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horrorhousereview · 4 years

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Creature from the Black Lagoon Franchise

When I decided to watch the Creature from the Black Lagoon, I had no idea that there was a whole series of movies to delve into. I'd only been aware of the one. Like other horror movies before it, however, the sequels couldn't compare to the original, though there was a weird romance to look forward to at the end of the road.

1. Creature from the Black Lagoon

Creature from the Black Lagoon is a typical old-fashioned monster movie, but in spite of its old style, it holds up fairly well. One of the things that impressed me most about the movie right away were the beautiful underwater shots of fish. In the era of black and white, I hadn't anticipated such cinematography. In that vein, the aquatic costume of the Creature itself was actually pretty great. Yes, it's a rubber suit. But it's a pretty good rubber suit.

The premise of the story was fairly interesting. Archaeologists discover remains of an ancient creature while on a dig site in the Amazon rainforest, some strange creature that might bridge land and sea. I remember being struck by the focus on science in the movie, and the lofty goals of the characters seeking to study it. That sentiment isn't something I've seen reflected quite so strongly in modern films.

While the archaeologists find only remains, our Creature is alive and well, and possibly is a nigh immortal version of the dead creature's mate. It attacks and kills a bunch of people, and other than being an exciting find, no one really cares.

That leads me into one of the weaknesses of such an old movie. The depictions of the native people are a little off, and the perception of the Amazon as a wild, uncivilized country (except that they hire natives to help them?) feels problematic. None of this is by any means the worst I've seen, but the foreign depictions did make me a little uncomfortable.

Most of the movie takes place with a group of researchers trying to track down the Creature that was observed to some extent in the start of the film. It takes place aboard a boat, with a group of male researchers and a surprisingly progressive depiction of either a female researcher or at least well informed lady as well.

When the Creature is on screen, it's mostly a lot of rubber-suit shots, dramatic but simultaneously boring fight scenes, and heavy use of orchestral music. When the Creature isn't on screen, those moments are mostly taken up by interpersonal drama about what to actually do about the Creature -- to capture and study it, or to kill it to save themselves, as their encounters become increasingly dangerous.

The ending I would say was mediocre. There was a final confrontation with the death of one of the characters, though I hadn't grown to love any of them so I wasn't very bothered by it. The Creature, as I think is widely known, had fixated on the woman and kidnapped her in a short but iconic scene. In the end, though, the Creature sank into the depths and the rest of the crew made their escape. It tied up the movie neatly but wasn't exactly noteworthy.

In the end, I was surprised how much I enjoyed the movie. In spite of it's shortcomings, I give the film a 7/10.

2. Revenge of the Creature

News of the Creature had spread after the events of the first film, and in this sequel we see a new group of people again aboard a boat in the Amazon, seeking out the creature they'd heard so much of. Now our scientists aren't simply archaeologists, but rather have plans to capture the creature and bring it back to America for study. And indeed, that is exactly what they do.

I thought there was an interesting difference in how the chimps and the Creature are treated by the research scientists. While the chimps had a seemingly loving caretaker, the Creature was "taught" what to do by luring it with food, then admonishing it and zapping it with an underwater cattle prod. Not very nice at all, and it was no wonder to me that the Creature didn't like its treatment. In spite of what could potentially be classed as animal abuse, I was intrigued by the scientists' fascination with animal intelligence, and the idea of evolution. Just like in the first film, science was depicted as wondrous and exciting, and definitely took a front seat.

Of our two main scientists in this movie, one of them is a woman, which was pretty progressive for its time as far as I'm aware. In spite of a fairly predictable sub-plot about scientists in love, it didn't detract from her actual competence in doing her job.

As expected, the Creature escaped its confines, and it wasn't happy with what had been going on. The name of the film is, after all, Revenge of the Creature. Unfortunately, the treatment toward the Creature, while not great, wasn't exactly torture either. In that light, neither is the Creature's revenge too severe, leaving me somewhat bored as a result.

Like the first film, the Creature fights any men it finds, but doesn't fight any of the women (or in this case, children). The Creature also has a fixation on the lady scientist, and like in the first film, she conveniently passes out helplessly as the plot demands. It was almost painfully predictable, but then again this is the sort of movie that birthed such a trope so I couldn't be too mad at it.

In the end, they did get their woman back, and once again the creature seemed to die without leaving behind a body. It ended about as mediocrely as the first film did, but fell a bit more flat because it wasn't that interesting the first time, and certainly wasn't the second.

It was more or less what I expected in a sequel, and while I had nothing major to complain about, I also didn't find it particularly riveting. In the end, I give this film a 6/10.

3. The Creature Walks Among Us

I wasn't that excited to watch yet another movie in the series by the time I got to the third. And indeed, the third film began just as the first and the second -- on a boat somewhere, looking for the Creature. I couldn't help but think they should really stop doing that.

This time, our scientists are doctors, and the main scientist wants to change the creature from an aquatic to land animal somehow, to prove some sort of a point. What? I have no idea, really. It was difficult to care, especially with the interpersonal drama going on throughout the film. We have a woman aboard again, because of course we have to have one. Only this time, she's not particularly likeable as far as I'm concerned. She didn't seem very intelligent, and she shot at sharks. She's also terribly unhappy with her marriage to the doctor, which lead me to wonder why she'd married him in the first place. I couldn't see any reason for their being together throughout the film.

The other male lead spent most of the movie trying to get with the doctor's wife. The doctor spent the movie becoming increasingly irrational and accusing his wife of infidelity. While she strongly protested the other dude's rapey advances, (which I ought to point out, the Creature tried to save her from at one point), she also did sort of have an emotional affair with him. The whole love triangle was cringey, confusing, and uncomfortable to watch.

They did end up catching the Creature, and they did end up somehow changing it into a land animal, at least somewhat. And while they dressed it as a man and remarked on how human it was becoming, they also kept it in a cage outside. They commented on how kind they'd been to it and the one man credited their kindness for its own gentleness, but I was acutely uncomfortable at how they could say such things while keeping the thing in a cage. Is it a sentient being or not? No one in the movie seems to make up their mind.

In the end, things come to a head between the two men and one kills the other. The creature escapes yet again. And the woman who I never really came to like was finally free of an abusive relationship. I'm not sure whether I cared.

Of all the films in the series, this one was the most tedious so far. And while the changing of the creature's physiology was somewhat interesting, and could have opened doors to introspection about what it means to be human or animal, the film only suggested there could be big ideas and never really delivered.

Overall, I'd rate the movie a 4/10.

4. Abbott and Costello Meet the Creature from the Black Lagoon

I wasn't really in the mood for a fourth film after slogging through three, but thankfully this was only a fifteen minute clip of Abbott and Costello. And indeed, it was their classic comedy, with all sorts of ghost stories and strange noises, culminating in Costello coming face to face with Frankenstein and the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Did it really have anything to do with the Creature? No. Did it prepare me for the final film in my list? Definitely.

Final rating? 10/10

5. The Shape of Water

I couldn't cover the Creature from the Black Lagoon without covering The Shape of Water. This supernatural romance, while not a horror movie, features a woman falling in love with our Creature. How could I not watch it?

Right away, when I realized the movie was by Guillermo del Toro, I knew the movie would be weird. I should have known that well enough simply based on the premise, but the director guaranteed it. In that regard, I was not disappointed.

The movie opens with a moody aesthetic reminiscent of Amelie. It starts off right away with arguably unnecessary nudity and masturbation, setting the tone for the rest of this strange film.

Elisa is the main character, and she is a mute woman who is part of the cleaning staff at some secretive governmental facility. She hangs out with her best friend, a starving artist, and largely seems to have a comfortable life. Then the secretive government facility gains the Creature, in order to study it much like the second movie of the Black Lagoon series. However, unlike the Black Lagoon films, this movie is far less focused on the wonder of science. Instead, the movie is dark and gritty, and focused primarily on secret agents from Russia, and the USA and Russia trying to gain a hold over one another by studying the Creature.

Our main governmental character is one of the most horrible to ever grace the screen. There was nothing likeable about him whatsoever. He was horrible to the Creature, to his family, and to his staff, even threatening sexual abuse toward Elisa. It was his job throughout the film to cause me to cringe either from torture scenes or his general personality.

Elisa fell in love with the Creature, and moved by its plight and the decision of the government to kill it, she helped it to escape, with the aid of her artist friend and a co-worker, as well as a convenient Russian secret agent scientist who didn't want to see the Creature die. The plot, while weird, is straight forward when looking at the big picture.

One thing that struck me toward the start of the film was the design of the Creature. Time had marched on, and it was a far cry from the rubber suit of the original. At first, I didn't like the change, but I admit that as the movie progressed I got used to the new aesthetic and even started to enjoy it. Having completed the film, I'm still not sure where I stand on the design over all. There was something very Aquaman-esque about it, rather than fish-man, which I suppose helps the sex scenes feel a little less weird.

The Shape of Water certainly isn't meant to be in keeping with the original Black Lagoon movies, but I couldn't help but compare it again and again throughout. How could I not, given the subject matter? The lack of emphasis on science, and the moody aesthetic I would say detracted from the original. The inclusion of a mute character and a starving artist to spice things up was a bit of a weird decision. But I give props to the much more comfortable inclusion of female characters and Elisa's black friend, which are a relief after the somewhat cringey outmoded culture in the original film.

One thing that the movie lacked for me was a depiction of the Black Lagoon itself. Even in the second of the Black Lagoon movies, we were at the lagoon at the start of the film before the Creature was moved to America for study. Here, I had no sense what it took for them to capture it, or what it acted like in its original environment.

Finally, there's the weird ending. I thought for sure Elisa and the Creature were goners right up until the very last moment. Then, they sort of lived happily ever after... except that the narrator of the story is the starving artist friend, and he doesn't seem to know for sure. I'm left wondering if the final scene was supposed to be speculative and hopeful, or literal for the viewer. I also thought it was interesting that natives apparently considered the Creature a god, and some of the characters from the film thought so too in the end when confronted with the Creature's healing powers. I suspect if he was a god, he'd have escaped himself from the facility long before, and that he just had weird abilities, but I suppose calling him a god is as good as anything. I also have to wonder whether the term god was selected specifically to contrast with the weird Christian fixation of the antagonist. Del Toro is pretty into symbolism, so maybe.

The real question is whether I liked it. I can't say for certain. Like Pan's Labyrinth, I can never really decide what I think of del Toro's work. I award significant points for creativity, but remain ever uncertain as to whether I actually enjoyed the film.

Final rating? 6/10

#horror #movie #review #fishman

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horrorhousereview · 5 years

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Carrie Franchise

Carrie, the heart warming tale of a high school girl who sets the world on fire with her mind. I knew little else about the original film, nor that it had a sequel and been remade twice. While the original movie proved to be better than I'd have imagined, attempts to recapture the essence of the 1976 version have sadly fallen flat.

1. Carrie (1976)

When I sat down to the original Carrie, my expectations were moderate. I knew that the movie was famous, and that the protagonist could set things on fire with her mind, but really nothing else. It sounded interesting but not earth shattering. I had no idea the wild ride the movie was about to take me on.

The opening scene, in classic seventies style, was a soft core porn in a high school girls locker room as they showered. The porn gave me whiplash when Carrie suddenly got her first period, and instead of handling it like a normal person screamed for help and grasped onto her teammates with bloody hands in a panic. The girls teased her in a sequence that can only make sense in movies, not real life, shouting for her to "plug it up" and pelting her with tampons and pads as she screamed and cried in a corner. Apparently, Carrie had literally never heard about how periods work before. This is attributed to her crazy, fundamentalist mother, but I would also like to raise questions about the state of sex ed. in schools in the seventies. I wasn't expecting much, but did they really not even go over reproductive organs for five minutes? Incredible.

The bulk of the movie is a slow burn wherein we follow Carrie, a girl who is relentlessly bullied by her peers. Not only that, but she is actually a little weird, due to her fundamentalist Christian mother who abuses her at home. Her mother says such gems as that Carrie wouldn't have gotten her period if she hadn't had sex, and that it was God's punishment. She then proceeded to lock her in a closet for several hours, telling Carrie to pray. Carrie's mother makes all of their clothes, and doesn't allow electric lights in the household, just to give the very briefest depiction of how weird it is there.

Through the movie we see that the gym teacher, and then a few others actually try to do right by Carrie. A boy asks her to the prom. They try to turn Carrie's sad life around.

Meanwhile, the head bitch of the school plots revenge on Carrie, whom she blames for her own teenaged angst. She's a terrible person.

Right in the last stretch of movie, Carrie wins the title of prom queen. Her dreams are coming true. Then the head bitch douses her in pigs blood, and a few people laugh, and Carrie totally snaps and kills everyone with her mind, including those who had tried to do right. She goes home, and her mother who believed she was possessed by the devil tries to kill her, but Carrie in turn kills her mother. The sole survivor of the night continues to have nightmares of Carrie attacking her from the grave, and it isn't clear to me whether that's delusion caused by trauma or whether Carrie continued to haunt even her from the beyond.

What a wild ride. I didn't see the ending coming at all, and the shock and chaos of it very much reminded me of Friday the 13th, and The Birds. To add to that, I'm still not certain who the true villain of the movie is. Carrie? Her mother? Her terrible classmates? All of them? None? And did Carrie's mother create her through the abuse, or was Carrie truly possessed by the devil the entire time? Her retribution, after all, was more than a bit excessive.

I enjoyed Carrie far more than I had expected to.

Final rating? 8/10

2. The Rage: Carrie 2 (1999)

When I started Carrie 2, I was curious how they'd go about a sequel. Carrie had died at the end of the first film. Would this be a sort of prequel to her life? Would she be a ghost? Would they find a way to resurrect her, as they did Jason Voorhees so many times? In fact, it was none of these. The story follows Rachel, Carrie's half sister. Apparently their father has a telekinesis gene that was passed on to both of them, because that makes sense.

We start the movie when Rachel is a little girl. She has a religious nutter mother, just like Carrie, who is trying to banish the devil from her, because she can move things with her mind. The mother gets taken away to a psych ward and is diagnosed with schizophrenia. Is she schizophrenic? Or justified? Perhaps both.

Rachel lives with terrible foster parents, and like Carrie is unpopular. Unlike in Carrie, however, the school atmosphere is completely unrealistic. There's absolute chaos, someone running around with a supersoaker, another guy filming girls' boobs. The cheerleaders are practicing on the school lawn before school starts. I'm always astounded by how unrealistic high school is depicted in some movies and shows, considering that the writers probably attended one.

Also unlike Carrie, Rachel isn't the single social pariah of the entire school. She's just one of many unpopular students, and even has an unpopular best friend. The friend sleeps with a jock (the eldest son from Home Improvement, weirdly), and then when he casts her aside she kills herself by jumping off the roof. This, I guess, is the catalyst for Rachel's telekinesis to start spiraling out of control.

One of the teachers at the school is the sole survivor from the Carrie incident twenty years ago. She wants to help Rachel before it's too late, but that never gains any traction. She also wants to sue Home Improvement boy for statutory rape, and while he and his friends are thoroughly disgusting that felt like a bit of a stretch to me. As a result, the jocks rally against Rachel, all except for Good Jock. Rachel and Good Jock start dating, and Good Jock temporarily friend-divorces the other jocks.

The story culminates in Rachel thinking that Good Jock used her due to the influence of his friends, and she has her Carrie moment where she tries to set everyone and everything on fire. Until this point the echoes of Carrie in Carrie 2 were stupid but boring. The carbon copy ending pushed the film into the realm of terrible.

In addition to the same end scene, they even had the original Carrie mother's voice repeating "they're all going to laugh at you" in the background of Rachel's mind, just as from the original Carrie ending. Why? How? What was it supposed to imply? As if that didn't ruin the scene enough, there was a hilariously bad performance of violent acts -- such as mentally flung CDs acting as shurikens. And Rachel's heart tattoo began to beat, and the barbed wire of it spread to mark her entire body. Again, why? How?

I finished this movie wondering why they'd bothered to make it at all, and also wondering how they failed so spectacularly in capturing whatever magic it was that had made Carrie so fantastic, while simultaneously copying as much from the original movie as possible.

Final rating: 3/10

3. Carrie (2002 made for TV film)

Like all good movies, it was perhaps inevitable that someone would do a remake of Carrie. I was skeptical of the 2002 made for TV movie, but I wanted so much for it to offer something unique. Some remakes actually do have artistic vision behind them. Unfortunately, it was as terrible as one might expect.

The main point to the remake, so far as I can tell, was to update Carrie to take place in a more modern setting. But what exactly was unrelatable about the 1976 film? The lack of sex education is the only real flaw so far as I could tell, and to be fair, the 2002 film does address it. Carrie opts out of sex ed. with a religious exemption. But she also lives in the world of the internet, and uses the web to research her secret powers instead of the library. Yet even with apparently websites helping her to learn them, no one else knows about telekinesis or believes what happened in the end. The modern setting, in my opinion, only built more plot holes rather than filling them in.

In Carrie 2002, the method of story telling is also different. We start off at a police station, after the main events of the film, as detectives interview students and teachers and try to piece together what had happened. I'm not sure what the point of the investigative narrative is, and in fact it threw me. In my experience, the point of having such a perspective is so that each time we're actually inside of the movie, the events we see are only told from the limited point of view of whoever is being interviewed. But that isn't so in Carrie 2002, because we frequently have perspectives from Carrie, who isn't interviewed at all, nor is she seen from the perspective of any of the interviewees. As such, the investigative angle is a weakness, not a strength.

Like Carrie 2, Carrie 2002 features a somewhat unbelievable vision of high school. Every detail, to me at least, is not quite sold. In fact, "not quite" is the theme of the movie, as every key aspect of the original film seems diminished.

Carrie's mother is abusive, but not very. She's religious, but not nearly as much so. The girls at Carrie's school are mean to her, but only to a point. The head orchestrator of Carrie's torments is almost shy in comparison to her original counterpart, and has to be goaded on by the advice of her sociopathic boyfriend. It's quite the departure from the sociopathic girl of the original movie with the whipped boyfriend following in tow.

The gym teacher does care, but she doesn't care nearly as much. The kind boy who takes Carrie to prom seems nice enough, but mostly seems to take Carrie because of his girlfriend's wishes. In the original, there was at least some foreshadowing of his kindness when he spoke up for her slightly in class.

Even the final scene of the movie felt lesser. At points it almost felt goofy, and like Carrie 2, Carrie 2002's final scene felt over the top. She kept going well after the school was destroyed, and proclaimed not to have remembered what happened when she reached home. While Original Carrie seemed to be in shock, Remake Carrie seemed to instead be purely evil, all nuance lost. Rather than the knife battle with the mother, the mother tried to drown her, and Carrie's over-the-top powers manifested again in an ability to visualize and control the mother's heartbeat in her chest.

The coup de grace as far as terrible decisions in the remake is that Carrie actually lived in the end. Sue, the girl who'd gone out of her way to help Carrie get a date to prom, showed up for some reason at Carrie's house after the massacre, and found her drowned but resuscitated her. She helped Carrie escape to a new life in Florida and didn't tell the truth to the cops. Why? I have no earthly idea. I suppose that she felt sorry for Carrie, but with the luke-warm mother and the brick-to-the-face storytelling, this film failed to manifest any of the conflicting feelings in me as the original. A final shot of Carrie shows that she's still haunted by visions of her mother and of the head mean girl, but they seem to be PTSD with no possibility of a haunting. It's a sad, pale shadow of the Carrie-haunting of Sue at the end of the original.

In the end, I'm not really sure why they felt a need to remake Carrie in 2002. Or if they really felt they must, then I fail to see the artistic vision. In any good remake, there should be some element offered that is uniquely its own. In this case, the writers failed to deliver.

Final rating? 3/10

4. Carrie (2013)

Once again, they decided to remake Carrie. Would it be as creative as the original? Unfortunately not. Instead, they made many of the same mistakes that they had in 2002.

