quetzalcoatlustastic - Tumblr blog

[quetzalcoatlustastic]

New music blog ideas for the future.

I’m probablhy going to start up music blogging again - “Oddballs” is going to be on the backburner for a while, but I have other concepts I haven’t done yet:

“Cut Out Bin”, covering the kinds of albums that sold well at the time but are now frequently found in thrift shops (examples: Cracked Rear View by Hootie And The Blowfish, Jagged Little Pill by Alanis Morrissette). I’d want to both review the music itself and speculate on what the album’s initial appeal was and why people eventually started returning them in droves.

 “From And Inspired By”, covering various artist soundtrack albums, focusing on how well the music actually relates to the movie - of course the songs on these albums usually have nothing to do with the movie, but the fun would trying to over-interpret things to fit. Inspired by a brief passage of the book Godzilla On My Mind by William Tsutsui, where the author at one point makes the tongue-in-cheek claim that “Untitled” by Silverchair, from the soundtrack of Godzilla (1998) is in fact supposed to be from the point of view of Godzilla. The aforementioned soundtrack would be covered, as would Batman & Robin and/or Batman Forever. 

Side Projects: One-off albums by side projects, especially ones that are notably different from the artist’s main project. This might either end up dissolving into the “Oddballs” column or replacing it , because it’s a fairly similar idea (albeit one where I wouldn’t have to worry about being scooped by Todd In The Shadows). Examples would be Fear Of Pop’s Volume 1 (Ben Folds Five), 2wo’s Voyeurs (Judas Priest) and Jackofficers’ Digital Dump (Butthole Surfers)

Reviews From The Alternate Future: Probably the weirdest blog series idea I have, this would involve reviews of completely fictional albums, be they fake albums by real performers or fake albums by fake bands. This is inspired by the Lester Bangs essay “Psychotic Reactions And Carburetor Dung”, in which he invents and reviews a fictional discography for The Count Five, a band who at the time only had one studio album (and would never release another). I could get occasional guest writers to make it feel like these are excerpted from some actual music publication, or even guest artists to make fake album covers (and probably try my hand at my own at times)

[quetzalcoatlustastic]

31:18 final list

It’s long after Halloween, but I realized I never posted the final list for my 31 in 31 project. Here that that is - every selection that wasn’t a fictional horror movie has a description of what other kind of media it is:

1. The Human Centipede (First Sequence) (2009)

2. Psychos (2017)

3. Hounds Of Love (2016)

4. Trilogy Of Terror (1975)

5. Killer Party (2014)

6. Would You Rather (2012)

7. Slither (2006)

8. Lost Boys: The Tribe (2008)

9. Chopping Mall (1986)

10. Night Of Something Strange (2017)

11. The Boy (2016)

12. Priest (2011)

13. Get Out (2017)

14. Morningside Monster (2014)

15. Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story (2015)

16. The Barber (2015)

17. The Witching Season (2018 - short horror anthology series)

18.  Ray Bradbury – The Halloween Tree (1972 - audiobook version of novel)

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

20. Tales Of Halloween (2015)

21. Troll (1986)

22. Bitter Feast (2010)

23. Terrifier (2017)

24. The Town That Dreaded Sundown (1976)

25. Creep 2 (2017)

26. Stephen King – Carrie (1974 – novel)

27. A Quiet Place (2018)

28. Buffy: The High School Years – Freaks and Geeks, Glutton For Punishment (standalone graphic novels based on the TV series)

29. Do Not Watch This (2018 – short horror anthology series)

30. Blade (1998)

31. Haunters: The Art Of The Scare (2017 - documentary about haunted house attractions)

Favorite new discovery: Hounds Of Love

Best re-watch: Slither

Best horror anthology film or series: Trilogy Of Terror

Best thing with the word “Halloween” in the title: The Halloween Tree

Most Self-Reviewing Title: Do Not Watch This

[quetzalcoatlustastic]

31:18 #4-11: Trilogy Of Terror, Killer Party, Would You Rather, Slither,  Chopping Mall, The Boy (2016)

