31 DAYS OF HORROR 2017-Day 30: THE HILLS HAVE EYES (2006) Unrated Version

The great American vacation gone horribly, horribly wrong.

PROLOGUE: Scientists in anti-radiation suits check a barren desert area for radiation levels and are promptly murdered, after which their corpses are dragged away behind a pickup truck, for purposes unknown...

The Carter family — uber-Republican ex-cop and manly man "Big" Bob (Ted Levine, best known as Buffalo Bill in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS), his religious wife Ethel (Kathleen Quinlan), eldest daughter Lynn (Vinessa Shaw), teenagers Brenda (Emilie de Ravin) and Bobby (Dan Byrd), Ethel's baby Catherine (Maisie Camilleri Preziosi) and Ethel's milquetoast cellphone salesman husband and lone Democrat, Doug Bukowsi (Aaron Stanford) — are driving through New Mexico en route to San Diego to celebrate Bob and Ethel's silver anniversary. They stop at a remote gas station run by scurvy redneck Jeb (Tom Bower), who advises them of a shortcut through the local hills that he says will shave several hours off of their journey. What the Carters do not know is that Jeb has been the reluctant ally of a clan of inbred mutants, a group descended from miners who were thought dead after the government destroyed their homes in an area designated for nuclear testing, and when Jeb thinks that Lynn has seen his satchel full of loot stolen from previous waylaid travelers, he directs them into the clutches of the mutants in order to protect his own ass. The Carters drive for a while and their tires are punctured by concealed spikes, which leaves them and their towed camper stranded in the middle of nowhere, with no mobile phone signal and little likelihood of rescue. Thus it is decided that Big Bob and the much-put-upon "pussy" Doug will go off in search of help, with Bob heading back to the gas station and Doug continuing along the alleged shortcut road in search of a hoped-for town.

The family's German Shepherds, Beauty and Beast, twig early to the fact that they are not alone, and when Beauty escapes from the camper in pursuit of the interlopers, she is killed and eviscerated, with her corpse displaying all the signs of it having been done by a knife-wielding human and not some desert predator. Young Bobby gives chase and finds the poor dog, but stumbles and falls, which knocks him out for a few hours, during which time he is observed by the shy and terrified Ruby (Laura Ortiz), a sympathetic member of the mutant clan. Bobby eventually comes to and makes his way back to the camper but does not tell the women about the fate of Beauty. As night falls, Bob arrives at the gas station and falls into the hands of the mutants, while Doug returns to the camper and tells the family that he has found an abandoned town in the middle of a huge crater — which was obviously where a nuclear test had been detonated — and the place is crowded with vehicles that we, the audience, realize once belonged to other unlucky travelers. So, with everyone on edge and now aware of what Bobby witnessed, the family settles in and attempts to sleep. And then the mutants arrive, handing out a home invasion marked by immolation, shootings, rape, forced suckling at Lynn's milk-bearing breast, and the kidnapping of the baby for food. Those of the family who survive ready for a private little war, fortifying the trailer should the mutants return, and Doug, the worm having turned, taking Beast into the mutants' town to retrieve wee Catherine.

Home is where the heart is...forcibly ripped from your chest and saved for dinner.

This update of the 1977 grindhouse classic is one of the rare handful of remakes that's actually an improvement over the original, bringing to the mix a solid budget, far better direction and cinematography, tight acting from all involved, and no padding to fill out the running time (one of the original's biggest flaws), while retaining most of the plot highlights that made the 1977 so shocking and memorable for its era. As for the DVD's unrated content, I didn't think there was anything egregious enough to warrant anything stronger than an "R." Yes, there is plenty of graphic violence and gore, and the infamous rape scene is re-staged, but it's done tastefully and without even a glimpse of nudity, so why this had to be edited down for theatrical release is beyond me. Anyway, the result is gripping and plays like a particularly nasty cautionary tale told around a campfire. Watch this version and you just might trade in your copy of the 1977 version at a used DVD store (like I did the other day).

Cover image for the DVD release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2017-Day 28: FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER (1965)

Grade A cheesy 1960's-style weirdness.

The horror genre, almost more than any other, is replete with schlocky Grade-Z crap designed to part the consumer from its hard-earned cash, and sometimes flicks of that nature can be a lot of goofball fun. One such example is FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER. It looks and feels like something an eight-year-old would have dreamed up, had they the resources at their disposal with which ti realize it, only after a short while it begins to feel like it's being viewed while in the grip of a high fever.

Say it ain't so!

The plot, such as it is, involves Martians showing up in Puerto Rico in order to kidnap Earth females in the wake of all but one of their own women dying out due to an atomic war. 

Them gaw-damn Martians...Stealin' our wimmin...

It's stuff we've seen eleventy-jillion times before, only this time the aliens are kinda/sorta challenged by Col. Frank Saunders (Robert Reilly),  a human-looking android astronaut whose brain and the left side if his face are damaged when his spacecraft crash-lands in Puerto Rico. 

Our Frankenstein, ladies and gentlemen.

Now a monster on the (meager) rampage, Frank eventually runs into the alien abductors, kicks their asses, frees the nearly-nekkid chicks, battles Mull, the titular atomic mutation from Mars, and then heroically sacrifices himself when blowing up the Martians' flying saucer. THE END.

The extraterrestrial fabulousness of Dr. Nadir (Lou Cutell, later known as Amazing Larry in PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE).

Bringing to mind a more competently-made answer to PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959), this film bears no suspense, scares, or even gore, but what it does have is that certain mid-1060's "camp' flavor that just simply happens and is mostly impossible to pre-plan or replicate. And while horny Martians making off with bikini-clad Puerto Ricans with (sort of) Frankenstein thrown into the mix is goofy enough, the film goes that extra mile by including the Martian leader's right-hand man, Dr. Nadir, as played to fey perfection by Lou Cutell, who would later turn up in Tim Burton's debut feature, PEE-WEE'S BIG ADVENTURE (1985), as the briefly-seen but unforgettable Amazing Larry.

