31 DAYS OF HORROR 2014-Day 10: BLACK ZOO (1963)

Eccentric private zoo owner Michael Conrad (Michael Gough) wants nothing more from life than to show off his menagerie of beautiful jungle animals and to care for them with more love than he shows to his own flesh and blood, but when his zoo is threatened by a developer who seeks to buy him out, it's time to open the cages and unleash a pack of loyal, well-trained killers...

Conrad's idea of what's acceptable in the living room.

There's just something that's so much fun about urbane British folks when they go stark raving mad, and Michael Gough really brings down the house as the homicidally-looney, animal-fancying Conrad. And as if it weren't enough that the guy has a decent number of big cats and other critters that are all too happy to maul and devour his enemies on command while being scenery-chewingly-abusive to his long-suffering wife and also to Carl, a mute teen who serves as his assistant, he's also a member in good standing of a secret cult of animal-worshippers!

The Loyal Order of Water Buffaloes this ain't.

BLACK ZOO is not a great movie by any means, but it definitely delivers when it comes to lurid, sleazy thrills that seem even more tacky and offensive due to their vintage and Britishness. It's a fun way to kill some viewing time, plus it just might traumatize the shit out of your younger kids if you opt to sit them through it. Hey, if you, their parents, aren;t going to take an active hand in the ruination of your own wee ones, who the hell else would you entrust with that vital developmental task?

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2014-Day 9: THE SHINING (1980)

Okay, I'm about to commit what amounts to horror movie fan heresy, so I'd better stop pussying around and just come right out with it.

I don't like THE SHINING.

Well, actually, if I'm being fully honest here, it's not as simple as a case of cut-and-dried dislike. THE SHINING confuses my feelings about it like few other films, and it's not for lack of me trying to "get" why it's considered such a big deal. I love a large number of Stephen King's novels, especially those from his first decade of output (THE SHINING was King's third published novel and first hardcover best-seller), and I also enjoy the majority of films by Stanley Kubrick, so one would think that Kubrick's adaptation of one of King's most well-regarded early works would yield an embarrassment of riches for me. Instead, what I got was too much of Kubrick and not enough of what made King's novel such an indelible work.

The story deals with the dire events that transpire when the Torrence family takes up residence at the remote Overlook hotel during the off-season, so recovering abusive alcoholic patriarch Jack (Jack Nicholson) can serve as paid caretaker while getting some writing done. With wife Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and psychic son Danny (Danny Lloyd) along for the months-long seclusion, things gradually build to a slow, supernatural boil as the dark spirits that infest the Overlook become visible to young Danny and work an insidious influence upon Jack. Before things turn grim, Jack is told of Grady, a previous caretaker who went stir crazy while snowbound in the hotel and horribly axe-murdered his wife and daughters before committing suicide, and young Danny is given some serious warnings about the Overlook by Hallorann (Scatman Crothers), the hotel's cook, who is himself psychic/telepathic and lets Danny know that there are others like them in the world, people who possess a gift called "the Shine." However, once everyone else clears out, it's just the Torrences and a hotel full of evil and disturbing spooks. Couple those elements with Jack's increasing instability and anger, plus his periodic trips back in time to a lavish party held in the hotel back in 1921 where he is steered by the spectre of Grady (Phillip Stone) down an inexorable path toward homicide.

Just two of the spirits that haunt the Overlook.

As experienced on the written page, THE SHINING may not really be filmable in a way that would preserve the book's palpable eeriness. It's a major work of unsettling mood, a good deal of which Kubrick manages to capture, but there's a certain undefinable...something to it that got lost in the translation to the big screen. Part of the problem may also be in Kubrick's patented approach, which stresses visual aesthetics over emotion that allows the audience to connect with the characters, and in the case of THE SHINING damned near all of the characters tend to come of as bland ciphers. Either that, or they're simply buried beneath Jack Nicholson's slow-building eventual full tilt into Torrence's madness. Up to this point in his career, Nicholson proved himself a compelling and believable screen presence who managed a finely-tuned balancing act that walked the tightrope between the everyman and the barking lunatic, and it was with THE SHINING that his madman tropes were carved in stone for all time. Once Torrence loses his mind, Nicholson's performance becomes a study in waaaaay over-the-top cartoonish insanity that goes so overboard that it comes back around to being creepily realistic. However, once the movie is over and the performance is given time to be fully considered and absorbed, what is terrifying in the moment morphs into burlesque caricature. More than three decades after the fact, Nicholson's "Here's Johnny" and other histrionics as Jack Torrence have entered the popular lexicon as punchlines or half-baked, annoying imitations hauled out by hack comedians or one's drunk uncle at a family get-together. It's fucking legendary, but no longer for the reasons that it should be considered as such. Jack Torrence might be where Nicholson stopped really bothering to act and from there on pretty much rehashed that character for most of the rest of his career, no matter how inappropriate such an approach may be.

