Tag Archives: Horrorthon

Horror Film Review: Twilight Zone: The Movie (dir by John Landis, Steven Spielberg, Joe Dante, and George Miller)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

1983’s Twilight Zone: The Movie is meant to be a tribute to the classic original anthology series.  It features four “episodes” and two wrap-around segments, with Burgess Meredith providing opening and closing narration.  Each segment is directed by a different director, which probably seemed like a good idea at the time.

Unfortunately, Twilight Zone: The Movie is a bit of a mess.  One of the episodes is brilliant.  Another one is good up until the final few minutes.  Another one is forgettable.  And then finally, one of them is next too impossible to objectively watch because of a real-life tragedy.

With a film that varies as wildly in tone and quality as Twilight Zone: The Movie, the only way to really review it is to take a segment at a time:

Something Scary (dir by John Landis)

Albert Brooks and Dan Aykroyd drive through the desert and discuss the old Twilight Zone TV series.  Brooks claims that the show was scary.  Aykoyd asks if Brooks wants to see something really scary.  This is short but fun.  It’s tone doesn’t really go along with the rest of the movie but …. oh well.  It made me jump.

Time Out (dir by John Landis)

Vic Morrow plays a racist named Bill Connor who, upon leaving his local bar, finds himself transported to Nazi-occupied France, the deep South, and eventually Vietnam.

How you react to this story will probably depend on how much you know about its backstory.  If you don’t know anything about the filming of this sequence, you’ll probably just think it’s a bit heavy-handed and, at times, unintentionally offensive.  Twilight Zone often explored themes of prejudice but Time Out just seems to be using racism as a gimmick.

If you do know the story of what happened while this segment was being filmed, it’s difficult to watch.  Actor Vic Morrow was killed during filming.  His death was the result of a preventable accident that occurred during a scene that was to involve Morrow saving two Vietnamese children from a helicopter attack.  The helicopter crashed, killing not only Morrow but the children as well.  It was later determined that not only were safety protocols ignored but that Landis had hired the children illegally and was paying them under the table so that he could get around the regulations governing how many hours child actors could work.  It’s a tragic story and one that will not leave you as a fan of John Landis’s, regardless of how much you like An American Werewolf in London and Animal House.

Nothing about the segment feels as if it was worth anyone dying for and, to be honest, I’m kind of amazed that it was even included in the finished film.

Kick The Can (dir by Steven Spielberg)

An old man named Mr. Bloom (Scatman Crothers) shows up at Sunnyvale Retirement Home and encourages the residents to play a game of kick the can.  Everyone except for Mr. Conroy (Bill Quinn) eventually agrees to take part and, just as in the episode of the Twilight Zone that this segment is based on, everyone becomes young.

However, while the television show ended with the newly young residents all running off and leaving behind the one person who refused to play the game, the movie ends with everyone, with the exception of one man who apparently became a teenager istead of a kid, deciding that they would rather be old and just think young.  That really doesn’t make any damn sense but okay.

This segment is unabashedly sentimental and clearly calculated to brings tears to the eyes to the viewers.  The problem is that it’s so calculated that you end up resenting both Mr. Bloom and all the old people.  One gets the feeling that this segment is more about how we wish old people than how they actually are.  It’s very earnest and very Spielbergian but it doesn’t feel much like an episode of The Twilight Zone.

It’s A Good Life (dir by Joe Dante)

A teacher (Kathleen Quinlan) meets a young boy (Jeremy Licht) who has tremendous and frightening powers.

This is a remake of the classic Twilight Zone episode, It’s A Good Life, with the difference being that young Anthony is not holding an entire town hostage but instead just his family.  This segment was directed by Joe Dante, who turns the segment into a cartoon, both figuratively and, at one point, literally.  That’s not necessarily a complaint.  It’s certainly improvement over Spielberg’s sentimental approach to the material.  Dante also finds roles for genre vets like Kevin McCarthy, William Schallert, and Dick Miller and he provides some memorably over-the-top visuals.

