It’s not really October without a teaser for a new Halloween film, is it?
Hopefully, Halloween Kills will be released next year. Here’s the second teaser:
Tag Archives: Horror
Horror on TV: Freakylinks 1.7 “Still I Rise” (dir by Joe Napolitano)
For tonight’s episode of Freakylinks, we have a little something called Still I Rise. It has a zombie theme to it. Towards the end of the episode, Ethan Embry goes a little crazy. (Far crazier then he went on Rex Manning Day….)
(C’mon, you know I was going to have to work in a reference to Rex Manning Day eventually.)
This episode originally aired on January 12th, 2001. And you can watch it below!
Great Moments In Comic Book History: The Death of Doctor Druid
Dr. Druid never got much respect.
First introduced in 1961 and originally known as Dr. Droom (his name was changed to prevent anyone from mixing him up with Dr. Doom), Anthony Ludgate Druid was a magic user who hunted monsters and who had studied the mystic arts with a Tibetan lama. Later, the lama was retconned into the Ancient One and it was said that Dr. Druid was the runner-up for the position of Sorcerer Supreme. This was a way of acknowledging an obvious truth, that Dr. Druid was an unsuccessful dry run for Dr. Strange.
With Dr. Druid’s monster hunting activities never becoming popular with readers, he was eventually just used as a host for Weird Wonder Tales, a series that reprinted old monster comics from the 50s. One look at Dr. Druid at this time shows why he was never able to seriously challenge Doctor Strange for the role of Marvel’s most popular sorcerer.
Eventually, Dr. Druid did enter the mainstream Marvel universe. He joined the Avengers and distinguished himself by getting himself elected Avengers chairman while possessed by a villainous and then disbanding the team. Even after Dr. Druid got his mind back, no one wanted much to do with him and he faded into obscurity.
He remained forgotten until 1995. That was when he was resurrected for a series that lasted for four issues. To this day, there’s debate over whether the series was meant to be a miniseries or a continuing series. What everyone can agree on is that Warren Ellis radically challenged what everyone though they knew about Dr. Druid.
Now, heavily tattooed and simply calling himself Druid, the former hero was an embittered alcoholic who embraced the dark side of his powers. For four issues, Druid roamed through London and killed almost everyone who he met. Druid was a dark and brutal series and it’s probably not surprising that it only lasted four issues.
The final issue featured Druid doing his usual killing and destroying until, in the final pages of the issue, Daimon Hellstrom suddenly appeared and announced, to Druid: “You’re a lunatic, a religious maniac, a bad idea. You should have been stamped on at birth. And, in the end, you’re a failure.” Hellstrom proceeded to burn Druid to a crisp and what I’ve always remembered about that issue were the final lines announcing that Druid’s corpse was left in a trash can.
When you’re a kid just reading a comic book, that’s some pretty heavy stuff! Those last moments of Druid have always stuck with me. I’ve always felt bad for Dr. Druid. He went from being a failed Sorcerer Supreme to a failed Avenger to eventually getting tossed in a trash can. He’s also one of the few Marvel characters not to return from the dead. He’s gone, never to return. He probably won’t even get to appear in a movie.
Alas, poor Druid. He was the Rodney Dangerfield of second-tier Marvel heroes. He never got any respect. No respect at all.
Druid (Vol. 1 #4, August, 1995)
“Sick of it All”
- Writer — Warren Ellis
- Penciler — Leonardo Manco
- Inker– Leonardo Manco
- Colourist — D’Ireali
- Letterer — Jon Babcock
- Cover Artist — Leonardo Manco
Previous Great Moments In Comic Book History:
Horror Scenes That I Love: The Window Scene From The Bird With The Crystal Plumage
Book Review: The Perfect Date by R.L. Stine
In this YA novel from 1996, Brady Karlin is one of the most popular boys at school. Everyone knows him. Everyone likes him. He’s got a likable best friend named Jon. He’s got a beautiful and popular girlfriend named Allie. The only problem that Brady has is that he’s still haunted by the death of his former girlfriend, Sharon Noles.