Nicholson as Jack Torrence. 

But allow me to say some positive things about this film. It is undeniably high on the creep factor, with the silence of the empty hotel bordering on deafening, and the snowbound location's desolation and the havoc it can wreak lending weight to what can be read as a study of a marriage's disintegration, spurred by a husband's alcohol-fueled anger and the diabolical influence of the haints that infest the Overlook. And whatever else one may have to say about THE SHINING, there's no denying its visual beauty. Its signature Kubrickian sterility, that pristineness of aesthetic that marks nearly all of the director's work, is in full force, and its innovative Steadicam sequences help place the audience deep within its simultaneously spacious and claustrophobic cinematic nightmare-scape.

THE SHINING is a classic of the horror genre that divides audiences like few others, with some hailing it as "the greatest horror film ever made" while others, myself among them, consider it somewhat overlong, soulless, and dull, with the majority of the performances seeming like they're coming from animatronic manikins, but at least the story goes somewhere. Individual mileage may vary, but it's a film that definitely should be seen by all serious horror fans at least once, if for no reason other than to consider the craftsmanship that went into it and to be able to join the discussion from an informed point of view.

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2014-Day 8: THEATRE OF BLOOD (1973)

In 1970, veteran Shakespearean thespian Edward Lionheart (Vincent Price) is denied the Critic's Circle award in favor of "a twitching, mumbling boy who can barely grunt his way through an incomprehensible performance." That un-endurable humiliation leads Lionheart to throw himself from the balcony of the penthouse where his detractors, the smug and assholish elite of London's theater critic glitterati, have gathered to celebrate their own self-perceived excellence in the wake of the awards ceremony. Believed dead after his fall to the river below, Lionheart returns two years later, aided by the alcoholic and mentally ill pack of derelicts who hauled him from the drink, along with a mysterious young man who sports a white man's 'fro, hippie 'stache and shades, and launches on a campaign of vengeance against the critics who brought him low. With nine arbiters of taste to dispose of, Lionheart works his way down his hit list by subjecting his targets to gruesome deaths culled from the classic works of the Bard (though one of the murders would technically count as a rewrite), a strategy that grants him the opportunity to display his formidable thespic skills while simultaneously forcing his critics to realize too late just how wrong they were in their merciless assessments of his contributions to the craft. As the authorities investigate, involving Lionheart's daughter Edwina (Diana Rigg) in the process, Lionheart proves in no uncertain terms just how brilliant of an actor he is, but his excellence as an interpreter of Shakespeare pales in comparison to his genius as a classically-themed serial murderer.

THEATRE OF BLOOD is a superlative showcase for the considerable talents of my man Vincent Price, an actor whose work has delighted and enthralled me since I was a child, and a man who it is my eternal regret that I never had the opportunity to meet and personally express my high regard for what he brought to the screen. Equally at home in sinister or comedic roles, Price was given a rare opportunity to cut loose with THEATER OF BLOOD, a jet black comedy that one could be forgiven for failing to notice its played-straight sense of levity. The role of Lionheart allows Price a macabre "gravest hits" repertoire of some of Shakespeare's most gruesome and cruel highlights with which to show off his considerable range, while also conveying the protagonist's deep sense of hurt and non-appreciation from those who were too caught up in their own arrogant self-perceptions to see genius when it was so clearly presented.

Lionheart (Vincent Price) affects the role of "Butch," a tres camp hairdresser with lethal intent.

