31 DAYS OF HORROR 2012-Day 4: CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962)

Mary (Candace Hilligoss) emerges from the river after a drag racing accident...and enters an eerie waking nightmare.

Remember the 1960 episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, "The Hitchhiker?" Well, director Herk Harvey's 1962 effort, CARNIVAL OF SOULS, tells much the same story, only at greater length and with the atmosphere and queasy creepiness cranked up to 11.

When church organist Mary (Candace Hilligoss) miraculously survives a drag racing accident that plunges a car full of herself and her girlfriends into a river, the spooky young woman moves to a job at a new parish in Utah and finds herself in a constant state of terror as she's haunted by a mysterious and silent chalk-faced man (Herk Harvey). This creepy figure turns up everywhere she goes and is sen by no one but Mary, and as if that's not bad enough, as the days progress, Mary begins to see more and more figures of her mute stalker's ilk as she begins to feel strangely drawn to an abandoned carnival pavilion on the shore of the Great salt Lake.  As her paranoia increases and her grip on reality erodes, Mary herself occasionally becomes imperceptible to those around her, an aspect that threatens to send the poor woman straight over the edge into shattered madness. The question is just what the hell is going on? The answer to that is obvious to anyone who saw "The Hitchhiker" or other not-dissimilar tales of driving-related hauntings.

The titular carnival in full swing.

I've never been a big fan of stories about hauntings and ghosts, but CARNIVAL OF SOULS holds a strong and very special place in my heart because it is genuinely eerie and possesses a positive surfeit of old school black-and-white atmosphere (which is aided in no small part by the film's all-organ score). The narrative progresses with a feel and pacing that's downright dreamlike, and that dreamlike aesthetic lugubriously builds to a full-blown nightmare by the time all is said and done. There are no visceral shocks or gory violence, and yet the viewer is held in the film's thrall by Candace Hilligoss's nervous, haunted turn as Mary. The film rests squarely on her performance, and its what she so memorably delivers that has earned her and the film its considerable, well-deserved cult rep. This is a thoughtful, quiet tapestry of utter creepiness and it's suitable for all ages, with Yours Truly strongly recommending that "horror parents" sit their impressionable young ones through it as early as age five or six. Sure, it may give them nightmares, but the grounding they'll receive will serve them well as they find their way down the path of the horror movie devotee, hopefully engendering a taste for the classy stuff early in their development. If not, there's always THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE.

Poster from the film's original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2012-Day 3: CHILDREN SHOULDN'T PLAY WITH DEAD THINGS (1973)

This low-budget late-hippie-era zombie flick played endlessly on the NYC area's Channel 9 and became a beloved favorite to many of my peers. I was never much of a fan but I admit that I had not seen the film since I was maybe eleven or twelve years old, so I figured I'd give it a second chance and sit through it again for this year's month-long horror movie retrospective.

An early effort from director Bob Clark — the guy who gave us both PORKY'S (1982) and A CHRISTMAS STORY (1983) — the film tells the story of what happens when a pack of thoroughly obnoxious early-1970's stage actors spend the night on a burial island for criminals and mockingly perform a Satanic ritual with the half-hearted intent of reviving a corpse named Orville. At first nothing happens, but in short order all of the island's corpses vacate their graves and pull a NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD by besieging the abandoned house that the actors have taken refuge in. Once the actors are down the gullets of the ravenous revenants, the zombies storm the actors' sailboat and make for the mainland. THE END.

Sounds like a fairly straightforward setup for horrific mayhem, right? Well, the film runs roughly 87 minutes, over an hour of which is spent on the bitchy, uninteresting antics of the theater troop, and when the zombie feeding frenzy finally occurs, it's way too little way too late. The attempts at clever, humorous dialogue fall flat and there are no truly effective scares — the zombie siege is too blatantly derivative of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), only minus that film's sheer terror — so what we have here is an almost total loss that is unlikely to please (or even interest) audiences in the 2000's.

While I know there are those out there who would willingly sit through two hours of nothing but a blank screen so long as it had the word "zombie" projected onto it, I cannot for the life of me fathom this film's undying cult popularity. Your mileage may vary, but I say life's too short to waste on feeble horror duds.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2012-Day 2: FRIDAY THE 13th PART 2 (1981)

One of the great lessons of the FRIDAY THE 13th series: Fuck and die. (NOTE: This shot was cut from the final MPAA-approved version, so don;t expect to see it if you decide to check this film out.)