Like the 2002 movie, Carrie 2013 is set in modern times. They give the students the internet and cell phones to make things seem more current, then randomly put Carrie in pool volley ball because somehow that's more relatable than the volleyball of the original movie. Throughout this adventure I've wondered why they've felt the need to change the sport, and am always curious to see which one it will be next. First volley ball, then softball, now the pool.

The first major misstep of this film, right off the bat, is that Carrie is incredibly conventionally attractive. No one can beat the sort of awkward and strange look of the original actress, although the casting in 2002 wasn't too bad. But in 2013, for some reason we get a completely normal, or even above average looking girl who can have no makeover on prom night, as she already looks amazing. Not only is the aesthetic off, but she fails to deliver the awkward mannerisms that go hand in hand with the character of Carrie.

Next, we come to the iconic opening scene, which as in the 2002 remake remained mostly intact. However, in Carrie 2002 the only truly redeemable thing was that Carrie's lack of sexual education had been explained by a religious exemption. For some reason, in 2013, we no longer have any excuse or idea how she has no idea what a period is. In the modern day setting, this is all the more difficult to swallow.

The writers seemed to want to correct a few of the 2002 mistakes: the head bad girl was more cacklingly evil, the good jock was once again good in his own right and had a little foreshadowing. But they kept some of the mistakes as well -- the bad girl's boyfriend being a criminal, and most notably Carrie's overpowered telekinesis. In 2013, it's probably more overt than ever before, as Carrie deliberately practices floating books around her, though perhaps it's not as spectacular as the random meteorites striking inexplicably in either Carrie 2 or 2002, I can't remember which.

Much like in its 2002 predecessor, Carrie 2013's mother has been reduced. She's not nearly so abusive as the original 1976 mother, instead turning much of her abuse inward, as she's seen slapping herself, and banging her head against a wall. She's also not as extreme in her rejection of electricity as in 1976. All of this -- the more pathetic mother, the stronger Carrie, serve to lose all the nuance of the original film. I'm not left thinking that everyone -- the school bullies, Carrie, and her mother -- are terrible. Instead, it read a bit like a '90s slasher film in the end scene, as Carrie spread her arms into the air like a caricature of a witch while she mentally flung things to and fro. Gone was the echo of the mother's voice in her head, and instead it was a rather boring scene, with none of the detached horror that I've come to associate with Carrie.

In fact, when Carrie arrived home after the devastation, she was visibly upset, bursting into tears and calling for her mother. That's a far cry from the original Carrie that had arrived at her home in a kind of stupor, washing herself methodically as if in shock or perhaps still possessed.

One improvement over the 2002 film was that they did kill Carrie as in the original. But one misstep? They still needed Sue Snell to make a final appearance in the final destruction. To what purpose? So that Carrie could tell her with preternatural ability, that she was pregnant. Why add this to Carrie's powers? Why have this scene at all? And instead of Carrie simply haunting Sue's thoughts as in the 1976 original, now she seems to be possibly, somehow, haunting Sue's baby. It's a ridiculous decision and I have no idea why they made it.

Final rating? 2/10

#horror #movie #review

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horrorhousereview · 5 years

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V/H/S and V/H/S/2

I'd been seeing V/H/S come up on horror movie lists for some time, so I finally decided to give this found footage film a try. Unfortunately, it wasn't what I had hoped for.

V/H/S

For starters, the movie opened with a disturbing, violent sexual assault in a parking lot. The perpetrators were the main characters, and their characterization only got worse from there, first with scenes of vandalism, then theft. I kept hoping for their demise, not their survival. I did get what I asked for in the end, though even their deaths weren't clear and certainly weren't cathartic, nor did they have anything to do with the sexual assault scene, thus in my mind making it entirely pointless to have such a disgusting depiction in the story at all. The first story of the series of shorts, for me, was a flop.

There were other shorts as well, though I'm not certain it's worth my time to describe them all. While they relied on popular tropes, none of them were well developed or particularly intriguing. The highlights of the movie for me were a few good jump scares and some creepy visuals, but even those were nothing new to horror. All in all, the film felt anemic.

The biggest problem I had with the movie was the way it was shot. While the movie is found footage, there are visual glitches every second of the film, the result of which was a muddy mess that was irritating to watch and difficult to discern. Not only could I barely see what was happening (a trick they seemed to rely on to hide their not-super-creepy visuals), but the story jumped from scene to scene randomly, thus confusing the narrative. It was not that easy to keep up with what was going on. And in the case of one of the shorts, I had to actually consult the wikipedia page to see whether or not I'd actually understood what was going on. I had, but that didn't mean it actually made any narrative sense.

I also found myself wondering throughout: what exactly is the narrative about where the footage is found, and how the movie I am watching came to be? There are a few hints, but no cohesive narrative, and for a found footage movie I found that supremely unsatisfying, if not a bit lazy. There were also bits in the footage that I found it difficult to believe that the camera-person would actually film. They seemed more suited to narrative convenience than what would actually be filmed by a normal person at such a time.

These facts combined with the visual noise of the film force me to point out the fact that there are far better found footage movies out there. This is not a genre that I particularly dislike, and at times have even quite enjoyed. V/H/S is just not a good example of the medium.

Add to all of this unlikeable look-alike characters and obnoxious music, and you have a sense of the movie.

I expected more of V/H/S, but what I got was not really worth seeing. Unfortunately for me, I just found out that I have a sequel to get through.

Final rating? 4/10

V/H/S/2

When I found out there was a sequel to V/H/S, I wasn't very excited. The first movie hadn't been great, and sequels are usually worse. In this case, however, the sequel was actually marginally better than the original.

Much like the first movie, V/H/S/2 is a series of found footage films all loosely bound up together. The main storyline that binds them together didn't make much sense to me, but that's not much of a change from the first film to be honest.

Of the remaining four segments, only one of them stood out. Apart from it you have an anemic ghost story with poor acting, an interesting start to a zombie movie, and a confusing mess of an alien invasion story. Like its predecessor, this film relies on common horror tropes and mostly fails to develop them or deliver any originality.

The one exception for me was the segment about a cult in Indonesia. The cult itself was disturbing enough, and the segment quickly developed into mass suicide, what appear to be zombies, and the birth of a demon. It was as much of a confused mess as the rest of the film, but at least it had my attention and seemed unique. I couldn't help but wish throughout it that it was in and of itself a fully developed movie that I could sink into.

That said, the themes of tasteless sex scenes, awful rock music, and shoddy footage continue through the sequel and I am left still having no idea why these movies end up on horror movie lists.

Final rating? 6/10

#horror #movie #review #found footage

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horrorhousereview · 6 years

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Rosemary’s Baby

When I first watched Rosemary’s Baby, I knew next to nothing about the film. I knew that it was horror, and that it’s considered to be one of the classics. And, presumably, it was about a baby. So I sat down to see what it was about. What I found was an impressive slow-burn horror, that was still unsettling even upon re-watch years later.

I tend to think of myself as having a bit of a short attention span for movies, but somehow Rosemary’s Baby still had me captivated. We follow around Rosemary and her husband as they move apartments. She keeps house while her husband works as an actor, at first struggling and later succeeding in his career. All the while, the couple get to know an old couple that are their neighbours in the apartment complex, and also struggle through the stressors of their marriage. They try to and succeed in conceiving a child, and as Rosemary’s pregnancy progresses, we see small fractures in what is going on.

It starts with weird things she notices about the prior tenant of their apartment. There are a number of strange happenings and coincidences. Strange details about the neighbours. A particularly disturbing fever dream she seems to have when she conceives, as she dreams she’s raped. And all the while as the viewer, it’s difficult to tell whether Rosemary is becoming mentally unstable or whether something is really going on. The hints are given frequently but in such small doses that I found myself on the edge of my seat, constantly struggling to put the meagre pieces together and solve the mystery.

All the while, the atmosphere was deeply unsettling, whether she were slowly coming unhinged or whether there was something more sinister afoot. To add to this paranoia is the fact that Rosemary has a difficult pregnancy. She is in pain for months, though the doctor continually tells her everything is fine. Her doctor, her husband, and her neighbours never seem to listen to her. They choose what doctor she sees, what she eats, what she drinks, how she spends her time. She’s helpless and disempowered, but is that because those around her are sinister? Or are they ultimately well meaning, if overbearing?

Over the course of the film, Rosemary believes she discovers that the neighbours are witches / Satan worshippers (let’s just ignore the religious incongruity there) and that they do dark rituals with the blood of babies. She believes she discovers that her husband is in on it, and then her doctor as well. Right at the end, she tries several times to escape and I felt the dread viscerally as she ultimately failed.

Her last desperate attempt at escape resulted in labour, and then the news was given to her that she’d supposedly lost the baby. Her husband, doctor, and neighbours all still insisted that she was delusional and in recovery. But Rosemary believed that she knew better. She thought that they were saving her milk. She heard the sound of a baby’s cry through the walls. She secreted her medications away without taking it, and snuck next door through a secret passage in the closet.

Even up until the last and final scene, I as the viewer was unconvinced whether everyone was in on this dark plot or whether Rosemary was simply crazy. I’ve seen a lot of things over the years attempt such an obfuscation, but this is the only time I’ve seen it done so well. Normally, one can figure out the truth well in advance of the reveal, but not so in this film.

The final scene is the only part of the movie that did not age well. The chanting of “hail Satan” was frankly hilarious and mood-shattering upon first watch, though on re-watch it wasn’t so bad since I knew it was coming. I think that it would have been a better movie if they’d found a way to leave the mystery ambiguous.

All in all though, with that minor criticism aside, I think that this is one of the better horror movies that I’ve seen. There’s no gore and no jump scares, which makes it all the more impressive that they managed to elicit such an unsettling feeling throughout.

Final rating? 8/10

#horror #movie #review #rosemary's baby

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The Wicker Man: 1973 versus 2006

My introduction to the Wicker Man was hearing again and again how terrible the 2006 version was. So of course, I went out of my way to see it first and foremost. As I’d expected, it was so bad it was wonderful, and I couldn’t understand why people hated it quite so much. Until of course I watched the original 1973 version, which I found to be utterly captivating, and a quite serious film. Only then could I fully appreciate the folly of what came after.

1. The Wicker Man (1973)

First and foremost, this is the first British film I’ve reviewed on my blog, and I have to say that it was refreshing to see such a different style to the usual American fare, or the Asian tropes I’ve become familiar with. The film has a serious tone throughout, and was filmed on location in Scotland (though it’s meant to be some mysterious island in the movie).

The film begins when a police officer arrives at the remote British island by water plane in order to investigate a missing girl, whose disappearance months ago had been reported to the mainland anonymously. The islanders don’t tolerate strangers, and at first deny any knowledge of the girl. Later, the officer is able to discover that the girl is indeed real, and they admit that she’s real but dead. When at last her corpse is exhumed much later in the film, the coffin is empty, save for a hare. The movie is nearly entirely about this officer trying to discover the mystery of the missing child, while simultaneously uncovering the disturbing truth about the island.

We find out rather quickly that the islanders aren’t Christian like our officer, but instead practice some old, bizarre form of paganism. Every rite and ritual seems centred around sex and death, and the British didn’t shy away from nudity in this film, which I appreciate and not just for lewd reasons. The whole of it feels both captivating and disturbing at once. We see throughout the film as well a reversal of gender roles to go along with the reversal of religions. The girls go to school while the boys do not. In sexual acts, the women are always seen on top.

There are weird sex rituals in the cemetery at night, folk medicines at an apothecary with jars full of foreskins. There are bizarre and unexplained scenes like a woman nursing a child in one arm while holding out an egg in her other hand. Maypole dancing for the little boys while the girls are taught of its phallic significance in their one room schoolhouse. Nude bonfire jumping, and a plethora of lewd folk songs throughout the film. The combination of sights and sounds and rituals is completely entrancing to watch, and I found myself falling in love with it even as I was disturbed by the undercurrent of something being very wrong with these people.

Another thread that is more subtle throughout the movie is the question of whether these pagan practices actually work or carry some power. My instinct for most of the film was to say no, and that they’re simply crazy. But there is a scene in which the woman in the room next door sings out to the police officer and he seems to be fighting some sort of mind control. Is he weak willed? Or does she hold some power over him? A later scene in the movie implies, but does not confirm, that they tried to drug him. Could drugs have explained the earlier scene as well? Inconclusive.

The film culminates in the iconic way: with a wicker man lit on fire, and our hero being sacrificed to the ancient gods. Though I was familiar with the scene already in a vague sense, I hadn’t been prepared for just how impactful the final shot would be. The people dancing, the ritual music, the impressive flames shooting up this massive structure, with the screams of dying farm animals in the background as well. The Christian aspect was perhaps a little heavy handed, but it was also moving in that the islanders no doubt found the officer’s religion to be as bizarre and ridiculous as he found their own -- and indeed so much was pointed out throughout the film.

This was a movie without a happy ending, or even a clear resolution, and that made it all the more enjoyable. The first film that comes to mind with a similar end would have to be the surprise twist at the end of Friday the 13th, only in the Wicker Man it isn’t a surprise so much as a grim inevitability.

I honestly can’t say I have any significant complaints about the movie, which is a rare treat.

Final rating: 10/10

2. The Wicker Man (2006)

As hilarious and iconic as the 2006 version of the movie is at times, I didn’t initially see why it was so hated. That is, until I saw the 1973 version. In comparison, the 2006 version does a great disservice to a fantastic film. The idea: to modernize the setting and make the location and tone of the film more American, is an idea I can get behind. Unfortunately, they killed many of the more interesting aspects of the original film, added complete nonsense, and did the bulk of it with poor acting on the part of the two main protagonists.

The film starts completely differently. Our officer in this case is seen helping what will become the missing girl and a strange woman, on the side of the road, only to see them be killed horrifically. But then the bodies are never found, lending mystery to the whole event. We see the officer suffering from frequent psychotic breaks, a theme which is played up throughout the movie, and detracts from the clever gas-lighting of the original film. Our officer, right off the bat, is identified as an unreliable narrator, much to my disappointment. And what is the point of his bouts of psychosis? Are we meant to assume that the others are doing this to him, via some magic? Or is it just meant to add confusion to the movie? Regardless of intent, it sits awkwardly in the narrative.

The missing child in this film, we find out, is the officer’s own. The mother is the one who allegedly wrote him for help, and is his ex-fiancé. Where is the mystery in the original film, of who this girl is and who sent the letter?

The main thread of the plot isn’t the only thing that has changed. The music of the first film is entirely absent, as is the sex. The sexual aspect is one of the main themes in the original and is the thread that ties everything together, and here it’s been entirely sterilized and scrubbed out of the narrative. We don’t get to see any boys dancing the maypole outside the school. We don’t see any of the weird mystery imagery like the woman with an egg in the cemetery. And the reason our officer is a target in this film has nothing to do with his virginity. Indeed, his blood link to his daughter on the island is instead what appeals to them.

The matriarchal aspect remains prominent, but they decide that in addition to produce coming from the island, honey is another major export. Nearly everything in the film revolves around the bees, and bee metaphors. Instead of relying on pagan roots, they mostly rely on flawed bee analogies, referring to our officer as a “drone” in the end. The men on the island are silent and used only for breeding and the most menial of tasks, but it comes across as heavy handed and obvious rather than the subtle role reversal seen in the 1973 version. The only thing in the entire film that I’d say the newer version did better was the fact that in the 2006 version of the film, the island is run by a woman, versus the man in 1973. The island’s matriarch, for me, is more in keeping with the rest of their societal norms, even given the explanation for it in the original film.

One of the main themes in both movies is that of a sort of pagan religion. In the first film, however, we’re given to understand that the old religion was artificially revived by the island’s patriarch’s ancestor, in order to more easily control them. And yet it is in the original film that the religion seems more developed and real. In the newer version, by contrast, we hear from the matriarch that her ancestors always practised this religion, and escaped to the island to avoid persecution. Yet in the newer version of the film, the religion feels anemic and fake.

The film’s final scene, for me, was also lacking. The “acting” in this scene could be referred to as chewing on the scenery. The wicker man itself was less impressive visually, and auditorially as well (a lack of squawking animals, singing, the roar of flames), and the lack of religious ceremony makes the onlookers less impactful. Even the costumes are less theatrical. And rather than ending on the morbid note of the burning, the writers decided to add an epilogue. Six months later, two of the ladies from the island are back on the mainland, again using strange men for their nefarious purposes. And thus ruining the final tone of the film entirely, at least for me.

If you’re looking for a hilarious movie, you might gain some real enjoyment out of this film, especially if you get the director’s cut for the notorious bee scene. But if you are looking for a quality film, perhaps give it a miss.

Final rating? 4/10

#horror #movie #review #not the bees

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200th Review: Gremlins Series

The final film in this 2 film series will mark the 200th film I’ve reviewed on this site. And what better films to review, than the Gremlins movies which inspired the Critters films I’ve most recently reviewed? Here are the films that started it all, and I must say that one, at least, I enjoyed more than I thought I would.

1. Gremlins

The Gremlins pre-date the Critters by a good two years, so I was eager to see the origins of this type of film and creature. Our main gremlin, Gizmo, is a gentle creature purchased rather dubiously from Chinatown at the start of the film, as a Christmas present. Which I have to say is the thing I liked most about the entire movie: it’s a Christmas film. Now I have something to watch over the holidays alongside Die Hard, if I need a break from the usual fare.

A gremlin looks rather like a Furby, and just do a quick search about the connection between the two and you’ll see I’m not nearly the first person to say so. There are apparently three rules governing the creatures which are given straight away: 1) They will die if exposed to bright light, 2) They must never be allowed to touch water, and 3) They must never be fed “after midnight”, though they never do explain how long after midnight you should wait to feed them again.

The water is the first to hit sweet Gizmo, and we find out then it causes him to reproduce much like a tribble. The new gremlins aren’t like Gizmo, though. They’re a bit rude already. And after they’re fed after midnight, they go into a cocoon and come out as evil, nasty-looking creatures who wreak havoc on the unsuspecting town.

I was surprised how entertained I remained throughout the movie, even though it’s rather long and even though it’s a comedy style horror. The Christmas music at regular intervals was a nice touch, and at one point the rather E.T.-esque looking gremlin calls out “phone home” while a telephone is being used, directly calling out the previously made film of E.T.

The details of the movie, the craftsmanship of it, is fantastic. Throughout, there are movies on T.V. in the background, and they’re often directly relevant to what’s happening in the foreground and help to set the tone. The townspeople are relatable and relatively well fleshed out in spite of the short time frame the writers have to do it in. One woman in particular is the perfect combination of Scrooge and the Wicked Witch from the Wizard of Oz. And the house wife, mother of the main character, goes berserk at one point and kills several of the little demons which was simply wonderful, and gave her a new depth of character.

The first half of the film sets the framework for the second half which is basically the main characters running around trying to control the disaster. It’s a bit kitschy, maybe a bit too “funny” for my own taste, but still not bad.

The final cherry on top for me is that throughout the film, the gremlins are referred to as “mogwai”, a name given to them by the Chinese man who had Gizmo at first. After looking it up afterward, I’ve found that it is indeed a sort of demon from Chinese mythology, which gives me an even deeper appreciation for the film in that they didn’t simply make up a word for the creatures entirely.

The only negatives are fairly obvious. It’s a light-hearted movie and not a true horror, which isn’t to my taste. There’s not much real substance to the film. The special effects could maybe have been better. In the end though, a solid film.

Final rating? 7/10

2. Gremlins 2: The New Batch

Gremlins 1 was surprisingly good, but Gremlins 2 was surprisingly bad, even considering the expected lower quality of a sequel.

In the original film, the one weakest point for me were the gremlins themselves, and the section of slapstick style goofiness featuring them. Luckily for the first film, the rest of the plot, the other characters, and the general style all made up for it. There was a surprising amount of non-gremlin substance in that first film. By the second, they decided to take the weakest point of that first movie and make it the entirety of the film. Nearly two straight hours of goofy puppets getting under my skin (not to mention the fact that they made one of them talk). Brilliant.