An across-the-board triumph, THEATRE OF BLOOD is not to be missed, especially by those who revel in Price's signature style of scenery-chewing. If you come away from this year's 31 DAYS OF HORROR overview with only one or two rock-solid suggestions for films you absolutely must sit through, I strongly urge you to place THEATRE OF BLOOD at the top of the must-see list. HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION.

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2014-Day 7: ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS (1957)

A team of Navy scientists is sent to a pacific atoll once used for atomic testing, where they hope to ascertain what happened to the now-vanished team that previously occupied the island. Once there the team is lowly whittled down by mysterious creatures that call to them in the night with the voices of those who have gone missing, and it soon discovered that the island is home to huge mutant crabs. These monstrous arthropods absorb the characteristics of what they devour, so they have taken on the intelligence of the humans they've eaten, as well as hideous quasi-human hybrid features, and they have rendered communication with the outside world impossible, so the Navy scientific team's hope of rescue is nil. And as if all of that were not dire enough, the island is geologically unstable, gradually eroding into the sea, which does not bother the crab monsters at all because they can simply  survive beneath the waves in undersea caverns while they prepare for the impending end of their reproductive cycle — meaning more of them are on the way, many more —  and work on their plan to eventually destroy the world.

A flick that I saw endlessly referenced in books on sci-fi/horror movies and issues of FAMOUS MONSTERS OF FILMLAND, ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS is emblematic of 1950's movies milking the relatively-new mystery of atomic energy and what could happen as a result of its utilization. It bears a lurid title and some seriously ridiculous-looking monsters, so one can be forgiven for pre-judging it as just another of its era's disposable would-be shockers, but it's a much better effort than it has any right to be. Gorier than expected for a film of its vintage — it features a Navy team-member getting his head gnawed off, while another loses a hand — and showcasing some truly Lovecraftian ideas that work despite its cheesiness and goofy-looking-at-first-glance title threat, ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS is one of those films whose scares take a little while to sink in, becoming quite horrible when one has time to really think them through. It's also a hell of a lot of fun in that Saturday matinee popcorn-muncher way that was once familiar from films of this ilk having regular airings on local TV horror/sci-fi movie shows, so it's an ideal creeper with which to indoctrinate the little ones. In fact, the more that I revisit these old horror/sci-fi cross-pollinations, the more I realize that a good number of their stories would have been right at home on classic-era DOCTOR WHO, which is only a good thing.

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2014-Day 6: BEYOND THE DOOR (1974)

In the wake of the massive box office success of THE EXORCIST (1974), it was a given that a legion of cash-ins and ripoffs would soon follow, and from what I recall at the time this Italian-American effort was by far the most prominent of that misbegotten lot. And though the film itself is about as scary as a sink full of tepid dishwater, it does gain points from me for having the sheer balls to rip off both THE EXORCIST and ROSEMARY'S BABY (1968) at the same time. To tell the truth, BEYOND THE DOOR really works more as a ROSEMARY'S BABY knockoff than a flat-out swipe from THE EXORCIST but any way you cut it, a ripoff is still a ripoff.

Long story short: A woman (Juliet Mills) is pregnant with her third child and in this case the third time is definitely not the charm. With her pregnancy marked by the usual laundry list of demonic possession movie tropes, it soon becomes apparent that she is either possessed by a demon/Satan  or she's carrying the Anti-Christ, or maybe both. That's all you really need to know, because BEYOND THE DOOR just isn't really all that interesting or even entertaining. I remembered it as being such from my long-ago days of watching movies en masse while drunk or stoned (or both, if truth be told) but I opted to watch it for this year's 31-day overview and give it a fair second chance, but I'm sorry to say that it was every bit the dud I remembered it being. It even ends on the always-eyerolling "THE END...QUESTION MARK?" note, which made me want to punch my TV right in the screen. This one's strictly for devil junk completists only, and maybe even that audience would be advised to give it a miss. It's simply mediocre, not even bad enough to do a one-eighty on itself and become fun as a bad movie that one can derive some cheap laughs from. Caveat emptor.