Trilogy Of Terror

A horror anthology TV movie – the three segments are based on stories by Richard Matheson, but the central gimmick is something else they all have in common: Karen Black playing the main character in all three segments. The first two segments are fine but unexceptional – in one Black is a mousy, single college teacher who finds herself blackmailed and manipulated by a student, in the other, she’s both a similarly dowdy young woman concerned about her promiscuous, occult-leaning sister and the sister herself, and both have fairly predictable twists. The third segment is the most famous one, in which Black’s character is menaced by a Zuni fetish doll. Like the rest of the movie, it’s a bit campy, but it is the most effectively scary piece, and it’s made all the more tense for the fact that it focuses entirely on Black and the stop-motion doll in a small apartment. 3/5

 Killer Party

This kind of belongs to an odd subgenre I tend to think of as the “not zombie movie” – that is, a movie that uses common zombie movie tropes, but the antagonists are not, strictly speaking, undead. The overall concept reminds me of The Crazies – an unexplained virus is causing people to become homicidally insane, but those who contract it are still intelligent to some degree and even retain a twisted version of their usual personality. That said, while The Crazies played things entirely straight, this is more of a satirical dark comedy – the L.A. setting gives an opportunity for humor at the expense of such targets as wannabe actors and conservatives, and then there’s the killer clown, who seems to have been prominently used in trailers and other promotional things: To be clear, what makes him particularly funny is that he’s not really a typical “evil clown”, just someone with a terribly hacky sense of humor who suddenly also has an insatiable lust for murder. 3/5

 Would You Rather? At a certain point, I half-jokingly started thinking of the premise as “Willy Wonka & The Torture Porn Factory”. Truthfully, the creators probably started with the idea of someone playing the popular drinking game of the title and literally forcing the participants to go through with their hypothetical decisions. In terms of tone, this sort of reminds me of the first Saw movie, in that the characters do go through some really unsettling torture, the emphasis is more on psychological horror and suspense over what the characters will do in a high pressure situation. 3/5

 Slither

I’ve seen this once before, and the main thing I like is how it finds fresh ways to juxtapose the bizarre body horror of its premise with its mundane small town setting: Sometimes this is played for dark humor, but just as often it turns the body-snatchers-like premise into a surreal metaphor for a dysfunctional marriage. 3.5/5

 Chopping Mall

Starting out as almost Robocop-like satire, this film quickly downplays any commentary in favor of the pleasures of teens battling cute but deadly robot security drones in a mall. More could have been done with the satirical element, but honestly the more action-based campy approach is just fun. 3/5

 Night Of Something Strange

 This comes off as the strange but perhaps inevitable collision of the raunchy teen comedy and the horror comedy. I say “inevitable” because both genres can (and often do) involve gross out humor and teen sex. The general premise is a motel that becomes a hot bed for an STD that basically turns its victims into horny zombies – almost like David Cronenberg’s Shivers but played for queasy laughs. Not something with a lot of replay value to me, but it’s impressive just how far they’re willing to go with the gross-out humor and detailed effects. 2.5/5

  The Boy (2016)

 As I’ve mentioned, I’m trying to work through a set of unwatched Horror Pack blu-rays, and by coincidence one of them is a totally unrelated movie called The Boy released a year before this one – so heads up, my final list is gonna look a little confusing I guess.  Anyway, this Boy is the more recent and well-known of the two – the one where a woman accepts a job as a nanny in a creepy English mansion, only to learn that Brahms, the child she’s supposedly caring for, is in fact a life-sized china doll. Naturally, the initial suspense is over whether the doll is haunted or if the parents have become delusional with grief over their real child and now being alone in a Victorian mansion with a creepy doll is driving the main character a little nuts too… An ambitious, if bizarre, twist in the final act reveals neither is exactly true. 3/5

[quetzalcoatlustastic]

