International Halloween Review: All Monsters Attack! (a.k.a. Godzilla’s Revenge) (dir by Ishiro Honda)

Posted on October 18, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“Godzilla says that I have to learn to fight my own battles.”

Well, good for you, Minilla, son of Godzilla. It’s good to see that Godzilla’s raising you well! But can your monster advice possibly contain any useful life lessons for the human world? Let’s watch 1969’s All Monsters Attack and find out!

You may have noticed that I’m specifically calling this a “Halloween review” as opposed to a “horror review.” That’s because it’s just not Halloween without a Godzilla movie or two but, at the same time, it would be really stretching things to describe any of the Godzilla films of the 60s and 70s as being horror films. Certainly, the original, black-and-white Gojira was a horror film, even if it no longer scares audiences. But, by the time the 60s rolled around, Godzilla had gone from being the living equivalent of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to becoming a cuddly friend of children everywhere.

All Monsters Attack, for example, is clearly a film made for children and stock footage aficionados. Ichiro (Tomonori Yazaki) is a little kid who has no friends but he does have an active imagination. Whenever he falls asleep, he goes to Monster Island where he watches as Godzilla beats up various monsters. Why exactly does Godzilla stay on Monster Island, I wonder. Like literally everyone else on the island seems to hate his guts and they’re constantly trying to kill him. If I was advising Godzilla, I’d suggest he move to another island.

Anyway, it turns out that Godzilla’s son, Minilla, is being bullied by a red-headed lizard named Gabara. Minilla is a monster who always seems to get a mixed reaction from Godzilla fans. When I first saw him, I was like, “AGCK! BURN IT! KILL IT WITH FIRE!” But actually, Minilla is kind of cute and he does this adorable thing where he breathes radioactive smoke rings at his enemies. Godzilla could protect Minilla but instead, he tells Minilla that he has to fight his own battles.

OH MY GOD, JUST LIKE ICHIRO! Ichiro is so moved by Godzilla’s advice that he decides to stand up to the bullies. But first, he’s going to have to stand up to some bank robbers as well, The bank robbers take Ichiro hostage so he promptly takes a nap so he can hang out on Monster Island with Godzilla and Minilla. Good plan, kid!

Anyway, All Monsters Attack is considered by many to be the worst of the old Godzilla movies and, in many ways, it is. While all of the later Godzilla movies were aimed at kids, most of them at least had a decent fight or two. All Monsters Attack is basically just 69 minutes of the kid getting in trouble and then taking a nap. In fact, Godzilla’s barely in the movie at all. Minilla gets most of the monster screen time. That said, the film’s heart is in the right place and if it made any bullied children feel better then it did some good.

(Listen, I’m always going to give any movie starring Godzilla the benefit of the doubt, okay?)

That said, it does kind of seem like the ultimate message of the film’s final scenes is that the best way to deal with a bully is to pull a mean prank on someone else and then join the bully’s gang. So maybe All Monsters Attack! did more harm than good. I don’t know. As long as Godzilla’s okay, that’s all that really matters.

The Things You Find On Netflix: The Laundromat (dir by Steven Soderbergh)

Posted on October 18, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

To say that Meryl Streep gives a bad performance in The Laundromat actually does a disservice to your average, run-of-the-mill bad performance.

Meryl Streep instead gives an absolutely terrible performance in The Laundromat, playing not one, not two, but three characters. One of the characters is Ellen Martin, a middle-class widow from Michigan whose attempts to collect a fair settlement after the death of her husband provides a portal in the world of shady con men and corrupt financial institutions. One of the characters is a secret, which means that Meryl wears a lot of make-up and frumpy clothes. That said, from the minute the character appeared on screen, I went, “Oh, there’s Meryl again.” Then, in her third role, Meryl plays herself, demanding campaign finance reform and striking a Statue of Liberty pose while holding a hairbrush instead of a torch.

Really, it’s the type of horrendous performance that could only be delivered by a truly great actress. (If Meryl Streep is the modern Norma Shearer, this is her Romeo and Juliet.) Watching Meryl Streep play the role of Ellen, It occurred to me that Meryl is one of those actresses who is incapable of being authentic but who can certainly act the Hell out of pretending to be authentic. You never forget that Meryl Streep is acting and that’s one reason why her best performances are usually the ones where she’s playing theatrical characters, whether they’re politicians like Margaret Thatcher, celebrities like Julia Child, or the Witch in Into the Woods. But when you cast Meryl as someone who is basically supposed to be a member of the “common people,” it just doesn’t work. Laura Dern, Laurie Metcalf, Allison Janney, even Annette Bening probably could have done a decent job playing Ellen Martin but Meryl is just too Meryl. As for her other two performances in The Laundromat, they don’t work because one is meant to be a joke on the audience and the other is just a retread of her standard “I’m just a middle class woman from New Jersey and I love the little people” awards show speech.