Yeah. FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE SPACE MONSTER is as bizarre a departure from the expected Frankensteinian tropes as FRANKENSTEIN CONQUERS THE WORLD (1965) was (though neither as good not as entertaining), but it's a fun way to pass seventy-nine minutes, provided one has a well-packed bong and a few six-packs close at hand.

Poster from the theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2017-Day 27: HALLOWEEN (2007)

"Jesus H. Christ, this movie is a piece of shit... And I was in the live-action FIST OF THE NORTH STAR, so I know what I'm talking about!!!

When looking at the international cinema of horror, from Day One of film the viewer has been treated to whatever the culture that created any given movie finds scary. Old creepiness dusted off from an indigenous base of rich myths and legends brought to moving, visceral life on the big screen; the Chinese have their hopping vampires, the Japanese roll out tales of tragic ghosts and hostile nature spirits, the Spanish give us lusty werewolves and the Catholic scares of the undead Knights Templar, Italy expresses a singularly gustatory horror with its epics of flesh-eating, Britain revels in the fairytale-like excesses of Hammer Studios' Gothic monster rallies, and so on. That's all a bit of a generalization, but the point I'm trying to make is that each of these cultures has been around for a loooooong time and have accumulated a deep and resonant bestiary of goblins, golems, vampires, and what have you, while America is still a relatively young country with a culture that mixes and matches its elements from the innumerable races, religions, and cultures that have settled here over the past couple of hundred years, and does not necessarily have the same kind of myth base that other lands possess. Our earliest horror icons, particularly the familiar monsters and miscreants found in the Universal horror cycle of the 1930's and 1940's, were mostly European in inspiration and setting — Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, and the Wolfman being the most prominent examples — but the uniquely American flavor of horror didn't really surface until the advent of Alfred Hitchcock's PSYCHO in 1960.

A cinema and genre milestone.

Seen by many as the true proto-slasher film, PSYCHO's crawly weirdness and intensely horrifying revelation of what deviant and homicidal behavior might lurk just beneath the placid, "aw, shucks" banality of modern day America struck a chord, especially since it was inspired by the true-life case of infamous cannibal/necrophile/murderer Ed Gein. Gein's arrest in 1957 exposed the nation to an unspeakable horror that absolutely no one at the time was ready for, and thus were sown the seeds of a new, uniquely American bogeyman: the twisted killer who dwells among us, with us none the wiser until it's too late.


PSYCHO's success opened a floodgate of would-be copycat shockers, and as times changed and the country had its eyes opened — and to some extent desensitized — by the brutality of the Vietnam conflict, the American horror audience accepted and in many ways embraced an escalating level of gore and gross-out theatrics that shocked minds who could see sights of mind-bending awfulness on the nightly news. The upped ante of mainstream shock reached its early-1970's apex with the religion-driven extremes of THE EXORCIST (1973), and once you've seen an apple-cheeked twelve-year-old girl cuss like a sailor, piss all over the living room carpet, vomit torrents of split pea soup, and — my favorite — sunder her nether regions with a bloody crucifix while screaming, "LET JESUS FUCK YOU!!!," where else can you really go after that?

John Carpenter provided an answer in 1978 with the original HALLOWEEN, a lean, taut tale of "the Boogeyman," here named Michael Meyers, that brought back genuine suspense and an overwhelming feeling of impending dread to the horror arena.

Phase 2 in the evolution of slasher films.

It was scary as a motherfucker and kept the gore to an absolute minimum, all the while providing the simplest of stories. In a nutshell, it can be summed up as simply as "the Boogeyman comes to town on Halloween and kills a bunch of horny teenagers," but that paper-thin setup, in this instance anyway, was used to maximum effect, executed with artistry and intelligence, and has deservedly gone on to be a cinematic classic.


Then FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980) ripped off the killer-and-kids scenario, only substituting graphic gore and violence for real scares and behind-the-camera competence, and in the process making a mint at the box office during a period dominated by teen coming-of-age dreck, post-disco musicals, and feeble STAR WARS ripoffs.

The low-budget bloodbath that launched countless sequels and imitators, and that was one of the defining flavors of 1980's cinema. (For better or worse.)

The unexpected success of FRIDAY THE 13TH did not go unnoticed and in no time the sequel machine got into gear, but since the killer in the first film was beyond all shadow of a doubt beheaded and therefore unrevivable, the creators had to come up with something new in the form of Jason Voorhees, a hydrocephalic drowning-victim whose story was told in the first flick. Jason went through the homicidal motions in the utterly perfunctory FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 2 (1981) and gained a definitive look when he donned a hockey mask in FRIDAY THE 13TH PART 3 (1982), after which he joined Michael Meyers as a voiceless, personality-void horror icon that's more of a malevolent force of both nature and twisted, puritanical anti-sex "morality." These unstoppable juggernauts of supernatural carnage had no explanation per se, they simply existed to kill, and no matter how many times they were shot, stabbed, immolated, or, in one particularly memorable example, blown to pieces with a grenade launcher, these monsters kept right on coming. Literally, the spirit of serial murder writ large, Michael and Jason — and Freddy Krueger a bit later — were terrifying (despite piss poor scripts and incompetent filmmaking) not just because of their seemingly never-ending killing sprees, but because of their very lack of any reason for their rampages. They were as unknowable and merciless as a hurricane, and equally impossible to control, and therein lay their power. If you're looking for depth or pathos in your bogeymen, don't look to Michael or Jason because their sole purpose is to offer up the most simple, direct, and downright visceral scare possible, with no bullshit involved.


Which brings me, in a rather round-about way, to Rob Zombie's 2007 remake of HALLOWEEN.