The main problem with this segment is the ending, in which Anthony suddenly reveals that he’s not really that bad and just wants to be treated normally, which doesn’t make much sense.  I mean, if you want to be treated normally, maybe don’t zap your sister in a cartoon.  The teacher agrees to teach Anthony how to be a normal boy and again, what the Hell?  The original It’s A Good Life worked because, like any child, Anthony had no conception of how adults felt about him.  In the movie version, he’s suddenly wracked with guilt and it’s far less effective.  It feels like a cop out.

Still, up until that ending, It’s A Good Life worked well as a satire of the perfect American family.

Nightmare at 20,000 Feet (dir by George Miller)

In this remake of Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, John Lithgow steps into the role that was originally played by William Shatner.  He plays a man who, while attempting to conquer his fear of flying, sees a gremlin on the wing of his airplane.  Unfortunately, he can’t get anyone else on the plane to believe him.

Nightmare at 20,000 Feet is the best of the four main segments.  It’s also the one that sticks closest to its source material.  Director George Miller (yes, of Mad Max fame) doesn’t try to improve on the material because he seems to understand that it works perfectly the way it is.  John Lithgow is also perfectly cast in the lead role, perfectly capturing his increasing desperation.  The one change that Miller does make is that, as opposed in the TV show, the gremlin actually seems to be taunting John Lithgow at time and it works wonderfully.  Not only is Lithgow trying to save the plane, he’s also trying to defeat a bully.

Something Scarier (dir by John Landis)

Dan Aykroyd’s back as an ambulance driver, still asking his passenger if he wants to see something really scary.  It’s an okay ending but it does kind of lessen the impact of Nightmare at 20,000 Feet.

 

Horror On The Lens: Dead of Night (dir by Dan Curtis)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

For today’s horror on the lens, we’re very happy to present to you, Dead of Night!

From 1977, this television film is a horror anthology, made up of three stories directed by Dan Curtis and written by Richard Matheson.  In the first story, a youngish Ed Begley, Jr. travels through time.  In the 2nd story, Patrick Macnee plays a man whose wife is apparently being menaced by a vampire.  And in the third story, Joan Hackett plays a mother who brings her dead son back to life, just to discover that sometimes it’s best to just let sleeping corpses lies.

The entire anthology is good, though the third story is clearly the best and the most frightening.  Not only is it scary but it’s got a great twist ending.

Enjoy!

The TSL’s Horror Grindhouse: Circus of Horrors (dir by Sidney Hayers)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

About 15 minutes into this film from 1960, Donald Pleasence gets mauled to death by a dancing beer.

Pleasence plays a character named Vanet.  Vanet is an alcoholic who, circa 1947, owns a circus.  He also has a daughter named Nicole (Yvonne Monlaur), whose face is scarred as a result of wounds that she received during Germany’s bombing of London.  When a plastic surgeon named Dr. Bernard Schuler (Anton Diffring) operates on Nicole and manages to “take away” her scars, Vanet is so thankful that he signs over ownership of the circus to Schuler.  Vanet then promptly tries to dance with a bear and gets killed.  Poor Vanet.

It turns out that Schuler is a brilliant plastic surgeon but he’s also kind of insane.  He and his associates (played by Kenneth Griffith and Jane Hylton) are on the run from the police.  However, even with the cops after him, Schuler has to experiment.  His plan is to use the circus as a front.  He’ll recruit scarred criminals, operate on them, and then require them to perform in his circus.  That plan doesn’t really make much sense but I guess a fugitive plastic surgeon has to do what he has to do.  Still, it’s hard not to be amused by Schuler describing his plans for the circus as if he’s just come up with the most brilliant plan ever as opposed to just a bunch of gobbledygook.  At no point do any of his assistants point out that his plan makes no sense so I guess he must pay well.

Anyway. the film jumps forward twelve years and what do you know!  The plan worked!  The circus is a hit!  People from all over Europe come to Schuler’s circus.  The circus is famous for featuring the most beautiful women in the world.  The circus is also famous for several mysterious and fatal accidents.  INTERPOL thinks that it’s possible that Schuler is intentionally killing his performers for the free publicity.  When Schuler makes plans to take his circus back to the UK, Scotland Yard is given a call and a heads up about what Schuler’s been doing.  A nosy reporter investigates while the murders continue unabated….