31:18: #3: Hounds Of Love

This feels true to life enough that I was mildly surprised to look it up and find out that it doesn’t claim to be “based on a true story”. One of the scariest things about it is that it’s set in late 80’s suburban Australia, where the common attitude is that kidnappings or murders just “can’t happen here” – the prelude to the film is the antagonists casually picking up a teen girl in their car in broad daylight (a previous victim), and once the main character herself gets abducted the police assure her mother that things will work themselves out and she’ll turn up on her doorstep in a few days, having run off and shacked up with friends for a while. While there’s some pretty intense violence, the overall focus is on the psychological and emotional aspects – the victim’s single mother trying to find her daughter despite minimal police help and the victim herself trying to escape, or later, trying to relate to one of her captors and convince her to let her go and end the spree of kidnappings. Actually, I’m just thinking about this now, but I guess one of the things I like about it is that, in a genre where women are usually passive victims, the female characters were actually the ones who were most active about pursuing their goals. 3.5/5

[quetzalcoatlustastic]

3118 #2: Psychos

I was subscribed to Horror Pack for a spell, and may re-subscribe after a while: Part of the reason I decided to quit was I found I was just not keeping up with all of the films, and I’m making it a secondary goal of this edition of 31 in 31 to go through as much of my unwatched Horror Pack pile as possible, with the end goal of picking which ones are worth keeping around and which I’m carting off to Goodwill. This had potential, and a few scary moments, but ultimately is going in the “give away” pile. To start with, this is pretty low budget looking with some fairly amateurish acting, but I was still fairly willing to give it a chance once these traits became apparent: Other Horror Pack selections have managed to make up for such weaknesses with unusual takes on horror tropes, themes that just don’t often make it into mainstream Hollywood, over-the-top humor, or interesting visuals. Unfortunately, this one never manages to do so. The initial premise is that three young women with repressed memories of being abused in the same house and escaping are sent graphic home videos, and join together to return to the house, recover the video evidence and possibly get some revenge. This alone could have been a strong enough plot for a horror film, but unfortunately the script throws a fairly cliché twist on thing, then a second, more incoherent twist on that twist. The two things I did come away liking was a memorably creepy performance by Aubrey Wakeling, and the fact that up until the end, the film leaves what exactly went on in that house to the imagination. 2/5

[quetzalcoatlustastic]

31:18 #1: The Human Centipede (First Sequence)

I think this was somewhere near the bottom of my queue for all of my previous 31 in 31 projects – from what I’d heard about it, it always seemed like the kind of thing I’d find more “gross” than “scary”, and I finally decided to watch it upon learning it was leaving Netflix on October 2. My initial impressions were largely right, though there is some suspense in the beginning when the antagonist Dr. Heller first gathers his victims (though you know he’s going to complete the experiment anyway), and in the end when they attempt to make their escape. Actually, I found the latter scenes the most interesting due to what seems like an unintentional side-effect of the premise, as the “human centipede” has to find a way to work as one: The victims are three tourists to Germany, two American and one Japanese, who don’t know the native language, let alone each others’ languages, so even in a more conventionally-premised “torture porn” film they’d have difficulty communicating a plan to each other. Due to being sewn together end to end, the Japanese man is the only one capable of speech and the other two have to direct him by poking and/or pointing, and even that is of limited use because they also have to use their arms for walking. 2.5/5.

Side note: Last year I stretched the concept by including standalone episodes of horror/sci-fi shows - I’m probably doing that again, and I’ve even been toying with the idea of other media, such as literature, graphic novels and music - a short story or novella could be read in a day, and there are at least a few significantly horror-themed “concept albums” out there (Ones where most/all of the songs have a horror theme, like Roky Erikson’s The Evil One or else ones that tell a single, horror-inspired story like King Diamond’s Abigail).

[quetzalcoatlustastic]

Oddballs: Kiss - Music From “The Elder”

Oddballs was on a bit of a hiatus for a year or so, but a couple things spurred my returning to it: For one, a youtube channel I follow, Todd In The Shadows, launched a video series with a similar premise called Train Wreckords: Watching the series reminded me I’d neglected this blog series, which I feel is just different enough in premise to not be redundant*. In particular, his review of Kilroy Was Here, another failed concept album that was contentious even among the performers themselves, made me think of what I had heard about Music From “The Elder”... and then I also happened to already be listening to music from 1981 for another blog anyway.