As we all know, success at the box office pretty much guarantees sequels, no matter how ill-advised or completely stupid and unnecessary they may be, and there is perhaps no greater example of this than the multitude of follow-ups spawned the original FRIDAY THE 13th (1980). The first film was just a humble little indie gore film that got picked up by a major studio (Paramount) for distribution, and its catalog of creatively gory murders shocked the motherfucking shit out of mainstream audiences who never set foot inside of the garden variety grindhouse theater, where this kind of thing was quite commonplace (and often far, far more extreme in content). I was barely fifteen when it hit and let me tell you in no uncertain terms that its impact on the local kids of my age was positively seismic. My parents occasionally took me with them to violent/gory R-rated movies when they could not find a sitter, so my childhood prepared me for FRIDAY THE 13th, and I frankly did not understand what the big deal was. It wasn't scary or suspenseful and the story was virtually non-existent, populated as it was with a pack of cardboard ciphers about whom it was simply impossible to care. What the viewer was left with amounted to "cinema as abattoir," a moving picture confection of gore for the sake of gore, disguised as actual horror. Now, I have nothing whatsoever against gore and violence — which you no doubt are aware of if you regularly read this blog — but I personally don't find gore with no resonating narrative to be scary, per se, so my young peers' decreeing that FRIDAY THE 13th was "the scariest movie ever made" struck me as a load of galloping horseshit.

But everyone has their own opinion and horrorphiles dug FRIDAY THE 13th so much that it raked in a fuckload of cash — a real windfall since its production budget wouldn't get you as decent meal at Manhattan's pricey Hill Country Barbecue — and so it was that FRIDAY THE 13th PART 2 was unleashed upon a gore-hungry public  just shy of a year after the initial entry.

This first in a long line of sequels is virtually interchangeable with its immediate predecessor, only it somehow manages to generate even less suspense and fewer scares — a real accomplishment, that — and is really only notable because it's the first time that the series' main bogeyman, Jason Voorhees, shows up in the (apparently) undead flesh to wreak havoc upon the latest batch of horny, cardboard summer camp counselors. That in and of itself was no mean feat since the first film quite clearly established that Jason — a grotesque hydrocephalic "retard" horror stereotype — died some twenty years earlier, and his deranged mother committed the murders the first wave of counselors the audience was led to believe were attributable to the restless spirit of the drowned special needs kid. So with both the actual murderer and her disturbing son very much dead — despite Jason memorably turning up in the first film's shock ending (which was shamelessly ripped off from Brian De Palma's CARRIE) — how would the filmmakers come up with a viable killer for the sequel? Simple: have absolutely no regard for anything even resembling logic and have Jason inexplicably be alive and homicidal, though now grown up. As long as he was there to graphically dispatch all of the other characters in the utterly perfunctory "story," who cared if it made no sense?

And while Jason would in short order go on to become one of the indelible horror icons of the late-20th century (and beyond), his signature hockey-masked appearance did not fall into place until the franchise's cash-in on the brief 1980's 3-D boom, FRIDAY THE 13th PART III (1982). In FRIDAY THE 13th PART 2, Jason is visualized as pretty much a hillbilly in overalls and shitkicker boots, with his head covered by a cloth sack with a single eye hole cut out of it.

That look, though very appropriate for a spooky story told around a campfire — which, to be fair, these movies kind of are — appears fucking ludicrous when realized outside of one's individual imagination, and when coupled with the listless, sub-TV movie direction and pacing found in this suspense-void time-waster,  it's not even remotely imposing, scary or memorable. And even when  the sack comes off and we see Jason as a misshapen-headed longhaired mutant (or whatever the fuck he's meant to be), he remains uninteresting and not at all frightening. And is he a ghost? is he some odd undead haint? Is he some sort of indestructible mutant retard? Don't ask me, because it's not explained here and it's never really answered in a satisfactory way in any of the subsequent sequels.

The bottom line on this film is that it's the first of this franchise's entries that is a total waste of time. Your life will be utterly unaffected if you give it a pass, and for all intents and purposes one could skip it and proceed straight to the next film without missing a single (flimsy) narrative thread. And while FRIDAY THE 13th PART III is also a brain-dead, by-the-numbers slaughterhouse potboiler, it's considerably more lively than this turgid dud.

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2012-Day 1: THE CABIN IN THE WOODS (2012)

I love horror movies. I really, really do. I've had a passion for them since I was old enough to understand that being scared can be fun, and I enjoy most of the myriad storytelling flavors that the genre has to offer. That is why THE CABIN IN THE WOODS completely blew me away when my dear friend Suzi and her sister, Kris, insisted that I check it out. They'd both seen it in Fresno in April when it opened, and I was dragged to it maybe a month later after Suzi, who knows me better than most people do, swore up and down that I would love it. When I asked her exactly what it was about the film that made it seem so up my alley, Suzi flat-out refused to give me an explanation, which totally piqued my curiosity, and after seeing it I totally understand why she refused to give me any information.