By the second film, we’re already familiar with what the gremlins are, how they work, how the rules play out. We know the two main human characters as well as the main gremlin. Now, for novelty’s sake, we’ve moved to NYC. The story takes place in a building that is part offices, part mall, part television studio, part city developers, and even features a dentist chair at one point. I can’t make heads or tails of it.

There are a handful of new characters and a handful of old ones, as well as some big name cameos to make up for the lack of actual interest in the film, but unfortunately that gimmick has never worked. They even paid the Looney Tunes guy to come out of retirement and draw a Looney Tunes introduction, which makes no sense whatsoever for the film and is in no way related to the plot. Hulk Hogan also makes an appearance partway through to address the audience directly. Here is where the budget obviously went, as it clearly didn’t go to the writers.

In addition to the non-stop hijinks of the featured creatures, there’s a meta thread running throughout. The first film is mentioned, the fourth wall is broken on the film we’re watching as well. And none of it makes one bit of sense. It’s not even a well done meta. I got the feeling they were trying to mimic the Killer Tomatoes films in that respect, but like Critters were failing completely. They even tried to mock themselves by having the female lead relay a story about a trauma she experienced on Lincoln’s birthday, but the joke for me fell entirely flat. The Christmas theme (and related trauma) of the first film was part of what made it interesting.

In the end, our guy from the first film is able to kill off the gremlins much as he did before -- with water and electricity. Only this time, one of the gremlins has got “into the phone lines”, which is not explained and again, makes no sense. It then shoots out as aggressive electricity from a phone and kills them all.

This sequel has taken the worst part of its predecessor and made it the main event, and destroyed all of the good bits while adding more bad. I’d like to reach my 200th review on a high note, but it is what it is, I suppose.

Final rating? 2/10

#horror #movie #review #gremlins #comedy

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Critters Series

I decided to watch the Critter series before even touching the better known Gremlins for one reason only. I saw a picture of a “critter”, and because I’m a sucker for movies with puppets I couldn’t stay away.

1. Critters

The thing that stands out most about this 1986 film for me is how many other movies it reminds me of. We have the critters themselves -- little destructive furballs from outer space. The design of them seems inspired by Fizzgig from The Dark Crystal (1982), but their personalities very much resemble the tomatoes in the Killer Tomatoes (1978) series.

The alien assassins sent to eliminate the threat very much remind me of Buckaroo Banzai (1984), and their boss has come straight out of Dune (1984). The infestation itself, when at the main family’s farmhouse very much has a Night of the Living Dead (1968) vibe, though the Buckaroo Banzai aliens’ brief foray into town has hints of The Blob (1958). Note how every movie Critters that resembles came first.

One must properly calibrate their expectations of this movie. It’s not a scary horror, it’s a Killer Tomatoes style B-movie with props someone made in their parents’ basement. In that regard, the movie was fairly entertaining throughout. The set design and costuming was also wonderful. The film was made in 1986, and every detail speaks to that fact. The 1980s is encapsulated perfectly -- from the outfits, to the makeup, to the hairstyles, to the home décor -- right down to their cups. This blast from the past was probably what endeared me most to the film immediately, as I could see my own childhood in it, complete with the mother speaking to the father in the basement via floor vent.

I can’t judge it too harshly for not being scary, as it’s clearly not trying to be, but the film was still a bit lacking. What does it have to offer, exactly, that I can’t get from another movie done better? As much potential as it had, unfortunately Critters fell a bit flat. I wanted more from it, and it didn’t deliver. I didn’t hate the movie by any means, but I’m a little suspicious of the fact that they went on to make more of these.

Final rating? 6/10

2. Critters 2: Main Course

Like the previous film, this one immediately called to mind the Killer Tomatoes films, even more so than before. What had been a fantastic depiction of 1980s clothing and décor had taken a turn for the silly, as had the entire tone of the film. In addition to the amped up comedy vibe, we have more direct shots of the critters themselves, which I think is to the movie’s detriment. The entire thing had an air of trying too hard and not really delivering.

As of the last film, we learn that the family had had to move out of the town for being ostracized when they talked about the aliens. The kid of the previous movie is now a giant hormone and comes back to visit a grandmother for Easter, though we hadn’t heard anything about her previously. And in this film, we hear nothing of the boy’s parents or sister.

Charlie, the town drunk from the last film had apparently gone along with the bounty hunter aliens and become a hunter like them. He is a bit of a star in this film, and probably the one redeeming quality of the whole thing. That, and the fact that one of the bounty hunters is temporarily a playboy centerfold.

The 80s vibe is gone, and the mystique of the critters and bounty hunters is gone as well. And unfortunately, Critters 2 fails to deliver anything of value all its own. I have to say, when it wasn’t irritating me with a try-hard comedy routine, Critters 2 committed the cardinal sin of being, dare I say it, boring.

Final rating? 3/10

3. Critters 3

In Critters 3, we’re firmly into the early 90s. The clothing, much to my pleasure, reflects that fact. Gone are the overly theatrical costumes of the second film, and I’ve once again returned to the familiar. Indeed, I’m sure they featured my mother’s hutch.

The critters have returned in this film, though we’re in a different town now. Charlie is still around to help fight them, but we’re never really given an explanation as to how they got here or why any of this is happening. Unfortunately, that lack of explanation is an early sign of the pointlessness of the whole movie. The premise? Critters. Again. The solution? Running from them, fighting a bit, and very little investment in anything else. I find myself wondering how these sequels get made when they’re so painfully boring.

The highlight of the entire film for me was a young Leonardo DiCaprio. I found myself smiling often when he was on screen, thinking simply “that’s him!”, in a sea of otherwise unrecognizable actors. It didn’t hurt that he also had the best shirts.

The plot itself features an apartment complex wherein all the remaining tenants know one another on a personal level. They’re one by one being evicted from a building that is one step away from being condemned. Leo’s evil stepfather is the landlord, and Leo finds himself with conflicted feelings by the end of the movie when the asshole is dead. Neither Leo nor his mother seem overly distraught, though Leo seems to think he should be sad about it, at least.

There’s a bit of pre-teen romance floating in the air, though thankfully not the hormone sodden monstrosity of the second movie. And the cast of characters is interesting, if not entirely engaging. We also have the story of a negligent father of the two main kids, who in the end is slightly less useless much to everyone’s warm-hearted feelings. Unfortunately, I wasn’t the least bit touched.

In the end, what is there to say, really? It was another Critters movie, and like its predecessors it did a lukewarm job, failing to deliver anything unique or spectacular. And unfortunately for me, they ended the film having already set up a fourth movie with a giant “to be continued”.

Final rating? 4/10

4. Critters 4

By the time I got to the fourth and final movie of the Critters series, I was already pre-emptively cringing. The last two movies were absolutely terrible, and I had a low expectation of this one. Much to my surprise and relief, it wasn’t actually that bad. Not a ringing endorsement, I suppose, but I must say that the film at least kept me interested and engaged throughout.

The end credits scene of the previous film set up the fourth movie, and the beginning credits of this film repeated the scene for those who might have missed it or forgotten. Shortly after Charlie is instructed to place the two final critter eggs into the collection chamber, the chamber misfires and Charlie is trapped inside. The module is then lost in space, with Charlie in cryo-stasis, and our final film begins in the year 2045.

A salvage ship finds the pod, and seeing the insignia on it they contact Ug’s people. Ug himself instructs them to bring it to one of their space stations where they’ll rendezvous for retrieval.

The captain of the salvage ship is cacklingly evil. The main character of this film is another young man wearing hot pink, giving a polite nod to the original. Though the year is 2045, this kid would fit comfortably into the late 80s and early 90s of previous films. Most of the crew are misfits that don’t get along, and honestly for the purpose of this film don’t matter.

It’s not long until there’s a critter problem aboard the space station where the salvage ship is docked, and the place is abandoned and dangerous in and of itself. Most of the movie that follows very closely resembles any one of the Alien films, to my eye. Barring of course the obligatory waste receptacle scene straight out of Star Wars. Star Wars is even mentioned explicitly later on when one of the crew refers to Ug’s soldiers as storm troopers.

The saddest part of this film is the fact that not only has Charlie lost everyone and everything he’d known, but for some unknown reason Ug has become a total asshole, and Charlie is forced to shoot him to save the remaining crew.

True to form, all’s well that ends well, and Charlie pilots the ship off in a blaze of music in the final scene. Like the rest of the films in the series, there’s nothing special that stands out about the movie. But as I’ve previously stated, neither is it as bad as movies 2 and 3.

Final rating? 6/10

#horror #movie #review #critters #80s

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Ginger Snaps Series

Having watched all of the Wolfman films, I’d found myself a bit disappointed by the depiction of lycanthropy. It was meant to show the horror of the monster taking over the man, but for me it fell somewhat flat. So I was eager to try another take on this classic horror villain, in the lesser known film series of Ginger Snaps.

1) Ginger Snaps

Right away I liked the main characters of this film. We start off with two teenaged goth girls: Brigitte and Ginger. They’re sisters and they’re inseparable. Ginger is a year older, and the clear leader of the two, and Brigitte (often called B.) follows her everywhere, including agreeing to a suicide pact for when they turn sixteen. While it’s almost painfully angsty at times, it’s also refreshing to see the typical preppy lead replaced by social outcasts.

After the personality and lifestyle of the lead characters is established, the werewolf bite happens rather quickly, and the original werewolf is almost immediately killed by a car. Thus begins the process of Ginger’s transformation, as B. works to figure out what is happening to her sister. When B. figures it out, Ginger at first doesn’t take her seriously, and then doesn’t seem to care.

The transformation is subtle, and we see the close bond between sisters slowly falling apart as Ginger loses herself more and more to the monster. But is it simply the lycanthropy that’s come between them? While the transformation itself may be subtle, the allegory between lycanthropy and menses is not. From the start, we find out that both girls are late in getting their first periods, and we hear about Ginger’s back pain that might be an early sign of menstrual cramps. And after the bite? A deluge of blood dripping between her legs is the result.

Ginger and B. are staunchly opposed to growing up, and opposed to the hormone fuelled fervor of their classmates. After Ginger is turned, B. feels equally estranged from her sister by Ginger’s sudden interest in boys. Is it the lycanthropy? Or simply her womanhood? This theme of puberty also extends to the shaving of unwanted hair all over her body, and the development of additional teats on her abdomen like a wolf -- an analogy perhaps for the horror of developing breasts for the first time.

Prior to Ginger Snaps, I don’t think I’d seen a female horror villain at all, and that alone makes this movie stand out. Not only is Ginger a woman, but Ginger and B. are empowered young ladies. They have disdain for their boy-crazy peers, but neither are they masculine as we see them always in skirts and jewellery. Add to that the continual references to menses, and you have a recipe for a great feminist film that isn’t afraid to touch on taboos. Indeed, when Ginger’s sexual partner contracts lycanthropy as if it’s an STD, he too is subjected to bleeding between his legs, in his own hellish menstruation. Well done, Ginger Snaps. Well done.

While Ginger’s life spirals out of control (and she goes on several murdering sprees that are becoming increasingly difficult to cover), B. is researching a cure with her new friend Sam. As a result of the distance between she and her sister, she’s also for the first time in her life beginning to stand up for herself. We see at the start of the film that she’s reluctant to agree to Ginger’s suicide pact, and by the end of the film B. seems to want to stand up on her own. Unfortunately, Sam is her link to a future where she can have other friends and continue on, and he doesn’t make it through to the end of the film.

All humanoid characteristics are gone within Ginger, and in a final showdown B. is forced to kill her. The cure is nearby and it was so close to hand, and all around her are pictures on the wall of she and her sister, and reminders of their suicidal plans. We see B. ignore the cure and lie down on Ginger’s monstrous corpse, and I can’t help wondering what will become of B. now that she’s infected. Will she take up the cure again, now that she’s ignored it, and now that Sam is gone? Will the guilt and memories urge her to kill herself? Or will she go on as Ginger had, becoming fully monster? Perhaps the sequel will tell.

Overall, this movie was thoroughly enjoyable. It was a fresh take on an old concept, and I’ll even go so far as to say it did what Wolfman always wanted to do but couldn’t. The horror of man as monster shines through, and nothing about the characters or their culture feels stale. It’s all new. The downfall of the movie is that from a horror perspective, I still wasn’t very scared while watching it. It was entertaining, and the horror element was more existential, but it didn’t leave me afraid of things that go bump in the night.

Final rating? 8/10

2) Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed

Immediately with this movie I wanted to know what had happened to B. at the end of the first movie. Had she cured herself? Become a werewolf? What turns out to happen is that very soon after the start of this movie, she ends up in a ward for women using drugs, having been caught shooting up wolfsbane. What had been assumed to be a cure as of the last film (under very dodgy circumstances) turns out only to slow the inevitable change.

The movie is a bit Girl Interrupted as B. tries not to change into a werewolf, tries to get wolfsbane to shoot up with, tries to escape the ward she’s stuck in before it’s too late. We meet a little girl who goes by the name of Ghost who clearly has some sort of mental instability that is hinted about throughout the film, but we don’t understand the full extent of until the end.

Throughout the film, there’s the addition of a fully turned werewolf trying to get to B., as she tries to dodge it before it’s too late. I found myself wondering who this werewolf was. Ginger is dead (though B. hallucinates her at times), and Ginger’s sire was killed as well. It turns out that this is a totally different werewolf who has caught B.’s scent, and wants to mate with her. B.’s denial of all things womanhood extends to this film as her psychiatrists wonder whether or not she’s a lesbian, and she denies the sexual advances of a boy named Tyler, as well as fighting the rogue werewolf that wants her as mate.

In the second film, as with the first, I didn’t find myself truly afraid of the werewolves -- neither the rogue werewolf, nor Brigitte. It was interesting and well enough written (high praise for a sequel, really), and I found myself rooting for Brigitte and wanting to see her succeed. The creepiest element by far was Ghost, and trying to figure out what her real deal was. Unfortunately for Brigitte, she turned out to be the real horror.

The ending was surprisingly dark, and as with the first film this one left us with an unexpected downer. Unfortunately, that narrative device wasn’t as satisfying the second time around, and now that there are no further sequels I just find myself worried about Brigitte’s fate. I guess all’s not well and I just need to let her go as a lost cause. I suppose that with this version of lycanthropy, she never really had a chance.

Final rating? 6/10

3) Prequel: Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning

This is the prequel to the Ginger Snaps series. I had imagined that it was about the sire that had bitten Ginger, but I was gravely mistaken. It is about some other random werewolves in the 1800s, in early America. Only for some reason, Brigitte and Ginger are back then, but are also different people. And it is back in time that they receive their iconic bone necklaces. None of it makes sense, it is never explained, and I hate it.

In addition to the time warp, some of the main characters are Native Americans. I was immediately wary, and unfortunately for good reason. We have references to Native American “prophecies” of various sorts. There is also mention of wendigos being originally from England and France (not true at all) and it’s never explained how they relate to werewolves. Also, Ginger and Brigitte are part of some prophecy, or something, and the natives here have visions and dreams of the future. It’s a hot mess.

The badassery of the original film is almost entirely absent in this one. There was one great moment where the sisters worked together to get a man’s gun from him and pointed on him, but after that? They were both pretty much useless women for most of the film. No gothic rebel attitude. No feminist strength. No menstruation metaphors. Why even make this movie?

The movie is also done in a more of a traditional horror style. That could be an interesting approach, except that it’s lost all of its pizazz. It’s painfully boring, and the irreverence and entertainment factor of the original are gone. The one weakness of the original films was that they weren’t really scary, as such, and doing this third film in a traditional style could have gone a long way to fix that. Unfortunately, the only thing it does is leave the whole thing anemic.

Throughout the film and the girls’ slow, tedious struggles, there was an implication that old timey Brigitte would kill old timey Ginger, just like in the original film, and give everything some sort of symmetry or foreshadowing. In the end, we instead have a twist ending where they run off together, and Brigitte doesn’t break her pact with Ginger. There’s no betrayal. There’s no sister death. Even the ending was a huge let down, killing the great reveal of the first film. They ruined the last opportunity of eliciting from the viewer some emotional response.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am still disappointed. This movie is a tragedy, and not in the theatrical sense.

Final rating? 3/10

#horror #movie #review #ginger snaps #werewolves #menstruation

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horrorhousereview · 7 years

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Trick ‘r Treat

It’s been quite a while since I’ve updated this blog, and I thought I’d kick things off with something different. Trick ‘r Treat is a sort of anthology of horror stories that all relate to one another in the end, and I can honestly say that thus far I’ve not seen anything like it.

The stories take place on Halloween night, which is a classic setting. The party atmosphere reminds me of any number of slasher films, but the scenes with children would have lent it a children’s movie vibe if not for the violence involved.

The horror villain in this movie is a little scarecrow creature named Sam who never speaks and is never explained. He clearly has some relationship to the spirit of Halloween, but what that exact relationship is is never defined. It doesn’t approve of those who dislike Halloween, and pumpkins seem to serve as some sort of protection -- except when they don’t.

Throughout the movie, I found myself trying to put all of the pieces together. Much like in the Ju-on movies, the scenes are out of order and intermingled, and the viewer doesn’t see the relationship between them until the very end. So it certainly kept my attention. Throughout, I also found myself speculating on the purpose of Sam and his relationship to events.

I’ll also give props to the fact that several times throughout the film I did find myself surprised. That’s really saying something, because so much of the movie relies on familiar tropes and feels rather predictable. The surprise twists are what keep the movie fresh and interesting.

The weakest part of the movie is what is left unexplained about the universe in which it takes place. Crazy things are happening all around, and we never find out the motivations why, or the mechanisms for the supernatural. We never find out the rules of the universe or the moral of the story, if there is one. And underpinning all of this is the fact that the general population seems so unsuspecting, so one can assume these things don’t happen all the time, and aren’t well known. Yet they’re happening across town in this movie, and those participating in certain events act as if said events are routine for them. How are their nefarious activities kept hidden? There are no answers.

And though the movie contains recognizable horror tropes, at no point did I feel afraid watching it. I’m left with a certain unease about Sam -- how do I avoid him in the future? What are the rules for placating this thing? But at the same time, I don’t truly fear him. I’m not going to find myself looking under the bed tonight, or jumping at strange sounds. And I remain uncertain whether I think that the costuming for Sam was done well after the point when his scarecrow hood comes off.

The most striking feature of the movie, in the end, is the fact that I cannot think of a single horror film to directly compare it to. Nothing at all comes to mind. And in a day and age where seemingly everything horror that can be done has been done, that’s impressive. Trick ‘r Treat introduced another style of what a horror movie could be, all the while maintaining many of our favourite tropes from the genre. For that reason alone, it’s worth a watch.

Final rating? 7/10

#horror #movie #review #halloween

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horrorhousereview · 8 years

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Texas Chain Saw Massacre Franchise

The original Texas Chain Saw Massacre is an iconic film that went on to inspire many horror movies that followed. After seeing it, I can understand why. Even now, many aspects of it remain unique within the horror genre. But like any franchise, this one has possibly more bad movies than good. Here, I journey through every last one of them, and find out what writers and fans have considered to be the most essential aspects of the films for years.

1. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

I wasn't sure what to expect when I took my first look at the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I suppose, knowing that the villain is called “Leatherface”, I was expecting it to have the same tone as Friday the 13th and Halloween. And when there was a spoken introduction about “these events” etc., I thought maybe it would take the form of a documentary. What I found was instead something that reminded me very much of Jeepers Creepers, which must have drawn inspiration from it, as well as The Hills Have Eyes. Now, having seen it, I understand how and why it was foundational to so much horror to come after.

The film begins with a group of friends heading into a rural area to visit the one wheelchair-bound guy's family's property -- an abandoned house of some sort. The reason for coming out to the boonies at all is because recently it has been in the news that someone has been digging up graves in the local cemetery, and this guy wants to know whether his grandfather's grave has been disturbed -- though it seems okay, once they arrive. Still, the subtle use of the radio reports and the scene of corpses out on a sunny day were fantastic and got me invested right off the bat.