Of course, The Laundromat itself is a remarkably bad film. Again, it takes a lot of talent to make a film this bad. Watching the film, I found myself wondering why, at this point in his celebrated career, Steven Soderbergh would decide to become a second-rate Adam McKay, especially when McKay himself is just a third-rate Jean-Luc Godard? The film is structured so that, while Ellen is obsessing on why she’s getting screwed over by the insurance companies, we’re also treated to scenes of Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas talking directly to the camera and explaining to use why the poor are always going to get screwed over by the rich. That’s probably true but the film gets so heavy-handed in its execution that the resulting migraine is going to be due less to outrage and more due to the sledgehammer that Soderbergh takes to your head.

Along with Ellen’s story, we also get to see several other stories featuring people and their money. Jeffrey Wright is a crooked accountant who has two families. And then there’s an African businessman who bribes his wife and daughter with shares in a non-existent company and then we take a trip to China, where we learn about cyanide and organ harvesting. And yes, I get it. It shows how a crime committed in China is ultimately felt by a widow living in Michigan. But one can’t help but wish that Soderbergh had just focuses on one story, instead of trying to imitate the worst moments of The Big Short.

Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas are technically playing the film’s villains but they’re both so charming that The Laundromat at times seems like more of a recruiting film for aspiring money launderers than anything else. (To continue the Adam McKay comparison, it’s a bit like how Vice actually left audiences feeling sympathy for Dick Cheney as opposed to writing petitions to send to The Hague.) It desperately wants to leave us outraged but Soderbegh gets so caught up in his own cutesy storytelling techniques that it just leaves us feeling somewhat annoyed. Watching the film, one gets the feeling that the perfect directors for The Laundromat would have been the Coen Brothers, who are capable of outrage but whose detached style would have kept them from bludgeoning the audience with it. Soderbergh is too angry to be effective.

As I said, there’s a lot of talented people involved in The Laundromat. It’s full of people who have done great work in the past and who will do great work in the future. As for The Laundromat, it’s a legitimate contender for the biggest disappointment of the year.

Horror on the Lens: The Terror (dir by Roger Corman)

Posted on October 18, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Have you ever woken up and thought to yourself, “I’d love to see a movie where a youngish Jack Nicholson played a French soldier who, while searching for a mysterious woman, comes across a castle that’s inhabited by both Dick Miller and Boris Karloff?”

Of course you have! Who hasn’t?

Well, fortunately, it’s YouTube to the rescue. In Roger Corman’s 1963 film The Terror, Jack Nicholson is the least believable 19th century French soldier ever. However, it’s still interesting to watch him before he became a cinematic icon. (Judging from his performance here and in Cry Baby Killer, Jack was not a natural-born actor.) Boris Karloff is, as usual, great and familiar Corman actor Dick Miller gets a much larger role than usual. Pay attention to the actress playing the mysterious woman. That’s Sandra Knight who, at the time of filming, was married to Jack Nicholson.

Reportedly, The Terror was one of those films that Corman made because he still had the sets from his much more acclaimed film version of The Raven. The script was never finished, the story was made up as filming moved alone, and no less than five directors shot different parts of this 81 minute movie. Among the directors: Roger Corman, Jack Hill, Monte Hellman, Francis Ford Coppola, and even Jack Nicholson himself! Perhaps not surprisingly, the final film is a total mess but it does have some historical value.

(In typical Corman fashion, scenes from The Terror were later used in the 1968 film, Targets.)

Check out The Terror below!

Horror on TV: One Step Beyond 2.7 “The Open Window” (dir by John Newland)

Posted on October 17, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

If tonight’s episode of One Step Beyond seems familiar, that’s because it’s a remake of a story that was originally filmed as an episode of The Veil.

This time, instead of witnessing a murder occurring in another apartment, it’s a suicide that is witnessed by artist Anthony March (Michael Higgins). Of course, when he investigates, he discovers that the apartment in empty. Is Anthony hallucinating or has he gone one step beyond and is he seeing the future? Watch to find out!

By the way, that’s future Oscar winner Louise Fletcher playing Anthony’s model.

This originally aired on November 3rd, 1959.

Enjoy!

The TSL’s Horror Grindhouse: The Children (dir by Tom Shankland)

Posted on October 17, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Poor Casey (Hannah Tointon)!

As 2008’s The Children opens, all she wants to do is celebrate New Year’s with her friends. Instead, her mom and her stepfather are dragging her off to some stupid house in the middle of nowhere, where she’ll have to hang out with her aunt and her dorky uncle and she’ll also be expected to look after not only her two much younger cousins but her two half-siblings as well! Even worse, once they arrive at the house, all of the young children start to complain about feeling sick. One of them even throws up. Everyone assumes it’s just car sickness but could it be something worse?

