All Monsters Attack, for example, is clearly a film made for children and stock footage aficionados. Ichiro (Tomonori Yazaki) is a little kid who has no friends but he does have an active imagination. Whenever he falls asleep, he goes to Monster Island where he watches as Godzilla beats up various monsters. Why exactly does Godzilla stay on Monster Island, I wonder. Like literally everyone else on the island seems to hate his guts and they’re constantly trying to kill him. If I was advising Godzilla, I’d suggest he move to another island.

Anyway, it turns out that Godzilla’s son, Minilla, is being bullied by a red-headed lizard named Gabara. Minilla is a monster who always seems to get a mixed reaction from Godzilla fans. When I first saw him, I was like, “AGCK! BURN IT! KILL IT WITH FIRE!” But actually, Minilla is kind of cute and he does this adorable thing where he breathes radioactive smoke rings at his enemies. Godzilla could protect Minilla but instead, he tells Minilla that he has to fight his own battles.

OH MY GOD, JUST LIKE ICHIRO! Ichiro is so moved by Godzilla’s advice that he decides to stand up to the bullies. But first, he’s going to have to stand up to some bank robbers as well, The bank robbers take Ichiro hostage so he promptly takes a nap so he can hang out on Monster Island with Godzilla and Minilla. Good plan, kid!

Anyway, All Monsters Attack is considered by many to be the worst of the old Godzilla movies and, in many ways, it is. While all of the later Godzilla movies were aimed at kids, most of them at least had a decent fight or two. All Monsters Attack is basically just 69 minutes of the kid getting in trouble and then taking a nap. In fact, Godzilla’s barely in the movie at all. Minilla gets most of the monster screen time. That said, the film’s heart is in the right place and if it made any bullied children feel better then it did some good.

(Listen, I’m always going to give any movie starring Godzilla the benefit of the doubt, okay?)

That said, it does kind of seem like the ultimate message of the film’s final scenes is that the best way to deal with a bully is to pull a mean prank on someone else and then join the bully’s gang. So maybe All Monsters Attack! did more harm than good. I don’t know. As long as Godzilla’s okay, that’s all that really matters.

Snakes On A Vacation: Curse II: The Bite (1989, directed by Frederico Prosperi)

Posted on October 18, 2019 by Jedadiah Leland

Clark (J. Eddie Peck) and his girlfriend, Lisa (Jill Schoelen), are vacationing in New Mexico. It’s a romantic getaway, except for all of the snakes. Clark manages to save Lisa from one snake through the use of his trusty rifle but then he himself gets bitten once they go to a motel. Luckily, traveling salesman Harry Morton (Jamie Farr!) has a suitcase that’s full of anti-snake venom antidotes. Unfortunately, the one that Harry gave to Clark doesn’t do much good because not only does the bite on Clark’s arm get worse but it starts to turn into a snake! In fact, his entire body is full of snakes, just trying to slither out! It’s a vacation from Hell as Lisa tries to find a cure for Clark, Clark tries to control his serpent-like instincts, and Harry tries to find the young couple so that they don’t sue him.

This is an unrelated sequel to a film called The Curse. In fact, it’s probable that this film was just called The Bite until the first Curse did slightly better at the box office than anyone expected. The two films share not a single character or plot point in common. There’s not really even a curse in this so-called sequel! Clark’s problems are all due to the snake being radioactive. (Once again, science is to blame.) It’s a typically cheesy, low-budget 80s horror film but it does have a few things to recommend it. The special effects range between being enjoyably cheap and effectively gross. Jamie Farr is entertaining as Harry Morton and seems to be happy to not be playing Klinger again. The truckers that Harry enlists to help him search for Lisa and Clark are all colorful characters and they are a little more interesting than the usual horror movie canon fodder. Bo Svenson also has a good cameo as the sheriff.

Best of all, the film features one the greatest scream queens of the late 80s and early 90s, Jill Schoelen. Schoelen is best remembered for her role in The Stepfather but she actually appeared in several horror movies between 1987 and 1993. As she was in almost all of her roles, Jill Schoelen is both sexy and believable in The Bite. She had a talent for making even the worse dialogue sound natural and that was a talent that The Bite gave her many chances to display.