While on the road, they stop to pick up a hitch-hiker who is super weird and creepy. His speech and mannerisms were off, he cut himself in plain view of everyone, his photo collection was unnerving, and he took a picture of someone and set fire to it in the van. These were the least of their problems, because he actually then cut the one guy with his straight razor and had to be physically ejected from the car. Understandably, the guy was unnerved about the crazy dude for quite a while afterwards, wondering if the guy was going to come after him or something.

They stop at a gas station and fail to get some gas, instead stopping only for barbecue, and finally make their way to the abandoned house. Two of the group break off right away to find a swimming hole down the path. When they fail to return around sunset, another of the group breaks off to look for them. What he doesn't know is that in the meantime they've already found a creepy house and met their demise.

Having heard a generator in the distance, the couple had gone to the house to ask if they could have some gasoline. Instead, they found a house of horrors with bones, skin, and bits of corpses from animals and humans alike inside. A man with a skin-mask, Leatherface, wasted no time in killing either of them -- one after another as they came inside. I was impressed by just how horrific they made the house, and a bit stunned by how quickly the killer took them down. It was the same for the searching friend as well.

The wheelchair guy and a girl were all that were left. Their friend had taken the keys, and so with a lack of better options they set off in the dark with a single flashlight and no weapons to try and find their friends. When the wheelchair guy met his end I was actually legitimately startled, jumping in my seat at how quickly Leatherface made his appearance on screen. That's tricky to do, considering I was already anticipating him the whole time.

The girl made a valiant run for it -- although now marked the beginning of an unending scream scene that would last the rest of the film.

She finally escapes Leatherface into the gas station from earlier in the film, and it almost looked like the man was about to help her for about two seconds, before he got out a rope and a sack. It turns out he's been in on it all along, and he threw her into his truck to deliver him back to the house of horrors. The barbecue he'd been selling was clearly made of human flesh.

The creepy hitch-hiker from earlier in the film also made his appearance, having also been involved the whole time. He got a quick chastisement for digging around the cemetery again -- and so we know what'd been happening at the start of the film.

Leatherface and hitch-hiker were the killers in the family -- the gas station attendant was only the chef. With the girl now secured, I'm not sure why they deferred in killing her when they'd done away with the others so quickly. But they proceeded to bring down “Grandfather” from upstairs, and it seemed to me at first that he was a corpse, but when presented with one of the girl's bleeding fingers he sucked on it for real. I have no idea what this guy was meant to be or why he looked the way he did, and it was never explained. Is there something supernatural in addition to everything else? Or is there some other explanation for his looks?

Finally, they try to allow the grandfather to kill the girl, and as he's incapable of even holding the proffered hammer, Leatherface is trying to guide him to it. The girl escapes again somehow, and flags down a semi-truck while she's being chased by Leatherface with his chainsaw, and the hitch-hiker as well. The hitch-hiker was hit by the truck and I suppose that crashed the truck, making it unable to be driven for some reason, because the driver and the girl don't escape with it.

Then she flags down a pick-up truck and actually does make an escape in it, still screaming all the while. And our final shot is of Leatherface spinning around in the street with his chainsaw. What a weird ending. I have no idea what to make of it, no idea whether I liked how it ended or not. But overall, I think that the rest of the movie easily holds up to whatever weirdness the ending provided.

Final rating? 9/10

2. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

While the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the better horror films I've seen, its direct sequel is one of the absolute worst.

We start this film much the same as the last, with a voice-over. It informs us that although the one woman escaped at the end of the last film, she told her story and then slipped into catatonia. They spent a good while looking for this alleged house and killers, and never found a thing. So that's kind of interesting.

Then we launch right into the movie. We have to troublemakers calling in to harass a radio show from their car phone, and we get to see their demise at the hands of Leatherface riding atop another vehicle. The whole thing has a completely different tone than the original -- much more of a slasher flick, but even more than that, it's a wacky comedy, with party music and wild gesticulations and exclamations.

Continuing on this theme, the chef from the previous movie is now a local chilli contest winner, and the secret ingredient is obviously people. We find out that the government is in on the killings and trying to help hide them, but we never do find out why. But there is one local sheriff who wants to find the killers once and for all. He teams up with the spunky radio host lady who has a tape of the murders from the start of the film.

The mentally challenged hitch-hiker guy from the first film is in this one too. Apparently the truck hitting him didn't kill him, and he has a metal plate in his head. He also has a distinctly corpse-like appearance, much like Grandpa, and we still get no real explanation for this look. It's just one more disappointment to add to the list. There was so much they could have done with this film, and instead... ugh.

Leatherface and the guy with the head plate attack the radio host and kill the assistant DJ. They don't want anyone left who knows about the murder, which really makes no sense, because the tape has already been played on live radio. “Stretch”, the radio host, escapes because she somehow befriends Leatherface, which was probably the most gutting part of the whole film. He's supposed to be a cold-blooded killer, and he gave me chills in the first film with how unstoppable he was, how relentlessly sociopathic, much like Michael Myers would become in Halloween. Instead we have some sort of gentle giant thing going on now.

Stretch follows them to their secret lair with sheriff Lefty in tow. (Those are seriously the names they go by. And while on the topic of names, Leatherface is actually called Leatherface multiple times, which absolutely ruins the nickname for me.) Stretch falls into a tunnel into the vast underground secret lair, and Lefty goes on some crazy spree to destroy the house by chainsawing all of the support pillars, while screaming “Bring it all down!”.

Unlike the original, not a single creepy or fear inducing thing happened the entire time. While Stretch made her comical attempts at escape, and Lefty continued to lose his mind, we got to see a good deal of gore and body horror inflicted on the apparently still living DJ they'd brought along. This is in direct contrast to one of the things the original film was lauded for -- it was horrifying while being virtually bloodless.

Stretch is captured, Leatherface still refuses to kill her, and then the grandpa scene from the first film is almost completely re-enacted, just to ruin everything for us, I guess. Lefty and Leatherface begin duelling with chainsaws as if they're swords. Grandpa is nothing like his original namesake, but instead is more lively and animated. Finally, Stretch “escapes”, and finds “grandma” in some weird tower above ground while plate-head follows her. Then I guess she accidentally finished off the grandma corpse thing. Where did this grandmother come from? There was no mention of her originally. And how did the family move all of their corpses and bones and things so quickly? Where did they find this lair?

Nothing about the ending is of note or matters. Our final shot is of Stretch spinning around with a chainsaw in the same manner Leatherface did in the original movie, and I have no idea what that is supposed to mean.

Final rating? 2/10

3. Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990)

I'd been warned that the third film would be even worse than the second, but I don't personally think that's the case at all. It was a distinct improvement over the second -- not that that's difficult to achieve. This film does choose to ignore the second film entirely, and considering how much I disliked it, I'm not sure that was a bad decision at all. Let's all just ignore that the second movie ever happened and continue.

We find out right away that Leatherface is probably still out there, but the authorities were convinced when they found one guy that he was the one responsible and the case was closed. We also find out about a recently discovered mass grave of victims. At the start, we're also introduced to an ex-couple who are still sort of friends who are driving from California to Florida via Texas, where the girl will drop off the car and leave for Europe. They get stuck in the middle of all of this.

At the last gas station for miles, the couple meet the crazy guy with a camera from the first film, and I think that they did a really good job re-imagining him. There's also a good-looking traveller called Tex that tries to hitch a ride with them, then tells the boyfriend about a faster route than the one he'd been planning to take. Finally, we see the crazy guy going crazy and coming after them with a gun while Tex fends him off. Tex goes down, apparently shot, while the couple speed away in a panic. They decide to take Tex's nearby recommended route. Ingeniously, this entire scuffle was a staged ploy between Tex and the camera guy in order to isolate the couple on a back road -- a ploy that they seem to pull off regularly.

The couple are first run down by a truck, and when they manage to escape that somehow and get on their way again, they later spot Tex in the middle of the road and swerve to miss him, nearly hitting a Jeep instead, and flipping their car. Next they meet the Jeep guy, a survivalist named Benny, who at first doesn't believe them about them allegedly being hunted, but comes around and tries to protect them. Before long, he's tied up in it too,as the truck guy tries to kill him as well.

It's in the woods during Benny's attempt at escape that he meets some swamp girl who goes on about how she and her sisters were stranded there a week ago and they'd all died, having been hunted and killed. She doesn't last long in this film, and neither does the main boyfriend. By this point I'm rooting equally for the main girl and for Benny.

The girl escapes to a house in the woods which as luck would have it is of course the home of her hunters. There she meets a little girl (amid a room of creepy bones), and the girl attacks her as well. I'm not sure why they decided to add an evil child to this film, but I found it a bit unnecessary. And in that vein, there were a few pointless additional members of the family in this film. At least one extra man, plus a wheelchair-bound mother. The “grandpa” is also there, but in this movie he appears to be nothing more than a corpse, and never gives us reason to think he's anything else. I'm not really sure what I think of that particular decision. The grandpa character didn't really make any sense in the original, but then again it opened the door to the possibility that something supernatural might have been involved in the universe instead of just crazy people. I have mixed feelings about the decision to just leave that weirdness out.

Toward the end, Benny appeared to die in the swamp, and the girl fought ferociously for her own survival, bashing Leatherface's head in with a rock. It was extra badass because we saw at the start of the film she'd hit an armadillo in the road and found it still alive but suffering -- and was unable to bring herself to finish it off with a rock, leaving the task to her partner. Now she's able to bash in a human's skull for her survival. The film had a definite slasher vibe, but also harked back to the Hills Have Eyes sort of vibe from the original, even more so here as she rose above, stronger than before.

Finally, we find that Benny had somehow survived his attack and came to pick her up along the side of the road the next day with a stolen truck. One more final struggle against one of their attackers and the two made off to escape. Leatherface's legs are seen in the final shot, and then blackness and the sounds of a chainsaw assure us that in spite of his apparent demise in the swamp, he's still out there. I thought it was a nice touch to keep him mysteriously still alive, and to choose not to end with the weird spinning and chainsaw wielding of the original film.

Overall, I think that this film was much more like the original than the second film was -- at the very least, it's not a comedy, though it did have a bit more of a slasher vibe than the slower, subtler original. It gave me some more of what I wanted to see, and though it was a bit bland at points, it never offended, and it seemed to try and remedy some of the weird decisions of the first. Though I'm still not sure about the decision to complicate matters by adding so many more characters to the family. All in all, a solid film.

Final rating? 6/10

4. Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation (1994)

This movie begins as all the rest -- with a spoken introduction. In it, all three of the previous movies are briefly referenced -- that this thing began in 1973, and that there had been two incidents since. I think it's a mistake to try and convince the audience right off the bat that these almost unrelated films were all part of the same universe, and I think that the shaky intro. was a sign of things to come.

The movie starts out as a kind of low budget slasher flick. There are a bunch of high schoolers (who aren't acted very well) and there's even a flash of breasts at one point in the movie. There's talk of sex and drugs, and we have four teenagers in a car leaving their prom and getting in a wreck in the woods. So far, so good. It's not a masterpiece by any stretch, but I was on board for that kind of movie.

Three of the teens go for help on foot while one stays behind with the other accident victim. Right away, these two meet with one of the villains from the last film. For the most part (but not entirely) we have the same cast as the previous film, never mind who died or went missing by the end of it. We're just going to ignore that entirely. And while I'm on the subject of the characters -- what happened to the mother? There's no mention of her. And there's no mention of the little girl. But the expanded cast of brothers is left intact.

Regardless, the two teens who'd stayed in the woods died in short order. The other three found some sort of office building with a kooky woman inside who allegedly called for the police or something. But instead of staying there to wait, for reasons unknown, the kids left to try and walk home... or find a ride... or something. The couple get separated from the awkward girl when they try to run after a truck, demanding a ride. Now everyone is spread out in the woods.

Following a typical horror movie plot (and films 1 and 3 of this series) the couple stumble upon the house of murderers all on their own. The girl is captured while her partner is killed. There's really no reason to go into details, except to say that I was a little surprised that Leatherface didn't use his chainsaw yet. I was also surprised and a little dismayed that he was dressed as a woman for this film, and I can only suppose that it was a blatant ripoff of Silence of the Lambs. Whoever is trying to keep this series going at this point obviously has no idea what is unique or good about it, and this kind of thing is the result.

Now that there's pretty much just the one woman left, it's obvious who the protagonist of the movie is -- though that was pretty obvious throughout. First she's picked up by one of the killers and receives a bunch of cryptic messages from him. She runs away, he chases, it's not really clear to me at all what's going on or what his messages mean. Then she's being chased by Leatherface in the woods with a chainsaw, and escapes to the office from before, asking help from the weird lady. She turns out to be in on the whole thing, much like the chef from the original film, and captures her. No idea why all these steps took place.

At the house, the woman tries to escape ineffectually several times, and the crazy lady tells her the members of the family are part of a larger conspiracy to make people disappear... or something? Our protagonist doesn't believe it, and almost grows enough of a backbone to escape, but of course fails. We also have the traditional dinner-time tableau from films 1 and 3, again with Grandpa, and this time he's portrayed as alive again, reaching for pizza all on his own. Strangely, pizza seems to be the only food eaten in the film at all, and there's no mention made of eating people whatsoever. It's just another weird decision on top of weird decisions throughout this sequel.

The ending is perhaps the most perplexing thing of all. Weird government guys show up and chastise the family for not doing their job and showing this woman horror. The prom queen character who has been mostly incapacitated for the film is finally killed, but the killer starts cutting himself in response as if in grief, which makes even less sense. There's a final chase in the daylight much like in the first movie, and the woman escapes finally... into a car with the weird government guy, leaving Leatherface behind to spin iconically with his chainsaw.

The government guy makes some sort of apology and says this was supposed to have been a spiritual experience, and then the woman is dropped off at a police office, and there's some weird final shot of her looking into the eyes of a woman on a stretcher (that I don't recognize at all) like it means something. What? This is the end? What can I possibly take from this?

This film is a confusing mess that not only doesn't hold together as a cohesive plot, but makes strange choices over what to keep and what to discard from previous films in the series.

Final rating? 4/10

5. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003, remake of 1974)

The remake of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre is fairly different from the original, but I'm not mad at it. In fact, I'm surprised at how good it is.

Early on, five friends are driving through the countryside. The reason is changed to them returning from a trip to Mexico, and the wheelchair bound friend is changed to a nerdy friend instead. The lot of them are into sex and drugs which makes them a little more insufferable but always seems to be in vogue for horror movies, and the main character, a girl named Erin, is the oldest sister from Seventh Heaven.

Right away, they pick up a hitch-hiker, but this isn't some creepy dude. Instead it's a traumatized woman, who soon kills herself. The group is severely shaken, and they stop at a gas station to have them phone for the police. Instead of the sheriff meeting them there, they're asked quite suspiciously to meet him at an old mill, and having no other course of action, they do so.

When they don't see the sheriff there, a creepy little boy tells them he's at some nearby house and two of them set off on foot to find him. As expected, one was lured away and diverted (Erin), while the boyfriend was killed quite suddenly and violently. In this respect, it followed the spirit of the original quite closely.

The sheriff wasn't at the house, of course, but Erin was permitted to make a call (though the home-owner suspiciously dialled for her).

Meanwhile, back at the van, the “sheriff” did show up, and took away the body and the gun. When Erin showed up later and her boyfriend was still missing, the group set off to find him, and instead found a junk yard that included human teeth. In one of the abandoned cars was a creepy photo of the dead girl and her family. Now things were officially weird, and no one wanted to die. Two waited behind, while Erin and guy #2 set off to find the missing friend.

Guy #2 succumbed, as expected, and Leatherface was finally using his chainsaw. It was about this point that the gore really began in earnest, and I did find this movie to be difficult to watch. One of the things the original was lauded for was its eschewing of gore while still managing to invoke the associated horror. This film goes in the other direction, and doesn't skimp on gore at all. A respectable enough decision, I suppose, but cringe-invoking.

The “sheriff” made yet another return, just as a screaming Erin tried desperately to start the van and effect their escape, having seen Guy #2's death and Leatherface's new face of her boyfriend. Now the sheriff got extra creepy in more ways than I have time to describe, but suffice to say he took nerdy guy with him in the end.

The useless girl died to Leatherface, and Erin made a final attempt at escape alone. This time, she sought help at a trailer where she discovered they were keeping a baby -- that had been in the family photo of the dead girl. The trailer folk were in on it too, and Erin was captured. Back at the house, we only really had a brief view of the mother of this dysfunctional family, and I think that her performance was truly chilling. The whole family dynamic seemed so real, cruel, and disturbing. This sort of thing is what I believe is at the heart of the success of the original film.

Down in the basement, Guy #2 was still alive but barely, and Erin was forced to mercy kill him. With an injured nerdy guy, she made yet another desperate escape. There was a long chase scene during which Erin utterly failed to pick up the chainsaw during her only chance, and we lost nerdy guy. Finally she lost Leatherface and escaped to a truck... which tried to stop at the gas station, where the evil folk all continued to wait.

Erin flipped out, tried not to let the truck driver stop, but he wasn't about to deal with a crazy person. Satisfyingly, though, she managed to hot wire the “sheriff's” car and steal the stolen baby, making a final successful getaway, with the iconically spinning Leatherface in the background. The movie ending was rounded out by more found footage and voice over, tying it in to the traditionally voiced over intro.

I thought this film was absolutely brilliant. They made a good deal of changes from the original, yet kept the spirit of it alive. It is one of the rare remakes worth seeing, if you can handle the gore.

Final rating? 8/10

6. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006 prequel to 2003 film)

This movie was a prequel to the previous one, and overall I was impressed with the fact that it was fairly consistent and answered some questions left in the previous film. Leatherface was apparently birthed in the meat processing plant and abandoned in a dumpster due to his deformity -- where he was found later and adopted by his current weird family.

He grew up and came to work at said meat plant, which was then closed for health violations. There is no mention of the switch to more humane style of killing the cattle that was explained in the original film, but there was no mention of that fact in the remake either (which this prequel goes along with) so I guess I can't complain.

As in the previous film, there is a decent amount of gore which I have little stomach for, but it also still got the tone mostly correct for this series. It was dark, and I was on edge through most of it, unnerved by what was on screen.

The main victims in this film were two men and two women -- one of the men (who were brothers) was trying to dodge the draft to the Vietnam war. This sets the film in the 70s, consistent with the original timeline, but for reasons I couldn't put my finger on it didn't have a 70s vibe. There was no décor or costuming that couldn't have been in the 1970s, and yet I felt like I was more likely to be in the 90s. If it weren't for talk of the Vietnam war, I wouldn't have remembered that this was the beginning at all.

The sheriff's involvement in the last film was explained here, as the last sheriff in town was killed by one of the family and his identity assumed, so that was a nice answer to one of my questions. His sheriff persona is what allowed him the easy capture of our victims in this film as well.

The blond guy was busy being tortured, the brunet guy was tied up, and the blonde girl was tied up inside being treated like a living doll. All in all a pretty standard Texas Chainsaw movie. These movies, I've come to realize, are a series of convoluted and unnecessary torture and chase scenes, and this was no exception. The brunette girl, meanwhile, had escaped notice.

We did have the brunette girl try to enlist the help of a biker guy, but he was offed pretty quickly. Shortly after, we lost the brunet guy, which was a shame because he had military experience and I'd really been hoping that he would be the one to escape if anyone could. My next hope was for the brunette girl -- and she almost made her escape, but decided to hang back and try to save her remaining friends.

In addition to the typical gratuitous violence against the victims, the family's leader shows his sociopathy when in order to take care of Uncle Monty's injured leg, he instructs Leatherface to cut it off with the chainsaw, and then to lop off the other just for good measure. It was pretty disturbing, and even the mother who'd seemed to be going along with the new program with a certain nonchalance seemed upset by the action. One can only wonder how the family reconciled the violence and went along with it in full by the next film.

The blonde girl probably had the worst of it of the whole lot. There was implied rape, as well as her mouth shown to have all its teeth removed. It was a bit of a relief when she had her throat slit at the table during the iconic family dining scene. Enough was enough, I guess, and the brunette girl made a final dash for escape. During her absence, the blond guy finally woke up and made his own efforts at escape.

