In this short film from 1958, a terrible little kid named Larry is given detention because he’s a terrible little kid. He’s supposed to clean the chalkboard but instead he draws a cartoon character, which promptly comes to life and probably traumatizes Larry for life. Larry does learn a little something about behaving at school but at what cost? Seriously, Larry may have had bad manners but you know who I blame? The parents. That’s who the stick figure should be tormenting.
Now, believe it or not, there is a reason why I’m posting this in October. This short film — like many educational films from the 50s — was directed by Herk Harvey. Harvey spent the majority of his long career making industrial and educational films. However, horror fans will always know him as the man who directed 1962’s Carnival of Souls! I’ll be sharing Carnival Of Souls next week but for now, enjoy Manners in School!
And remember …. good manners are good for everyone! And if you don’t believe me, a stick figure is going to lecture you and give you nightmares.
Agck! Seriously, dear readers, don’t mess with Ouija boards.
That’s really the main lesson that’s to be learned from the 2017 Spanish film, Veronica. Taking place in 1991 and based on a true story (No, it really is!), Veronica tells the story of a 15 year-old girl named …. well, Veronica (Sandra Escacena). Veronica lives in a nice but cluttered apartment with her three younger siblings and her mother. Ever since the death of her father, Veronica’s life has pretty much centered around going to school and looking after her siblings. While her friends get to experience life and mature and develop, Veronica seems to be trapped in that one apartment with her responsibilities. Veronica is a good babysitter and she appears to puts up with a lot without losing her temper. You can’t help but sympathize with her.
One day, during a solar eclipse, Veronica and two friends sneak into the school’s basement. While all of the other students watch the eclipse while under the strict supervisions of the nuns, Veronica and her friends use a Ouija board in an attempt to hold a séance. Veronica wants to talk to the spirit of her father. Instead, a very different spirit shows up and Veronica faints.
When Veronica wakes up, things have changed. Her friends now seem scared to be around her and they refuse to talk about what happened during the séance. When Veronica returns home, she feels like she and her siblings are not alone in the apartment. She starts to have disturbing dreams, in which the children are in danger and a dark shadow is stalking her. Veronica becomes convinced that an evil creature is after her and her family. A blind nun known as Sister Death tells Veronica that the only way to get rid of the spirit is “by doing right what you did wrong.” Cryptic advice is always the best advice, right?
Veronica knows that she has to do something but what? With the children starting to suffer from mysterious injuries, Veronica tries to figure what she did wrong so that she can fix it. But, as you probably already guessed, she’s not going to like the answer….
Veronica is an effectively chilling horror film. I’ve seen it described as being “the scariest film on Netflix” but I wouldn’t quite go that far. It didn’t make me jump, though it did make look over my shoulder a few times just to make sure there wasn’t anything sneaking up behind me. Veronica is, however, a film that very much gets under your skin. If you’ve ever had to look after a child (let alone three children) and feared that you might not be up to the task, you’ll be able to relate to Veronica and her terror. It’s not just about bringing a bad spirit into the world. Nor is it just about the fact that Ouija boards are inherently creepy. Instead, it’s all about protecting those children and the gradual realization that, despite all of your best efforts, there are some bad things in the world that you can’t just wish away. The evil spirit that follows Veronica into the world is not just a paranormal monster. Instead, it’s a metaphor for every fear that anyone has ever had while growing up. It’s the fear of not being good enough. It’s the fear of missing out on life. It’s the fear and resentment that comes from living in a world that is inherently unfair.
Veronica is an intelligent and thoughtful horror film, one that is blessed with a great performance from Sandra Escacena in the title role. It’s on Netflix. Just look for the blind nun.
Of course, if you’ve been watching Lifetime for the past month or so, you know that. Lifetime has spent most of October showing movies about cheerleaders who are either killing or being killed. Now that Lifetime has decided to show Christmas movies for the rest of the year, the deadly cheerleader movies have moved to the Lifetime Movie Network.
For instance, last night saw the premiere of The Pom Pom Murders! Now, I was co-hosting the #ScarySocial live tweet last night so I missed The Pom Pom Murders but, fortunately, my sister Erin had the foresight to set the DVR for me. Thank you, Erin!
As I always do whenever there’s a killer cheerleader movie on the DVR, I tried to get Erin to watch it with me. Erin was a cheerleader in high school and I always feel it’s good to get an expert opinion on whether or not these films accurately reflect the cheerleading experience. (I always refused to try out for cheerleader in high school, mostly because two of my sisters had done it and I wanted to establish my own identity. Of course, since I was a teenager at the time, establishing my own identity meant writing a lot of emo poetry.) Erin, however, declined because no one was murdered while she was a cheerleader. I guess she has a point.