Circus of Horrors is odd.  It’s as if someone reached into a bag and pulled out random cards that read, “Circus,” “plastic surgery,” and “Word War II subtext” and then did what they had to do to construct a plot out of those three elements.  Of those three elements, the World War II subtext is probably the most interesting.  The majority of Schuler’s patients were scarred as a result of the war (which Europe was still recovering from in 1960) and Schuler is played by German actor Anton Diffring.  It’s easy to see Schuler, with his German name and his love for medical experimentation, as a stand-in for Nazi fugitives like Josef Mengele and Klaus Barbie. Schuler and his circus move across Europe and, in the end, it’s going to take Europeans working together to stop him.  The shadow of World War II hangs over every scene.

Beyond that, Circus of Horrors is a flamboyant mix of horror and soap opera.  The colors are bright, the blood flows freely, and the melodrama is definitely embraced.  It’s like a Hammer film, just without a Hammer cast.  Unfortunately, Anton Diffring is a bit bland in the role of Schuler.  One could imagine an actor like Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing working wonders with the role but Diffring often seems to be bored with the whole thing.  As well, the film sometimes get bogged down with footage of the circus performers doing their thing.  For instance, do we need to see the clowns and the acrobats when what we really want to see is the murderous knife thrower?  Circus of Horrors has its moments but, while watching it, it’s hard not to think about how much more fun it would have been if it had been a Hammer film.

International Horror Film Review: Paganini Horror (dir by Luigi Cozzi)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Yes, this 1989 Italian horror film does deal with the legend that violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini sold his soul the devil in return for his talent.

And yes, it does feature Paganini coming back to life and murdering people.

Listen, there’s a lot of critical things that you can say about this film but you have to love the idea of a slasher film that feature an actual historical figure coming to life and doing the slashing.  I mean, this is no ordinary, masked murderer!  No, this is a murderer whose compositions are still played in concert to this day!

Paganini Horror was written by Daria Nicolodi (who also co-starred) and directed by Luigi Cozzi, two Italian horror figures who — fairly or not — will always be associated with Dario Argento.  Nicolodi co-starred in several of Argento’s films and was his longtime girlfriend.  She’s the mother of Asia Argento.  She also provided Dario Argento with the story that would eventually become Suspiria.  Argento and Nicolodi had a notably bad breakup and, though they continue to occasionally work together, it’s rare that you ever read an interview with Nicolodi where she doesn’t have something negative to say about Argento and his later films.  Luigi Cozzi, meanwhile, is often considered to be a protégé of Argento’s.  Argento produced several of Cozzi’s films and Cozzi has directed multiple documentaries about Argento.  For several years, Cozzi was also the co-owner and manager of Argento’s movie memorabilia store, Profondo Rosso.

Considering Nicolodi and Cozzi’s well-documented relationships with him, it’s interesting that Paganini Horror features a character who appears to be, at the very least, slightly based on Dario Argento.  Mark Singer (Pietro Genuardi) is an arrogant director of bloody horror films who is hired to shoot a music video for a band.  The band, which is in desperate need of a hit, is recording a song that is based on a never before recorded (or heard) composition by Paganini himself.  The band’s drummer, Daniel (Pascal Persiano), purchased the composition from a mysterious man named Mr. Pickett (Donald Pleasence).  We later see Mr. Pickett standing on the roof of a church, grinning maniacally as he throws away Daniel’s money.  Hmmm….I wonder what that’s all about.

Though Pleasence isn’t in much of the film, his performance is definitely one of the highlights of Paganini Horror.  That he’s playing an evil character is obvious from the minute he shows but Pleasence seems to be having so much fun with the role that you can’t help but like him.  There’s something especially charming about the way he smiles while throwing away that money.

