Category Archives: Film Review

Horror Film Review: The Wolfman (dir by Joe Johnston)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

I have to admit that I’m always a little bit surprised to discover how many people really don’t like the 2010 film, The Wolfman.

I mean, I’ll be the first to admit that it may not have been the greatest film ever made but the amount of negative feelings that this film has managed to generate over the years seems, to me, to be a bit out of proportion.  Essentially, it’s just a silly film about a werewolf.

Yes, it is a remake of The Wolf Man and we’re all honor-bound to dislike remakes but, if we’re going to be absolutely honest, the original Wolf Man was sometimes pretty silly too.  If anything, the original’s success is largely due to the heartfelt work of Claude Rains in the role of the Wolf Man’s father.  Yes, the original Wolf Man is a classic but remaking it is not exactly sacrilege.

In the remake, Benicio Del Toro takes over the role of Larry Talbot, who is reimagined as a Shakespearean actor who has a history of mental instability.  Del Toro is not exactly convincing as an Englishman, though the same could be said of Lon Chaney, Jr.  However, nobody broods with quite the panache of Benicio Del Toro and that’s what was needed for the remake’s version of Larry Talbot.  If Lon Chaney, Jr. played Larry as being a dumb lug, Del Toro plays Larry as being a tortured artist.

Anthony Hopkins takes over the old Claude Rains role.  Just as it’s difficult to imagine Del Toro as being English, it’s next to impossible to imagine him sharing any DNA with Anthony Hopkins.  And yet, I’m really glad that Hopkins was cast in the role.  Of course, in the remake, the character of John Talbot has been totally reimagined.  He’s now something of a bitter and sarcastic alcoholic, a negligent father who always seem to be amused at some mean-spirited joke that only he can understand.  I imagine that if I asked Hopkins, he’d say that he did this role for the money but there’s nothing wrong with that.  Some of Hopkins’s best performances have been the ones that he subsequently claimed to have done only for the money.  Freed from any obligation to give a nuanced or subtle performance, Hopkins goes totally over-the-top and it’s actually a lot of fun to watch.  In The Wolfman, Hopkins turns the delivery of bitter bon mots and erduite insults into an art form.

Watching the film’s first half, we all know what’s going to happen.  Gypsies are going to show up in the woods near Talbot Hall and paranoid villagers are going to blame them for everything that happens.  Larry is going to get bitten by a werewolf and transform every night when the moon is full.  Larry is going to fall in love with Gwen (Emily Blunt) but, for her own protection, will try to send her away.  An arrogant but clever inspector, Francis Abberline (Hugo Weaving, playing a version of the real-life detective who inspired the role played by Johnny Depp in From Hell), is going to arrive from London to investigate all the recent deaths…

About halfway through, The Wolfman takes a totally unexpected turn.  I won’t spoil it here, just in case you haven’t seen the movie.  I know a lot of people don’t care much for the big twist but I happened to love it.  Yes, it doesn’t necessarily make a lot of sense and it’s all a bit overdone but so what?  It’s exactly the type of weird twist that a movie like this needs.  It all leads to a final confrontation, one that is as exuberantly silly as the original’s conclusion was somber and tragic.

The key to enjoying The Wolfman is to accept it for what it is, an occasionally dumb and definitely not-to-be-taken-seriously movie that features some appropriately atmospheric cinematography, gorgeously gothic production design, and some very talented actors.  (I especially enjoyed Weaving’s performance as Abberline.)  A classic it may not be, but it’s still a fun little movie if you’re in the right mood for it.

A Movie A Day #296: Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983, directed by Jack Clayton)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Something Wicked This Way Comes is one of my favorite films.

The place is Green Town, Illinois.  The time is the 1920s.  The carnival has come to town but this is no normal carnival.  Led by the sinister, Mr. Dark (Jonathan Pryce), this carnival promises to fulfill everyone’s dreams but at what cost?  Double amputee Ed (James Stacy) gets his arm and his leg back.  The lonely teacher, Miss Foley (Mary Grace Canfield), is young and beautiful once again.  Mr. Dark may bring people what they want but he gives nothing away for free.  Only two young boys, Will (Vidal Peterson) and Jim (Shawn Carson), realize the truth about the carnival but no one in town will listen to them.  Mr. Dark wants Jim to be his successor and Will’s only ally is his elderly father, the town librarian (Jason Robards).