Anyway, The Pom Pom Murders is about Audrey (Anna Marie Dobbins), who tries out for a spot on the cheerleading squad of the Los Angeles Renegades basketball team! She makes the squad and she even gets a charming new boyfriend when star player Walter Wilson gives her a ride home! Everything seems to be perfect, until the murder of Bailey (Grace Patterson), a member of the squad and Walter’s ex-girlfriend! Bailey is strangled while her dog watches, just in case you needed any more evidence that this killer is ruthless.
With Walter as the number one suspect and an apparent killer stalking the Renegade Girls, can Audrey cheer the team to victory without losing her life? One would normally think so, seeing as how this is a Lifetime film and most Lifetime films do, eventually, have a happy ending. However, this film also features a rather snarky voice-over from Audrey, one which suggests that this story might not have a happy ending. Of course, Audrey also suggests that she might just be saying that to make you watch so one huge reason to watch the film is to see if Audrey’s an honest narrator or not!
The best Lifetime films always mix the melodrama with a healthy dose of self-awareness. These are films that go cheerfully over the top and make no apologies for doing so and that’s certainly the case with The Pom Pom Murders, which features an enjoyably eccentric group of suspects. Is the murderer the pervy janitor or the intense coach or the strange owners? Is Audrey going to be able to solve the case or is she going to end up the latest victim? Is she going to become the newest star cheerleader or is she going to finally listen to her mother and go to law school?
You’ll have to watch the film to find out! This is a fun movie. If you’re into Lifetime movies, you’ll be doing some cheering yourself.
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking.
After I rewatched Final Destination, I watched it’s sequel, 2003’s Final Destination 2.
Final Destination 2 is not only one of the best horror sequels ever made but it’s also the film that, even more than the first installment of the series, established what we consider to be a typical Final Destination film. The characters are far more eccentric and the deaths are far more elaborate. Death itself shows a sense of humor that wasn’t present in the first Final Destination film. If you manage to escape Death the first time, Death isn’t just going to track you down. It’s going to play without and have some fun before it finally fills its quota.
Final Destination 2 opens with Kimberly Corman (AJ Cook) having a vision of a crash on the interstate. She’s so freaked out by her vision that she blocks the entrance ramp. This may save the life of everyone stalled behind her but it also ends up killing all of her friends when a truck smashes into her SUV. Fortunately, Kimberly survives because she had gotten out of the vehicle to talk to a policeman named Thomas Burke (Michael Landes).
So, the bad news is that all of Kimberly’s friends are dead.
The good news is that Kimberly has a whole new group of friends, all of the people who were supposed to die on that highway but who are now alive and on Death’s do-over list as a result of Kimberly’s actions.
Along with Kimberly and Thomas, Death now has to take care of lottery winner Evan Lewis (David Paetaku), stoner Rory (Jonathan Cherry), neurotic chainsmoker Kat (Keegan Tracy Connor), teacher Eugene Dix (T.C. Carson), and Nora (Lynda Boyd) and her son, Tim (James Kirk). It turns out that Death is not only after them because they didn’t die on the highway but also because they all have a connection to the deaths that occurred in the first Final Destination. It’s actually a pretty clever idea and it also provides an excuse for Clear Rivers (Ali Larter) to return from the first film and act as a sort of death guru.
Needless to say, the deaths are elaborate. In fact, they’re so elaborate that Final Destination 2 occasionally feels like a satirical take on the first film. It’s not just that Nora loses her head in an elevator accident. It’s that there just happens to be an old man carrying a box full of claws on the elevator. In another scene, Rory looks inside a closet and sees hundreds of things that could possibly kill him, my favorite being the bowling ball that just happens to be precariously balanced on the top shelf. When Clear Rivers returns, she doesn’t just explain how death works. She also gives them a list of safety precautions that make her sound like an overly protective parent, looking at her son or daughter’s apartment and freaking out over how many appliances have been plugged into one outlet.
Final Destination 2 is a clever film with an appropriately dark and macabre sense of humor. On the one hand, all of the characters are well-written and the cast is so likable that you don’t want to see any of them die. On the other hand, Death is so inventive that it’s hard not to want to see what it has up its sleeve. And, like the first film, the sequel works because it gets at a universal truth. You can avoid death but can never truly escape it.