I have a minor bone to pick about when the brunette is being chased in the meat processing plant. She hides herself in a vat of blood, and the blood is still really liquidy. Just when did this plant shut down? I would have thought at least a little bit of time had passed between Leatherface's first kill and the attack on these four victims, but maybe not. Blood congeals fairly quickly as far as my limited interaction with it goes, so I'm left wondering if this was an oversight or if it took place something like a day after the initial kill.

What perhaps surprised me the most out of the whole thing was the fact that there were no survivors in this movie. Every last victim was killed in the end. I suppose it makes sense, because the escaped victims from later films were supposed to have been noteworthy. But still, with so many nods to iconic scenes throughout the film, it was a little surprising to see this key departure. No spinning Leatherface, and no final escape for anyone.

Overall, it wasn't as bad as I was expecting for a film this late in a series. Was it totally consistent with the previous film? I don't think so, but it really wasn't the worst I've seen by any means. It was decent and it was mostly what I'd expect from a Texas Chainsaw movie, but I was getting a little bored of it by this point. It's a difficult balance between doing what the audience has come to want, while giving something new and interesting to the series.

Final rating? 6/10

7. Texas Chainsaw 3D (2013)

Texas Chainsaw, now in Three-Dee!! Whoa!

For obvious reasons, I didn't have very high hopes for this last film of the series. I was a bit surprised that it wasn't entirely terrible, but I do have a number of issues with the film.

The film's intro. credits began with clips from the very original 1974 movie. Right away I was pretty excited, because after so many twists and turns and missteps, I was eager to get back to something familiar. As the story began in full, however, I saw an entirely new cast of family members, again. I'm really not sure at this point whether any two movies in the entire franchise had the same set of family in them, and I'm far beyond trying to actually figure it out.

This film, it turns out, ret-cons the entire rest of all the series, and is a sort of alternate timeline after the first film. The woman got away and called the cops, and the local sheriff showed up right away to demand they send out Leatherface. Inside, the house is packed with family members, and they're about to actually send out Leatherface for his arrest when a group of rednecks, led by the local mayor, show up and open fire, throwing Molotov cocktails at the building and setting it ablaze. A shoot-out ensues from both sides, and the entire family dies, save for Leatherface of course who somehow makes his escape. (Leatherface at the start of this film is the incarnation with clown makeup and women's clothing, by the way.) During the entirety of this, the sheriff was unable to regain control of the situation.

Some hick finds one of the family members with a baby in the wreckage. He takes the baby and kills the mother, then lets his barren wife raise the child as his own. This film is about that baby, Heather, when she is an adult.

Heather finds out that she's adopted when she's contacted with her grandmother's inheritance. She and her friends go to Texas to find a mansion left to her. There's some foreshadowing right away in that the girl makes bone art, so I figure the movie is saying something about crazy running in her genes.

Along the way, the friends pick up a hitch hiker. They leave him at the mansion while getting some supplies, he ransacks the place, and he finds Leatherface locked in the basement and dies. That's basically how Leatherface escapes back into society after so long. This movie is like every other one in the franchise -- a series of chases and deaths.

After a series of chases and deaths, Heather manages to find out about the history of her family being killed and the town's dirty little secret. The mayor and the sheriff are still arguing about how to handle this newest incident, and the rogue mayor wants to kill Heather because she's a Sawyer and therefore evil, or something. Because he and his goons kidnap and try to kill her, she ends up siding with Leatherface in the end, which was kind of predictable. This film also casts Leatherface as not necessarily evil outright. A lot of the other movies in the franchise have done this as well, and so I don't think it's entirely unprecedented. Many times he's depicted as being abused by the rest of his crazy family, and killing because of orders given to him combined with his mental retardation. This film takes it a step further, and actually managed to make me feel bad for him at one point, which was very strange. I'm not sure that I liked this angle as much, and I'm not sure it's in keeping with the hair-raising original film that this one borrowed clips from in its intro.

Overall, the film isn't too gruesome compared to some of the others, but they couldn't leave it go entirely and included an entirely unnecessary body horror scene of Leatherface sewing his new skin face directly into his actual face. The only plus side is that for most of the film he doesn't continue on with his clown face and women's clothing that was a serious misstep in the series, and shouldn't have been mentioned here at all.

We do have a lot of classic chainsaws, attacks, and chase scenes -- complete with a car that wouldn't start. We have our classic road trip, and a girl stuck in a freezer. But we didn't have the classic dinner, the introductory voice-over, the gaggle of relatives, the spinning chainsaw scene in the end, or even much by way of cannibalism actually. It was shown, but only so briefly that it was barely a plot point.

Heather, it turns out, has a birthmark that's actually a brand of the letter S, the same S on necklaces all of the Sawyer women wear. So once Leatherface knows Heather is family, they team up and kill the mayor and his friends. The sheriff inexplicably decides to let them go, and Heather decides to continue on the Sawyer family tradition of locking (a willing) Leatherface in the basement and taking care of him and the mansion. All's well that ends well?

In the end, this wasn't a film that I'd describe as good, but after some of the other train wrecks in the series I can't be entirely mad at it. I think I'm just a bit disappointed. There were a lot of plot holes in this for me, and a lot of it just didn't manage to convince me that the decisions characters made (or the decisions the writers made) made sense.

Final rating? 5/10

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horrorhousereview · 8 years

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Children of the Corn Franchise

The Children of the Corn series was something I've been wanting to review since the earliest days of my blog. The setting of corn fields is inherently appealing to me, having grown up in close proximity to the fields. For me, this was prime horror movie territory. I even began working on reviewing these films early on, slowly finding one movie after another, watching it, and keeping track of my review for it. Unfortunately, this series proved extremely difficult to get a hold of most of the films. Fortunately, I am tenacious, and now I can finally post my review in full!

1. Disciples of the Crow (1983)

Most people think of the 1984 movie Children of the Corn as the original, first movie of the franchise. However, even before that there was a 1983 short entitled Disciples of the Crow, based on Stephen King's Children of the Corn short story. In it, we're introduced to all of the things we will come to love about the 1984 film, as this short is later expanded into the full length film we're most familiar with. We see the strange cult, the creepy children, the fateful car accident bringing regular folks into this place. Disciples of the Crow isn't as developed as the later movie will be, but it's intriguing and a great way to get excited about the coming films.

Final rating? 8/10

2. Children of the Corn (1984)

Here is the original movie (not counting the short) that everyone is most familiar with. I'm not sure what I was expecting when I first saw it -- something Deliverance-esque, I guess. What I got was a fairly unique film with great music and even some things that surprised me along the way.

We see right off that all the children in this backwater town in Nebraska go completely nuts and kill all of the adults. They're pretty creepy looking and acting, so if you like creepy children movies, right away this is one you want to check out.

As we continue to move forward in the movie, we see that the kids are a weird combination of hyper-conservative Christian and some folksy mountain paganism, all combined into a death/corn cult. The leader Isaac commands all the strange little rituals, rules, and sacrifices that they perform, and claims to have a direct connection to their god-figure, He Who Walks Behind the Rows. His right hand man Malachi is the brute strength and sociopathy needed to thoroughly control the herd, and eventually Malachi's thirst for blood gets out of control as he even overpowers Isaac toward the end.

Not all of the children are content with Isaac's death cult, however, and some try to escape. One little boy has almost made it to the road when Malachi catches him and slits his throat. Staggering to the street in his last moments, a car hits him. The car is driven by a doctor and his girlfriend, on their way to Seattle where he plans to start his private practice. At first they're horrified at having hit the little boy, and the doctor only becomes more concerned when he realizes the kid was already dead and something around here is very wrong.

Determined to take the body to the next major town (at the gas station attendant's advice), 20 miles away, he drives forward only to find that the children mysteriously mess with the signs again and again, driving him in circles. He gives in to the logic of going to the closer, smaller town only 5 miles away. The town inhabited by the children of the corn, whose leader has deemed that the “outlanders” should die.

It is here our adults meet the two adorable, not-crazy children of Job and Sarah. We know right from the start that there's something more to this universe than simply crazy children, as Sarah has the gift of sight, and draws scenes of what's to come with her crayons. It is these two who continue to help our adults escape.

What really threw me for a loop was toward the end, when Malachi offers Isaac up as a sacrifice, and there's actually a demon. What?! I really had thought until now that the kids were all just crazy. But there is in fact a demon. The depiction of it is a little bit silly -- some sort of blurry, light and dark mishmash of static, but it is meant to give the impression that the demon is not of this world and cannot be accurately depicted. It's not nearly as scary as the children, to be honest, but it was an exciting revelation as now all of their deeds have a tangible cause. In a last ditch effort to stave off an end-of-days style destruction of the town and its inhabitants, Job and the doctor work together to burn the corn fields and the demon to death.

All's well that ends well, I guess, as the two adults and two decent children make off on foot for the 20-mile-away town, their car having been destroyed by the children some time ago. The evil seems defeated, all the main characters appear to be safe, and one wonders if the doctor will even get over his commitment issues with his girlfriend as he agrees to keep the children for at least a month. Maybe it's not the most legal course of action but whatever, they survived a demon together.

What I liked most about the movie was the unique angle, the attention to detail when it came to the cult, the thematic music, and the setting. Where the movie was a little lacking was in hindsight, the general amount of time it took to get from A to B. A lot of little things happen, but in the end it's not that complex. The bad guys wanted to sacrifice these people for some reason, and the people got away. Fairly straight forward, in that regard. That said:

Final rating? 7/10

3. Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice (1993)

Our third film in a series of ten (if we count Disciples of the Crow as the first film) is conveniently named “final”, which means we can safely ignore the rest of the series. Right? After the way this film played out, I am tempted to do just that.

We start off this movie back in the town of Gatlin, where the cops and investigators have descended, finally discovering and taking care of all the dead bodies, and redistributing the creepy children to foster homes in the next town over (a town that is essentially a carbon copy of Gatlin). Apparently the family from the last film had in fact gone to the authorities, as expected, though we don't hear about them in this movie at all other than that fact.

Isaac, of course, is dead, and Malachi is no longer the iconic red-head we'd come to love, but I suppose that if they couldn't get the same actor they did as best they could with someone who looked slightly similar. Still kind of a disappointment, though. And as for Isaac, the charismatic cult leader? He's replaced early on by Micah, who acts in the exact same manner, but this is explained by him becoming possessed by the demon creature from the first film, who still lives in the ubiquitous rows of corn. Apparently they didn't kill him after all.

Our story this time centres around a reporter and his son, and I'd say that the entire film is more of a father-son genre than a horror movie. They begin with a challenged and strained relationship, and throughout the movie work closer toward healing that fracture, complete with trite words to such an effect by the very end.

As the movie progresses, we see that the children, as expected, are still creepy and evil. They're killing again, although I think this movie makes a slight departure in manner of murders. In one instance, two people are killed seemingly by the corn itself, and with the addition of purple electricity, the implication is that the demon did it himself. In another scene, Micah is able to kill a man by use of a sort of voodoo doll. I believe that the murders in the first film were more straight-forward, though there is some of that in this film as well. We have them crushing a woman to death, as well as setting fire to an entire building of people locked inside. We see them attempting to use their weapons as well in the final battle. I'm not sure now to feel about the voodoo-esque scene, but I suppose on the whole the consistency is mostly there.

There's a weird scene in which the children are waiting for a “sign” from their demon, and an old lady's house is marked with some sort of green gunk. We find out later there's a weird side plot about last year's corn getting mouldy with some potentially toxic mould, and the doctor, head police officer, and perhaps others are in on a plot to cut it with the new year's crop and sell it in spite of the toxicity in order to not lose the money. Supposedly, the green gunk that the woman's house was marked with might be the same mould, and that was why the doctor didn't want to talk about it when questioned, as he was in on the mould plot.

In general, the mould plot doesn't make any sense for the movie. First of all, what does this have to do with anything? It's entirely unnecessary. And second of all, the mark on the woman's building was supposed to have been placed by the demon. And we know from both last movie and this one that there is in fact a very real demon controlling the children, yet it's hypothesized that the mould can cause hallucinations and paranoia, and that children are especially susceptible to it. I have no idea whether this “toxin” in the movie has any basis in reality, but regardless, I don't know why they'd even mention it as a potential cause for the childrens' behaviour.

One of the people to discover this mould plot, it must be said, is Doctor Redbear. A Native American man who is a Doctor at a local college, at first glance the man appears to defy Native American stereotypes. But then he goes on to list some vaguely Native-sounding philosophies about this area having “power”, a power that he believes children are highly susceptible to the influence of. He appears to truly believe in his native religion (a religion which I'm dubious about the accuracy of to begin with), but at another time in the movie he says that he thinks the kids are just crazy. And later he blames the mould. I'm not sure whether this just makes him a terribly inconsistent character, or a suitably nuanced one, reflecting a spectrum of conflicting thoughts and behaviours we see in most people. I'd be willing to accept the latter, that this was indeed a nuanced depiction of a Native man, if it weren't for the final scene. He's dead and cremated at this point, but we see his spirit in Native garb for the first time as he continues the Native paintings he discussed earlier in the film, then walks off to vanish into nature. This scene was wholly unnecessary, and makes me wince a bit at the caricature the writers seem to have created with him. And they were so very, very close to being passable. For more discussion on Native American depictions in horror, also see Poltergeist II: The Other Side.

So, in the end were the kids just crazy? Was it the mould? A Native American power? In the end I'm pretty sure it was the demon again. And in fact, Micah turns into a demon when the father and Redbear kill him with the combine. We kind of knew it was a demon all along, so the other hypotheses offered were entirely unnecessary, and even detrimental to the flow of the film.

I actually enjoyed the first film of the series, but this sequel left me disappointed. Not only was it really just a thinly veiled father-son movie, but it didn't give me more of what I enjoyed from the first movie. Not really. The children and their murder plot was a carbon copy of the first, and the demon unchanged and uninteresting. No additional meaningful information was added to the universe as a whole. No questions were answered, and no significant new questions were posed. This movie fell a bit flat.

Final rating? 4/10

4. Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (1995)

Children of the Corn 3: What a disaster.

We start of our movie having to get some of the creepy kids in the city, obviously. We find out the explanation over the course of the film. Eli (the younger of two brothers) had come to be adopted by Joshua's father, in Gatlin. Eli, it turns out, was one of the original Gatlin kids. Joshua's father had moved in to Gatlin some time after the events of previous films, because the land was cheap, and so knew nothing of Eli's danger. And for a while, Eli and Joshua were close with one another, as Eli protected Joshua from his father whenever he became drunk and enraged. Right in the opening we see him attacking the father in the fields as they flee.

It is right at the start we get a glimpse of just how terrible the special effects will be in this film. As the corn stalks bind his wrists and ankles as improbably strong ropes, smaller filaments stitch shut his mouth and eyes. The strength of the ropes are enough to rip his arms partway off, in a manner that is somehow simultaneously unrealistic and sickening body horror. While the effects of the films in this series have never been great, this film takes an opportunity to remind us exactly what “bad” is.

[And while we're on the father, let me point out that he isn't entirely dead up there. He later turns into a bizarre living scarecrow, and I'm not sure if this is a zombie thing, or just the demon again, or what, but it certainly wasn't in anything that came before. We see this zombification with a homeless man as well.]

Joshua's dad out of the picture, the children are adopted by a couple in the city, and the story begins. Eli is obviously the evil one, and Joshua is mostly okay, though naive, and takes a while to realize his brother is evil. We get to see some new departures from previous films here as well. When Eli's new mother opens his suitcase, she sees it teeming with roaches, but when it's opened again, it's simply ears of corn. This is not simply a hallucination. Eli sets corn kernels in the cafeteria, which become roaches, walk into the food, and disappear. Later, the priest is seen coughing up a roach. Where did this magical bug/corn transformation come from? Where was this in previous films? That's a pretty significant magic power.

And that's not the only magical power Eli has up his sleeve. He plants some of his corn in the abandoned factory behind his house, and the corn grows to full height within weeks. And it's not just glossed over that it grows this quickly; it's a significant part of the plot. The father, it turns out, trades stocks on corn. Now that he has access to a magically amazing strain, resistant to all pests and fast growing, he decides to throw ethics to the wind and cash in on it. This is all part of Eli's plan to get his evil corn distributed throughout the world. Does this mean the corn itself carries the demon? Does it mean that even without a charismatic leader, children the world over will turn evil? Or will all corn sprouted from this crop turn into bugs in peoples stomachs?

The factory field also has a magical property of either seeming really big inside, or teleporting people to some alternate dimension temporarily. More than once we see someone running through it, seemingly lost, but when the camera is zoomed out to show the garden, it's clearly not very big at all. Oversight on the part of the directors, or weird new magic property?

Through the film, both the priest and Joshua figure out who and what Eli really is. And he is, yet again, inconsistent with previous films. He is the charismatic cult leader. But he is also the demon itself. And he is not just a demon, but it's implied by the priest that he is Satan himself. We also see him drawing morbid pictures at one point, and it's unclear to me whether these function like the voodoo doll in the previous movie, or like the seer drawings from the first film. If it's the latter, then he also has the magical seeing powers on top of everything else. Why is Eli all things? This makes no sense. Previously, there was a whole system to what was going on, not just one boy.

There is sort of a system here. Joshua realizes that due to magical plot reasons, only he can defeat Eli, because they're family. Even though they're not really family, and even though this has nothing to do with anything. He also learns from the priest’s magical intuition that he has to find Eli's evil bible. He does find it in the original cornfield, and brings it to their final fight. It is here Joshua explains that Eli is “like a worm”, that the boy is half and the book is half, and both must be destroyed in order to kill him. This is when I started just wishing for the film to end, because the writers were just making things up at this point, and not even fun things. Utter rubbish.

In the final battle, Joshua has to defeat an enormous worm monster (fitting, given that he believes Eli is like a worm). He even has his girlfriend swallowed by it, and in a theatrical cliché, slices open the monster to save her. But in the end, the fight scene was just a constant stream of B-movie level effects, and no special strategy or action to end it all. Eventually, he just kind of stabs it enough. Most lacklustre ending ever. And the worst part? Everyone else seems to be kind of okay. I had hoped that at least everyone would die or something.

In a final sort of epilogue we see a crate of corn in Germany, of Eli's magical strain, and the atmosphere is meant to be tense and sort of ominous. All I found myself thinking was why there was both white and yellow corn in the crate, if it all came from the same strain. Come on, guys, that's not how corn even works.

Final rating? 2/10

5. Children of the Corn IV: The Gathering (1996)

What a disaster. But then, what did I expect?

In this movie, an older sister comes home to her clusterfuck of a family. Her mother is going crazy with ominous dreams, and her two younger siblings need her around to take care of them. The older sister, for her part, was trying to go to school and make something of her life, but her terrible family drags her back into her small town. Throughout the movie we see the older sister's friends and acquaintances asking whether she'll move back for good, and each time she hedges the question and mentions wanting to go back to school once her mother is sorted out.

The movie really begins when an evil boy comes out of a well, and for a moment I had to ask myself whether I was watching The Ring. The evil boy gives all the children in the town some sort of fever. After the fever passes, the children's teeth begin to fall out, and they all start calling themselves by Biblical names, and begin killing their parents.

All the while, I want to know how this fits in with our previous plots. Where is this in the time line? Everything is so generic looking in each film I couldn't even hazard a guess. Nothing from the previous movies seems to be mentioned at all. We do have a brief glimpse of water turning into grasshoppers, which is consistent with the food beetles of the last film, but other than that, there's nothing particularly corn related at all, nor any mention of the previous corn kids. And though there are mentions of the Biblical stuff scattered about, there is really no strong plot about killing off the sinning parents. As far as we can see, the parents are all good people, and all care about their kids when they become ill.

In the end, it's two old ladies who have the answers. They inform our older sister that there was once this one kid who was a televangelist or something, and he brought in so much money because he was so young. When he began to grow up, the adults poisoned him with mercury to stunt his growth, which also happened to make him go crazy, and eventually die. He killed everyone, and now his spirit was coming back for vengeance.