As much a coming of age story as a horror film, Something Wicked This Way Comes takes the time to establish Green Town and to make it feel like a real place and its inhabitants seem like real people.  When Mr. Dark shows up, he is not just a supernatural trickster.  He is not just stealing the souls of Green Town.  He is also destroying the innocence of childhood.  Jonathan Pryce is both charismatic and menacing as Mr. Dark while Jason Robards matches him as the infirm librarian who must find the strength to save his son.  The confrontation between Pryce and Robards, where Pryce tears flaming pages out of a book, is the best part of the movie.  Along with Robards and Pryce, the entire cast is excellent.  Be sure to keep an eye out for familiar faces like Royal Dano, Jack Dodson, Angelo Rossitto, and especially Pam Grier, playing the “Dust Witch,” the most beautiful woman in the world.

Based on a classic novel by Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes is one of the only Bradbury adaptations to do justice to its source material.

The TSL’s Horror Grindhouse: Hard To Die (dir by Jim Wynorski)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

 

Do you remember how, a few days ago, I reviewed a silly little movie called Sorority House Massacre II?

Well, it turns out that there’s a sequel and it’s on YouTube!  Both films were directed by Jim Wynorski and featured pretty much the same cast, despite the fact that a few of them were playing new characters.  It was released under several different titles.  Hard To Die is the one that I’m going with for this review.  However, the film was also known as Tower of Terror, which makes sense when you consider that the majority of the film takes place in a hi-rise office building.  It was also apparently released in some places as Sorority House Massacre III, despite the fact that there’s no sorority house in the movie.

Actually, it’s debatable whether or not Hard To Die is actually a sequel.  It’s true that Orville Ketchum (Peter Spellos) does make another appearance.  In the first movie, Orville was the creepy neighbor.  In Hard To Die, he’s the janitor at the office building.  Orville tells the exact same story, with the exact same flashbacks, that he told in Sorority House Massacre II.  (Those flashbacks, of course, were lifted from a totally unrelated movie called Slumber Party Massacre.  There were apparently a lot of massacres in the 80s and 90s.)  The evil spirit of Hockstadder returns as well, though this time he comes flying out of a box that was accidentally delivered to the office building as opposed to a Ouija board.  And, of course, there’s an abundance of lingerie, awkward dialogue, and cheap gore effects.  (At one point, a bucket of fake blood is literally splashed on a wall.)  However, Hard To Die also tells almost exactly the same story of Sorority House Massacre II.  There are so few differences that I’m actually more tempted to say that Hard To Die is a remake of Sorority House Massacre II than a sequel.  The only problem with that theory is whether or not a second movie can be considered remake when the first movie literally came out the exact same year.

(One of the reasons that I love my work here at the TSL is that it allows me to obsess over minutia like this.)

Anyway, the main difference between Hard To Die and Sorority House Massacre III is that there’s no sorority house in Hard To Die.  Instead, Hard To Die takes place in a lingerie shop that just happens to be located on the 7th floor of a skyscraper.  The hard-working employees are spending the weekend doing inventory but it’s not going to well.  For one thing, the sprinklers accidentally go off so everyone decides to take off their wet clothes, put on skimpy lingerie, and order pizza.  Personally, I probably would have waited for the pizza to arrive before getting naked but then again, I’ve never worked retail or dated a pizza deliveryman.

The pizza does eventually arrive but no one gets to eat it because the deliveryperson gets set on fire and ends up falling several floors to her death.  That’s a waste of good pizza, which is kind of depressing.  Meanwhile, Orville keeps trying to warn everyone about Hockstadder but, instead, he keeps getting beaten up.  The end credits of Hard To Die promised that the next film would be called Orville In Orbit.  Apparently, it was never made but I do hope that Orville got a vacation after all of this.

Anyway, Hard To Die is an extremely silly movie but it’s just so sincere in its silliness that it feels somewhat churlish to be too critical of it.  If I had to choose whether to be in Sorority House Massacre II or Hard To Die, I would probably pick Hard To Die because, at least in that movie, I’d get to shoot a machine gun.  Hard To Die is so blatantly and unapologetically over the top that you can’t help but be amused by it all.