The other highpoint of the movie is Paganini himself.  As played by Roberto Giannini, Paganani wanders about wearing a mask and a black coat.  He carries a violin that has a very sharp blade sticking out of the bottom of it.  Yes, it’s totally ludicrous but that’s kind of the point of it.  Paganini was known for two things: 1) being a great musician and 2) the rumors that he sold his soul to the devil.  Paganini Horror may emphasize the rumors about the devil but it doesn’t let us forget that Paganini was a damn good violinist….

Anyway, Paganini Horror is a frequently incoherent film, where characters don’t act logically and the rules of Paganini’s curse seems to change from scene to scene.  Once you get passed the novelty of Paganini being the murderer, this really is a standard slasher film, albeit one that’s a bit more graphic than its American and British counterparts.  That said, I don’t think that it’s quite the disaster that Luigi Cozzi has described it as being.  (Cozzi has consistently cited it as one of his least favorite of the films that he’s directed.)  Donald Pleasence appears to have had a blast playing his role and there are a few memorable shots of Venice.  (Of course, it’s pretty much impossible to find an unmemorable shot of Venice.)  The scenes of the band pretending to perform are also enjoyably silly.  Paganini Horror may not be great but it’s certainly not boring.  If you appreciate Italian horror, you get it.

I watched Paganini Horror on Tubi.  It was an enjoyable 90 minutes.  I have no regrets.

 

Horror On TV: Baywatch Nights 2.5 “Circle of Fear” (dir by Bruce Kessler)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

For tonight’s horror on the lens, how about a chance to watch David Hasselhoff and Angie Harmon battle the forces of dark magic?

That’s right, it’s an episode of Baywatch Nights!  This episode shows what happens when Angie and David investigate the burned book that they found at the scene of an occult gathering.  It’s all a little bit silly but then again, that’s the charm of the show!

Enjoy!

Circle of Fear originally aired on October 27th, 1996.

The Trial of the Incredible Hulk (1989, directed by Bill Bixby)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

Still on the run and hoping to find a cure for the condition that causes him to transform into the Incredible Hulk, David Banner (Bill Bixby) is now in New York and using the name David Belson.  He’s grown a beard to keep himself from being recognized.  I guess it’s like when Superman used to put on his glasses.  When David sees a woman being harassed on the subway by two thugs, it’s too much stress for him and he transforms into the Hulk (Lou Ferrigno).  When the Hulk turns back into David, he is arrested and charged with being a mugger.  (No one believes the witness’s account of seeing a huge green man on the subway.)

Despite the title, the Hulk never goes on trial, though there’s a dream sequence where David turns into the Hulk in a courtroom.  (Stan Lee plays the jury foreman.)  Just having a nightmare about turning into the Hulk is enough to cause the transformation for real.  No New York jail can hold the Hulk.

David’s lawyer is blind and yes, his name is Matthew Murdock (played by Rex Smith).  Murdock thinks that the attack on the subway was somehow linked to a crime lord named … yes, Wilson Fisk.  Fisk (John Rhys-Davies) wants to set up a national crime syndicate, as if Lucky Luciano didn’t already do that.  Using the name Daredevil, Murdock tries to prevent that.  David eventually ends up helping.

The Trial of the Incredible Hulk is a huge tease.  It promises the Hulk on trial but, instead, it’s just a backdoor pilot for a Daredevil TV series.  Just like in The Incredible Hulk Returns, the Hulk is forced to make room for a new hero.  But at least The Incredible Hulk Returns actually featured the Hulk working with Thor.  In Trial of the Incredible Hulk, the Hulk is hardly present at all.  Banner encourages Murdock not to give up, even after he’s badly beaten by Fisk’s men, and he works with Matt to help him prepare for a rematch.  But the final battle is almost all Daredevil.  Once he escape from prison, Banner doesn’t turn into the Hulk once.

Rex Smith isn’t bad as Daredevil.  While he’s not as good as Charlie Cox, he’s still better than Ben Affleck.  While the movie does not feature the classic Daredevil costume, it does at least get Daredevil’s origins and powers correct.  John Rhys-Davies hams it up as Wilson Fisk.  One of Marvel’s most intriguing villains is turned into just another generic bad guy in an office.  It’s disappointing.