The previous album from Kiss, Unmasked, is also a bit different from the usual Kiss sound – there’s the occasional flashy guitar solo and plenty of the sleazy lyrics about sex and partying you’d expect, but overall it’s a commercial power pop album, one which makes me think they had noted the success of bands like Cheap Trick and The Knack: There’s distorted guitars playing happy, non-threatening chords, lots of vocal harmonies, and the occasional new-wave-inspired synthesizer part or studio effect. Only a few songs come off as memorable, but it’s not the most unfitting way they could have tried to follow trends, especially when glam metal wasn’t really a thing yet.

Music from “The Elder”, however, is where things get weird. Unmasked was less commercially successful than previous albums, so initially they had the idea to return to heavy rock… But then Gene Simmons, Paul Stanley, and manager Bill Aucoin decided that a big, artistic statement would bring more attention to the group, so they came up with a rock opera about a boy being chosen to help fight evil, written with the aid of Destroyer producer Bob Ezrin, The American Symphony Orchestra, St. Robert’s Choir, and perhaps most unlikely of all, Lou Reed.

The somewhat surprising thing to me is that this frequently doesn’t end up sounding like a hard rock band trying to branch out into a more artistic style as it does someone affectionately mocking art rock – whenever the album tries for something epic and uplifting-sounding, I tend to think of Ween or Tenacious D before I think of any serious prog band; not necessarily a bad thing, because that at least means I’m entertained. In contrast to the airier, progressive-influenced first half, the second half features heavier guitars, in part because several of the songs seem to be from the antagonists’ perspectives – songs like “Dark Light” and “Mr. Blackwell” sort of present a sludgier, more idiosyncratic version of their usual sound, and coming from this band, I’m just more liable to buy lyrics like “we’ll drink a toast the inhuman race” than ones about someone being “pure of heart and free of sin”.

 Post-script:

 Most members of the band, as well as Bob Ezrin, have subsequently made statements calling the album a mistake – Ace Frehley had been against the whole idea to begin with, but was outvoted by the others at the time. It didn’t do well commercially, and fan reaction was predictably negative, but it got a few relatively good critical reviews at the time and at least one music publication has deemed it “underrated”. Very little of the album has been performed live, especially since there was no tour supporting it… But “A World Without Heroes” made a surprise appearance on the 1996 MTV Unplugged album and has been played live sporadically since then. The song was also notably covered by Cher.

  *Though I’m going to try to avoid writing about any albums he’s already covered.

[quetzalcoatlustastic]

3117: The End

I didn’t blog about all of them, and may not get to, as starting tomorrow I’m attempting to start my first nanowrimo novel, but I did at least watch 31 movies/shows in the horror vein. Here’s the list, followed by some conclusions: 1. Species 2. The Eyes Of My Mother 3. Stake Land 4. Coraline 5. Strange Events 6. Black Mirror (”White Bear”) 7. The Craft 8. The Dark Below 9. Killer Pinata 10. The Nightmare 11. Corpse Bride 12. Galaxy Of Horror 13. Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter 14. Eerie Indiana (”America’s Scariest Home Video”, “Heart On A Chain”) 15. Hocus Pocus 16. A Cure For Wellness 17. The Belko Experiment 18. XX 19. The Real Ghostbusters (”The Collect Call Of Cathulhu”, “When It Was Halloween Forever”) 20. Pumpkinhead 2: Bloodwings 21. The Babysitter 22. The Houses October Built 23. Tales From The Crypt (”Dig That Cat, He’s Real Gone”, “Lover Come Hack To Me”, “Only Sin Deep”) 24. Cube 25. Holidays 26. Donnie Darko 27. Mystery Science Theater 3000 (”Zombie Nightmare”) 28. Night Watch 29. Day Watch 30. The Amityville Horror 31. The Old Dark House Favorite New Discovery: XX

Worst Movie: Probably Killer Pinata, but I was still entertained. 

Total Horror Pack films watched: eight 

Films involving vampires: 3 (Stake Land, Night Watch, Day Watch)

Films involving witches: 6 (The Craft, Hocus Pocus, Night Watch, Day Watch, the Halloween segment of Holidays, and I’m gonna go and count Bee from The Babysitter as a witch)

Films Involving Zombies: Somewhere between one and four. No zombie apocalypse movies at all, and the only undead creature that’s categorically called a zombie is in Zombie Nightmare. I suppose Jason Vorhees, Pumpkinhead, and Emily (the titular Corpse Bride) all fit some definition of “zombie”. 