Horror Film Review: The Vampire (dir by Paul Landres)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Headaches are a bitch!

And if you didn’t already know that, you will know it after watching the 1957 film, The Vampire.

Like many films of this kind, The Vampire starts with death.

Actually, I take that back.  Technically, it’s true but it’s also little bit too melodramatic.  And, to be honest, The Vampire starts with a 14 year-old boy, who is very much alive, riding his bicycle down the street of Anytown USA.  He has a box with him, one that has air holes.  On the back of his bike, a cardboard sign reads: “Bobs Pet Zoo!  If Its Alive We Got It!”  Apparently, the kid is smart enough to run his own zoo but not smart enough to know when to use an apostrophe.

Anyway, the kid comes up to a creepy old house, one that looks somewhat out of place in the otherwise pristine suburban neighborhood.  Originally, I thought that maybe Pennywise lived in the house but then I reminded myself that The Vampire was made decades before It.  Instead, the house belongs to Dr. Campbell, a scientist who is doing experiments with blood and who needs a never-ending supply of animal test subjects.  (Boooooo!  Animal testing!  Hiss!)  Apparently, the kid keeps Dr. Campbell supplied with animals.  When the kid enters the house, Dr. Campbell is nowhere to be seen.  It’s not until the kid enters the laboratory that he discovers Campbell, dead and slumped over his desk.

As news spreads of Campbell’s death, his friend, Dr. Paul Beecher (John Beal), searches through Campbell’s belongings and he comes across a mysterious bottle of pills, which he promptly takes home with him.  Dr. Beecher is kindly doctor, the type that we all wish we could deal with whenever we had to go in for a check up.  However, he suffers from terrible migraines.  That night, when he’s literally blinded with a headache, he asks his daughter to get him his pills.  She retrieves a bottle of pills but guess what?  They’re the wrong pills!  They’re not headache pills!  Instead, they’re Dr. Campbell’s vampirism pills!

The pills cause Beecher to blaxk out.  Whenever he comes to, he never has any memory of what he may or may not have done while he was out.  However, strange things are happening to his friends and his patients.  One of his longtime patients dies of fright when he comes by her house.  On her neck, he finds two puncture wounds…

So, it’s not a spoiler for me to tell you that Dr. Beecher has been transformed into a vampire.  And I know what you’re thinking.  Why doesn’t he just stop taking the pills?  The simplest answer is that the pills are addictive.  The more complex answer is that he doesn’t want to.  The pills have brought out his dark side and, now that it’s free, it’s not planning on going anywhere.

In a strange way, The Vampire reminded me of Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life.  In Bigger Than Life, James Mason plays a gentle and good-hearted professor who, after taking steroids, turns into a monster who dreams of creating a master race.  Bigger Than Life was unsettling for the exact same reason that The Vampire is unsettling.  Both suggest that the pills didn’t turn their user into a monster.  Instead, the pills just allowed his true self to come out.

The Vampire was a low-budget film, a B-movie as many would probably call it.  The musical score is overly melodramatic and so are some of the actors.  But I would say that The Vampire is actually a bit of a subversive masterpiece.  This 1957 film suggests that behind the pristine facade of suburbia, there lurked monsters.  Even an outwardly successful and respected man like Dr. Beecher can turn into something totally different behind closed doors, this film is saying.  That’s a message that it as relevant today as it was when this film was first released.  In its own way, The Vampire is a brilliant and important movie.

Horror Film Review: Vampyr (dir by Carl Thedor Dryer)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

A dream of dark and disturbing things….

Allan Gray (Nicolas de Gunzburg, performing under the name Julian West) might be a student of the occult or he might just be a man having a dream within a dream.  He’s handsome with just enough of an aristocratic bearing to be intriguing.  His face is strangely blank.  Whenever we see him, we wonder if he’s awake or if he’s asleep.  We’re reminded of Werner Herzog’s film Heart of Glass, in which the entire cast recited their lines while hypnotized.

Allan’s come to a small village in France.  It’s a quaint little place, probably the type that most tourist would consider to be quite beautiful.  But from the minute that we see it, the entire landscape seems to be off.  The inhabitants of the village seem almost as blank-faced as Allan.  When we see the trees sway in the wind, we’re reminded of  Victor Sjöström’s The Wind and how the nonstop wind drove Lillian Gish mad.