The only legitimate reason for filmmakers to do a remake of a classic film is to in some way reinterpret or improve the source material for a contemporary generation. That said, Rob Zombie — the most ridiculous director's moniker of all time, and, yes, I know he's been known by it since his days as the frontman for White Zombie — has done neither, simultaneously desecrating the modern slasher genre's Rosetta Stone and churning out a faceless, soulless, by-the-numbers entry that is staggering in both predictability and listlessness.

Taking the basic template of John Carpenter's 1978 landmark, Zombie — I feel like an idiot simply writing that name — spends the first forty (or so) minutes of the flick showing us the squalid home life and day to day existence of the young Michael Meyers, a childhood anti-wonderland defined bystereotypical trailer trash dysfunction, alcoholism, verbal and physical abuse, a mean and slutty older sister, adolescent animal-slayings, sadistic school bullies, and a mother whose career as a stripper is the only source of family income. Young Michael is also really into Halloween and spends a lot of time creating disturbing masks, facades that when donned allow Michael's inner rage to be expressed. Then Halloween rolls around and Michael begins his homicidal career by murdering one of his schoolyard tormentors in the woods, after which he's ready to go out trick-or-treating with his walking STD of a sister as his escort. But when his slutty sister decides she'd rather get fucked by a scurvy-looking swain and leaves Michael to fend for himself, the lad stews until he snaps, killing everyone in his family save for his mother and infant sister. Locked up and placed under the psychiatric care of Dr. Loomis — played by Malcolm McDowell, my favorite actor, in another in a long line of utterly thankless roles that waste his immense talents — Michael soon stops talking and begins a fifteen-year stint in the rubber room, his only outlet for expression being his mask-making hobby.

Years pass, and on one fateful night Michael escapes from the institution. He soon finds himself at a pestilent truck stop where he murders Ken Foree (the cool black guy from the original DAWN OF THE DEAD) and steals his gas station attendant jumpsuit, after which he stops off at his long-abandoned boyhood home to retrieve his trademark William Shatner mask — yes, you read that right; for those who did not already know, the famous Michael Meyers pullover is the likeness of STAR TREK's Captain Kirk — and a butcher knife, and from that point on the movie is a beat-by-beat remake of the 1978 original.

I have to admit that the setup of Michael's evil had me interested during the family dysfunction bits, but then Zombie — damn it, man, your name is Robert Cummings! Use it, for fuck's sake!!! — shovels on layer after layer of his trademark cruelty, the same kind of shit that made both HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES and the inexplicably well-touted THE DEVIL'S REJECTS so stunningly unpleasant, to say nothing of boring, and with that he lost me. But what do I know? It seems that the contemporary horror audience willingly forgoes actual scares, instead shelling out cash to see flicks like SAW and HOSTEL, both in the vanguard of the odious "torture-as-horror" sub-genre, so this version of HALLOWEEN may just be exactly what the contemporary fan wants to see, namely a series of pointless, gory killings that aren't hampered by anything so unnecessary as any hint of real suspense or an actual story getting in the way of the bloodletting and titties.

And, yes, I know I just described nearly every slasher film ever made, especially those unleashed in the wake of FRIDAY THE 13TH, but none of those films had any pretensions of being anything other than assembly line low-budget, cynical gore shows out to make a quick buck, whereas much of the current R-rated horror cinema tries to be perceived as "tapping into the dark corners of the modern zeitgeist and revealing ourselves to be the greatest horror" or some such shit, while casting garden variety sadists as the new bogeymen.

Zombie's HALLOWEEN reduces Michael Meyers' supernatural elements to nil, a castrating de-mystification that leaves him an all-too-understandable product of the havoc wrought by the horrors he endured as a child, even attempting to get the viewers to sympathize with him, which is one of the most ill-advised "re-imaginings" I've ever witnessed. Zombie apparently has some sort of affinity for serial killers and sadists, as was so cheerfully demonstrated in his two previous efforts, but while those films were not really meant to be taken seriously, HALLOWEEN strives to present real emotion and sadness, two things that Zombie is utterly incapable of providing. After a promising setup, Zombie pisses away everything he'd built by simply — and lazily — aping the original film, but those of us who've seen the template suffer all the more because we know just how good the source was, to say nothing of it actually being scary.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the point of horror movies to scare the audience, hence the name "horror movie?" Well lemme tell ya something, bunkie: Rob Zombie has succeeded in making a horror movie with absolutely no suspense whatsoever and no trace of even one legitimate scare, instead seeking to get us not to notice his sheer lack of talent as a director by pouring on the gore. Once Michael's got his mask on, the film cruises along on auto pilot. It's sort of like sitting through a dull refresher course on a subject that you long ago memorized and now must rehash in the pursuit of some form of certification. All that's onscreen is a monument to one man's hubris and buying into the undeserved critical and fan accolades based on two less-than-mediocre features that preceded it. The wan restaging that unspools barely maintains one's interest, save for the task of morbidly stacking up the remake against its progenitor, a process of evaluation that leaves Rob Zombie's HALLOWEEN standing exposed as a would-be porn star out to eclipse John Holmes as the biggest cock ever seen, yet pitifully wielding a two-inch dick like it was a baseball bat.

Rob Zombie's HALLOWEEN is an almost total waste of time, and was also a make-or-break film for me. Having absolutely hated HOUSE OF 1,000 CORPSES and THE DEVIL'S REJECTS, I was ready to write of Zombie's films for good, but when it was announced that he'd had the King Kong-sized balls to remake one of the greatest horror films ever made, I just had to see for myself if he could actually do something worthwhile. Well, his take on HALLOWEEN merely confirms that I should have followed my gut and given it a miss, and that Rob Zombie can barely direct a turd out of his own asshole, let alone a feature film. Some of you out there may still be intrigued after what I've just had to say, but I'm telling you flat-out that the film is a major disappointment, or would have been if I had ever liked any of the director's other work. It's just a big waste of time and isn't even worth sitting through whenever it pops up on cable.