Films where the only danger is violent/insane people: four (The Eyes Of My Mother, The Belko Experiment, The Dark Below, The Old Dark House)

Most creative “killer inanimate object”: Surprisingly not Killer Pinata, but the Strange Events segment “Toothbrush”, involving a killer toothbrush

[quetzalcoatlustastic]

3117 #22: The Houses October Built

Oddly, this is the second film I’ve received in a horror pack that deals with the basic idea of a haunted house being run by actual psychopaths. I guess it’s a logical enough idea for two filmmakers to arrive at independently: There’s major overlap between horror film fans and haunted house aficionados, and the idea of a place where the scares are supposed to be safe and controlled unexpectedly going off the rails is a pretty creepy one. This is a found footage film with the setup that the main characters are traveling the country visiting haunted houses and trying to find one particularly infamous “extreme” one known as Blue Skeleton. Because it incorporates interviews with actual haunted house actors and features some real haunts amongst the fake ones, it occurred to me that I’d actually want to watch an actual documentary with a similar conceit – sorta like Endless Summer, but for Halloween I guess*. Where Scarehouse at least had the danger entirely confined to the haunted house, here the house’s inhabitants are frequently encountered outside its confines, and even seem to know where the protagonists are going before they get there. My favorite character in terms of creepiness is Porcelain, a woman dressed as a life-sized porcelain doll that’s fallen into disrepair, complete with unnaturally pale skin, cracks in her face and patchy hair: Aside from her appearance, there’s the fact that the rest of the main group of antagonists are revealed to be “just” sadistic psychopaths wearing masks, but she rarely speaks and never breaks character, as though she went too deep into method acting her persona for the haunt and actually went insane in the process. The marketing department seems to find her a memorable character too, since she’s on the DVD cover and most of her scenes are in the trailer. 3/5

 * A real documentary about haunts inspired the film and it’s included in the extras, so maybe I’ll check that out later

[quetzalcoatlustastic]

3117 #20-21: Pumpkinhead II: Bloodwings, The Babysitter

Pumpkinhead 2: Bloodwings

 The original sort of made a virtue of its low-budget, but this belated, direct-to-video sequel feels a bit more like the b-movie it is. Still, the cornier feel can be charming, the cast includes a few actors who will be familiar to fans of eighties b-movies, and  Pumpkinhead (technically the spawn of the original Pumpkinhead and a human witch) is still pretty cool looking. 2.5/5

 The Babysitter

 This actually excels at what is often a weak point of horror movies (even horror comedies): The initial 30 minutes of introducing characters and plot points that are going to come up later breeze by pretty seamlessly because they’re directed as though they’re a totally different movie: The first third of the movie perfectly mimics the feeling of a coming-of-age comedy about an awkward pre-teen and the cool babysitter who shows him how to stand up for himself… Until said babysitter makes a human sacrifice to Satan. By the end, it settles on being both a gory, over-the-top horror-comedy and a coming of age story, which is pulled off surprisingly well. 3.5/5

[quetzalcoatlustastic]

3117 #19: The Real Ghostbusters - Collect Call Of Cathulhu / When Halloween Lasted Forever

Yes, the Saturday morning cartoon based on the Ghostbusters movies tackled the Cthulhu mythos (the spelling in the title is theirs, and must have been an unnecessary copyright dodge). There are lots of fun inside references (especially in one-off character names), and it’s clear the writer of this episode is an HP Lovecraft fan and tried to make things as accurate to his writings as you could in a 20 minute episode of a show whose primary audience is supposed to be children. I particularly like how, while the Ghostbusters remain their usual wisecracking selves, Cthulhu is never portrayed as anything but a serious threat. Slimer, who is the comic relief/”team pet” of the show, is completely absent, which might have been a further sign that they were taking the occult element entirely seriously this time out. Even though the Ghostbusters of course defeat Cthulhu over the course of one night, it’s strongly hinted that they’ve just put off the inevitable, which is the closest Lovecraft has ever allowed to a “happy” ending when it comes to the old gods. 3.5/5