The Bite is hardly a great film but, by the standards of late 80s cable fare, it’s undeniably entertaining.

The Things You Find On Netflix: The Laundromat (dir by Steven Soderbergh)

Posted on October 18, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

To say that Meryl Streep gives a bad performance in The Laundromat actually does a disservice to your average, run-of-the-mill bad performance.

Meryl Streep instead gives an absolutely terrible performance in The Laundromat, playing not one, not two, but three characters. One of the characters is Ellen Martin, a middle-class widow from Michigan whose attempts to collect a fair settlement after the death of her husband provides a portal in the world of shady con men and corrupt financial institutions. One of the characters is a secret, which means that Meryl wears a lot of make-up and frumpy clothes. That said, from the minute the character appeared on screen, I went, “Oh, there’s Meryl again.” Then, in her third role, Meryl plays herself, demanding campaign finance reform and striking a Statue of Liberty pose while holding a hairbrush instead of a torch.

Really, it’s the type of horrendous performance that could only be delivered by a truly great actress. (If Meryl Streep is the modern Norma Shearer, this is her Romeo and Juliet.) Watching Meryl Streep play the role of Ellen, It occurred to me that Meryl is one of those actresses who is incapable of being authentic but who can certainly act the Hell out of pretending to be authentic. You never forget that Meryl Streep is acting and that’s one reason why her best performances are usually the ones where she’s playing theatrical characters, whether they’re politicians like Margaret Thatcher, celebrities like Julia Child, or the Witch in Into the Woods. But when you cast Meryl as someone who is basically supposed to be a member of the “common people,” it just doesn’t work. Laura Dern, Laurie Metcalf, Allison Janney, even Annette Bening probably could have done a decent job playing Ellen Martin but Meryl is just too Meryl. As for her other two performances in The Laundromat, they don’t work because one is meant to be a joke on the audience and the other is just a retread of her standard “I’m just a middle class woman from New Jersey and I love the little people” awards show speech.

Of course, The Laundromat itself is a remarkably bad film. Again, it takes a lot of talent to make a film this bad. Watching the film, I found myself wondering why, at this point in his celebrated career, Steven Soderbergh would decide to become a second-rate Adam McKay, especially when McKay himself is just a third-rate Jean-Luc Godard? The film is structured so that, while Ellen is obsessing on why she’s getting screwed over by the insurance companies, we’re also treated to scenes of Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas talking directly to the camera and explaining to use why the poor are always going to get screwed over by the rich. That’s probably true but the film gets so heavy-handed in its execution that the resulting migraine is going to be due less to outrage and more due to the sledgehammer that Soderbergh takes to your head.

Along with Ellen’s story, we also get to see several other stories featuring people and their money. Jeffrey Wright is a crooked accountant who has two families. And then there’s an African businessman who bribes his wife and daughter with shares in a non-existent company and then we take a trip to China, where we learn about cyanide and organ harvesting. And yes, I get it. It shows how a crime committed in China is ultimately felt by a widow living in Michigan. But one can’t help but wish that Soderbergh had just focuses on one story, instead of trying to imitate the worst moments of The Big Short.

Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas are technically playing the film’s villains but they’re both so charming that The Laundromat at times seems like more of a recruiting film for aspiring money launderers than anything else. (To continue the Adam McKay comparison, it’s a bit like how Vice actually left audiences feeling sympathy for Dick Cheney as opposed to writing petitions to send to The Hague.) It desperately wants to leave us outraged but Soderbegh gets so caught up in his own cutesy storytelling techniques that it just leaves us feeling somewhat annoyed. Watching the film, one gets the feeling that the perfect directors for The Laundromat would have been the Coen Brothers, who are capable of outrage but whose detached style would have kept them from bludgeoning the audience with it. Soderbergh is too angry to be effective.

As I said, there’s a lot of talented people involved in The Laundromat. It’s full of people who have done great work in the past and who will do great work in the future. As for The Laundromat, it’s a legitimate contender for the biggest disappointment of the year.