Poster from the theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2017-Day 26: DOCTOR WHO "THE ARK IN SPACE" (1975)

When the human body becomes an alien incubator.

Time: The far future. 

Location: The Nerva Beacon, a space station orbiting planet Earth.

The Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker), Sarah Jane Smith (Elizabeth Sladen), and Harry Sullivan (Ian Marter) randomly arrive via the TARDIS — the Doctor's time/space-traversing vehicle — on a seemingly deserted space station orbiting Earth. 

The Doctor (Tom Baker) marvels at the frozen survivors of the human race, his favorite species.

After exploring  the facility and noting that something had damaged assorted station functions, the travelers discover several hundred cryogenically preserved human beings, along with the long-dead corpse of a large insectoid creature. Upon reviving the station's first med-tech, Vira (Wendy Williams), the Doctor and friends are informed that the Nerva Beacon contains genetically-screened pairs of ideal humans that were placed in orbital stasis in advance of solar flares that would scorch the planet. The plan was for the sleepers to awaken after five-thousand years and reclaim the Earth, but, thanks to the unexplained systems damage, they overslept by several thousand years. The station's captain, Noah (Kenton Moore), is also awakened, but while he warmly greets Vira, his assigned pair-mate, he perceives the Doctor and his companions as threats and treats them with open and uncharacteristic hostility. It soon becomes apparent that the station was long ago breached by the Wirrn, a species of sentient insects that lived in deep space but required planets upon which to establish breeding colonies, and indigenous mammals to serve as hosts for their larvae. While the survivors on the Nerva Beacon slept, other spacecraft were launched from Earth and sent deep into the galaxy in search of other suitable worlds, and some of them chanced upon the Wirrn's breeding ground, which they wiped out. That drove the desperate insects back into space in search of new breeding areas and host fodder, where they found both objectives in the form of the Nerva station. The dead Wirrn was a queen and she managed to infect Noah and another crew member as they slept, and Noah is beginning to metamorphose into something other than human...

The insidious reproductive cycle of the Wirrn meets Homo Sapiens.

The Wirrn are also revealed to absorb the knowledge of the creatures they gestate within, but until now they only had access to lesser life forms. If the Wirrn succeed in gestating within the station's sleepers, the Wirrn will become technologically capable and seize the Earth as the launching point from which to begin a campaign of interstellar colonization/conquest. Needless to say, the Doctor and the active humans cannot allow that to come to pass...

An adult Wirrn.

Coming just after the lackluster "Robot" (Tom Baker's inaugural serial as the Doctor), "The Ark in Space" marks the first of several truly great stories from Baker's legendary and lengthy run as our favorite Timelord. The isolated location with no chance for outside help is the perfect setting for this tale, harking back as it does to the "base under siege" trope that became the show's stock in trade during the era of the Second Doctor, and the Wirrn and their creepy reproductive cycle really get under the viewer's skin. (Pun intended.)

Noah (Kenton Moore), on the way to no longer being human.

The story also brings to mind that seminal work of British sci-fi/horror, THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955), aka THE CREEPING UNKNOWN (which was adapted to the cinema from an acclaimed 1953 television serial), which dealt with an astronaut returning from a space mission and changing into a hideous and deadly alien organism. But what's most interesting about watching "The Ark in Space" today is noting how similar many of its plot elements are to 1979's ALIEN, one of the all-time masterpieces of sci-fi/horror fusion, which came four years after this serial first aired. I'd like to think that the makers of ALIEN didn't see this story and shamelessly crib from it — after all, some of the roots of ALIEN can be seen as far back as the script for DARK STAR (1974), which was co-written by Dan O'Bannon, who went on to write the screenplay for ALIEN — but the similarities are too glaring to ignore...

Whatever the case may be, "The Ark in Space" is absolutely recommended to those who prefer their DOCTOR WHO old school and scary, and for ALIEN junkies who'd like to see an earlier take on similar material (other than 1958's IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE).

Packaging art for the DVD release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2017-Day 25: TRAIN TO BUSAN (2016)

Hell on earth, and there's nowhere to hide.

Seok-Woo (Gong Yoo) is a workaholic whose obsessive concentration on his job has led to estrangement from his wife (who has left him) and his unintentional neglect of Soo-An (Kim Su-an), his sweet little girl. For her birthday, more than anything else, the depressed child wants to visit her mother in the city of Busan, so her father, racked with guilt over having missed his daughter's recital where she had practiced a song intended for him, takes a rare day off from work and accompanies Soo-an on the long train journey departing from Seoul. But as the train leaves the station, Soo-an looks out of the window and sees people outside acting strangely. One of those individuals boards the train, unnoticed by the train's security officer, and once she's on board she makes her way into the bathroom to apply a makeshift tourniquet to her mauled leg. She eventual emerges from the restroom but it's clear that there's something seriously wrong with her. She collapses in the vestibule between cars and, as a female staffer attempts to help her, the afflicted woman goes into convulsions and rises as a white-eyed, blood-drooling, savage killing machine. She attackers her would-be rescuer, who also turns into an insane, ravening killer, and as the two claw and tear their way through a carload of terrified passengers, the infection rapidly spreads, creating a horde of zombie-like "infected" whose urge to kill is stimulated by them being able to see their prey with their limited vision, and when their ability to visually perceive victims is impaired by darkness or obscuring windows with some form of a shade, they track with their hearing.

 The implacable hordes of the Infected.