The Trial of the Incredible Hulk ends with Murdock pledging to protecting the city and Banner again hitchhiking away.  Daredevil would have to wait for another 25 years before getting his own series.  Banner would return in The Death of the Incredible Hulk.

 

Horror Film Review: Wake In Fright (dir by Ted Kotcheff)

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

To be honest, it’s probably open for debate whether or not Wake In Fright is actually a horror film.

This 1971 Australian film, which tells the story of a school teacher who becomes stranded in a small town in the outback, doesn’t feature any ghosts or werewolves or vampires or zombies or anything else of a supernatural nature.  The school teacher meets a large number of people in town, the majority of whom are technically quite friendly.  They teach him how to gamble.  They take him on a hunt.  They give him shelter when he doesn’t have anywhere else to stay.  The word “mate” is tossed around so frequently that it soon becomes clear that every man — significantly, there’s only two women in the film and one of them only appears in the teacher’s memories — in the outback is considered to be one.

The people of town of Bundanyabba — or “The Yabba,” as they call it — are also very generous with their beer.  If they meet you for the first time, they expect you to have a beer with them.  If they see you for the first, second, or third time during the day, they expect you to have a beer with them.  They wake up in the morning drinking and they go to bed drunk.  When John Grant (Gary Bond) first shows up in the Yabba, he can barely handle two beers.  By the end of his stay, he’s drinking nonstop.

However, John also discovers that it dangerous to turn down those offers of beer.  Turn down a beer and you might get a strange look, if you’re lucky.  More likely, you’ll get yelled at.  Turn down a beer from the wrong person and you might even get attacked.  Everyone in the Yabba is friendly but everyone is also always on the verge of throwing the first punch.  Refuse a beer and you might be in trouble.  Refuse to enthusiastically take part in a savage and sadistic kangaroo hunt and your mates might starts to talk.  When John first arrives, he’s a bit amused by the town and what he sees as being its backwards ways.  It’s obvious that he looks down on the people around him and one can sense that they realize that.  Perhaps that’s why everyone around him seems to take such joy in watching John slowly lose his identity.

That’s horror at the heart of Wake in Fright.  It’s not the horror of the paranormal.  Instead, it’s the horror of the isolation.  There’s no way to fight the isolation and the madness it brings.  Your only choice is to either surrender to it or be destroyed by it.  The longer John spends in the Yabba, the more the bleakness of the outback gets to him.  It’s a world dominated by brutal men, none of whom are particularly impressed when they find out that John’s teacher and that he has a suitcase full of books.  They view John as being soft and, in order to prove that he’s not, John starts to sacrifice his identity.  He starts to become just as much of a brute as Dick (Jack Thompson) and Joe (Peter Whittle).

Having lost all of his money, John eventually ends up staying with Doc Tydon (Donald Pleasence).  Doc really is a doctor.  He’s also, as he cheerfully explains, an alcoholic.  When John says that he’s going to find some place else to stay, Doc makes it clear that John isn’t leaving.  The film makes good use of Pleasence’s eccentric screen presence.  Is Doc simply being friendly or does Doc have more sinister motives fueling his insistence that John stay with him?  When Doc gives John advice, is it to help him or is it to further degrade John?  Like John, Doc is an educated man and obviously smarter than those around him.  And yet, Doc seems very happy in the mad world of the Yabba, drinking, hunting, and gambling.  Is John destined to become Doc or can he escape?

John discovers that leaving the Yabba isn’t easy.  Every time he tries, he ends up back in town.  All roads seems to lead back to the Yabba.  In retrospect, perhaps the most frightening thing about Wake In Fright is that no one seems to be surprised by the sight of the increasingly disheveled and unstable John.  Even when he stumbles through town while carrying a rifle, no one gives him a second look.  He’s just another part of the scenery.