Allan stays in an inn.  He goes to sleep.  When he wakes up, an old man stands in his room.  The old man gives him a package.  The package is not to be opened until the man’s death.  Allan goes outside.  The village is full of shadows.  He watches an old woman and the town’s doctor.  Allan meets with one of the old man’s daughters and learns that her sister is deathly ill.  She needs a blood transfusion.  When Allan reads a book about vampyres, he suspects that both the town and the sisters are being held prisoner.  At times, the events feel almost random but the film has such a hypnotic power that we automatically know that nothing happens by mere chance.

Directed by Carl Theodor Dryer, Vampyr was filmed in 1931 and released in 1932.  This was Dreyer’s first sound film but Vampyr almost seems like a silent film.  It certainly has more in common with Dreyer’s hallucinogenic silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc, than it does with Universal’s version of Dracula.  Vampyr feels like a cinematic dream, full of surrealistic images and odd performances.  As a collection of images, Vampyr is one of the most intensely atmospheric film that I’ve ever seen.  Allan, who may be having a dream within a dream, discovers a coffin and is shocked to discover who is inside.  A character is buried alive in flour.  Fogs rolls across the river and a figure with a scythe brings to mind Charon, the ferryman who took the dead to the underworld.  Shadows dance across the screen.  Much like Lucio Fulci’s Beyond trilogy, Vampyr succeeds by creating its own cinematic world, one where reality is solely defined by the images on the screen.  The plot of Vampyr might not always make sense in the real world but it’s perfectly logical in the world created by the film.

Vampyr’s a surreal classic, one that reportedly came close to being a lost film.  Several of the video releases have been technically inferior, though the flickering picture and inconsistent soundtrack of those releases can actually add to the film’s dreamlike power.  It’s been released by the Criterion Collection and that is the ideal version to watch.

 

Horror on the Lens: Night of the Living Dead (dir by George Romero)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Happy Halloween everyone!

Well, as another horrorthon draws to a close, it’s time for another Shattered Lens tradition!  Every Halloween, we share one of the greatest and most iconic horror films ever made.  For your Halloween enjoyment, here is George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead!

(Be sure to read Arleigh’s equally iconic review!)

ENJOY!

A Halloween Film Review: A Ghost Story (dir by David Lowery)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

To quote Taking Back Sunday:

“What’s it feel like to be a ghost?”

That’s the question that is asked in the hauntingly beautiful film, A Ghost Story.

How to describe the plot of A Ghost Story?  It’s not going to be easy because A Ghost Story is a film that defies easy description or categorization.  It’s power comes less from the specifics of the story and more from the mood that it creates.  A Ghost Story makes you think and it makes you feel and, to a certain extent, you’re just going to have to take my word on that.  This is one of those film that, to truly understand, you simply must see.

Casey Affleck plays C and Rooney Mara plays M.  They live in a small house, near Dallas.  They’re like any couple, really.  Sometimes, they appear to be in love.  Sometimes, they appear to be on the verge of breaking up and never seeing each other again.  Sometimes, they are happy.  Sometimes, they are sad.  The film starts with an almost random series of scenes, showing their life together.

Suddenly, we see a smashed car sitting in front of the house.

Just as abruptly, we’re in the hallway outside a sterile hospital room.  We can see that, inside the room,  M is staring down at a body on a slab.  The body has been covered with a sheet.  M leaves.  Slowly, the sheet-covered body sits up.  We watch as the sheet-covered ghost walks down the hallways of the hospital.  Briefly, it pauses to look at what appears to be a portal to … somewhere else.  The ghost does not enter the portal and the portal closes.

We spend the rest of the movie following that sheet-covered ghost as he wanders through our world.  No one living sees it and the ghost never says a word.  He watches as M mourns over his passing.  Time passes.  People enter and leave the house.  Life goes on but the ghost is stuck forever where he is, powerless to do anything other than occasionally break a dish, play a piano, or open a book.  Time passes.  The ghost sees the future, the past, and the present.  Why is the ghost still there?  Does the ghost know?  Is the ghost just waiting for someone who it has forgotten?