To say more about the plot's details would spoil the experience for potential viewers, so I'll merely make a few points and move on:

• The film works within the same tense parameters as relentless, no-way-out horror classics like the original NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) and DOG SOLDIERS (2002), and is an intense study of a disparate group of people trying to survive on a train filled with mindless creatures bent on senseless murder.
• The script, performances, and direction are all top-notch from start to finish, and I dare to say this film comes from out of the glutted zombie genre to earn distinction as an instant classic.
• Unlike the usual ciphers/cannon fodder that populate most horror films, the people depicted here are all fleshed-out characters whom we get to know, understand, and care about, so their struggle for survival becomes ours by way of empathy, and it is one rough motherfucker of a ride.
• Though ostensibly a zombie apocalypse movie (despite the monsters technically being diseased and not supernatural in any way) and quite intense in its depictions of victims being savaged six ways to Sunday, the film is surprisingly not the gorefest one may go into it expecting. Believe me, it's so intense that any showers of gratuitous gore would have been utterly beside the point.
• I've seen TRAIN TO BUSAN twice, in both its native Korean with English subtitles and with the English language dub, and of the two the one with subtitles is the one to go with. I recently ran the dubbed version for some friends — our DVD player for some reason would not allow the subtitles to be seen for the Korean version, so we had no choice but to watch it with dubbing —  and when the film started there were titters at English vocal delivery that made the actors sound like anime characters. Once things got intense, which was early on,  we were able to ignore the fact that things were dubbed and just enjoy the ride, but take my word for it that the native language/subtitled option allows the performances to be experienced as originally intended, and the film is all the stronger for it.

As you have no doubt figured out by now, I rate TRAIN TO BUSAN as a solid winner. It's tension-filled, brutal, and incredibly bleak, and is hands down one of the finest horror efforts of the decade. HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION, and I say that as a guy who is waaaaay past sick and tired of zombie movies.

Poster from the Korean theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2017-Day 24: NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR (1985)

"Everybody's got somethin' ta do...Everybody but YOU!!!"

While growing up in southern Connecticut, I spent a lot of time haunting the area's grindhouses in search of cheap and sleazy celluloid thrills, and more often than not such diversion meant horror movies while seated in a theater full of rowdy drunks and junkies. Many was the night I spent being thoroughly entertained by the head-on collision of a crappy movie and the hilarious and profane antics of my fellow moviegoers. It was the ass-end of a golden period in which trashy, zero-budget exploitation flicks were dumped into run-down theaters where they played for a week before vanishing into the ether and one's fond memories. VHS was in full flower at the time and a lot of those shitty movies did make it to home video, but the at-home experience simply could not compare to being at Ground Zero for the big screen release of the latest gore/nudity/profanity-laden attraction that was sure to bring the never-boring dregs of humanity to the theater. Those reprobates managed to liven up even the the least entertaining of time-wasters, so it was an extra-special event when the forces of drunken moviegoerdom collided with a bad movie of undeniable watchability and utter shameless, slapdash cruddiness. 

Such was the case on the May night in 1985 when I hauled my ass to Wilton Cinema to see NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR. Wilton Cinema was a weird theater whose programming often defied comprehension, thanks to them running quality mainstream releases one week, and random pieces of cheap exploitation garbage the next, and sometimes they would inexplicably pair respectable pictures with R-rated ultra-violent fare as inappropriate double-features. By the mid-1980's, the theater circuit's programmers finally gave up altogether and the theater morphed into one of Fairfield County's most reliable showcases for garbage cinema and insane audiences, and on the night when I experienced NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR, the evening was punctuated by a thick haze of other-than-nicotinal smoke, the chime-and-crash of dropped 40-oz. malt liquor bottles hitting the sticky floor, and the merry audience hurling endless rejoinders at the action unfolding onscreen. On this specific night the audience was in rare form, and their wit was given a target worthy of their skills once the night train began its journey.

The film immediately gets into the audience's face with a so-bad-it's-awesome musical number in which a bunch of obnoxious faux-MTV types dance around at a party held on a speeding train. Led by a blonde, would-be-cool pretty boy who sings an inane dance tune, the group subjects us to feeble choreography and even some appalling white boy breakdancing as the singer admonishes the viewer with "Everybody's got somethin' ta do...EVERYBODY BUT YOU!!!"

One cannot help but admire the sheer nerve of not only foisting this "so '80's it's ridiculous" mess of a dance number upon an unsuspecting general public, but also for the film knowing exactly what kind of movie it is and directly calling out the viewer for having nothing better to do with their time than watch this piece of shit. Well played, NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR. Well played. (respectful clapping)

This hilarious number pops up a few times during the film and I defy you not to fall in love with its sheer awfulness and sing along every time the chorus tells us that "Everybody's got somethin' ta do...EVERYBODY BUT YOU!!!" (The smashed audience at Wilton Cinema sure did, and it was like an enthusiastic revival meeting.)

At this point, the audience had no idea what to expect from the film, since there had been no trailers leading up to it in the months before its release, nor were there any commercials on television, and the poster gave away absolutely nothing, seeing as it was simply an image of a bloody butcher knife embedded on a train track. That led one to believe that it was going to be yet another in the era's long line of cookie-cutter cheapo slasher flicks, so imagine our surprise when the movie turned out to be a horror anthology culled together from three pre-existing films (one unfinished), hung upon a framing device in which God  and Satan ride in a private car on the train as, unbeknownst to the dancing revelers, it hurtles toward its pre-ordained doom at dawn. God (Ferdy Mayne, familiar from THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS, WHERE EAGLES DARE, BARRY LYNDON, THE VAMPIRE LOVERS, HAWK THE SLAYER, and many, many more) and Satan (Tony Giorgio, best known from MAGNUM FORCE, FOXY BROWN, and as Bruno Tattaglia in THE GODFATHER; yes, a cast member from THE GODFATHER is in this movie) review the individual cases of assorted people and decide on whether their actions will relegate those hapless mortal to Heaven or eternal damnation. Each of these case plays out in segments edited from the aforementioned pre-existing films.

Cool! We get to watch TV with God and Satan!

"The Case of Harry Billings"

Otto's grim harvest.