When Halloween Lasted Forever seems to be a bit more typical of the series: Slimer has a fair amount of screentime, and in comparison to the Shoggoth and Spawn of Cthulhu, the goblins villain Samhain use as henchmen are pretty goofy. Samhain himself is pretty scary for a Saturday morning cartoon villain though, and I particularly like the ending: The Ghostbusters look into the containment unit and expect Samhain to be fuming, but instead he’s merely sitting and waiting patiently for his next chance. 3/5

[quetzalcoatlustastic]

3117 #18: XX

A horror anthology film featuring the work of four female directors (the title naturally refers to chromosomes): There’s no stated theme beyond that and a focus on female characters, so it’s interesting that three out of the four shorts have main characters who are parents, and accordingly a lot of the horror is drawn from fears someone responsible for a family would have: The Box deals with a mother whose son sees something disturbing in a box a man on the subway is carrying and starts refusing to eat, His Only Living Son feels like a distant sequel to Rosemary’s Baby (the main character’s unseen husband is even an actor who made a deal with the devil to further his career), and The Birthday Party is a black comedy about a woman who’s determined not to let her husband’s sudden unexpected death ruin her daughter’s birthday party. The one short that doesn’t fit the pattern is Don’t Fall, in which four college-age friends go camping and encounter an evil spirit – That one could maybe be said to deal with gender politics, as the main characters are evenly divided between genders and everyone reacts to the situation a bit differently. I hope someday there’s a sequel, maybe featuring a different set of directors, so we can see more of what women can bring to what’s stereotypically a male-oriented genre. 4/5.

[quetzalcoatlustastic]

3117 #15-17: Hocus Pocus, A Cure For Wellness, The Belko Experiment

Hocus Pocus

Who knew I’d end up watching two things in a row starring Omri Katz*? Actually, the odd thing is I watched both this and Eerie, Indiana as a kid and I don’t think I picked up on Max and Marshall being the same actor; I guess he did grow a bit in the year  between Eerie and this movie. Anyway, maybe not something I’d recommend seeing now if you didn’t grow up with it (though the Sanderson sisters can be hilariously campy and there is one eerie scene where Sarah, the youngest witch, hypnotizes all the children in town to come to her through song). If you did grow up with it though, it may be worth a rewatch for some mildly adult oriented jokes that might have flown over your head at the time. 2.5/5

* James Marsden was also in both this and Eerie, but his character wasn’t featured in either episode I picked

A Cure For Wellness

Though I’d ultimately term this an “art film”, this definitely aims for an unsettling atmosphere, and it includes some elements of gothic horror and lovecraftian body horror, so it feels like a good fit here. This is clearly trying to say something about contemporary society, but whatever message it has feels sort of muddled. However, it scores a lot of points on tension and an unforgettable visual style. 3.5/5

 The Belko Experiment

The “elevator pitch” version of this movie’s plot is basically “The Office meets Battle Royale”, though the comedic elements feel organic to the plot, and mostly disappear as the film gets more intense for its second half. It could have either been more of a dark comedy or more of a straight take on the idea, but I kind of like the combination because it feels kind of realistic in regards to how people would act in the situation. 3/5

[quetzalcoatlustastic]

3117: #13-14: Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter/ Eerie Indiana

Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter

This is a pretty average Friday the 13th film, and considering it was supposed to be the last film in the series, the ending is a bit weak. However, it’s perfectly watchable other than perhaps a potentially annoying young protagonist, and it also has Crispin Glover, who gets a bizarre dance scene and the movie’s most memorable death 3/5.