I was recently rewatching the 2000 film, Final Destination, and a few things occurred to me.
Number one, no one ever really thanks Devon Sawa for getting them off that plane before it explodes. Final Destination opens with a group of high school students boarding a plane so that they can go on their senior class trip to Paris. (I wish I had gone to their high school. Our senior class trip was to …. well, we didn’t get one.) When Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) has a vision of the plane exploding, he freaks out and he, his teacher, and a few other students are kicked off the plane. Needless to say, everyone’s pretty upset with Alex but then, just a few minutes after taking off, the plane does explode. Alex was right. He saved everyone’s lives.
And yet, no one ever says, “Thank you, Alex!” Instead, everyone is still like, “Hey, that’s the weirdo that ruined our trip to Paris!” No, the plane exploding is what ruined your trip to Paris. Alex saved your life! Poor Alex. And yet, it kind of makes sense. In the face of inexplicable tragedy, people need someone to blame and Alex is a convenient scapegoat.
That scapegoating continues once the survivors of the flight start to mysteriously die. No one wants Alex near them, even though Alex has managed to figure out that Death is stalking them because they messed up its plans by getting off of that plane. Then again, Alex doesn’t always come across as if he’s the most stable person in the world. Gaunt and hallow-eyed, Sawa portrays Alex as someone who haunted by survivor’s guilt even before it became obvious that he and his former friends were being targeted. Sawa, it should be said, gives a remarkably good performance in Final Destination.
Another thing that occurred to me as I rewatched Final Destination is that, in this film, Death doesn’t have much of a sense of humor. The Final Destination sequels are notorious for their elaborate and often ironic death scenes, the majority of which seem to indicate that Death might be a little bit too clever and precocious for its own good. However, in the first Final Destination, Death is a lot more direct and, in some ways, a lot more sadistic. Terry Chaney (Amanda Detmer) steps out in the street and gets run over by a bus. Goofy Billy Hitchcock (Seann William Scott — why two n’s Seann!?) makes the mistake of standing too close to the railroad tracks and he loses the top half of his head. Death really only get creative when it comes to taking out Todd Waggner (Chad E. Donella) and Ms. Lewton (Kristen Cloke) and, even then, it’s methods are nowhere near as elaborate as they would eventually become.
The final thing that I noticed is that Final Destination holds up really well. It’s hard to remember now but, when Final Destination first came out, a lot of critics dismissed it as just being a slasher film with a slightly clever twist. But actually, that twist is far more than just “slightly” clever and the film really does a lot more with the idea than it’s often given credit for. Final Destination is a film full of thrills and chills — I still freak out at some of those death scenes — but it’s also a film that always makes me think about mortality. Has our destiny already been written? Can we defeat death? Or are we just pawns with our fates predetermined? In the end, that’s what makes Final Destination so effective. We all know that we can’t escape death, both in real life and in the movies. The one thing that everyone has in common is that death is eventually going to come for all of us. It’s the one enemy that we can’t defeat or laugh away. Instead, all we can do is try to hold it off for a while. Final Destination taps into the fears that we all have.
The plot is clever. The script is frequently witty. I liked the fact the characters were all named after horror movie icons. Plus, you got Tony Todd dominating the entire film with just a brief role. Final Destination is a classic.
I should start things off with a confession. This is actually not the first time that I’ve shared Manos: The Hands of Fate here on the Shattered Lens. I previously shared it on both October 8th of 2013 and October 15th of 2015 and, both times, I even used the exact same picture of Torgo.
However, Manos proved to be such a popular choice that I simply had to post it again. As I pointed out two years ago, Manos has a reputation for being one of the worst films ever made. And, honestly, who am I to disagree? However, it’s also a film that is so bad that it simply has to be seen.
By the way, everyone who watches Manos ends up making fun of Torgo, who was played by John Reynolds. What they may not know is that Reynolds committed suicide shortly after filming on Manos wrapped. So, as tempting at it may be to ridicule poor Mr. Reynolds’s performance, save your barbs for Torgo and leave John Reynolds alone.
My friend Jason says this is a great film so I’ll share the trailer, despite the fact that YouTube is probably going to start recommending some crazy stuff to me now.
The film is apparently about some theater employees who watch a cursed pornographic movie and then have to deal with a succubus. These things happen. One the one hand, moving to video from film did adversely effect the quality of the films being released by the adult film industry. At the same time, it also led to less supernatural curses. Everything has a price.
Anyway, here’s the trailer. Google’s recommending porn to me now.
Through the Shattered Lens 