Category Archives: Horrorthon

Mortal Sins: Absolution (1978, directed by Anthony Page)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Father Goddard (Richard Burton) is a stern and repressed teacher at a Catholic boys school.  Goddard is strangely obsessed with two of his students.  The intelligent and athletic Arthur Dyson (Dai Bradley) is a favorite of Goddard’s.  However, Goddard cannot stand Arthur’s best friend, Benji (Dominic Guard).  Benji wears a leg brace and takes a sarcastic attitude towards Goddard and the Catholic Church in general.  When Goddard finds out that Benji has been hanging out with a drifter named Blakely (Billy Connolly) and that Blakely is camping near the church, Goddard calls the police.  After the Blakely’s camp is destroyed and the drifter mysteriously vanishes, one of the boys goes to confession and tells the priest that he has murdered Blakely and hidden the body.  Is the boy telling the truth or is Goddard the victim of an increasingly complicated prank?

Written by Anthony Shaffer (who also wrote the classic The Wicker Man), Absolution is an extremely complicated mystery that sometimes seems like it’s trying to do too much at one time.  It starts out as a character study of an out-of-touch priest and then it becomes a coming of age story about Benji and his friendship with the free-thinking Blakely.  Then it turns into a murder mystery and a horror movie before finally settling on being an anti-Catholic tract.  The story does hold your interest because of the actors but that does not mean that it always makes sense.  The film’s central conspiracy is clever and complicated but also thoroughly implausible.

The man reason to watch the film is that Richard Burton gives one of his best performances as the self-loathing Father Goddard.  Burton had a famously mixed-record as a screen actor but Absolution makes good use of his tendency to ham it up.  Much of what motivates Goddard is left unclear in the movie, though it is subject of much speculation among his students.  Burton fills in the screenplay’s blanks with an intense performance as a man who has convinced himself that he has complete control when he actually has none at all.

Retro Game Review: Beyond: Two Souls (2013, Quantic Dream)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

In between replaying Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human, I decided to go ahead and also replay Qunatic Dream’s Beyond: Two Souls.

In Beyond: Two Souls you play two characters who are linked together.  Jodie (Ellen Page) is a troubled young woman who, after being rejected by her family while still a child, is raised by paranormal researcher, Nathan Dawkins (Willem DaFoe).  You are also Aiden, a mysterious psychic force that Jodie can use to read minds and move objects.  Because of Jodie’s powers, the CIA wants them to work for her.  Because Jodie does not want to assassinate progressive world leaders just because the CIA wants them dead (remember, this is a French game), Jodie goes on the run.  The game itself is told out of chronological order, with the player going back and forth from Jodie’s childhood and Jodie’s present as a fugitive.  Like Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human, Beyond: Two Souls has multiple endings depending on what you do during the game.

Beyond: Two Souls is a weaker game than both Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human but, when I replayed it, I discovered that it was not as bad as I remembered.  Willem DaFoe and especially Ellen Page are amazing in the roles of Jodie and Nathan and the parts of the game that took place during Jodie’s childhood actually improved on a second playing.  (There’s nothing more fun than burning down the bully’s house.)  The nonlinear storytelling was still needlessly confusing.  Fortunately, there is an option to play the game’s chapters in chronological order.

The game’s flaws were still there, though.  The CIA stuff was heavy-handed but that is to be expected from Quantic Dream.  The main problem I had with the game is that the constant switching back and forth between Jodie and Aiden felt awkward.  You can switch between the two throughout the game and I kept pushing the wrong button and I would suddenly find myself stuck in Aiden form, even when there wasn’t anything for Aiden to do.  The game’s heavy reliance on quick time events also made me feel as if I didn’t have as much control over the narrative as I did in Heavy Rain and Detroit: Become Human.

Quantic Dream is one of my favorite video game developers because they are willing to experiment and take risks.  Sometimes, those risks pay off and sometimes they lead to an interesting failure, like Beyond: Two Souls.  Tomorrow, I’ll look at one of their experiment’s that worked.

Book Reviews: Nightmare Store and Horror Hotel by Hilary Milton

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

You are trapped in a department store overnight!  Can you survive even while being pursued by ghosts, monsters, and killer mannequins?