Horror on the Lens: The Terror (dir by Roger Corman)

Posted on October 18, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Have you ever woken up and thought to yourself, “I’d love to see a movie where a youngish Jack Nicholson played a French soldier who, while searching for a mysterious woman, comes across a castle that’s inhabited by both Dick Miller and Boris Karloff?”

Of course you have! Who hasn’t?

Well, fortunately, it’s YouTube to the rescue. In Roger Corman’s 1963 film The Terror, Jack Nicholson is the least believable 19th century French soldier ever. However, it’s still interesting to watch him before he became a cinematic icon. (Judging from his performance here and in Cry Baby Killer, Jack was not a natural-born actor.) Boris Karloff is, as usual, great and familiar Corman actor Dick Miller gets a much larger role than usual. Pay attention to the actress playing the mysterious woman. That’s Sandra Knight who, at the time of filming, was married to Jack Nicholson.

Reportedly, The Terror was one of those films that Corman made because he still had the sets from his much more acclaimed film version of The Raven. The script was never finished, the story was made up as filming moved alone, and no less than five directors shot different parts of this 81 minute movie. Among the directors: Roger Corman, Jack Hill, Monte Hellman, Francis Ford Coppola, and even Jack Nicholson himself! Perhaps not surprisingly, the final film is a total mess but it does have some historical value.

(In typical Corman fashion, scenes from The Terror were later used in the 1968 film, Targets.)

Check out The Terror below!

The TSL’s Horror Grindhouse: The Children (dir by Tom Shankland)

Posted on October 17, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Poor Casey (Hannah Tointon)!

As 2008’s The Children opens, all she wants to do is celebrate New Year’s with her friends. Instead, her mom and her stepfather are dragging her off to some stupid house in the middle of nowhere, where she’ll have to hang out with her aunt and her dorky uncle and she’ll also be expected to look after not only her two much younger cousins but her two half-siblings as well! Even worse, once they arrive at the house, all of the young children start to complain about feeling sick. One of them even throws up. Everyone assumes it’s just car sickness but could it be something worse?

(Of course. There’s always something worse!)

In fact, perhaps the only positive thing about the holiday is that it’s snowed! All of the snow sure does look pretty and it’s a lot of fun to play in. Once the kids get over being sick, they can’t wait to go outside and have some fun! One of the adults accompanies them. While he’s sledding, the kids use a garden rake to kill him. They even disguise it to look like an accident…

Yep, there’s definitely something going on with the children. At first, Casey is the only one who understands that the children have turned evil. (Of course, her first clue comes when they attack her in the woods.) All the adults are either in shock or denial. At first, they refuse to even consider that their children are trying to kill them. Of course, once the children lay siege to the house, the adults are in for a rude awakening…

This is actually the second film called The Children that I’ve reviewed for this site. The first one was a film from the early 80s that featured a school bus driving through a toxic cloud with the end result being a bunch of homicidal, radioactively-charged children. In the second version, it’s left a bit more ambiguous as to why the children have suddenly turned homicidal. While it’s established that that they’re suffering from a virus, the film never tells us where the virus came from or even how it was contracted in the first place. In fact, until the film’s last few minutes, the audience is never quite sure just how far the infection has spread. That ambiguity is what gives this film its power. There’s nothing scarier than not being sure what’s going on.

The Children is a grim and disturbing horror film, one the features very little humor and which ends on an ominous note. It’s a film that exploits something that we all know but rarely want to admit, which is that children can be incredibly creepy. We tend to idealize children, which is exactly what the children in this movie use to their advantage.

The Children is also a very well-acted horror film. Hannah Tointon is sympathetic in the lead role while all of the killer children are played with a proper combination of savagery and innocence. This may very well be the best killer children film ever made.