None of this, of course, makes any sense. And none of this relates to the last film. And why is the kid able to come back now? That part is never really explained, though we do find out that he needs a sort of kindred spirit to reincarnate himself. For this, we have the little sister, who was “abandoned” by her older sister when she went to school. How dare she try to get an education and leave her small town? Shame on her. So she finally is able to use special mercury bullets and defeat the demon kid, and save her sister. The mother is dead by then. And all's well that ends well, I guess, when the sister gives up all her plans for a real future and takes care of her younger siblings. What a terrible moral to a story.

The worst part is that upon researching the movie, I found that they actually could have tied this in to the series and chose not to. There was supposedly a deleted scene in which they explain that the demon kid is the origin of He Who Walks Behind the Rows. I'm still not sure that makes sense or is consistent with the message of previous films, but at least it would be an attempt at cohesion. As presented, though, this movie could have almost stood entirely on its own, and had no association with the rest of the series, other than in general aesthetic and rural setting.

Final rating? 3/10

6. Children of the Corn V: Fields of Terror (1998)

The last two films were utter disasters, and so I was delighted that in this film the writers tried desperately to get back to the series' roots.

We begin our film with some kid becoming possessed by the demon via bad fire effects, and then skip ahead to “one year later” when the movie takes place. I wasn't exactly thrilled with the ongoing demon effects, but I was encouraged to see something familiar.

A bunch of teens end up in the middle of nowhere because they were going to release a friend's ashes or something. By pure coincidence, the one friend, Alison, figures out that her estranged brother is living in this small rural town, when she hears mention in a bar of He Who Walks Behind the Rows. Apparently, she knows that her brother joined a cult like that. So when two of the friends are killed off, Alison sets out to find her brother and look for some answers, and also maybe rescue him from the creepy death cult.

Right away the film had a sort of slasher vibe, both at the start of the film and at the very end. I'm not really sure why that decision was made: After all, this film was from 1998, which was not exactly the height of the slasher genre, nor has this series ever had a slasher vibe before. There was also a bit of weird attention at the start given to blow up dolls which was strangely reminiscent for me of Hard Ticket to Hawaii from over a decade before. A film out of its time.

I knew I was beginning to really like the film when I realized that the Christian and Pagan themes from the original movie were left intact here. It was a bit lacking in corn-related decorations, unfortunately, but the vibe was right. They also kept it simple, which is a good thing.

The kids are orphans, and they've been abandoned by shitty parents largely, so there was no conflict for me in why loving parents might have to be killed like in the last film. The plot itself is very simple as well. One of the kids has to die for his 18th birthday, in keeping with the lore of the original movie, and that kid is Jacob, Alison's brother. She's set to rescue him. It was a great decision not to include all sorts of weird extra stuff in this film. By keeping it straight to the point, I didn't get confused or distracted.

Now, the vibe isn't 100% accurate to the first film. For example, there's weird soap-opera-style music every time the one girl, Kir, says anything relating to love. Not that she matters. She ends up killing herself for the death cult, so I guess she fulfilled her role in the film.

Another thing that the film kept consistent with every previous movie is a young male cult leader, in this case named Ezekiel. He is this film's Isaac. But leading the entire gaggle of kids was an adult man, and I was thoroughly confused by him for much of the movie. Why was he allowed to live? How was he involved in all of this? My questions were answered though, as satisfyingly he was dead the entire time, possessed by the demon and controlled by it and Ezekiel. For a moment there, I'd been worried.

While some plot holes were filled, others remain. For starters, why is the demon back? How is he alive, when he was killed repeatedly before? And where exactly does this film take place? No mention is made to any of the previous movies, so I have to assume it's an entirely new corn field. Why here, why now? And whatever happened to the tainted corn sent to Germany? We may never know.

The final battle between Alison and the demon was quite anti-climactic -- not quite as bad as the worm-monster fight from a previous film, but just a really small explosion that leaves a silo intact and doesn't really hurt anyone. Huh. Was that all it took? They didn't even have to destroy the corn in this film. But they're the children of the corn. I thought that it was special.

Finally, before Jacob died we'd found out that he'd impregnated one of the other older children. At the end of our film, we see Alison adopting the baby once it's born, as its mother is still a child and has been adopted by a new family. In a final shot, the baby's eyes flash with bad effect demon fire, implying that now he's possessed somehow, for some reason. How and why? Ugh.

Overall, I do think that the film redeemed the series. It reminded me of what I liked about these movies to begin with, and gave me more of what I wanted. But it's just not quite there. Keep trying, corn children!

Final rating? 6/10

7. Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return (1999)

When I began this movie, I was already a bit dubious about the quality of it. After all, it literally says “666” in the title, as well as bringing back Isaac, and in my experience resurrecting old characters doesn't tend to go well in most movies. Fortunately, it was better than expected -- although I might be damning it with faint praise, seeing as how I hadn't been expecting much.

The story revolves around Hannah, who is one of the original Gatlin babies, one of the “children of the children” as it is described throughout the film. She was adopted, but knows where she originated from, and wanted to return to the town to find out who her birth mother was. We also find out she regularly experiences visions while there of all kinds of creepy and weird stuff. Also, everyone in the town is acting weird and in on some cult thing. It's pretty standard horror movie fare, and pretty reasonable for a Children of the Corn movie. I don't need to go into too many details.

Isaac comes into play in that we find out that for the last nineteen years, he's been in a coma, and not actually dead. I think that's a bit of a ret-con, but I can't remember whether the body was ever actually confirmed to be destroyed in the first film, so I will tentatively accept that as true. Regardless of the fact that the religion has traditionally centred around the purity of children, Isaac, as he wakes from his coma, still fancies himself the leader, and all of the now-grown Gatlin kids, (and many of their children as well), are still willing to follow him. I think that there was a bit of an oversight in terms of the inherent evilness of adulthood that seemed to be an integral part of the lore, and I'm not totally certain any of the myriad of writers has fully thought out how it should all work.

Isaac says there's some prophecy, and Hannah is meant to fulfil it. Apparently she is the first-born female child, and Isaac has a son, Matt, who is the first-born male child. Together, they're supposed to procreate at midnight on a specific night, and their child will then be the start of some new pure race. I'm not really sure how eugenics is supposed to play into the lore, and again I wonder if there was some oversight in the consistency of it. That said, there has always been a thing about them having children join the cult and raising them within certain beliefs, so I'm not totally rejecting the idea of it either.

All the while, Hannah's birth mother is trying to run her out of town, so that she can avoid fulfilling this prophecy. She seems to be worried it'll come true, yet at the same time she continually argues that Isaac doesn't have any special powers except those bestowed on him by his cult followers. Again, a bit of an inconsistency, but maybe she means that she thinks he can be defeated by others if only they'd try, while still recognizing his supernatural powers? Not sure.

After a big hullabaloo, Hannah escapes in the nick of time with this guy Gabriel who has been helping her out throughout the film. They have sex in a barn conveniently at midnight of the night Hannah was supposed to be knocked up by Matt, according to Isaac.

In the end, we find out that Isaac is drunk on power or something, and considers himself to actually be He Who Walks Behind the Rows, but Gabriel reveals that it is himself that is the demon. Which makes absolutely no sense as far as I'm concerned. Throughout this film series I think that there's been a lot of inconsistency about whether the demon is humanoid or entirely other -- and whether he possesses people or simply influences them, and also as to whether he's actually associated with Satan in some way. A total hot mess, and it's not cleared up in the slightest by this film, unfortunately. I was actually starting to become invested in the plot as it went along, tentatively impressed that it was coming together and not a total disaster, but the gaps in lore irritate me. And while I'm at it -- wasn't the demon a big fire thing in the last film? And multiple other things in the films before that? Yet I'm meant to believe he was also Gabriel for the last 19 years of Gabriel's life? So confused.

Not only is Gabriel the demon itself, but he is supposedly the actual first-born male Gatlin baby, and Isaac just wanted it to be Matt so that he could pass down some sort of power to his son... or something. And since Gabriel has had sex with Hannah, the prophecy has been fulfilled.

In a last scuffle, Isaac was actually killed, along with a bunch of other people. Hannah and her birth mother escaped a burning building, leaving a seemingly dead and defeated Gabriel behind, who of course was conveniently not actually hurt and used magical healing powers on himself. We hear in the end that things had gone exactly according to his plan, and the “seed had already been sown” in terms of his child with Hannah. One can only hope that she'd take some Plan B or have an abortion, but that's obviously too much to hope for in this series.

As I've already stated, the film wasn't nearly as terrible as I'd anticipated. The return of Isaac wasn't as ridiculous as it could have been, and though there are a lot of questions about Hannah and the other children of the children, I'm willing to hand-wave a bit of it away in order to see the common thread continued. It seems that someone out there wanted the series to get back to its roots, and this was their attempt at getting the it back on course. But without some sort of lore book to guide it all, I find myself wincing again and again as the little inconsistencies.

Final rating? 6/10

8. Children of the Corn: Revelation (2001)

There was no revelation in this film. There were barely even children of the corn.

Right away, I could tell that there was a different vibe to the film. It didn't seem culty, or have that classic summer horror movie vibe. It didn't even really seem creepy in the slightest. But I hung in there, because I wanted to know where it was going. After all, this movie was first and foremost a sort of mystery to be solved, as one woman looked for her missing grandmother, who'd been harmed in some ambiguous way at the start of the film.

We found out through the story that the grandmother was involved somehow with the Gatlin kids years ago, but it was never made clear to me who she was or why she was related to anyone else in the series. No mention was made of Isaac, and as far as I could tell no mention was made of any of the other films. I am left wondering how this is even part of the same series, when it bears almost no relation to what came before it. Not only that, but I can't for the life of me figure out why this was all happening here, wherever it was, instead of in Gatlin. There was some mention of the building having once burned down, but if it made any sense at all it got lost in a muddle.

Among the problems in the film is also the fact that one of the creepy ghost children claims to be He Who Walks Behind the Rows, the demon himself. And he speaks with a weird, deep, kind of demon-like voice. But why? Has this ever happened this way before? And who exactly is this kid? And what about all the other things in all of the other movies? What's the time line? Was the demon ever in two places at once? Why is he alive again? There are no answers.

We also don't have real children in this film. I guess that the children in question died in a fire in the grandmother's childhood, and then later the grandmother grew up and had kids, and they, too, died in a fire. Because of something about them paying for the sins of their ancestors? And the children in this movie are ghost children who look like partially burned zombies. And they've come back for revenge. Or something.

There's also a creepy priest who has some relation to what's going on, but it's never clear what, and he seems almost entirely useless, which just frustrated me further. It was his assertion that He Who Walks Behind the Rows is Satan, which we did have another priest say in a previous movie, but it remains unclear if this is just a weird priest belief or if it's true.

Throughout the film, random people are killed off by the creepy kids. We do have a few things reminiscent of the other films -- corn bleeds at a few points, which reminded me vaguely of the time bugs came out of the corn. Another time some sort of bugs come out of the ghost girl's mouth. And we do have precedent for the corn to attack with weird rope vines ...but not in one of the good movies. Unfortunately, that plot device makes a reappearance here, and kicks up a few notches, leaving this film almost as bad as the one with the giant worm. Not only do the vines come out of the bathtub to kill a woman, but they sprout up seemingly on their own in the end battle to attack the granddaughter. When the studly cop comes to save her in the last minute, slashing the vines, the vines bleed. Why? What was the basis for this decision?

This movie was incredibly slow throughout most of it. I kept waiting, and waiting, and waiting for something of interest to happen. And then a few non-creepy attacks took place, and still I stuck it out. Because I wanted the key to the mystery. And I really never felt like I got it at all, although I did find out that one of the ghost children was the ghost of the grandmother. That only spurred more questions.

I have no idea what they were thinking when they made this.

Final rating? 2/10

9. Children of the Corn (2009 remake)

The original Children of the Corn, while perhaps having a few problems, was a pretty good movie. And so, as with most remakes, I found myself wondering what on earth possessed them to remake this movie. As I watched the remake, I found that in a number of significant ways, the remake differed from the original. That in and of itself isn't necessarily a problem, if those changes enhance the movie in some way. The problem in this case is that I'm not sure that they accomplished that.

We started the movie off in roughly the same way as the original, with a couple on the highway hitting a boy whose neck had just been slit. What's different right off the bat, however, is that the couple are fighting constantly. Neither one of them is particularly likeable, in stark contrast to the original couple. And they're not heading to Washington, they're heading to California for unknown reasons. And the man is not a doctor, but instead is a Vietnam war veteran, a fact which becomes important throughout the film.

In the original film, both Isaac (the cult leader) and Malachi had very distinctive looks, and in Isaac's case, a distinctive sound to his manner of speech a well. This was one of the important factors that I think the success of the film hinged upon. While the remake does get a fairly impressive replacement for Malachi (although not quite as distinctive-looking), it misses the mark entirely on Isaac. He is no longer the charismatic cult leader in my book, but is just a child playing at acting. He doesn't look right and he certainly doesn't sound right. After that significant misstep, the movie really had no ability to creep me out in the way that the original did.

And while I'm still on the note of Isaac -- there is something entirely unexplained about his age in this film. We began the film with Isaac, and we continued it on with a “12 years later” thing on the screen, and yet Isaac can't have even made it to 12 years old for the duration of the film. Why is it he doesn't age, when we have every indication that everyone else in the film does?

There are a few things that I must point out were kept consistent -- the corn-related decorations for one. The book of names found in the church. The Blue Man. And even the soundtrack. These, in addition to the plot in a broad way were the same, and so this movie isn't entirely on its own. It is related to its predecessor -- just not strongly enough.

The man being a Vietnam veteran became an important point of the film. Unlike in the original, they killed off his female companion right away, and he was left with the decision to fight them. It was a bit satisfying to see him killing kids left and right, but it was a distinctly different vibe than the original where the decision was primarily to run and escape. For him, there was to be no escape.

Additionally, the original film had a whole plot going on about what that kid in the beginning had been doing -- trying to escape the cult. This was left entirely out of the film. The whole sub-plot about a brother and sister who escaped in the original is left out too, including the little girl's visions of the future -- though they do allude to one of the little kids having some sort of visions, but they imply that he might one day become the next Isaac or something. And in the original film we had a whole sequence of when the kids killed all the adults in the town originally, a sequence which is entirely absent in the remake.

In the original it's also a major plot point that the children sacrifice themselves on their eighteenth birthday. This is mentioned in the remake as well, but we don't get to see that. Instead, we see two of the kids having public sex in the church to add a new kid to the ranks in the creepiest way possible. It's interesting that they decided to shine a light onto what must be a necessary part of continuation of their child cult -- but it was entirely unnecessary to add it, and not really a classy decision in the least, considering that it wasn't in the original at all.

While all of this is going on, our Vietnam veteran unfortunately was having an entire nervous breakdown out in the corn in the middle of the night, complete with PTSD flashbacks from the war. And he's not exactly wrong to be paranoid either -- another facet that differs from the original film is the fact that none of the children are willing to go into the corn at all at night, because He Who Walks Behind the Rows might get them. Consistent with the first, however, is the fact that the demon is real. But in this movie, there is no happy ending. Our veteran dies at the hand of the demon, complete with moving rope-vines that the series just can't seem to let go of.

My biggest question is why, out of all the decisions they made to change things in this film, did they change from a happy ending to a bad one? This was kind of the last straw for me, as it irrevocably changed the entire vibe of the movie. I don't think it was at all in the realm of “improvement”. Instead it was probably something that shouldn't have happened.

If the film were on its own, I wouldn't necessarily hate it. It doesn't have a lot of good going for it, but it's not horrible either. For example, there is no giant worm at all. But I do have to take it in the context of all that came before it.

Final rating? 5/10

10. Children of the Corn: Genesis (2011)

When I watched the final Children of the Corn movie, I could find no indication if it was supposed to be a sequel to the remake, or another film in the time line of the first set, or maybe just another corn-themed movie. One of the main failings, I think, is that even after watching the whole thing, I can get no real sense of how it ties in to everything else in the series. In a lot of ways, I think that it might have done better as a stand-alone movie.

We begin the story with a soldier just returning home from Vietnam, and he sees his whole family has been killed. A little girl threatens and kills him as well, all the while he's having flashbacks of some Vietnamese kid he's killed while the little girl calls him a baby killer. Then we skip ahead to “present day”, and for the life of me I can't figure out how that beginning scene had anything to do with anything. It's quite possible that I missed some tie-in, but if it was something that easy to miss, that's a pretty critical misstep.

Unlike previous films in the series, this one takes place in California, somewhere in the boonies, though the main bad guy referred to as “the preacher” did say he was originally from Gatlin. That's really the only tie-in of substance that we have.

A husband and his pregnant wife have their car break down on some back road, and go to a ramshackle little house to ask to use their telephone. There they meet “the preacher” and his Ukrainian wife, who are creepy recluse-types.

While there, things have a nice creepy vibe right away. Beginning in the flashback, there was some very Ju-on-esque stuff happening with flashes of things, the way it was all framed, and this continued right into the ramshackle house, with a flash of a little boy standing in the room when the pregnant woman took a drink of tea and saw him through the glass. Her gasp told me something had happened, and I had to re-watch the scene because it was so subtle and quick. I love that.

The couple wind up staying the night, because the nearest tow truck isn't available on Sundays and the further away one would charge the $900. The Ukrainian wife suggests that a delivery man is set to visit them the next day, and he could give them a lift to the nearby tow place in the morning. Before retiring for the evening, the creepy preacher warns the couple not to go wandering around his home or property.

When the pregnant woman goes out to use the outhouse, she hears sounds and inevitably goes snooping around just as she shouldn't have. She discovers firstly a weird church/sex dungeon set-up in the garage, and then discovers a little boy locked in the shed. Freaked out, she tries to get her husband to make a phone call for help and get them out of there. Unfortunately, he isn't quick enough.

A lot of weird and creepy things proceeded to happen. The little boy wandering the home, just out of frame, leaving bloody foot and hand prints in his wake. Their attempts to escape the house met with poltergeist-like behaviour, and with the classical trapped in the house theme. The preacher keeps making suggestions to them to make them doubt one another, and they are both assaulted with mental images that plague them as well. All the while, we're not certain who to believe.

The man says that the boy in the shed was his wife's but not his own, and that it was an evil power he tried to keep at bay. The Ukrainian wife says that it was the preacher's son, and that she put him in the shed to protect him from the preacher, who is evil. The pregnant wife makes the assessment that there's no way to tell who is lying, who is evil, and what exactly is going on.

They do make an attempt to call the cops, but when the cop arrives he can't sense them inside the house even as they bang on the window, and then he is whisked into the air, and into the blackness of night. Gone.

When the delivery man finally arrives the next morning, they're ready to get the hell out, but the husband has a weird premonition of his capture in that delivery truck. The couple steal the abandoned cop car and make it as far as the highway. It is then we see the child is responsible for their deaths, as he causes a car crash from a distance. So I guess he is evil after all.

The ending is a bit weird though. I get that the child wanted her baby, but not exactly why, or why then. And I'm not sure why the husband had to die. For that matter, I'm not sure why exactly they were left to escape only for the woman to be brought back as a prisoner, by the delivery truck man -- except that they mention it got rid of their cop car problem. That doesn't quite add up, but okay. In the final scene when the pregnant woman is delivered back to the preacher, we see the child kill the Ukrainian woman, his mother, and we see a bunch of weird cult followers have showed up at some point for reasons unknown.

As I mentioned earlier, I'm not sure that this really ties in with the rest of the series very well at all. It might have done better on its own. But I do have to say that I really liked the vibe of it, and a lot of the details they put in. I liked the confusion early on, because it kept me interested and trying to figure out exactly what was happening, but not so lost that I couldn't follow any of it. The ending is a bit of a sticking point for me though, because I didn't feel like things were resolved or explained fully by the end of it.