Newlywed Harry Billings (BARBARELLA's John Phillip Law) survives a terrible car accident that kills his wife. Rescued from the crash by some of the most unscrupulous doctors in history and is drugged and brainwashed into becoming their personal errand boy,  Harry is dispatched to drug and kidnap busty women. Once they are drugged, the guy hauls his victims back to the creepy sanitarium that serves as the doctors' base of insidious operations, and the women are stripped to a state of gratuitous nudity before being molested/raped and eventually dismembered alive by Otto (NIGHT COURT's Richard Moll), a tall and incredibly creepy orderly, so that their components can be sold to medical schools around the world. (The sequences of the victims meeting their fates are quite nasty, with the dismemberments taking place offscreen while horrific screaming is heard, and the camera pans to a room that can only be called a human slaughterhouse, filled as it is with gory dismembered body segments on display and being packaged for shipping.) Harry is also pressed into sexual service for the pleasure of Dr. Fargo (Sharon Ratcliff), who drugs and lobotomizes her partner, Dr. Brewer (Arthur M. Braham), in order to take over the operation and reap all of the profits for herself.

Dr. Brewer, betrayed by his partner in evil.

As his usefulness nears its end, Otto prepares a jar in which to store Harry's soon-to-be-removed head, but Harry breaks free of the mind-control and sets out to free the living female prisoners after cold-cocking Fargo and strapping her to an operating table. Fargo meets a just and horrifying end as the lobotomized Dr. Brewer finds her and, with the help of another lobotomized staffer, decides to "open her up" without anesthetic. Harry fights Otto to the death and (rather unbelievably) wins, after which he walks into the operating room as the strapped-down and topless Dr. Fargo has her throat slit with a scalpel wielded by a barely-functional madman.

Bye-bye, Otto.

 By far the anthology's most visceral, nasty, and gory segment, this was originally shot as SCREAM YOUR HEAD OFF in 1981, but that film was never finished. As such, the re-purposing of footage as used here works quite well.

 "The Case of Gretta Connors"

When young love takes a detour into the very, VERY bizarre...

Pretty musician Gretta Connors (Meredith Haze) supports herself by selling popcorn at a carnival, where she meets sugar daddy George Youngmeyer (J. Martin Sellers), who scoops her up as his live-in lover and kept woman. Youngmeyer promises to make her a star and Gretta falls under his spell, finding herself starring in cheap porno reels shown at frat parties. (What we see of one of those efforts features Gretta in the most low-budget "squaw costume ever, roughly consisting of a poncho and a headband with a feather in it, as she finds herself on the receiving end of the lecherous attentions of a "pioneer" in an equally pitiful getup.) College student Glenn Marshall (Rick Barnes) sees one of Gretta's tenderloin opuses and instantly becomes obsessed with her. He somehow tracks her to Youngmeyer's Manhattan nightclub where she works as the house pianist (and we un-ironically see that her musical skills are barely up to those of a lazy grade-schooler) and the two become passionate lovers, which does not sit at all well with Youngmeyer. So, rather than simply accept that he's been supplanted by a younger man or simply hire someone to kick the shit out of Glenn, Youngmeyer instead invites the pair to the "death club," a cabal run by Youngmeyer in which the death-obsessed members regularly convene and expose themselves to novel forms of being killed. Each new possible demise results in a member dying horribly, and Youngmeyer intends for his former paramour and her lover to go out in that fashion. The methods of doom include death by rare stinging insect (actually a tatty stop-motion puppet), electrocution, and being crushed by a wrecking ball, all of which are cheesily depicted for our viewing pleasure.

How to lose the electrocution game.

Confusingly, the segment comes to an abrupt end, with no shown climax, and instead we cut back to God and Satan, where the train's porter states that "Gretta went off with the nice young man and lived happily ever after," with no mention whatsoever as to the fate of Youngmeyer. ???

"The Case of Gretta Connors" was edited from segments of the completely out of its mind DEATH WISH CLUB (1983), which is one of the most bizarre and insane movies it has ever been my pleasure to sit through. I found it on VHS in the dollar bin of an odd-lot closeout store in Manhattan in the early 1990's, knowing full well that it was the source of a segment in NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR, but that foreknowledge in no way prepared me for just how crazy the unadulterated DEATH WISH CLUB was. The truncated version actual renders the madness into coherent form, but one notices in one of the sequences in NIGHT RAIN TO TERROR that Gretta's long hair suddenly switches to a rather butch short style with zero explanation, then back to her long-haired look for the rest of the story, and I remember noting that and being confused when seeing it in the theater. However, it is fully explained in DEATH WISH CLUB as Gretta, for no apparent reason, suddenly snapping and deciding from out of the blue that she is a man. At that point, she and Glenn are forced to participate in the death games at gunpoint and Gretta has clearly gone off the deep end into majorly unstable territory. My VHS copy of DEATH WISH CLUB is long gone, but I wish that film would get a DVD release. It's a unique work in the annals of bad cinema and it needs to be rescued from undeserved obscurity immediately.

Cover art from the VHS release of the delirious DEATH WISH CLUB (1983). The images seen on this cover have nothing to do with anything in the film.

"The Case of Claire Hansen"

An undying evil.

A demonic entity — who's implied to be the son of the Devil — named Olivier (Robert Bristol) has been around throughout human history and seeks to wipe out mankind. First seen in the narrative as a high-ranking Nazi official during WWII, Olivier turns up again in the 1980's and his existence is now provable thanks to the advent of photography. His efforts are opposed by a grungy monk (Maurice Grandmason) and who recruit skilled surgeon and devout Catholic, Dr. Claire Hansen (Faith Clift), the latter of whom ends up tasked by the Church with killing Olivier by cutting out his living heart. A number of Satanic obstacles hinder our heroes on the way to the completion of their mission, including a charming stop-motion demon.

Bargain basement Harryhausen or "Gumby Goes to Hell?" YOU decide!

Cribbed from CATACLYSM (1980), which I saw in its entirety on VHS under the title THE NIGHTMARE NEVER STOPS, the final segment is by far the most coherent and best-realized. And while it's fun in this abbreviated iteration, I urge you to seek out the full-length CATACLYSM and check that out. It's a good minor effort and deserves better than to languish in cinematic obscurity.