And really, he should be haunted considering that it was all his fault! Sharon told him that she wasn’t ready to go sledding down that hill lat summer. Brady, however, insisted and Sharon went hurtling down the hill and eventually ended up dead and without a face. Honestly, I don’t care how good-looking or charming you are. If your last girlfriend lost her face because of your stupidity, you’re simply not going to be attractive to me. Sorry.
Anyway, it’s winter again and Brady is already thinking about ending things with Allie. There’s only so many basketball games and pizza parties that he can go to. However, instead of just breaking up with Allie, Brady instead starts to secretly a date a new girl named Rosha Nelson. Brady soon finds himself growing obsessed with the mysterious Rosha, who refuses to tell him anything about her past and who seems to really have a talent for getting Brady involved in dangerous, potentially life-threatening situations.
Meanwhile, there’s a mysterious “scarred girl” following Brady and Rosha around. Soon, people are mysteriously dying and the entire books leads to a climatic fight in which bodies are literally dismembered!
So, I liked The Perfect Date. It was as grotesque and morbid as a Christopher Pike book without any of the pretentious philosophizing that occasionally turns up in Pike’s work. While Rosha’s secret is pretty easy to figure out, Stine deserves a lot of credit for following the story to it’s natural conclusion. The book ends with a scene so weird that I had to read it twice. Really, what more can you ask for?
All in all, this book made me happy that I live in Texas. No snow equals no tragic sled accidents. This book made me appreciate our 60-degree winters.
A Blast From The Past: Understanding Others (dir by Herk Harvey)
In this short film from 1958, the high school press club is thrown into chaos when their faculty sponsor selects Ben Curtis to be the editor-in-chief of the school paper.
Bob Stevens can’t believe it, because Ben doesn’t have an outgoing personality and he doesn’t come from a rich family. Ben, himself, is shocked because he feels like all of the other students are snobs who have no interest in being friendly. But the teacher sees something in Ben.
Can everyone learn to understand each other and put out a worthy school paper? Luckily, there’s a narrator present to encourage everyone to set aside their differences and …. understand. Just in case we miss the film’s message, the same event is shown to us three separate times from three different points of view.
This film was directed by Herk Harvey. Harvey directed a ton of educational films in the 50s and 60s. However, he’s best known for directing one of the most important horror films of all time, Carnival of Souls! I’ll be sharing Carnival of Souls tomorrow. For now, try to understand others.
Enjoy!
International Horror Film Review: The Killer Snakes (dir by Chih-Hung Kuei)
Given my long-standing fear of snakes, you may be wondering why I would even own a copy of this 1974 film in the first place. The best excuse I can give you is that I believe in confronting my fears. Add to that, the back of the DVD claims that this this film is “infamous” and that it has been banned and censored in many countries. Back in 2010, that was pretty much all I needed to read to convince me to purchase something.
Anyway, The Killer Snakes is a grim and sleazy film from Hong Kong and if you weren’t scared of snakes before watching the film, you’ll definitely be scared of them afterwards. This isn’t like Snakes on a Plane, where there’s comedy and Samuel L. Jackson dropping classic lines. This is a brutal and rather nihilistic film, one where the good and the bad alike are destroyed for their sins. Everyone in this film took a bite from the fruit of the tree of knowledge and now the serpents are going to get revenge.
The film tells the story of Chen (Kwok-Leung Gan), who is the neighborhood weirdo. After being traumatized by an awful childhood, Chen is now obsessed with bondage and voyeurism. Being more than a bit creepy, he’s a natural target for every neighborhood bully. He’s grown obsessed with Hsiu Chuan (Lin-Lin Li), a shopgirl who appears to be the only nice person living in the neighborhood. Unfortunately, her boyfriend is not only one of the people who regularly bullies Chen but he’s also a pimp as well.
Chen’s only friends are the snakes that he’s been rescuing from the local restaurant. At the restaurant, the snake’s gall bladders are removed and they’re tossed out into the ally to die Chen has been collecting the restaurant’s snakes and all of the other local abused snakes and nursing them back to health. Soon, Chen has an entire army of snakes which he then unleashes on everyone who he feels has mistreated him. (Of course, what Chen doesn’t consider is that the snakes are seeking revenge less for him and more for their own personal reasons.)