Poster from the original American theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2014-Day 5: THE HEAD (1959)

While watching THE HEAD (1959) as my bedtime movie a few weeks ago, I discovered that it is far from the dud I'd been led to believe it was. This noirish, expressionistic German film was a part of the brief wave of late-'50's "body horror" sci-fi flicks and it tells the story of an utterly insane wannabe surgeon (Horst Frank) who joins forces with a brilliant professor (Michel Simon) who has successfully kept a dog's severed head alive apart from its body. The professor, who is in poor health, would like to take his theories to the next level and sustain the life of a severed human noggin but he is unsure that his procedure would work. When his health problems get the better of him and the professor is moments from death's door, the insane surgeon — who also happens to be a genius — severs the scientist's head and keeps it unwillingly alive in his lab. All of that would have been enough to hang a creepy film on but the story turns the horror and tragedy up to 11 as one of the supporting characters, a malformed and hunchbacked nurse (Karin Kernke), catches the eye of the mad scalpel-jocky, who decides to give the facially-beautiful woman a body to match her looks. The nurse falls for his line about him being able to give her a "new body," a phrase she takes as a metaphor, and agrees to the procedure. The madman then stalks and kidnaps a voluptuous artist's model/stripper, murders her, and transplants the nurse's head onto the sexy body.

The rest of the narrative revolves around the nurse (who was in a medically-induced coma for three months while she healed) putting together the clues and coming to the horrific conclusion that her lust-struck surgeon is quite mad and has murdered an innocent woman to provide her with an ideal form. Imagine being in her position and finding all of that out. Seriously, it's tremendously sick and disturbing, and far darker than more frivolous and exploitative entries in this sub-genre. THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE is my favorite severed head sci-fi/horror flick thanks to it's intentionally sleazy and lurid content and aesthetic, but THE HEAD gets my vote as the best and most downright creepy entry in its category. Very good stuff. STRONGLY RECOMMENDED.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2014-Day 4: FIEND WITHOUT A FACE (1958)

Not exactly the generally accepted definition of "brain food."

Ah, the 1950's. A postwar era of prosperity that promised great leaps in science, accompanied by (if the movies were to be believed, anyway) the opening of a Pandora's box of unspeakable, Lovecraftian, technology-related terrors. The greater majority of films delving into such material tended to be American in origin, but this memorable little shocker hails fro England and once seen, it's impossible to shake.

Mysterious deaths in a Canadian farming community near an American Air Force base leave in their wake corpses missing their brains and spinal cords, but that are otherwise in pristine condition. The military's investigation turns up a retired scientist whose experiments in telekinesis have granted him the ability to successfully project his thoughts, but an unexpected side-effect of all that is the generation of a new, invisible form of self-replicating life, thanks to radiation from the base's nuclear-powered radar experiments (?). These invisible critters feed on the base's radiation and begin a spree of killing anyone who stands in the way of them taking over the reactor. Once the radiation levels are cranked up by a pair of them, the creatures are rendered visible and revealed to be the missing brains/spinal columns, only now mutated to include eye stalks and pseudo-tentacles, with the spinal columns serving as powerful springs to launch them into aerial attack mode. Soon the military and a handful of civilians find themselves trapped in the scientist's home as the abode falls under siege from a legion of the brain monsters and all bets are off, as all hell breaks loose in a splattery orgy of bullets, blood, and gray matter.

FIEND WITHOUT A FACE would be a rather undistinguished half of a double-bill if not for it wielding a decent creep-factor during the creatures' unseen phase, and its unforgettable last fifteen minutes. Once the brains are visible, they fly all over the place in a flurry of stop-motion malevolence that is dealt with by the military with no-holds-barred extreme prejudice. It's so balls-out that it can immediately be cited along with THEM! (1954) as one of the ancestors of the us-against-monster-horde mayhem found in ALIENS (1986). For that reason alone, FIEND WITHOUT A FACE is required viewing for both the casual viewer and the seasoned genre completist.