Once the final segment reaches its climax, we shift back to the train as God and Satan await the moment when the vehicles crashes (for no apparent reason) and kills all on board, save for our two cosmic entities. But after the fatal disaster happens, the train is restored and all are brought back to life, apparently to live out the scenario endlessly.

The titular conveyance heads forward to meet its fate, presumably on endless loop.

Bottom line: NIGHT TRAIN TO TERROR is world-class idiocy and is one the prime recommendations for when throwing a movie party in which you and your friends get your drink and your snark on. Out of the uncountable legions of bad movies, this is one of the most flat-out entertaining of the lot, and I cannot recommend it enough.

Poster from the theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2017-Day 23: NOSFERATU, A SYMPHONY OF TERROR (1922)

Just one of the film's nightmare-fuel images.

NOSFERATU, A SYMPHONY OF TERROR is one of the most influential horror flicks ever made, standing tall as one of the crown jewels of German expressionist cinema and sporting one of the most iconic and horrifying vampires ever committed to celluloid. No lie, it's a straight-up masterpiece of chilling, creepy eeriness, and the beauty of it is that it's basically a bootleg Dracula movie. I may love it, but that affection cannot mask the fact that it's a shameless knockoff. No lie, NOSFERATU is an unlicensed adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel DRACULA, and Stoker's heirs sued over the flagrant copyright infringement. The courts decided that all existing copies of the film were to be destroyed, but some survived and it's a damned good thing that they did, because this film is arguably the best Dracula movie ever made.

In fact, NOSFERATU is such a bootleg that I won't bother to go into the plot in detail. All you need to know is that it contains all of the basics of the seminal Dracula story, and I make a case for it doing better at it than any other adaptation. While the classic 1931 Bela Lugosi version cemented the image of the Count as more or less a suave undead aristocrat/pimp and Christopher Lee's interpretation was a study in Gothic rage and outright evil, Max Schreck's Count Orlok leaves them both in the dust when it comes to sheer creepiness and malevolence of presence.

Count Orlok (Max Schreck). Hand down my favorite cinematic vampire, this guy is a nightmare made flesh.

Slender, pale, pointy-eared and markedly rat-like in appearance, Orlok bears none of the glamour of perceived sexiness of the undead suckfaces that came in his wake and has the decency to be simply a straight-up, unapologetic monster. When we first meet him, his bald pate and pronounced ears are obscured by a hat, but as the film progresses he sheds all pretense of humanity and prowls the night with claws that bring to mind the deadliest of scythes.

No sex-appeal or sparkling for this vamp.

Orlok's menace is immeasurably aided by the silent-era black-and-white imagery and that distinct look of its period's German expressionist aesthetic, which only roots the film even further into the nightmarish. And it should also be noted that NOSFERATU is surprisingly lively for a film of its antique vintage. While many other silent films can come off as too arch or bring due to outmoded early filmmaking aspects, NOSFERATU's 94-minute running time holds the viewer in a tight grip, even if one has seen many of the subsequent Dracula iterations, and it is never dull. 

This one's a classic for numerous reasons and is a must-see for all horror and vampire enthusiasts. It's a concrete case of one of a genre's progenitors proving not to just be some stolid fossil fit only for scholarly consideration. NOSFERATU is the balls-out real deal and its eerie quality is unlikely ever to fade.

Promotional art from the original German release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2017-Day 22: HUMAN LANTERNS (1982)

If this looks creepy, trust me, it is.

Lung (Liu Yung) is an arrogant asshole who has gained fame and fortune via his mastery of swordsmanship and general badassery, and he maintains a bitter and competitive rivalry with Tan Fu (Chen Kuan Tai), who's his equal in all ways. After grievously insulting Tan in public, the two vow to compete against one another to win the yearly lantern festival, so Lung seeks out the services of Chao Chun-Fang (Lo Lieh), an artisan of renowned lantern-making skills. Lung hires Chun-Fang and acts all arrogant about it, knowing full well that seven years prior he bested Chun-Fang in a sword duel and stole his woman. The lantern-maker accepts the commission, with the stipulation that Lung not come to check up on his progress during the work process. When Lung goes on his merry assholish way, Chen-Fang embarks on a murderous spree in which he murders and flays three women and an old man so he can use their skin to make the lanterns, the idea for which he got from a tall tale once told to him by the old man over drinks. 

The butchery begins.

Chen-Fang's defeat and the loss of his woman seven years prior has driven him completely and viciously insane, and he has used the years since his humiliation to train himself into a state of nigh-invincible martial arts mastery. Donning a demonic costume, he preys on the notorious local prostitute that Tan both Lung and Tan are involved with (despite Lung being married to Chen-Fang's former squeeze), Tan's huntress sister, Lung's wife — whom he rapes before flaying her alive — and the aforementioned old man. The abductions of their ones cause Lung and Tan to believe each other is responsible, and thus does Chen-Fang sow discord between them that he hopes will make them like him. Their animosity builds to a couple of kung fu throwdowns before they figure out that they have been set up — skilled they may be, but they are none too bright — and take the fight to Chen-Fang in the apocalyptic climax.

Collecting art supplies the hard way.

HUMAN LANTERNS (also known as HUMAN SKIN LANTERNS) is a very uneven gene-splicing of the horror and Shaw Brothers martial arts genres, and as such it's a very interesting work. On the the one hand it's a straight-up wuxia morality play whose message boils down to "Don't be an arrogant douchebag," and on the other it's a gruesome and gory shocker about a psycho who skins naked women alive, and though both are handled with the quality one expects fro a Shaw Brothers production, the two flavors never quite gel. Instead of the horror and the kung fu blending seamlessly into one another, in one scene it's a lush costumed martial period piece, and in the very next scene things jarringly transition into ultra-dark nightmare fuel. It's never boring, and even the aforementioned rape scene is handled in a palatable manner — what's happening is absolutely clear, though we are not shown any explicit nudity, and the act of violation itself is intercut with shots of the turning cogs in a bloody mill and the crying face of Lung's soon-to-be-skinned wife — but the end result is a film that tries to be please chopsocky junkies and gorehounds, and yet might not necessarily fully satisfy either audience.