Final rating? 6/10

#horror #movie #review #children of the corn #fields #rope vines #giant worm

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horrorhousereview · 8 years

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Attack of the Killer Tomatoes Series

There are some who say they don't enjoy horror movies, but I believe that the umbrella of horror is wide, and encompasses many sub-genres, and influences other genres altogether. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is a musical black comedy horror film, and is sure to please both horror fans and comedy fans alike. Here, I take a look at all four movies in this ridiculous series.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1978)

If you're looking for a movie to actually scare you, this film might not be your best bet. But along the same lines as Cabin in the Woods, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is a film for horror fans -- only this time parodying the horror with slapstick comedy instead of fright. It calls to mind Russo's Return of the Living Dead, but is even more ridiculous and absurd. It was a thoroughly enjoyable watch.

Throughout, we have little nods to horror films here and there -- in particular, Jaws was called out when one of the killer tomatoes was floating in the water, and in the ensuing panic our tourists threw themselves off their boat, rather than try to guide it to safety. But even those who are not familiar with horror tropes will find love for this film. It routinely makes fun of our politics, of war films and detective films as well.

The main plot of the film, of course, revolves around killer tomatoes. I am sure that I don't need to explain this phenomenon further.

All the while, there is a place for the utterly ridiculous. The musical numbers are a joy to behold -- if like me you're a bit strange. The final love scene, wherein the man and the women dub each others singing is perfection.

When I first decided to watch the film, I was worried that it might actually be bad, as in unintentionally funny. But no, the film is entirely self aware, and it's evident the whole time. Time and again it nods to the audience, letting us know that they know exactly what they're doing. The gags are overt and genuine. We're not meant to enjoy it ironically. We're simply meant to enjoy it.

So if you're between truly scary films right now and need to give yourself a bit of a break, please give this movie a look.

Final rating? 10/10

Return of the Killer Tomatoes! (1988)

Just as its predecessor was completely self aware, so too is this film. The theme song is largely the same, and it says so in the lyrics, as well as assuring us that the plot is largely unchanged as well. There's a bit of a ret-con involved in order to make the sequel possible, but honestly I didn't care at all. The plot was hardly important to my enjoyment of the first film -- why should it be any different here?

The first movie was the best of the 70s, the second the best of the 80s, in clothing, decor, and music. Gomez Addams' actor played a mad scientist that reminded me heavily of Doc Brown from Back to the Future. My favourite characters from the first film were back, as well as some new ones. And this film contained Tomato People as a new twist.

What can I say? It's a low budget comedy, and not a proper horror at all, but it nods to horror throughout. I saw allusions to Frankenstein (and Young Frankenstein), as they poked fun at the film industry itself with talk of actors guilds and product placement. I'm not usually someone who likes comedy, either, but these films for whatever reason are right up my ally.

Final rating? 9/10

Killer Tomatoes Strike Back! (1990)

The third film in the series brought me, as expected... more tomatoes. And although this movie came out technically in 1990, it was so very, very eighties. We followed a quirky police detective throughout, and a hot tomato scientist that he fancies. More so than perhaps the previous two movies, I really enjoyed the protagonist, beginning right at the start of the film as he wakes up, half-asses some exercises, and eats coffee grounds straight from the can. Amazing.

Fuzzy Tomato, a hero from the previous film, makes a reappearance and is made to look like a villain by the actual villain -- the returning mad scientist. Now the mad scientist is a popular talk show host, in disguise. Whereas the first film definitely made fun of politics pretty overtly, and the second film did the same but around news media, this film makes fun of trashy talk shows and the culture around them. The meta-narrative does give the film a bit more interest than the corny jokes and weird tomato-based plot line.

The actual plot thread of the movie, as in the second film, is probably the weakest part of the whole thing. The best part for me were the characters of the detective and the hot scientist. One memorable scene involves soft lighting, love music, and a wind machine on our sex symbol -- a wind machine which builds to hurricane force winds around them.

In the end, I hate to admit it, but I'm starting to wear a little thin on the tomato theme. I know, I never expected it either. That said, it was still pretty amusing and enjoyable. I can't help myself.

Final rating? 7/10

Killer Tomatoes Eat France! (1991)

The fourth, and thankfully final movie of the Killer Tomatoes series takes place in “France”, and it is this fake, over-the-top France that retains some of the humour I enjoyed in the beginning of the series. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, particularly by the third film, this series had developed an over-arching plot. And I think that was to its detriment. The same villain continues to want to take over the world, and it has become tedious.

To make matters worse, the design of the actual killer tomatoes was atrocious in this film. They were Chucky-esque, a far cry from the store-bought tomatoes and paper mâché of the first film, or even from the fuzzy character FT. They have over-large teeth and look ridiculous. And on that theme, they actually have the tomatoes singing, with real voices. First, it's FT, who we already know does not have a real voice, except that now he suddenly does. And then it's the Child's-Play-esque toothy tomatoes with another, even worse musical number. I was half an hour into the film and regretting it.

After the musical numbers, I'll admit things did (thankfully) pick up a bit for the rest of the film. The movie continued to rehash jokes about scripts, but breaking the fourth wall was slightly less funny the second time around. The France jokes were what sustained me throughout, which is a bit of a shame considering the wide breadth of joke types found within the first film.

In the end, it was certainly the weakest of the Killer Tomatoes movies, but I suppose that's to be expected as most series degenerate and die.

Final rating? 5/10

#horror #movie #review #tomatoes #killer tomatoes

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The Man Who Laughs (1928)

The Man Who Laughs is a silent movie from 1928, and while it's not a horror movie at all, it's considered to be horror by some, due to the unnerving permanent smile of the main character. The film is certainly dark, and the premise is creepy, but it's more of a melodrama than anything. But drama or not, the movie has its influence on the world of horror, and the laughing man himself was the inspiration for the Batman character Joker.

In this story, there's a lord who has pissed off the king, and in retaliation, the king had surgery performed on the man's son so that his son would have a permanent grin, thus laughing at his father for all eternity. Then he killed the man in an iron maiden.

The disfigured boy basically ran away from home and lived with some guy. He also found a little abandoned baby girl, who grew to be a blind woman. The two of them were in love, and their guardian used them in plays about the laughing man's freak face -- which is kind of messed up, but it was the olden days, and they seem to be mostly a happy family.

The film is mostly about how sad this guy's life is, and how he doesn't want to marry the blind girl because he thinks he's unworthy of her. Later in the film it comes out that he's royalty. A queen is in charge now, and he's supposed to marry some duchess who currently holds his wealth, but he refuses and runs off, guards chasing. Meanwhile his surrogate father and the blind girl have been banished.

In the end, all's well that ends well, as they all escape on a boat at the last moment. But after doing some digging, apparently in the original book they both die in the final scene, and the only silver lining, if it can be called that, is that at least they can be together in death. The book has a thoroughly more depressing ending and would probably make a better horror story, but I can't say I'm upset about the happier ending, because I really was rooting for the couple. After all, the best quote depicted on screen was when the laughing man declared “The Queen made me a Lord -- but God made me a man!”, just before he refused to follow the Queen's order of marriage.

You might wonder why I'd review a drama on my horror blog, but as I've said in the beginning, it's because of the film's influence. And because of the creepy, uncanny-valley style grin that this man holds throughout the film. Now that I know of its significance, I'll certainly be keeping an eye out for similar characters in media. Right away the Grinning Man comes to mind -- a paranormal type phenomenon that was once reported in New Jersey. Who knows where else I might see it?

#horror #movie #review #silent

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Part 3: Alien vs Predator Crossover Movies

The final leg of my journey is Part 3: The Alien versus Predator movies. I began this adventure with Part 1: The Alien Series, and then Part 2: The Predator Series. Here I take a look at the intersection of the two, with one movie surprisingly better than I'd imagined it might be, and the other surprisingly worse.

1. Alien vs. Predator

There was so much wrong with this movie, but its saving grace was that most of the problems happened during the first half, leaving a second half to redeem itself somewhat.

Immediately, I was curious as to the timeline of this film. The Alien series takes place far into the future of the Predator series, yet the Predators have been seen with a Xenomorph skull in their ship. The movie takes place on Earth, some time after the second Predator movie, and the showdown between these two monsters is in Antarctica. The explanation we have for there being Xenomorphs there, is that the Predators are our ancient gods. They invented the pyramids, and we worshipped them. Their ship, in fact, looks like a pyramid. I somehow don't remember any of this being explained before, and it sounds suspiciously like the plot to Stargate. I'm really not impressed. In addition to this, the Predators are who invented the Xenomorphs. They were bred to be the perfect prey, in some sort of Hunger Games scenario wherein the teenaged Predators would have a showdown against the Xenomorphs to prove themselves worthy adults. Or die. It doesn't make much sense really, especially for such a sophisticated space faring race, but whatever. And the humans? We're apparently just here to help breed Xenomorphs.

One might ask oneself, if the Earth at points has been completely overrun with Xenomorphs, why haven't we found skeletons of them? We've found fossils of insects that pre-date the dinosaurs, but not a single Xenomorph? Details....

The Predators have been explained in past films to like heat, but seem to have no problem showing up in Antarctica for this battle. There's an ancient ship under the ice that's been there for hundreds of years, and we never do get a good explanation of why the Predators are here now, though the humans are obviously there to figure out why there's a pyramid under the ice. And speaking of it being under the ice, a tunnel is dug conveniently from space by the Predators. Not only does this beam technology not make sense, but it leaves convenient climbing ridges the whole way down. For a franchise that poses as a quasi-sci-fi, it doesn't do much work to maintain that façade.

In addition to the Predators now liking the cold, their specialized heat vision also gains an x-ray component this film. And not even a sensible x-ray vision, but one that shows whatever is convenient for the plot. Sometimes whether there's a Xenomorph inside someone. Sometimes illness within a body. Sometimes simply guns strapped into a backpack. Sometimes it's a man completely covered in snow, even though slightly cool mud would normally hide a body. Whatever.

But perhaps I'm being a little too harsh about the sub-zero temperatures of Antarctica. After all, the humans don't wear hats throughout most of it, and our main character Alexa even loses her coat at the very end, and it doesn't seem to kill her, although we never do get final confirmation on that. Maybe she froze to death in the icy wasteland shortly after the close of the film. You might say it's because the pyramid ship was coming back online that they didn't have to wear as much protective gear, but then why didn't anyone notice and comment that the heating unit had kicked on?

Maybe it's because the characters are unbelievably stupid. One of the archaeologists says something about removal of the heart, and it takes a doctor to correct him while looking at the body, that that's not where the heart is. I'm pretty sure that basic anatomy is something archaeologists study. We also have an explanation at one point that the alien ship uses the Aztec calender... which uses metric? And therefore... the ship should reset itself every ten minutes? How are these things in any way related to each other? And what evidence do we have that the ancient Aztecs (or more accurately, the alien species of Predators) even had the concept of a minute? Again I feel like a fact checker wouldn't go amiss in this film.

Speaking of facts, we get no explanation whatsoever about Bishop, the head boss guy. He's the head of the company from the Alien series, and he's here now. Way, way in the past. As a real guy, who is ill, and who dies in this film. But he looks exactly like the android Bishop, and exactly like the guy who said he was human and had created android Bishop, who seemed to either actually be human or a convincing facsimile. What's his deal? How does any of this relate to each other? No explanation is given. I'm forced to believe this guy is only here because he's in every movie that's ever been made.

A good hour into the movie, we finally have an Alien versus a Predator. And it was immediately wonderful. I'm not sure why they wasted half a movie with poor fact checking and build-up. It was totally unnecessary. I came to see an Alien and a Predator fight each other, and once they did, it was great! I thought that the two were fairly evenly matched throughout the movie, and they didn't necessarily strengthen or weaken either species based on what we've seen them do previously -- although there was some inconsistency with what the Xenomorph's blood dissolved.

The most unexpected and best part of the film was the relate-ability of the Predators -- and in particular, one which the fandom has deemed Scar. Scar was nearly human, and my favourite part of the whole movie was when Alexa teamed up with him to ensure her survival, kneeling passively before him to present to him the weapon he'd been so desperate to obtain. And he didn't attack her -- because the Predators, interestingly, have an internally consistent sense of honour about who they will and won't engage with in a fight.

In the two previous Predator movies, I was almost bored with the alien beings, but in this film I found myself rooting for both Alexa and Scar. I thought that the ability to make his totally foreign face show emotions -- real fear in the eyes, and later fierce determination -- was fantastic, and difficult to pull off. I'd previously thought that a movie entirely of Aliens and Predators wouldn't work, because they both were so animalistic, communicating in only screeches and clicks. But by careful use of humans, particularly Alexa, and by the re-visioning of Scar, they were able to pull it off. I was also a bit wary of the conspicuously missing Ripley, but Alexa certainly embodies her spirit.

Then ending itself was so frustrating. The Xenomorph queen was finally defeated, but Scar was down, and Alexa probably slowly freezing to death in the icy wasteland (though they ignored this). Everyone else was gone. And then finally, Scar's people arrived to cart his dead body away, awarding a cool spear thing to Alexa for being a badass. I had a final drop of hope that they'd use their advanced technology and intimate knowledge of the Xenomorphs to save Scar, but no, he was dead, and an alien burst from his chest in the end. Just heartbreaking, really. I could watch a full series of just Alexa and Scar teaming up to kick ass together.

Finally, I must reluctantly admit that even with the cool ass-kicking, I'm still pretty sure this violates the Alien series' timeline. Even with the final explosion, there should have been all kinds of foreign debris. And a Xenomorph queen. Also, Bishop was still never explained. This film was far, far more generous toward the Predator franchise than the Alien one. In addition to those problems, there is also the little problem of the fact that the Aliens attacked Scar even though he was carrying their young -- which goes against what we see in past Alien films. And the fact that he doesn't immediately kill himself when he becomes infected bothers me as well, as it seems to go against the Predator films -- since the Predators thus far seem to kill themselves left and right at the first sign of danger. And he certainly would have known he's got one of the things inside of him, as he saw them inside others in this same film.

So yes, it's not perfect, but no, it's not the worst. By the end of it, I was able to have something of a good time.

Final rating? 6/10

2. Alien vs. Predator: Requiem

The premise of the movie makes very little sense. On the Predator ship, Scar's dead body is still lying around with a Xenomorph inside of him. With no actual genetic engineering, his new Alien has Predator-like traits, even though this took humans extensive science to purposely construct when we cross-bred them with humans. So it makes no sense that this spontaneously happens. And the Predators, who have proved they can see Xenomorphs inside of bodies, do not quarantine Scar in any way. The chest-burster bursts forth, and kills a bunch of personnel, and then the ship crashes into a fiery ball on Earth, killing all but one Predator. This Predator then explodes his ship to destroy all evidence of his existence I guess, and I have no idea how he plans to get back to his people, and then he proceeds to try and hunt down the Aliens as they take over the town. Great. Awful premise, but we're up and rolling I guess.

The first thing that stands out about this movie is the fact that everything in it seems to be from another film. I remember one scene in particular where a homeless man dies in a tunnel to a Xenomorph, and I swear I've seen the exact scene somewhere else. The best guess I can come up with is Children of the Corn: Urban Harvest, although it might have been elsewhere.

The main plot of the film is that the Xenomorphs are taking over a city, and a select group of people are trying to escape before the city is bombed by the government. Sound familiar? It's basically Return of the Living Dead Part II... and probably a whole host of other movies, honestly. It's such a clichéd premise.

There are little things after that too, although they're mostly too subtle to recall. One example is that they have the Predator and a Xenomorph battle in a sewer. It's not particularly interesting, and I fail to see the point of using the sewer at all... unless it's to rip off Jason Takes Manhattan, and dozens of other horror films that force us into a sewer. These aren't even good scenes they're ripping off, really. And don't even get me started on the super old “teenagers” the movie suffers from. It's really the worst.

The next biggest problem, aside from the blatant rip-offs from other franchises, is the fact that all of the interesting relate-ability of the Predators from the last film is lost, just completely gone. Alexa is gone. We have no female protagonist to represent the Alien franchise at all, really. They do have this military chick, but none of the characters are important at all to this film. All we have are a bunch of Xenomorphs and Predators running around, panicked humans, and long boring stretches of time during which I can't recall anything happening at all. Whatever redeeming qualities AVP had in its second half, they are totally lost in the sequel.

And perhaps the most cardinal sin of the film is that they weakened the Xenomorphs considerably, when compared to any other film in the Alien franchise. Bullets seem to be perfectly effective against them all of a sudden. How threatening are they really if guns work against them? And the Predators? I can't recall a single interesting fact about them for the whole of this film. What a disappointment.

By the end of the film, we also must acknowledge that with Xenomorphs attacking an entire town, and a giant space-ship with Xenomorph samples on it prior to the explosion, and with military intervention, and people actually escaping and surviving... we still apparently have never heard of the Xenomorphs by the start of the first Alien film. Ugh.

Aside from the various plot problems, and lack of unique characters, I didn't even like how they shot the movie. Everything was fast and choppy, grey and blue and dark. It was the cliché of what action films are when they're bad.

In the end, I can forgive a film if it's bad but interesting. But when it's bad and boring? What is the point?

Final rating? 3/10

#horror #movie #review #crossover #alien #predator

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horrorhousereview · 8 years

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Part 2: Predator Series

Get to the choppa and join me in looking at Part 2 of my 3 part series, the Predator series of films. Part 1: Alien Series can be found here. And Part 3, AVP Crossovers here.

1. Predator

The Predator series, in a way, is very similar to the Alien series. Whereas the first movie in the Alien franchise is the only one to be officially considered horror, and the rest follow as action films, the series of Predator films is sometimes considered to be horror, even though each individual film is characterized as action. And just as you can see the horror thread throughout the Alien series, there is an element of it in Predator as well.

First and foremost, however, this is an 80s action film, with Arnold Schwarzenegger as the protagonist, shouting “Get to the choppa!”. It is utterly ridiculous. Another of the characters proclaims at one point “I ain't got time to bleed.”. This is the kind of film that throughout, I couldn't decide whether I was enjoying it or hating it, but I knew that either way it was painful.

The Predator itself is a dreadlocked bipedal alien in a grungy power suit. He's killing everyone because of unspecified reasons. Arnold is an elite soldier guy who was sent in to the jungle to figure out where some soldiers disappeared to, again because of reasons. The plot throughout the film is flimsy and perhaps overly convoluted, considering they never go anywhere with any of the developments. It's really just an excuse to get Arnold to face off with this alien thing. And the alien thing? We never really find out what his deal is -- where he's from, or what he's trying to accomplish.

While the movie contains a futuristic alien, it is almost certainly not science fiction. The way that the thing hears and sees and behaves makes only the most precarious amount of sense. Best not to consider it too closely.

The Predator itself is its namesake -- a predator. And it has the makings for a very convincing horror monster. Our team finds humans hanging from trees, skinned. The Predator is following them, unseen, invisible, silent, undetectable. It seems immune to their best weapons. It's a totally unknown force. Unfortunately, this creepy vibe is marred by the constant switching back to UHF-style Rambo-esque soldiering, although I hate to even invoke Rambo's name because it was a better movie.

The biggest weakness of the whole movie, a cardinal sin, was how boring it was. We spend long minutes shooting up some jungle village, and they could have cut the scene to a third of its original length, easily, without losing anything. The same can be said for countless jungle-walking montages. There were inexplicable lulls in the storytelling all over the place, and this is a pretty long movie so I've no idea why they wouldn't cut out some of the boring parts.

In the end, I see why it is entertaining, but I'm a bit surprised this first movie was enough to develop a whole series off of. Colour me confused.

Final rating? 6/10

2. Predator 2

I went into Predator 2 expecting it to be bad, but expecting it to be bad in the same way that the first one was. As much as the first movie pained me, I was kind of looking forward to a bit more of Arnold, and a bit more GET TO THE CHOPPA. But the makers of this movie apparently did not have me in mind when they created it, because I got neither.