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2014-Day 3: DOCTOR WHO "THE DÆMONS" (1971)

Sometimes a genre is not as cut-and-dried as it is commonly perceived to be. A case in point would be horror stories set within what is ostensibly a science-fiction context, such as IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE (1958), PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES (1965), and, perhaps the ultimate example, ALIEN (1979), which some astute observer (whose name I forget at the moment; possibly Stephen King?) rightly described as "Lovecraft in Space." And one of the favorite tropes of the sci-fi/horror mashup is the explaining away of our myths and legends as being based on ancient contact with or interference from extra-terrestrial life forms, some of which bear forms only tangentially related to what primitive man could comprehend, thus their translation into myth and legend as animal hybrids or demons/devils and suchlike. Though primarily defined as a science-fiction series, Britain's venerable DOCTOR WHO television franchise — fifty-one years and going stronger than ever — has gone to the well of explaining mythic and legendary creatures and figures with scientific logic on numerous occasions, as well as veering such science-fictional myth-busting straight into the realm of outright horror, an aspect for the which the show became a cultural institution in the U.K. back in the days. Many are the tales of Britons of a certain age watching DOCTOR WHO "from behind the settee," and with installments like "The Dæmons," it's easy to understand why.

The Master, having exhausted damned near every other kind of evil shenanigans, inevitably goes straight to the source.

When a mildly-psychic neo-pagan witch in the ominously-named village of Devil's End predicts that an archaeological dig at the town's Devil's Hump area will unleash great evil and set free a gigantic horned creature — read "the Devil" — her warnings are of course ignored by the media that's covering the event for the BBC. The Doctor (Jon Pertwee) — an extra-terrestrial, quasi-immortal time/space-traveling genius who at the time worked as scientific advisor to a United Nations-related military task force — sees the broadcast and finds truth in the dismissed witch's claims, so he and his assistant, Jo Grant (Katey Manning), head out to investigate. Upon arriving at Devil's End, the pair encounters a community steeped in "the old ways" and swiftly discovers that the new local vicar is none other than the Doctor's opposite number, the Master (Roger Delgado), who is conducting what are basically Satanic rituals in a cavern conveniently located beneath the town's church. 

"Pleased to meet you...Hope you guess my name!"

Said robed and pentagram-motifed ceremonies seek to summon up Azal, an all-powerful entity from the planet Dæmos that entered our collective consciousness as, well, the Devil, and the Master covets the power over humanity that this baleful presence can grant him. Supported by gullible community members who are convinced they will benefit from his rise to dominance via the occult, along with the lethal Bok, a stone gargoyle brought to life by Azal and gifted with dis-integrator powers, the Master seems to hold the winning hand and things look quite bleak for the Doctor and the fate of our world...

The Doctor encounters Bok.

Though once-notorious for its low-budget and rather shonky special effects, DOCTOR WHO of the series' classic era often more than compensated for its deficiencies with solid acting and scripts rife with ideas and rampant creep-factor. The atmosphere generated by its stories wove a tapestry that read like THE HITCH-HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY gene-spliced with THE MONSTER MANUAL, or in this case a copy of Russell Hope Robbins's THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF WITCHCRAFT AND DEMONOLOGY, and that serial dipping into the bestiary of the imagination would seem to have prepared the TV audience of 1971 for a teatime kids' show taking a hard left into the diabolical. By the time DOCTOR WHO had reached its eighth year, the youngsters for whom the series was originally created had grown up with the show, reaching adolescence and beyond, and the program's material and ideas matured along with  them, so a story like "The Dæmons" is perhaps not as much of a stretch for perceived children's entertainment in Britain as one might think. Though not outright scary to grownup eyes, "The Dæmons" solidly works on a adult level when one takes the time to mull over its concepts. Extra-terrestrial demons approaching mankind as an experiment to be influenced, modern rural society only slightly removed from its pagan traditions (some of which are not at all genteel), an animated gargoyle that disintegrates people without a second thought (if it is even capable of what we consider to be actual thought processes), Azal's variable scale depending on where he is during the cycle of his three summonings (the image of his gigantic hoof prints on the countryside as seen from a helicopter is memorably foreboding), the seamless overlap of "magick" and science, all a lot heavier than the expected mere kiddie fare. 