Or

You are trapped in a hotel!  No one else seems to be around!  Can you survive even while being pursued by ghosts, monsters, and a crazy doctor with a scalpel?

It all depends on which one of these two books you read!

These are two books that I ordered off of Amazon two years ago and they’re both enjoyable reads.  They’re choose your own adventure-style books, where you get trapped in a location overnight and you have to try to survive while various monsters and ghosts try to kill you.  Every few pages, you’re given an option for what you want to happen next in the story.  What’s interesting is that, instead of it being the usual “If you run got page 75” sort of thing, it’s instead more like, “If you hear a noise, go to page 33.  If you see something out of the corner of your eye, go to page 28.”  So, to an extent, you get to decide how your scary story plays out.  These books were written for children, of course but both of them still get surprisingly grisly and intense at time.

Of the two, I preferred Horror Hotel.  The hotel was just a more interesting locations than the store and there was a lot more variety to the options and storylines in Horror Hotel.  I mean, yes, it’s obvious that Horror Hotel is basically just The Shining for kids but so what?  It had some scary moments!  It also had some scary pictures to go along with the text.  I wonder how many children in the 80s were traumatized by that picture of a scaly hand reaching out from underneath the bed and grabbing your ankle?  Or how about the picture of the crazy-haired scientist running at you with a scalpel in his hand?  AGCK!

Anyway, these are fun books.  They can orered off of Amazon and and they’re an enjoyable way to kill a little time in between hauntings.

International Horror Film Review: Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell (dir by Hajime Soto)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The world’s ending and does it really matter?

The 1968 Japanese film, Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell (love that title!), opens with an airplane flying across a blood red sky.  Why has the sky changed colors?  The pilots aren’t sure and the passengers barely notice.  Indeed, the passengers are more concerned with their own problems.  There’s the arms manufacturer who is desperate to land his next big contract.  There’s the professor who views the world with professional detachment.  There’s the corrupt politician who only cares about increasing his own power.  There’s the terrorist who is traveling with a rifle hidden in the plane.  There’s the other terrorist who has a bomb and who may or may not be working with the first terrorist.  (It’s a dangerous world out there.)  And then there’s the American war widow, Mrs. Neal (Cathy Horan), whose husband has just been killed in Vietnam.

When a report comes over the radio that one of the passengers has bomb, the crew searches everyone’s bags.  “Why are you searching our bags!?” the arm manufacturer demands.  “There was a mix-up at the airport and we may have the wrong bag on this flight,” the co-pilot lies.  Finally, when the co-pilot and a stewardess come across a metal box in the back of the plane, they think that they’ve found their bomb.

Instead,they’ve found the first terrorist’s rifle.  He uses that rifle to hijack the plane and then he shoots out the plane’s radio.  Unfortunately, this couldn’t have happened at a worse time because it turns out that the Earth has just been invaded by aliens!

A UFO causes the airplane to crash on a uncharted island.  The rifle-toting terrorist is possessed, Thing-style, by one of the aliens.  The passengers start to bicker among themselves.  Who is to blame for the plane crash?  The terrorist or the pilots?  Who is to blame for the aliens invading, the aliens or the humans?  The professor theorizes that the aliens saw that Earthlings are constantly at war and they decided that this would be a great time to invade the planet.  In fact, as the professor goes on to speculate, perhaps we have brought this on ourselves.  Maybe we deserve to be invaded.  The humans on the island proceed to go out of their way to prove the professor correct.

Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell plays out like a pop art alien invasion film.  The colors are bright and vibrant.  The imagery is often surreal, with the alien literally oozing out of the forehead of the people that it has possessed.  By the end of the film, entire cities are full of shriveled up dead bodies while spaceships glow in the distance, their pulsating lights making them resemble the atomic mushroom clouds that have haunted Japanese horror and science fiction cinemas ever since World War II.  While the surviving passengers debate whether or not the Earth deserves to be saved, we get red-tinted inserts of assassination and war.  The passengers may not be sure whether or not Earth deserves to survive but it’s obvious the filmmakers have made up their minds and they, for one, welcome our new alien overlords.

How about you?