Chen is so bullied that you might be tempted to have some sympathy for him but, whenever you start to feel sorry for him, he always manages to remind you that he may be a victim but he’s also a major creep. He’s a grimy little voyeur with an obsession with revenge and bondage. Whatever sympathy you may have for him will disappear as soon as one of his trained snakes attacks a bound prostitute. (If you have a morbid fear of a snake slithering into your vagina, this is not the film to watch because …. AGCK!) Actually, everyone in the film is terrible. There’s literally not a single truly likable person to be found in the entire film. Even the snakes are ultimately jerks.
The Killer Snakes is one of those films that seems to take place in a world that’s so sleazy and so covered in grime and lost hope that, after watching it, you’ll feel the need to take a shower to wash it all away. Of course, in doing so, you’ll be running the risk of getting attacked by a snake. That’s the type of film that The Killer Snakes is. It’s unpleasant, it’s grimy, it’s sleazy, but it will still definitely have you checking under the covers for snakes. It’s an effectively icky film. These snakes don’t have to get on a plane to freak you out.
Icarus File No. 5: mother! (dir by Darren Aronofsky)
You have to admire the courage of a filmmaker like Darren Aronofsky. After receiving some overdue Oscar love for Black Swan, Aronofsky probably could have settled into the type of career that Tim Burton currently has: i.e., the self-styled quirky director who makes safe studio films. Instead, Aronofsky has continued to chart his own course as an artist by following up Black Swan with two films that seemed specifically designed to challenge audiences and annoy the complacent.
With Noah, Aronofsky dared to suggest that God’s mistake with the Great Flood was to allow anyone to survive at all. Then, he followed up Noah with 2017’s mother!, which was a film that practically dared confused and alienated audience members to stand up and walk out. And walk out they did. mother! was one of the few films to score an F on Cinemascore. I mean, typically, a bad movie will at least get a C. You have to really piss off the audience to get that F rating. Watching mother!, it’s obvious that pissing off the audience was a part of the film’s design.
Paramount Picture advertised mother! as being a horror film and, to a certain extent, it is. Jennifer Lawrence plays the Mother. She lives in a beautiful house with a poet named Him (Javier Bardem). Him spends a lot of time talking about how much he loves the Mother but it quickly becomes apparent that he’s rather self-absorbed. People are constantly showing up at the house to speak to and eventually worship Him and he continually lets them, regardless of how difficult it makes things for the Mother. The Mother is reduced to begging people not to make a mess but no one listens to her. As the crows gets bigger, fights break out. There are sounds of war and explosions rock the Mother’s meticulously cared-for home.. Him can only smile and shrug while his visitors trash the house. The more the Mother complains, the more cruelly she’s treated by the crowds.
Among those who show up are the Man (Ed Harris) and the Woman (Michelle Pfeiffer). They have two teenage sons who have developed a dangerous rivalry. Him seems to be very concerned with them but the Mother just wants them all to leave. Once they finally do leave, Him is inspired to write his greatest work which, of course, just leads to more people showing up. It’s a dangerous cycle….
I could actually relate to what the Mother was going through. I tend to be a little bit on the neat side, which is a polite way of saying that I’m obsessed with keeping the house clean and tidy. Nothing annoys me more than when a stranger comes in and drags dirt or leaves or whatever across a freshly vacuumed carpet. When Jennifer Lawrence was reduced to begging people to just make the most basic effort towards not messing up the house, I totally sympathized with her. Jennifer Lawrence yells so much in this movie that she actually starts to lose her voice in a few scenes. I could relate.
Of course, Jennifer Lawrence is not just playing a homeowner who doesn’t want her house to get trashed. And Bardem isn’t just playing a poet. As you probably already guessed, Bardem is God and Jennifer Lawrence is the Earth and Ed Harris and Michelle Pfieffer are a surprisingly old version of Adam and Eve. The entire film is a biblical allegory and it all gets a bit heavy-handed. Aronofsky has said that the film was a result of “anger and anguish” but it’s obvious that all of that anger and anguish prevented him from considering that mother! would have worked better as a 15-minute short film than a two-hour epic. It doesn’t take long to figure out what’s going on and the film occasionally gets almost embarrassingly obvious in its attempt to push it metaphor. Aronofsky, at times, seems to think that his film is more enigmatic than it actually is.