"The Dæmons" can lazily be summed up as THE WICKER MAN for kids, with heavy lashings of

THE DEVIL RIDES OUT (with the Doctor in the Christopher Lee role) and QUATERMASS AND THE PIT thrown in for good measure, but it all somehow manages to coalesce into the unique flavor that was classic-era DOCTOR WHO in such a way that it's easy to completely overlook the other, better-known works with which it shares similarities. Leisurely-paced at five half-hour chapters, "The Dæmons" is very much recommended, especially for those who only know DOCTOR WHO as of its wildly popular 2005 reboot. The differences in approach between old and new WHO are numerous, and this story serves as a strong and offbeat example of just how much TV storytelling has evolved — or de-evolved, if you ask me — when it comes to this specific franchise.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2014-Day 2: THE FOUR SKULLS OF JONATHAN DRAKE (1959)

Yeah, it pretty much sucks when your family is on the ongoing receiving end of a righteously pissed-off witch doctor's curse. You see, nearly two-hundred years before the start of the story, a Drake family ancestor wiped out every male in an Amazon Indian tribe of head-shrinkers, all save the the tribe's witch doctor, who curses his male descendants to die at age 60, with their heads inexplicably removed, yet somehow  the victims' skulls end up in the family tomb. With his elder brother recently deceased under the previously described curse, Jonathan Drake (Eduard Franz), himself a hair away from sixty, has spent considerable time studying the occult in an effort to figure out what the hell is going on and how to thwart the inevitable, but exactly what hope does have have when the curse is enforced by Zutai (Paul Wexler), the terrifying immortal assistant of the curse's initiator?

Though I somehow missed this flick during my formative immersion into the genre, I rate this as a perfect film with which to get kids hooked on old school, E.C. Comics-style shudders. The operative word here is "spooky," with the film's look and atmosphere exuding a humid creepiness that really draws the viewer into the proceedings. And the comic book analogy is quite apropos as the movie has the feel of a well-thumbed cheap funny book obtained from a highway rest station during an over-long family car trip. I can't speak for you but comics of that nature saved my young sanity a good number of times during my childhood, and a tad later the same came to be said about the old shockers that used to populated horror movie showcases on local TV channels in the pre-cable days of yore. Films like this were emblematic of the kind of dark comfort one obtained from tuning in to CREATURE FEATURES, FRIGHT NIGHT, CHILLER THEATRE, and other such indoor, at-home, cathode ray campfires, and the memories engendered by those stories, even the ones that kinda sucked, made eager kids into horror fans for life. Try this one out on your own spawn and see for yourself what happens. Anyway, I heartily recommend checking out THE FOUR SKULLS OF JONATHAN DRAKE. It's not a life-changer but it is certainly a hell of a lot of fun.

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2014-Day 1: EDEN LAKE (2008)

An appealing young couple's weekend getaway to the idyllic British countryside turns into a one-way ticket to the abyss when they run afoul of a band of out-of-control teens and their vicious dog. Trapped in the middle of nowhere by savage, sociopathic hostiles who are locals and therefore have the home advantage, only a miracle can save the young lovers, but in these days such divine intervention is in gravely short supply...

This will be a brief review because the film's plot is every bit as simple as described and American viewers are advised to think of it as a UK answer to DELIVERANCE (1972), only several degrees more severe, intense, and downright nasty. It's the old "city slickers versus evil country bumpkins" trope writ in large, mean-spirited strokes, only done with stark realism and a growing sense that  there is absolutely no way out for the protagonists. It's especially harrowing when taking into account Britain's recent social woes involving the proliferation of " Chavs," with this film utilizing that vulgar, ignorant, and loutish sub-group to maximum terrifying effect. In a society as class-based as England's, such a perceivedly-trashy and earthily tribalistic rabble is about as perfect a threat to its image and stiff upper lip propriety as an audience could hope for, and as a result EDEN LAKE is a claustrophobic and scorching masterpiece of all-too-human terror. Not for the weak, this one's recommended only for those who can take strong meat handle frustrating acts of cruelty that'll make you want to tear your hair out and leap into the screen to kill the Chav kids with a fully-loaded nail gun. And if any of you out there have seen EDEN LAKE, please write in with your honest assessment of it. I'm curious to see what you have to say on the subject.