The unbridled madness of Chen-Fang (Lo Lieh).

The film is populated with faces familiar to fans of Shaw Brothers films and other classic martial arts movies, including Chen Kuan Tai (THE FLYING GUILLOTINE, EXECUTIONERS FROM SHAOLIN), Liu Yung (FIST OF FURY, THE WAY OF THE DRAGON), Lo Meng (FIVE DEADLY VENOMS, THE KID WITH THE GOLDEN ARM), and Chien Sun (THE CHINATOWN KID, FIVE DEADLY VENOMS), but the movie truly belongs to the one and only Lo Lieh as Chen-Fang. LO Lieh was a prolific legend who appeared in around 200 films, several of which are martial arts classics, including the seminal FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH (1972) — which, for those who may not be aware, was the film that launched the 1970's kung fu boom in the West — DIRTY HO (1976), EXECUTIONERS FROM SHAOLIN (1977), the genre-defining THE 36th CHAMBER OF SHAOLIN (1978), the spectacular MAD MONKEY KUNG FU (1979), fan-favorite FISTS OF THE WHITE LOTUS (1980), and many, many more. While he was great as the hero in FIVE FINGERS OF DEATH, his true forte was playing some of the vilest villains ever committed to celluloid, and Chen-Fang just might be his most viciously insane role. The bastard is completely out of his mind and carries a grudge like nobody's business, which is especially bad when combined with the character's superlative ass-kicking acumen.

In a rare moment of reverie, Chen-Fang takes time to admire a "pretty" mole on the skin of the woman he just raped and flayed.

While the film overall suffers from an extreme case of scene-by-scene genre flip-flopping, don't let that steer you away from enjoying Lo Lieh at his most reprehensible and unhinged. Believe me, if You've seen some of his films and know what he's like as a bad guy, you know that calling his performance here "his most reprehensible and unhinged" is not a statement to be taken lightly. HUMAN LANTERNS may not be perfect or a classic, but check it out for Lo Lieh (R.I.P.).

The titular light sources.

Poster from the original Chinese theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2017-Day 21: THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951)

First contact of the worst kind.

A United States Air Force team is dispatched to a research station at the North Pole, where the research team have discovered a recently-crashed and flash-frozen extra-terrestrial spacecraft. Though their recovery efforts accidentally cause the flying saucer to self-destruct, the crew manages to salvage a large block of ice containing an 8-foot-tall manlike alien life form. 

Frozen friend...or foe?

The military takes over the situation and enforces by-the-book protocols for handling the frozen alien, much to the dismay of the scientific research team. However, the researchers mostly see the wisdom in caution, so they agree to wait for the soldiers to receive further orders. While they wait, a mishap involving a heat lamp thaws the spaceman, and it's out of the ice, it proves itself to be one seriously tough and aggressive son of a bitch whose presence and continued existence could spell the end of the world as we know it.

I first saw THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD when I was ten years old and it played on Channel 9. I watched it with a classmate who was sleeping over at my house that night, and since both of us were fans of sci-fi and horror movies and had both heard of the film, it was something we expected to be little, if at all, different from the many 1950's flying saucer and aliens flicks we'd already seen at even so tender an age. What we absolutely did not expect was an intense shocker made for grownups that featured an intelligent script populated with characters who spoke and acted in a realistic manner. And once the titular "thing" was on the loose, the film became a study in true terror, perhaps the first horror movie I saw that was genuinely scary as hell.

Our all-too-relatable heroes.

The alien is tall and humanoid and we never really get a good look at it in detail, but believe me when I tell you that the motherfucker is very bad news indeed. It's deduced to be a highly intelligent vegetable-creature — an "intellectual carrot" — that does not contain blood and may not be able to die, as we know of the concept, is possessed of great strength and clawed hands, feeds on the blood of mammals, regenerates lost limbs, and rapidly reproduces via seed pods. In short, it's a formidable being and, unfortunately, we'll never know if it may have been benevolent as it was immediately shot at the moment it emerged from the ice, and was driven into the deadly cold where it lost an arm to a pack of defensive sled dogs, so its hostile actions may have been committed in self-defense. But an answer will never be had, for the soldiers and the research team must fight for their lives as the apparently invulnerable creature goes on a vicious and deadly rampage through the isolated station and its grounds, killing sled dogs and slashing the throats of humans, which it then hangs upside down like cattle in a slaughterhouse (offscreen, mind you).

Most man-sized monsters can be vanquished with fire. Not this guy...

If not the very first of the 1950's decade-dominating wave of flying saucers-and-aliens movies, THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD early on defined the genre as a showcase in which plucky human protagonists must wage war against hostile invaders from beyond. But while this was a smart and groundbreaking work of great importance to the genre and to cinema in general, most of the Earth-meets-aliens films that followed in its wake focused more on special effects spectacle or shoving bug-eyed monsters in our faces, often minus anything resembling a story with a brain in its head or something that could satisfy adults as well as matinee-attending kiddies. As an exemplar of the smart science-fiction film, THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD stands tall, while also simultaneously inventing the cross-bred science-fiction/horror movie. Without THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD to lay the groundwork, there would never have been IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE (1958), ALIEN (1979), and of course the 1982 remake, John Carpenter's THE THING (but more on that later). Though perhaps tame by the standards of today's audience, this is string meat for its era and must be approached from the mindset of someone who's never seen this kind of film before. As such, it's a real kick in the head.

Poster from the theatrical release.