Eerie Indiana: America’s Scariest Home Video / Heart On A Chain

This is the second time I pulled the “TV episodes count too” card, and I want to try to make it the last – because Eerie is a half hour show, I tried to pick two favorites. Despite taking place on Halloween, America’s Scariest Home Video is one of the more humorous episodes in the series, highlighted by a deadpan Tony Jay performance and the general idea of a bratty grade schooler replacing the monster in a 50’s horror b-movie and still managing to terrorize the female lead. Heart On A Chain is one of my favorites because the plot, where a young girl gets a heart transplant from a reckless male suitor and starts behaving like him and being unable to pursue any other romantic interests, feels like a classic urban legend. I also like how it’s one of the few episodes where, up until the ending, it’s left up in the air whether something seemingly supernatural is all in a character’s head. 3/5 / 4/5.

[quetzalcoatlustastic]

3117 #12: Galaxy Of Terror

This one tries to differentiate itself from other horror anthologies by specifically focusing on “sci-fi horror”, presenting stories set either in space, on earth but in some sort of future dystopia, or in a couple cases a place very much like the present with one major difference (“Iris” features an electronic personal assistant developing a sense of morality, “Kingz” introduces aliens and cyborgs into its tale of a drug deal gone wrong). It occurs to me that it might be a bit tougher to present a sci-fi horror short than a regular one because there’s more risk of either boring your audience with too much exposition or expecting them to figure out too much on their own and just coming off as confusing. Opening short “Eden” in particular ends up with the latter problem, while “Pathos” and “Flesh Computer” could be accused of the former, though in “Pathos” it works because the maddening repetition of information we already know is part of the dystopia itself. To me, the most effective shorts were ones that required less set-up: the already mentioned Iris is so close to present day technology that the backstory is limited to a brief, pseudo-press-conference clip, while “Entity” tells a nearly dialogue-free story of cosmic events occurring as an astronaut finds herself alone in space outside her ship with no hope of rescue. Also of note is that the wraparound story is humorous and oddly self-effacing: An astronaut is forced to watch the short films as his ship powers down, and is trying desperately to get them to stop so that the ship can conserve energy and buy him more time to be rescued. Midway through he even utters the line “I don’t want to watch this!” 2.5/5

[quetzalcoatlustastic]

3117 #10-11: The Nightmare, Corpse Bride

The Nightmare

Though it’s a documentary about the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, I decided this film still fits the theme of this blog because it uses the trappings and atmosphere of horror films: A group of people who go through sleep paralysis are interviewed in bedroom sets, and as they describe the accompanying hallucinations and feelings of dread, we see them reenacted on screen. Some of these scenes start feeling repetitive because the experiences caused by sleep paralysis tend to revolve around some common elements (shadowy humanoid figures, loud buzzing noises, unintelligible whispers and murmurings), but they’re all pretty effectively eerie and give the viewer some idea of what it’s like to live with this phenomenon in your life. One of the segments, based on one of the subjects’ earliest experiences of sleep paralysis, also stood out as being oddly hilarious: A shadow person stands on the other side of the room and welcomes him to “the giant insect of the month club”, then causes an enormous tarantula to materialize on his chest. 3.5/5

 Corpse Bride

It’s pretty easy to look at this as just “the closest thing to a Nightmare Before Christmas sequel as we’re going to get”: It’s a Tim Burton-directed movie-musical with songs and score by Danny Elfman, and though the animation is CG instead of stop-motion, the character designs have a very similar look to them (Emily, the titular corpse bride, looks pretty similar to Sally from Nightmare, for instance). You could also say that the undead are treated similarly to the denizens of Halloweentown, and that their trying to throw their idea of a festive wedding is humorous for the same reasons that the embodiments of Halloween trying to have their own Christmas is. To me the key difference is that Corpse Bride’s story is meant to feel like an old folk tale – this might make the plot a bit more predictable, but adds a bit more of a timeless quality to the more serious moments. 3/5

[quetzalcoatlustastic]

3117 #9: Killer Pinata

Yeah, so this is one of those movies that spell it all out in the title. It’s very self-aware about how ridiculous the concept is, because it’s impossible not to be - after one of the more ludicrous kill-scenes, the film even cuts to a character saying “what a silly movie” (she’s in the next room, watching a movie-within-a-movie). The acting can be pretty weak, but there are some very funny scenes, the shoestring budget feel can be charming if you’re a b-movie fan, and overall it at least feels like a labor of love rather than pure exploitation.  2.5/5