In this film, instead of the jungles of Central America, we're in Los Angeles during a heat wave. And apparently what happens during a heat wave is that all the drug lords and their gangs, who are all conveniently grouped by nationality, go into open warfare on the streets. The Jamaican drug cartel in particular likes to practice voodoo. I have to say, I was a made a little bit uncomfortable by the casual sexism of the first film, but it walked that line between actually funny and uncomfortable. But the second film's casual sexism was simply awful, and the second film's casual racism was downright painful. I have no idea what they must have been thinking. I can only partially placate myself by believing they were “different times”.

Some black cop I've never seen is the main protagonist of this film, and he's no Arnold. He's more of an Everyman character, who just happens to do better than the elite soldiers for some reason. And the Predator itself is hardly a villain when you've got Gary Busey on the screen. Busey is this film's Schwarzenegger, but he just can't compare.

As with the plot of Alien, the government of this film wants to get a hold of the Predator and study it. We do find out why they're here as well. Apparently they're on a safari-type hunt to collect predatorial humans for their trophy collection. We get to see this collection of skulls, and have an early indication of an Alien/Predator crossover, as the Predators have the skull of one of the Xenomorphs in their collection.

In addition to finding out there's more than one Predator, we've now found out that they frequent our planet for these hunts and we've just never noticed them before on Earth in any big way. In fact, they have a space ship conveniently parked in a tunnel beneath an elevator shaft in the middle of a city, because that makes sense.

In the end, our cop impresses the Predators with his skills and gumption, and they award him with an antique Earth pistol. Great!

Just to be clear, in case I wasn't already, this movie was a total mess. It made little sense from start to finish, gave me almost nothing of what I'd enjoyed from the first film, and had a dud ending. I have no idea what they must have been thinking. But apparently they continued to think it, because they continued to make more.

Final rating? 4/10

Alien/Predator Crossover Movies:

The next two movies in the series are:

3. Alien vs. Predator

4. Alien vs. Predator: Requiem

I've included them in Part 3 of my series. Part 1: Alien Series can be found here. For now, I'll direct you elsewhere to read about the crossovers, and will continue to focus solely on the Predator franchise on this page. The fifth and final Predator film is listed below.

5. Predators

After the disaster that was Predators 2, the so-so AVP, and the tragedy of AVP 2, I wasn't very hopeful for this last and final film in the Predator franchise. However, while I won't say it was a masterpiece, I was surprised by how decent it was.

The most intriguing part of the film is the premise itself. A bunch of elite soldiers, killers, criminals, (and a doctor?) are dropped on an alien planet with no memory of how they got there. It's very much like the movie Cube, in that way, as they turn against one another at first, wondering how they ended up there, and then reluctantly ban together to ensure survival. What has happened, of course, is that the Predators have taken them there, to hunt and to kill, as part of their weird sport.

Throughout the film we get to see our party struggling to keep it together as one after another they are picked off. I'm simultaneously impressed and very uncomfortable about the diversity displayed. Impressed, because they're not all just Americans. Uncomfortable, because everyone is a stereotype of their region. But I guess it's not as bad as Predator 2, so I can't complain too much?

We also find out another interesting fact about the Predators: there are apparently two species of Predator (or perhaps just tribes of a sort), one which is smaller than the other. These tribes are continually at war, and the tied-up little guy that one of our party frees to try and ensure his own freedom is the sort that we're used to from the other films. That means that the other Predators which hunt throughout this movie are even bigger and more vicious. Our friendly Predator does not survive.

I thought the ending was decent. It was neither victorious, nor a complete failure with everyone dead. The final survivors get to see more bodies being parachuted in, and so we can assume their struggle continues, with still some hope of eventual escape. There was also an interesting twist where one of the seemingly decent people was terrible, so that always adds a bit of interest.

Now that I've spoken so highly of the plot, I'll say that the worst part of the film was the acting, especially the acting (or maybe the writing?) of the main character, an American mercenary. It was just abysmal, and he seemed a caricature of himself, with a constant stream of tough-guy lines and postures, and a gravelly voice nearly that of Christian Bale's Batman.

Final rating? 6/10

#horror #movie #review #predator #the choppa

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horrorhousereview · 8 years

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Part 1: Alien Series

I'm taking a step away from traditional horror for a moment to cover some films that are tangential to horror, or perhaps best friends with horror, holding hands, working together to make something horror-esque. In particular, I wanted to cover the classic action-horror series of Alien and Predator, and their crossovers. I'll be doing this as usual in a three part series. I'll begin with Alien, but you can go here for the Predator films, and over here are the Crossovers.

1. Alien

Alien is considered to be one of the best horror films and one of the best science fiction films of all time. But I have to say, I don't really see it. Now, I'm not saying that it's a bad movie, not at all. But it didn't grip me in the way that some of the other classics have, or even how some lesser known movies have. It's a firm sort of medium quality film.

The basic plot of Alien is that there is a group of people on some sort of space ship, and they work together there for some company. They're on their way back to Earth when they take note of some sort of signal on a nearby planet, and stop to investigate it. This is where they encounter the alien, and I was pretty familiar with its basic form beforehand through cultural osmosis: it's the face hugger from the Half Life video game series. Fantastic. We were rolling along.

Unfortunately, the movie had a bit of a slow start for me. The ship had taken damage, but it wasn't clear to me how serious the damage was, and whether this would be a major plot point or was just filler. We were introduced to a cast of characters, but honestly none of them stood out to me. It took me quite some time to learn any names at all, and the only saving grace was that they looked sort of different from each other: the long haired woman, the short haired woman, the black guy, the Hawaiian shirt guy, and so forth. I couldn't keep track of who was in charge, if anyone, because it never felt totally relevant. And I never fully caught what their company did as a business.

Right away I fell in love with the long haired woman, Ripley, as she was from the start the only competent member of the crew. When her crewmate showed up with an alien lifeform attached to his face, she didn't want to allow him in and break quarantine. If they'd just listened to her, perhaps the whole movie could have been avoided. But of course someone overrode her decision and let the thing inside. Things got kind of interesting when they tried to detach the face hugger from the man's face, only for some crazy acid blood to begin eating through multiple layers of the ship where it had dripped. Awesome, so that's not an option. And during this initial encounter with the organism we also hear from the black guy who clearly represents us as the audience: as he looks on eating his snacks, he demands to know why they don't just freeze the thing off, and I'd like to know that as well, but I don't recall his question ever being directly addressed, unfortunately.

Things pick up when the face hugger mysteriously disappears and they set out to hunt it, finally finding it dead and their crewmate fully recovered. But during dinner that night, the iconic scene of the chest-burster takes place. Again, I knew this was coming through cultural osmosis, and I knew it was supposed to be a big highlight of the film. For me, it fell a bit flat, and actually looked a bit silly. I'm not sure whether this is a case of it not holding up to the test of time very well, or whether I'd built it up too much beforehand with my expectation; perhaps it relied heavily on having no idea it was coming. Whatever the case, though, it was a bit of a let down.

Now that the thing had escaped onto the ship somewhere, they set out in earnest to hunt it down and kill it. In record time it had grown to an invincible human-sized black metallic form, and the crew began to fall apart. The head scientist who'd been acting shifty the entire movie was finally outed as a secret robot, and I had mixed feelings on the point. On the one hand I thought well, this is a sci fi film, so I guess that makes sense. On the other hand, it was clear he wasn't right from the beginning, and while I didn't think “robot” right away, I knew something was up and was just waiting for the inevitable reveal. And while we're on science fiction, why is the ship's AI running on DOS and unable to have a conversation, but the infinitely smaller robot man is fully functional? Nevermind.

In the end, Ripley was the only competent crewmember, and therefore she was the only one to escape. Setting the ship to blow up behind her, and being the only survivor (along with her cat), she made it into an escape pod just in time. And in a small twist, the alien had escaped onto the pod with her, but even that didn't stop her, as she managed to secure a space suit long enough to space the thing.

The movie was a bit formulaic and I was worried that everyone would die in the end, but was pleased that both Ripley and the cat made it to safety. I'd say that for me, the ending was perhaps the most satisfying part of the entire film.

In the end it wasn't a bad film, as I've said, but it wasn't one of the greats either. The best overall aspect was the competent female protagonist, so rare in any film. In the end, though, this film falls in more of a “medium” category than anything.

Final rating? 7/10

2. Aliens

The first film of the Alien series is the only of the entire franchise that's considered to be a horror, while all following films are firmly in the realm of an action film. The line between the two is hazy and unclear. Many horror films have plenty of action, and many action films may have a horrific element. This is certainly true for the well known sequel Aliens, in which the alien organism from the first film makes a reappearance. Like our favourite slasher films, we have a return of our horror villain. And like the early Hellraiser movies, we have a return of our iconic female protagonist, Ripley.

It's the similarities with early Hellraiser that strike me the most. In our slasher films the focus is on the iconic villain: Jason, Michael, and Freddie. In the Saw series we have Jigsaw as our common thread, The Blair Witch is obviously the antagonist in those films. But offhand, it is only in our first two movies of the Hellraiser series that we have a common protagonist (which they then attempt to bring back much later in the series, as if flailing for a reason why the movies suck). It makes me wonder, is this the thin distinction between an action and a horror film? Some of the great action series such as Die Hard, the Bond movies, and the Bourne series have the protagonist as the commonality. But Alien perhaps uniquely keeps both protagonist and antagonist intact, leaving me to scratch my head over its actual genre.

It was difficult for me to fall in love with Ripley in the first film, because she was simply the most competent crewmember -- surrounded at all times by idiots. But in the second film, she definitely earned a place in my heart.

Ripley awakes fifty-some years after her stasis from the last film, having been found adrift in space almost by accident. Her 11 year old daughter had grown to old age and died, and she was having understandable issues, including a host of PTSD symptoms to contend with. As in the last film, this one is set in a dystopian future wherein corporate greed seems to rule the universe. When Ripley tries to warn the government of the threat to humanity, no one will listen. Until the colony on the alien planet goes quiet, and they enlist the help of Ripley as a consultant to take action.

The marines, early on, suffered from a certain incompetence that is common in movies and a bit hard to believe of real life. These men and women train in discipline, and I'm always a little astonished at how stupid and reckless they appear on screen. This happens in Aliens as well, early on, as a means to conveniently set up our plot -- only a few survivors, the aliens overrunning the place, their means of escape compromised. Luckily, they seem to wisen up after that, and though I don't come to really care for any of the marines, I at least don't hate them quite as much as the crewmembers from the first film.

And in contrast to the evil android from the first movie, the android in this film redeemed his entire species with his heroism.

In the end, Ripley kicked ass in just the way I'd hoped she would. It is no mystery to me why she is one of the big feminist icons in media. So while the aliens themselves continue to bore me, I'm almost looking forward to the next film for Ripley alone.

Final rating? 8/10

3. Alien 3

Alien 3 begins by killing off everyone but Ripley, and I think that was a bit of a mistake. Where is the continuity? Where is the cool little girl? What about Ripley's incredible duality of a motherly instinct and serious ass-kicking skills? But no. The random marine who had survived last movie is dead, the little girl is dead, and Bishop (the AI) is torn to little bits.

Ripley crash lands on a prison planet full of extra-Y-chromosome men with violent inclinations, but who've found religion or something. I was very intrigued by this idea at first. I was already aware of the extra-Y phenomenon, and had hoped it would go somewhere interesting, but it fell a bit flat for me. They could have been any prisoners anywhere, or they could have even just been a bit rough for men, honestly. The writers tried to make it serious by depicting a near-rape, but then seemed to chicken out and simply leave it boring. (Although, if we're going for accuracy, the extra-Y thing doesn't seem to have much impact on men at all, but I had hoped if we were setting this up specially, it would be for a reason.)

Ripley immediately becomes paranoid about the little girl's death, and checks for evidence of a Xenomorph. Of course it turns out that an alien did somehow crash on the planet and is running amok, killing people. I have a bit of trouble with this too, because the implication at the end of the last film was that they'd escaped safely without contagion. I can't quite remember the details well enough to know if this makes sense, so I'll give it a pass, but it does make me narrow my eyes in suspicion.

Ripley has a bit of trouble getting the leaders on her side, but both the leader and the charismatic doctor are killed in short order, leaving Ripley as the most competent character once again. I think it was a bit of a cop out to get rid of the doctor like that. They could have made an interesting team of sorts. After the doctor, the nearest leader-type would be the preacher, and I think his character was written a bit inconsistently as he wavers between refusing to help and then doing all he can.

I do think that these movies remind me a bit of Romero's Living Dead series, in that the films explore a villain that is almost a natural phenomenon: both the Xenomorphs and the zombies are much closer to a force of nature than they are to a regular villain such as classic slasher antagonists. And in both series, we jump between different settings and with different sorts of individuals to see how the situation will be handled in a variety of circumstances. The only problem is that Romero seemed to know what he was doing, and Alien seems to not be quite sure about what part of their formula is most important, and they don't seem to have planned for any overarching theme very well.

The ending with a human who looks like Bishop (because he's Bishop's creator?) doesn't make any sense at all. It's neither here nor there, and adds nothing to the story but confusion. Ripley, who'd been infected with the new queen, wisely kills herself in order to keep the evil Company from getting their hands on this universe-ending specimen, and I thought it was totally in keeping with Ripely's character to make that final sacrifice. My only worry at this point in the series is that there are more movies, and the writers have written themselves into a corner. They can go the way of Hellraiser, and have a new, non-Ripely protagonist take over, thus removing the best part of their entire formula. Or they can go the Friday the 13th route, and resurrect Ripley somehow through annoyingly unbelievable circumstances. There is no brilliant scenario.

And this whole thing could've been avoided if instead of infecting Ripley, they'd revealed that the Xenomorph was instead in her cat, which she'd left behind on Earth. The entire planet could have been compromised while she was gone. Oh well. Opportunity missed.

Final rating? 5/10

4. Alien Resurrection

Alien Resurrection, it turns out, was a hot mess.

I knew right from the start that they had no good options, because the writers had written themselves into a corner in the last film. Here, they decided to bring back Ripley by cloning her in the future. She somehow retains most of her memories, even though she's a different person. She is also super-human, and part Xenomorph. They did this so that her baby would be a Xenomorph with a human reproductive cycle, because... reasons.

The nonsense doesn't stop there. A motley crew of... some people... is temporarily aboard a military/medical vessel. I think. And then... one of them, Call, is a robot, and she wants to destroy the aliens, and destroy Ripley. I have no idea why her people were there, really, or what the vessel was ostensibly doing, or what her crew thought of her being a “terrorist”. As I have already explained, the movie was a hot mess. And no, I'm not going to take the time to look up the actual plot, because it was nigh incomprehensible while I tried desperately to follow along.

The movie was fast paced, but not a good action film. Directed by Joss Whedon, it had Buffy-esque acting, with nearly everyone behaving unrealistically and having slapstick-style expressions on their faces at the oddest moments. The only highlight of the film was a chamber of body horror human-alien hybrids that was truly chilling, and called to mind season two of American Horror Story -- something I'm not really grateful to have remembered existed. At any rate, it was only there for moments, and was off-tone from the rest of the film.

A brief stint in The Poseidon Adventure while they swim through flooded chambers for some reason in order to get to safety, and I was about ready for the film to end.

In the end, Ripley escaped and killed her alien child thing. Was anything learned from this? Did we advance at all? And most importantly perhaps -- do the writers/producers/directors/whatevers even understand why this franchise had done well to begin with? This movie seemed to totally miss the mark.

Final rating? 4/10

Alien/Predator Crossover Movies:

The next two movies in the series are:

5. Alien vs. Predator

6. Alien vs. Predator: Requiem

I've included them in Part 3 of my series, after Part 2: Predator. For now, I'll direct you elsewhere, and will focus solely on the Alien franchise on this page. The seventh and final Alien film (a prequel) is listed below.

7. Prometheus (prequel)

Prometheus is a movie that I would have rated more highly had it been a movie unto itself, not trying to be a part of an established series. As it stands, though, it doesn't make a lot of sense. In spite of the great visuals it offered at times, it was a disaster, and largely a disappointment.

We find a bunch of dots in the sky painted in caves across the world, and this means there are ancient aliens. No, seriously, they're going with ancient aliens. Apparently Stargate wasn't good enough, we have to rehash this idea over and over again. We call them the Engineers, and our scientists (specifically a man and a woman who are characters in the film) tell us they believe the Engineers created us. Not only that, but using the rough formation of dots painted in caves, we have figured out where in the universe the Engineers' planet is located. Using our advanced futuristic technology, we decide to go to their planet and find them. Find our makers.

The Engineers are supposed to have appeared in the original Alien film. When they discover the Xenomorphs in a downed spaceship, there are giant dead humanoids in the ship. These are the Engineers. Prometheus is meant to be a prequel to the Alien series. But in spite of all of that, the technology shown throughout the film is superior to that in pretty much all of the rest of the Alien franchise, but especially superior to that of the first film. It doesn't make any sense.

The Weyland company is at the centre of the plot once again, and Mr. Weyland wants to find the Engineer planet because he's close to death, and being kept mostly in stasis. Since the Engineers created us, he believes they can save him. This flies in the face of everything we know about the head of the company from the other films. They necessarily can't be in the same universe, and I have no idea why the writer decided to contradict things like this, when he could have come up with literally any other explanation.

Right away, I'm suspicious of the way the mission's being run. All of these people signed up to take part in it, but they aren't briefed on anything to do with it until they're woken up after 2 years of stasis, finally having arrived at their destination. Who in their right mind signs up for a mission like that? They seriously don't have the first hint of what the basic outline of the deal is? My suspension of disbelief was instantly shattered. But not as shattered as it would be by the bad science throughout.

Not a single member of the team, regardless of their extensive scientific backgrounds (or you know, basic ability to have braincells) does anything remotely scientific the entire film. They randomly walk up to threatening lifeforces, touch things left and right, take things on the ship to mess around with, take off their helmets on an alien world recklessly. The entire thing is cringeworthy.

At the heart of the film we have an android who is Weyland's only “son”, who seems to waver slightly between wanting to be an evil despot in his own right and wanting to do what his father tells him -- which is also largely evil. His sister, who is actually flesh and blood, doesn't matter, and seems cranky about it. The AI, in addition to having confusing motives, has such an over-powered ability to comprehend new science and language at the drop of a hat that it's again, suspension of disbelief breaking. This is a more powerful robot than possibly anything I've ever seen in any movie.

The lady scientist is the other major player. Her motives are all over the place. First she seems to want to find the Engineers with a childlike glee, like her partner, but then whenever he douches it up, she kind of shies away from him and tries to be an actual scientist. Sort of. Anyway, he dies pointlessly so it doesn't matter. When she tells him she's barren, she cries about how sad it makes her, but when she finds out she's pregnant she's horrified and wants the alien creature removed immediately. Which the AI won't allow, for evil reasons that are never explained or revisited. She removes it herself, and no one seems to mind. Also, you can run a lot after getting a C-section, apparently.

You'd think after the evil AI did medical experiments on her she'd be pretty pissed, but the AI seems to convince her to join him and his people to finally meet an Engineer. She's like oh, okay, never mind that you drugged me, bound me, and performed body horror on me. Also, never mind the fact that you know all sorts of things that don't make sense. Then later... she works with the pilot to destroy the ship, and also the alien ship, and whatever... to save Earth. Because she loves Earth, and hates the Engineers, and hates the AI. Except she later decides to work with the AI, and go to find the Engineers at the end of the film, and refuses to return to Earth. Great. Glad all that was worked out. Clear as mud.

The Engineer they do find makes no sense either. We find out that the planet they're on is a military outpost of sorts, and that they'd bred the Xenomorphs as weapons to destroy Earth. How they decide this, I have no idea, but they think they're going to unleash them on humanity and destroy us, but... decided not to? Except when they wake the remaining Engineer from stasis, he wastes no time in killing everyone in sight, then grabs his ship, revs it up, and starts in toward Earth to kill us once and for all. How does this make any sense? If he's well enough to do all of that, and if his technology is so advanced, his stasis chamber should have woken him ages ago to get on with it. And what about the part where they decided not to destroy us? And even if they had, why doesn't he talk to anyone before killing?

In the end, this movie really was the worst.

Final rating? 2/10

#horror #movie #review #alien

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