No, Wake In Fright is not a traditional horror film but it’s a horror film, nonetheless.  It’s about the horror of not only losing your identity but perhaps not being quite sure what your identity was in the first place.  As played by Gary Bond, John is an often frustrating character but you never stop caring about him.  It’s frightening to watch him lose himself, even while you wonder if he ever knew who he truly was in the first place.  Bond was a stage actor who only appeared in three films.  Wake in Fright was his final film and one of the huge reasons why it’s so effective is because Gary Bond is not an actor who we recognize from other films.  We don’t seen an actor when we look at him.  Instead, we see a person who, for the first time, is discovering just how unsettling life on the fringes can be.

It’s a powerful film and a controversial one.  When John is taken on a kangaroo hunt, footage from an actual hunt was included in the film and it’s a horrific sequence, one that’s made all the more disturbing by the fact that the hunters refuse to acknowledge just how horrific and unjust it all is.  Reportedly, when Wake In Fright was first released, someone in a Sydney theater stood up and shouted at the screen, “This is not us!”  Actor Jack Thompson, who made his film debut in Wake In Fright, was in the audience and shouted back, “It is us, mate!  Sit down!”

For a long time, it was impossible to see Wake In Fright.  Only one known print was known to exist and it was a badly damaged one.  Fortunately, in 2002, another print was found in Pittsburgh and Wake In Fright was rereleased and rediscovered.  When it was first released in 1971, the film’s violence and downbeat atmosphere were both controversial and it struggled at the Australian box office.  (Many Australians, like that theatergoer in Sydney, initially viewed the film as being a bit of a personal attack.)  Rereleased in 2003 and championed by Martin Scorsese, Wake In Fright was embraced by a new generation of critics, many of whom declared it to be one of the greatest and most important Australian films ever made.

Wake In Fright is a powerful and unsettling film, a portrait of a place that seems to be fueled by toxic masculinity and self-destruction.  It’s a disturbing film and not easy to watch.  But if you do watch it, it will stick with you and leave you thinking long after the final credits roll.

Game Review: Six Gray Rats Crawl Up The Pillow (2015, Caleb Wilson as “Boswell Crain”)

Posted on by Jedadiah Leland

You are Rinaldo di Gorgonzola, a spoiled fop living in Renaissance-era Italy.  With the plague shutting down most of the country and with you needing money to pay your rent, you accept a bet.  All you have to do to win is spend the night in the deserted castle of a recently deceased nobleman.

The main challenge of this Interactive Fiction game is to figure out how to get to sleep.  Getting in the caste is easy.  Since there’s only three rooms in the castle, finding the bedroom is easy.  Once you figure out that the command is “enter bed” and not “lie on bed,” getting on the bed is easy.  It’s getting to sleep that’s the hard part.  Not only are there things you have to do — like get undressed, eat, and read — before you can go to sleep but you also have to deal with a series of memories.  This game is unique in that your inventory includes memories that have to be examined before you can go to sleep.  Each memory leads to another memory until you finally reach one memory that will not go away.  The solution for getting rid of that memory is so simple that I’m worried that it took me so long to solve the puzzle.  I might not be as good at these games as I think I am.

The game doesn’t end once you fall asleep.  There’s some other things that you have to deal with.  You didn’t think that spending the night in a dead nobleman’s castle would be easy, did you?  But those puzzles are considerably easier to solve than the puzzle of how to get to sleep in the first place.

Six Gray Rats Crawl Up The Pillow is a well-written and atmospheric game.  There’s a lot of unexpected wit to be found in the game.  At one point, I grew so frustrated with trying to figure out how to go to sleep that I commanded the game “shoot shelf,” just to be reprimanded for always thinking about myself.  Another entertaining thing to do is to try to pick up the corpse of the nobleman.  (Yes, it does seem that the body was just left in the bedroom.)  I liked the way the game incorporated memories into the inventory, though I think some of the memories could have been combined to help the game flow better.  It took me about 40 minutes to play the entire game.  Someone who is actually good at this will probably be able to do it in 10.  It can be downloaded from here.