(Of course. There’s always something worse!)

In fact, perhaps the only positive thing about the holiday is that it’s snowed! All of the snow sure does look pretty and it’s a lot of fun to play in. Once the kids get over being sick, they can’t wait to go outside and have some fun! One of the adults accompanies them. While he’s sledding, the kids use a garden rake to kill him. They even disguise it to look like an accident…

Yep, there’s definitely something going on with the children. At first, Casey is the only one who understands that the children have turned evil. (Of course, her first clue comes when they attack her in the woods.) All the adults are either in shock or denial. At first, they refuse to even consider that their children are trying to kill them. Of course, once the children lay siege to the house, the adults are in for a rude awakening…

This is actually the second film called The Children that I’ve reviewed for this site. The first one was a film from the early 80s that featured a school bus driving through a toxic cloud with the end result being a bunch of homicidal, radioactively-charged children. In the second version, it’s left a bit more ambiguous as to why the children have suddenly turned homicidal. While it’s established that that they’re suffering from a virus, the film never tells us where the virus came from or even how it was contracted in the first place. In fact, until the film’s last few minutes, the audience is never quite sure just how far the infection has spread. That ambiguity is what gives this film its power. There’s nothing scarier than not being sure what’s going on.

The Children is a grim and disturbing horror film, one the features very little humor and which ends on an ominous note. It’s a film that exploits something that we all know but rarely want to admit, which is that children can be incredibly creepy. We tend to idealize children, which is exactly what the children in this movie use to their advantage.

The Children is also a very well-acted horror film. Hannah Tointon is sympathetic in the lead role while all of the killer children are played with a proper combination of savagery and innocence. This may very well be the best killer children film ever made.

Horror On The Lens: Night Tide (dir by Curtis Harrington)

Posted on October 17, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released in 1961 and directed by Curtis Harrington, Night Tide stars a young Dennis Hopper as Johnny, an awkward sailor. Johnny meets Mora (Linda Lawson), who works as a “mermaid” on the pier. For Johnny, it’s love at first sight. However, the more that Johnny pursues her, the more he learns about both her mysterious past and the dark fate of her previous boyfriends.

Night Tide is low-key and atmospheric gem of a movie, one that serve as an inspiration for low-budget filmmakers every where. Lawson is perfectly cast as the enigmatic Mora but the film really belongs to Dennis Hopper. Hopper’s naturally off-key presence made him perfect for the role of Johnny.

Night Tide is one of those low-budget movies that, because it’s in the public domain, has been released on DVD (often in inferior form) by dozens of different companies. Often times, films like this turn out to be fairly forgettable. Night Tide, however, is an exception.

Music Video of The Day: Written in Blood by She Wants Revenge (2007, dir by Justin Warfield)

Posted on October 17, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Oh my God, I love this video.

Everything — from the atmosphere of ominous decadence to the dark cinematography to the wonderfully sordid art direction — just works perfectly. Fortunately, this is one of those videos where we actually have the names of some of the people who worked behind the scenes so here they are:

Director — Justin Warfield
Director of Photography — Simon Thirlaway
Production Design — Ariana Nakata, Production Designer
Costume and Wardrobe — Brooke Dulien and Stefanie King Warfield, Wardrobe Stylists

Great work by all! Jean Rollin would be proud.

Enjoy!

Horror on TV: One Step Beyond 2.5 “Night of the Kill” (dir by John Newland)

Posted on October 16, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

When young Davey Morris tells his parents that he’s been hanging out with a friendly Bigfoot-type creature, all of the adults in town react in the worst way possible.

This episode, from the second season of One Step Beyond, was one of the first to deal with the legend of Bigfoot. Needless to say, it’s the adults who turn out to be the true monsters in this scenario.

This episode originally aired on October 20th, 1959.

The TSL’s Horror Grindhouse: Blood Cult (dir by Christopher Lewis)

Posted on October 16, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Oh no! There are bad things happening! On a small college campus, co-eds are being stalked and killed by a masked murderer who carries a cleaver. With each murder, the killer chops off a limb and carries it off with him. He also leaves behind a mysterious gold medallion, one that appears to feature an etching of a dog on it. It’s a bit of a mess, really.

Early on, in the 1985 film, Blood Cult, a narrative crawl informs us that the events that we’re watching occurred during the previous winter. These murders, we’re told, were “the strangest crimes in recent recorded history.” The film opens with one of those crimes. In an homage to Psycho and every other slasher movie ever made, the first murder occurs in a shower. The showering victim looks straight at the camera during her scenes. When she delivers her lines (“Is that you? Did you get the pizza? Did you get my anchovies?”), she does so in a flat, Oklahoma accent. In short, these scenes proudly announce that we are watching an amateur, regional production.