 

6 Horror Performances That Deserved An Oscar Nomination

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Despite making some inroads as of late, horror films still never quite get the respect that they deserve when it comes Oscar time.  That’s especially true of the performers who regularly appear in horror films.  If it’s rare for a horror movie to receive a best picture nomination, it’s even rarer for someone to get nominated for appearing in one of them.

And yet, it takes as much skill to make a monster compelling as it does a historical figure or a literary character.  In fact, it may take even more skill.  After all, everyone knows that Queen Elizabeth I actually ruled over England and that Atticus Finch was an attorney in the South.  However, everyone also knows that there’s no such things as vampires and that the dead cannot be reanimated or raised as a zombie.  It takes a lot of skill to make a monster seem human.

With that in mind, here are 6 horror performances that deserved, at the very least, an Oscar nomination:

1. Boris Karloff as The Monster in Frankenstein (1931) and The Bride of Frankenstein(1935)

The great Boris Karloff is perhaps the most egregious example of a deserving actor who was consistently ignored by the Academy because of the type of films in which he appeared.  In the role of Monster, Karloff was never less than brilliant and he set the standard by which all future monsters are judged.

Dracula (1931, directed by Tod Browning)

2. Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931)

When viewed today, it’s perhaps a little bit too easy to be dismissive of Lugosi’s grandly theatrical interpretation of Dracula.  But, if you can ignore all of the bad imitations that you’ve seen and heard over the years, you’ll discover that Lugosi’s performance is perfect for the film in which he’s appearing.  Indeed, Lugosi’s best moments are the silent ones, when he goes from being a courtly (if vaguely sinister) nobleman to a hungry animal.  In those moments, you see why Lugosi’s performance endures.

3. Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in Psycho (1960)

Ah, poor Anthony Perkins.  Before he played Norman Bates, he was considered to be something an up-and-coming star and even something of a neurotic romantic lead.  As with Lugosi’s Dracula, we’ve seen so many bad imitations of Perkins’s performance that it’s easy to overlook just how good he is in the role.  He was so perfect as Norman that spent the rest of his career typecast.  And, sadly enough, he didn’t even get a much-deserved Oscar nomination out of it.

4. Christopher Lee as Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man (1973)

Christopher Lee was one of the great actors and, though he may be best remembered for his horror work, he actually appeared in almost every genre of film imaginable.  Lee was often dismissive of the Dracula films that he made for Hammer so, as much as I’d love to argue that he deserved a nomination for The Horror of Dracula, I’m instead going to suggest that Lee deserved one for the role that he often cited as his favorite, the pagan Lord Summerisle in The Wicker Man.  Lee brings the perfect mix of wit and menace to the role and, in the process, shows that not all monsters have to be undead.

5. Donald Pleasence as Dr. Sam Loomis in Halloween (1978) and Halloween II (1981)

Much as with Lugosi and Anthony Perkins, it’s important (and perhaps a little bit difficult) to separate Pleasence’s performances in these two slasher films with all of the imitations that have followed.  In both films, Pleasence does a great job of playing a man who has been driven to the verge of madness as a result of having spent too much time in the presence of evil.  As potentially dangerous as Sam Loomis sometimes appears to be, there’s no way not to sympathize with him as he continually tries to get people to understand that he wasn’t the one who left Michael escape.  If nothing else, Pleasence deserved a nomination just for his delivery of the line, “As a matter of fact, it was.”

6. Betsy Palmer as Pamela Voorhees in Friday the 13th (1980)

“I’m an old friend of the Christys.”  AGCK!  RUN!

4 Shots From 4 Films: Halloween, Hereditary, Mandy, Mom and Dad

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

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!

This October, we’re using 4 Shots From 4 Films to look at some of the best years that horror has to offer!

4 Shots From 4 2018 Horror Films

Halloween (2018, dir by David Gordon Green)

Hereditary (2018, dir by Ari Aster)

Mandy (2018, dir by Pan Cosmatos)

Mom and Dad (2018, dir by Brian Taylor)

Horror Film Review: Vampire’s Kiss (dir by Robert Bierman)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Nicolas Cage plays the world’s biggest douchebag in the 1989 film Vampire’s Kiss.