If I’m making A Ghost Story sound like a sad movie … well, it is.  There are moments of humor, largely coming from the fact that the ghost is literally a sheet with some eye holes.  For the most part, though, this film is a somber meditation on life, death, and what makes it all worth the trouble.  It’s a film that makes you wonder whether you would have entered that portal or if you too would have returned to your old house so that you silently watch the world go on without you.

From the stillness of the morgue to the view of a futuristic cityscape that the ghost can see but probably no longer appreciate, director David Lowery gives some truly beautiful and haunting images while telling this story.  (It’s not surprising to learn that the Dallas-based Lowery previously worked on Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color.)  A Ghost Story came out earlier this year and really didn’t get the attention that it deserved.  It’s a thought-provoking film and definitely one of the best of the year.

An October Film Review: The Night America Trembled (dir by Tom Donovan)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Today is the 79th anniversary of Orson Welles’s infamous War of the Worlds broadcast.

In 1938, Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater of the Air performed a radio adaptation of H.G. Welles’s War of the World.  Presented as a live news program, it was one of the first mockumentaries.  It also caused a panic.  How big the panic was is open for debate.  Some say only a few people took it seriously.  Other sources say that it was a nationwide crisis.  But, regardless, Welles made history on that night.  Not only did he illustrate the power of the media but he also scared the Hell out of a lot of people.  All in all, a pretty good night…

Filmed in 1957 for a television program called Westinghouse Studio One, The Night America Trembled is a dramatization of that night.  For legal reasons, Orson Welles is not portrayed nor is his name mentioned.  Instead, the focus is mostly on the people listening to the broadcast and getting the wrong idea.  That may sound like a comedy but The Night America Trembled takes itself fairly seriously.  Even pompous old Edward R. Murrow shows up to narrate the film, in between taking drags off a cigarette.  (I enjoyed the show but, whenever Murrow showed up, I was reminded of a grumpy old teacher complaining that none of his students cared about the Spanish-American War.)

Clocking in at a brisk 60 minutes, The Night America Trembled is an interesting recreation of that October 30th.  Among the people panicking: a group of people in a bar who, before hearing the broadcast, were debating whether or not Hitler was as crazy as people said he was, a babysitter who goes absolutely crazy with fear, and a group of poker-playing college students.  If, like me, you’re a frequent viewer of TCM, you may recognize some of the faces in the large cast: Ed Asner, James Coburn, John Astin, Warren Oates, and Warren Beatty all make early appearances.

As I said, it’s an interesting little historical document and you can watch it below!

Enjoy!

A Movie A Day #295: Zombie Island Massacre (1984, directed by John N. Carter)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Zombie Island Massacre has got a massacre but it ain’t got no zombies.

Instead, it has a group of tourists who travel to Zombie Island so they can watch a voodoo ceremony.  Afterward, their tour bus breaks down.  The driver leaves to get help but never returns.  There is a deserted villa nearby so the tourists decide to take shelter there for the night.  Whenever anyone stumbles away from the main group, they are killed by someone wearing a costume made of leaves.  There ain’t no zombies or surprises in the glacially paced movie.  There might not even be an island.  It might actually be a peninsula.  I’m not sure.

The only reason that Zombie Island Massacre is remembered is because one of the tourists is played by Rita Jenrette.  Rita was the wife of John Johnrette, a South Carolina congressman who was taken down as a part of Abscam.  Rita got a divorce and wrote a book called My Capital Secrets, where she revealed that she and John had sex on the capital steps while the House was holding an all-night session.  Rita was not a bad actress, though the material only required her to scream and take a shower.

The main problem with Zombie Island Massacre is obvious.  There ain’t no zombies on that island.

Horror On The Lens: Haxan: Witchcraft Through The Ages (dir by Benjamin Christensen)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

I previously shared Haxan back in October of 2013.  A day later, YouTube removed the video and turned my post into a tease.

Well, the video has been uploaded again so I’m sharing Haxan again!

To quote what I wrote the last time that I shared this particular film:

Directed by the Danish director Benjamin Christensen, Haxan is a quasi-documentary that, over the course of four separate sections, documents the history of witchcraft and superstition in Europe.  Along with making a potent case that religion and superstition are largely the same thing, Haxan is best known for dramatizing various old folk tales.  Though the film was made in 1922, its images of lustful devils and dark magic remain powerful to this day.

Enjoy Haxan!