Still, despite the fact that the film goes on for way too long and is never quite as much of a mindscrew as Aronofsky seems to think that it is, you have to admire not only the courage of Aaronofsky but also the dedication of Jennifer Lawrence. This film was not the first high profile Jennifer Lawrence film to not be a hit with audiences (Passengers wasn’t exactly beloved) but it is the one that’s most often cited whenever anyone writes an article about why Jennifer Lawrence’s star is a bit dimmer today than it was back in the days of The Hunger Games. Undoubtedly, some people did go to the film expecting to see a “typical” Jennifer Lawrence film, just to suddenly be confronted with Javier Bardem ripping her heart out of her chest. But, at the same time, you have to appreciate a star who is willing to take a chance and that’s what Lawrence did her, lending her star power to a project that was thoroughly out of the mainstream. Both Aronofsky and Jennifer Lawrence took a chance with mother! and, even if the film is not quite the triumph that some viewers may want it to be, you still respect them for having done so.
Previous Icarus Files:
4 Shots From 4 Dario Argento Films: Deep Red, Suspiria, Inferno, The Phantom of the Opera
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’ve been using 4 Shots from 4 Films to pay tribute to some of our favorite horror filmmakers! Today, we honor the one and only Dario Argento!
4 Shots From 4 Dario Argento Films
Deep Red (1975, dir by Dario Argento)
Suspiria (1977, dir by Dario Argento)
Inferno (1980, dir by Dario Argento)
The Phantom of the Opera (1998, dir by Dario Argento)
Horror Film Review: Squirm (dir by Jeff Lieberman)
Worms are creepy and you don’t want to get them in your hair.
I think that, more than anything, explains the continuing appeal of this lightly satirical Southern shocker from 1976. The film’s plot is a simple one, as the plots of the best horror films often are. There’s a storm. The power lines over Fly Creek, Georgia get knocked down. The power line lands in the mud and soon, you’ve got thousands of electrified worms crawling all over the place. These worms are angry and noisy and they like to eat people’s faces and take control of their bodies. Of course, since the power lines are all down, you’re can/t exactly call for help and even worse, you’re thrown into darkness once the sun goes down. Squirm gets at some very basic fears.
Squirm has a welcome sense of humor, as any film about killer worms should. It’s obvious that Lieberman knew that the audience would be demanding that the worms get revenge on at least a few fisherman and those scenes are tossed in there. The film’s nominal hero is Mick (Don Scardino), a visitor from New York City, and he’s so out-of-place in rural Georgia that it becomes funny watching him try to do simple things like order food or have a simple conversation. Even when he tries to warn people about the worms, you can tell they’re thinking, “He might be right but do I want to listen to a yankee?” As we say down here in Texas, you can always spot the yankee because they’re the ones sweating profusely and talking about killer worms. The scenes of Mick trying to order something at the local diner reminded me of the great “We don’t got no goddamn trout” scene from Hell or High Water.
Mick is in Georgia to visit his girlfriend, Geri (Patricia Pearcy). Almost everyone who Mick meets seems like they could have come out of an overheated first draft of a Tennessee Williams play. Once the worm attack starts in earnest, Geri’s mother sinks into a state of denial that would have impressed Blanche DuBois. Meanwhile, Squirm has its own wannaba Stanley Kowalski in the form of Roger (R.A. Dow), who obviously can’t understand why Geri would want a boyfriend from New York when she could have him. Roger is a creep but he’s a familiar creep. Anyone who has ever lived in the country will immediately recognize Roger and know everything that they need to know about him.
That said, the worms are the real stars of Squirm and they certainly do manage to get everywhere. On the one hand, it’s funny to see the worms emerging from a shower head but, on the other hand, it’s actually really terrifying because, when you’re standing naked in a shower, the last thing you want is to get about a thousand worms dumped on your head. Seriously, that would freak me out even more than threat of getting killed by Norman Bates’s mother. The film is also full of close-ups of the worms and, to be honest, worms are really freaky to look at. The opening and closing of that little mouth is like pure nightmare fuel.
Squirm is a classic of Southern horror. You’ll never look at a worm the same way again.
Through the Shattered Lens 