Oedipus Mess: Rivals (1972, directed by Krishna Shah)

Posted on October 17, 2019 by Jedadiah Leland

Christine (Joan Hackett) is a young single mother and widow who lives in New York City. She has a son, Jamie (Scott Colomby, playing a ten year-old even though he’s obviously a teenager). Jamie is an aspiring director who make a film of his classmates running around the playground while wearing Richard Nixon masks. Jamie, who is described as having a genius IQ, is also unhealthily obsessed with his mother, which the film, via flashback, links to her taking a shower in front of him while he was still potty training.

Jamie is not happy when Christine meets Peter (Robert Klein), a loudmouth who gives tours of the city to New York residents only. If you’re from out-of-town, don’t even try to get in Peter’s microbus. Peter and Christine start to date and then, eventually, they get married. Despite the fact that his older babysitter wants to have an affair with him, Jamie remains obsessed with his mother and refuses to accept Peter as his stepfather. Peter knows that Jamie doesn’t like him and eventually gives up on trying to win him over. What Peter doesn’t know is that Jamie has come up with an elaborate scheme to murder him.

Rivals is the type of strange and messy film that could only have been made in 1972. I guess it would be considered to be a mix of a horror movie and a psychological thriller but the tone of Rivals is all over the place so it’s hard to know what the film is trying to say about Jamie or his mother. Throughout the film, there are sudden montages that seem to have little to do with the plot. For instance, the film comes to a halt so we can spend several minutes watching as Peter attempts to harangue people into getting in his bus. Peter is supposed to be likable but he comes across as being so obnoxious that it is easy to see why Jamie would not want him for a stepfather. As for Jamie, he’s supposed to be ten but looks like he should be starting middle school so his obsession with sex is never as shocking as it should be. The ludicrous subplot about his babysitter goes nowhere and just seems to disappear. The one bright spot in the film is Joan Hackett as Christine. Hackett does the best she can with her inconsistent role and she’s the one person in Rivals who you will actually care about.

Rivals is a mess, perhaps worth seeing only for the location footage of New York in the early 70s. Otherwise, this is a forgotten film that does not need to be remembered.

Horror Film Review: The Possession of Hannah Grace (dir by Diederik van Rooijen)

Posted on October 17, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

2018’s The Possession of Hannah Grace is a real idiot film.

As in, “Hey, idiot, there’s a dead woman behind you!”

The dead woman in question of Hannah Grace (Kirby Johnson), who was once alive and had brown eyes but then she was possessed by demons and her eyes turned blue. An attempted exorcism didn’t go well, with the older priest ended up getting impaled on a conveniently placed hook and the younger priest being one of those young bearded types who had obviously never done an exorcism before. Finally, Hannah’s father, Grainger (Louis Herthum), was like, “Ah, screw it,” so he just smothered her to death,

Unfortunately, the demon is still inside of Hannah’s body and, three moths later, that means trouble when it shows up at the morgue. Megan (Shay Mitchell), who is working the night shift, is an ex-cop with drug and alcohol problems and she’s not sure if Hannah is really wandering around or if she’s just hallucinating things. The film probably would have been more interesting if we had been as uncertain as Megan as to whether or not she was really seeing Hannah wandering around the morgue. Unfortunately, though, the film starts with the unsuccessful exorcism and, as a result, we already know that it’s Hannah and we’re just kinda like, “We get it. You’ve got issues. Who cares?”

Anyway, even though the morgue is a restricted area, people keep coming down there and getting killed. What’s interesting is that everyone who dies is on duty at the hospital yet hardly anyone seems to notice or care that they’re suddenly absent. We do see one security guard wandering why his partner hasn’t returned but that’s pretty much it.

And it should be scary because this is one of those films that seems to exclusively take place in dark rooms and unlit hallways but it never really is, largely because we know everything that Hannah’s going to do before Hannah does it. And everyone is so stupid that there’s not really any suspense as to whether or not Hannah’s going to be able to rip them up into little pieces of naive medical personnel. This all, of course, leads to Megan declaring that she’s now a stronger person and will be able to face the the future with renewed confidence so I guess all of those people dying for no good reason was worth it.

Anyway, I usually like to make sure that my reviews usually run at least 500 words but I kind of feel like that would be a waste of effort where The Possession of Hannah Grace is concerned. I’ll be happy with 440.