Anyway, the film itself deals with Sheriff Ron Wilbois (Charles Ellis), who must solve the murders before they harm his chances of being elected to the U.S. Senate. Fortunately, he has some help from his daughter, Tina (Judi Adelman). Tina is a librarian, which means that she has magical research powers. All she has to do is open up a book and, thirty seconds later, she will have discovered whatever needs to have been discovered. Unfortunately, Tina may have some secrets of her own. She’s also dating an rather dorky guy named Joel (James Vance). Joel is the type of guy who, when he meets his girlfriend’s father in a diner, lazily props his feet up in the seat across from him. I mean, come on, Joel! At least try to impress the old man! I kept expecting Sheriff Wilbois to yell, “Get the Hell away from my daughter!” and maybe draw his gun but apparently, that was not the Sheriff’s style. The Sheriff’s a good, honest lawman. He’s not the type to abuse his powers. He just wants to solve the murders, go to the Senate, and drink a lot of Coke. Seriously, there are so many Coke cans in this movie that, if not for the film’s amateur status, one could be forgiven for assuming that the film was produced by the Coca-Cola Corporation.

Can you spot the Coke?

There’s a twist to Blood Cult but it’s not a particularly surprising one. In fact, there’s really nothing surprising about Blood Cult. Some of the gore effects are effective in a low-budget way. One victims gets beaten to death by another victim’s severed head. That was kind of creative. For the most part, though, Blood Cult never escapes the constraints of its low budget and its status as an amateur production. I did feel that Charles Ellis, who was a regional theater actor, gave a fairly good performance as Sheriff Wilbois. He came across like being a genuinely nice guy. I would have voted for him. The rest of the cast was forgettable at best and painfully stiff at worst.

Blood Cult is historically significant because it was actually the first movie to ever specifically be made for the home video market. Every straight to video movie ever made is a descendant of Blood Cult. Apparently, it was filmed in nine days, with the cast and crew taking a week off from their days jobs. To the film’s credit, there are a few atmospheric scenes, largely because Oklahoma is a naturally atmospheric state. But, for the most part, Blood Cult has a “Grandpa Picked Up a Video Camera And Made A Horror Film” look and feel to it. I have a weakness for amateur, regional horror movies and the DVD of Blood Cult comes with a likable director’s commentary but, for the most part, this is a film that’s significant mostly as a piece of historical trivia.

Horror Book Review: Monster by Christopher Pike

Posted on October 16, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

“They were no longer human…” the cover of 1992 first edition of Christopher Pike’s Monster announces and indeed, they’re not! That cover, I should add, makes the book look a lot more light-hearted than it is. It makes it look like it’s some sort of sci-fi comedy about a demonically possessed football player when there’s actually very little about this book that could be considered light-hearted.

This book is dark. Like, seriously, dark.

It opens with popular high school student Mary Carlson walking into a party while carrying a shotgun. She blows away a football player named Todd and then a cheerleader named Kathy and then she points the gun at her own boyfriend, Jim. Fortunately, the new girl at school, Angela, manages to distract Kathy just long enough for Jim to take off running into the woods. Mary goes chasing after him but she gets arrested before she guns him down as well. It’s probably a good thing that Jim survived because, without him, how would the football team ever win another game? After all, the team sucked just last season before all of the players and the cheerleaders suddenly got super strong!

Anyway, Mary says that she was shooting her friends because they were no longer human and, according to her, the three of them have been picking up people and killing them in a warehouse. Police Lt. Nguyen doesn’t believe her but Angela feels a bit of an obligation to investigate Mary’s story. And really, it’s the least she can do considering that she promptly starts flirting with Jim right after Mary’s arrested.

It quickly becomes obvious that something strange has happened to all of the school’s athletes and cheerleaders. Maybe it has something to do with the mysterious crater from which the town gets its drinking water. Angela notices that Jim tends to eat everything in sight, including a raw hamburger. After she and Jim make out and she ends up getting some of his blood on her, she soon finds that she’s eating everything in sight. Is it possible that some sort of monster has not only taken over Jim but is now taking over Angela as well!?

Yes, it is. That’s bad news for Kevin, who is Angela’s BFF and who is totally in love with her even though she only views him as being a very good friend. Oh, poor Kevin! Kevin is one of the few wholly sympathetic characters in the book and he still ends up with a broken neck. Like I said, this book is dark!

It all ends on an appropriately dark note and I guess that’s the important thing. This book was written in 1992 and, at the time it was written, it was probably meant to be a metaphor about the dangers of having unsafe sex, as Angela is infected after fooling around with Jim. Reading it today, though, it feels more like a commentary on just unsafe school has become over the past decade. Mary Carlson, blowing away her friends because they’re “not human,” brings to mind so many recent gun-related tragedies. It’s a bit difficult to read.

Anyway, Monster is a seriously dark book but still an effectively macabre story. Nobody was as skilled at traumatizing young readers as Christopher Pike!