Cage is playing Peter Loew, who is kind of like Patrick Bateman’s less successful cousin.  He’s got a nice apartment in New York City and he wears fairly nice clothes and he has this weird, stuffed-up way of speaking.  By night, Peter spends all of his time at the bars and the clubs, trying to get laid.  During the day, Peter goes to his job as a literary agent, where he sits around in his office and spends most of his time tormenting his secretary, Alva (Maria Conchita Alonso).

Peter has recently been tasked with finding the Heatherton Contract.  It’s a contract from 1963, one that was signed long before either Peter or Alva joined the company.  All Peter knows is that the contract is somewhere in a huge stack of files.  Harold Heatherton wants a copy of the contract so that he can frame it.  Peter wants the contract so that he can advance at his job and make even more money.  Alva just wants to be left alone.

“ALVA!” Peter spends his days yelling from the office.

“I hate my boss!” Alva says as she spend the morning crying in bed.

Yes, Peter is a jerk.  He maintains a toxic work environment.  He’s a misogynist.  He’s the type of asshole who screams at Alva to go find the Heatherton Contract and then stares at her backside as she walks back to her desk.  He’s a terrible human being and he’s steadily getting worse.  That’s because Peter is convinced that he’s turning into a vampire.  There’s even a lengthy scene where he stands in front of a bathroom mirror, moaning that he has no reflection.  Of course, we can see that he absolutely does have a reflection.

In his apartment and his office, he is often visited by Rachel (Jennifer Beals).  Rachel has fangs.  Rachel bites him in the neck.  Rachel sucks his blood.  But is Rachel there or is she a figment of his imagination?  Is he truly a vampire or is he like Patrick Bateman in American Psycho or the lead character in George Romero’s Martin?  He has become so consumed by his fantasies of being an all-powerful monster that he can no longer tell the difference between fantasy and reality?

Vampire’s Kiss is understandably best known for Cage’s demented performance.  Cage bulges his eyes, screams his lines, and spends a good deal of the film walking around with his shoulders hunched up.  This is the film for which Cage famously ate a live cockroach.  It’s undeniably watchable, though I think Cage made the mistake of playing Peter as being obviously unhinged even before he decided that he was a vampire.  The scenes where he obsesses over the Heatherton Contract start out as mildly amusing but become more disturbing as the film progresses and Peter grows more and more deranged.  From the moment that he started to chase the terrified Alva through the office, the film became so unpleasant that I just wanted it to hurry up and end.  On the plus side, Alva does get revenge though I think it would have been more effective (or maybe, just for me, more satisfying) if the film’s final action had been carried out by Alva herself.

Vampire’s Kiss is a film that has quite an enthusiastic cult following.  Having watched it, I can say that I’m not a member of that cult, though I can understand why Cage’s unhinged performance has fans.  The film is about 20 minutes too long and it reveals the truth about Cage’s “vampirism” far too early but, if nothing else, Cage really does throw himself into it.

Horror On The Lens: Carnival of Souls (dir by Herk Harvey)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Well, we’re nearly done with October and, traditionally, this is when all of us in the Shattered Lens Bunker gather in front of the television in Arleigh’s penthouse suite, eat popcorn, drink diet coke, and gossip about whoever has the day off.

Of course, after we do that, I duck back into my office and I watch the classic 1962 film, Carnival of Souls!

Reportedly, David Lynch is a huge fan of Carnival of Souls and, when you watch the film, it’s easy to see why.  The film follows a somewhat odd woman (played, in her one and only starring role, by Candace Hilligoss) who, after a car accident, is haunted by visions of ghostly figures.  This dream-like film was independently produced and distributed.  At the time, it didn’t get much attention but it has since been recognized as a classic and very influential horror film.

This was director Herk Harvey’s only feature film.  Before and after making this film, he specialized in making educational and industrial shorts (some of which we’ve watched this month), the type of films that encouraged students not to cheat on tests and employees not to take their jobs for granted.  Harvey also appears in this film, playing “The Man” who haunts Hilligoss as she travels across the country.

Enjoy Carnival of Souls!

And remember, don’t stop for any hitchhikers!