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS is a film whose considerable impact depends on the audience going into it with no knowledge of it's about, or rather all one should be aware of before seeing it is a general understanding of horror movie tropes that have been pretty much carved in stone since the advent of HALLOWEEN (1978) and FRIDAY THE 13th (1980). The narrative very convincingly leads the audience to believe it's going down the "teen slaughterhouse" path for the umpteenth time, and by now we all know the requisite elements for that cinematic ritual. If you've seen almost any film of the FRIDAY THE 13th school — more often than not a lazily-crafted non-narrative that serves to get a number of personality-void teenagers/twenty-somethings to a remote location wherein they are systematically and gorily murdered by some cutlery-wielding psychopath/bogeyman or a summoned force of supernatural malevolence — you know what to expect from THE CABIN IN THE WOODS' setup. You get:

• A group of youthful cannon fodder, consisting of five key genre archetypes: the athlete (a pre-Thor Chris Hemsworth), the whore (Anna Hutchison), the stoner/fool (Fran Kranz), the scholar (Jesse Williams), and the virgin (Kristen Connelly).

The story's five unlucky college students.

• The titular cabin the woods, to which our protagonists retreat for the weekend, intent on booze and weed-fueled partying and sexual escapades outside of wedlock that serve to spur the meat grinder experience to come.
• The cabin's incredibly creepy basement that's filled with assorted antiques of a mysterious, eerie nature.
• The "harbinger," the disturbing backwoods redneck type who warns the kids not to go to the spooky house/summer camp/site of a horrible massacre of Native Americans (or some other oppressed/abused minority). This character is inevitably mocked and ignored, much to the all-too-short regret of the protagonists.

With those cookie cutter elements in place, one would have every right to expect yet another "I could write this while taking a hearty Taco Bell dump" potboiler, but all bets are off when the film is in the capable hands of director/co-writer Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon, writer of a ton of really good shit and creator of the now-legendary BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, a TV series that regularly turned the expectations of jaded horror fans upside down. The pair possess a fervently self-proclaimed love of the horror genre and an equally passionate loathing of what the form has become after being dominated too long by brain-dead, character-void forays into "slasher" territory and its more contemporary iteration, the vile realm of "torture porn." THE CABIN IN THE WOODS is both a love letter to horror as a storytelling form and a commentary upon its current sorry state that trots out those familiar tropes and veers them waaaaaay left field of the likes of HALLOWEEN PART XVII.

I would be a complete and total asshole if I revealed exactly what the plot of THE CABIN IN THE WOODS entails, but here's what I can tell you about it without ruining its surprises: The aforementioned college kids head off to the cabin for the weekend and unintentionally revive a family of undead torture-loving rednecks by reading a Latin passage from a diary found in the basement's trove of ominous tchotchkes. But, unbeknownst to them, their every move has been carefully, even ritually orchestrated by what appears to be a crack team of administrators and lab types in some sort of high-tech government base, which leads us to ask exactly why the hell would a bunch of suits and lab-coated eggheads would be setting up the horrible demise of innocents? (NOTE: The base and its staff are the first thing we see in the film, so mentioning them here in no way spoils things.) The answer is quite surprising and will greatly appeal to horror fans who are sick and tired of slashers, torturers, and the other flavors that have usurped the kind of terrors that made the genre a beloved draw in the first place.

Also worth noting is that the script pulls the rug out from under our expectations by giving us protagonists whom we get to know and care about, each of whom is clearly intelligent and they pretty much act like you or I would if stuck in the shitstorm they find themselves thrown headfirst into. What would have been a bunch of uninteresting ciphers in virtually any other formula fright flick of roughly  the past three decades are here given vivid characterizations and the actors who portray them are to be commended.

So what we have with THE CABIN IN THE WOODS is a massive "fuck you" to the lazier, more crass entries that many, myself included, feel have all but irrevocably destroyed the horror film as a forum in which legitimate, story-driven things that go bump in the night have been neglected for too long. No lie, I hereby go on record and state that this film is the theatrical experience I most enjoyed during the past twenty years or so, and it gives me hope for the return of the kinds of horror stories that I have adored since first seeing stuff like KISS OF THE VAMPIRE, NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, and many other pre-FRIDAY THE 13th celluloid nightmares. HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2012-intro

The month of Halloween is upon us as of tomorrow and considering how much fun I had last year doing the first edition of 31 DAYS OF HORROR, I'm psyched to review 31 more horror movies to delight enthusiasts and alert readers to flicks they may not have seen before. There will be examinations of classics, thrillers that blur the line of what may be specifically defined as "horror," and unbiased looks back at some of the "slasher" fodder that so defined my generation's horror movie experience, so get ready for anything to happen...

(CUE SCARY THEREMIN MUSIC)

OH, I AM TOTALLY THERE WHEN THIS OPENS...

WHEN GEEKDOM RANDOMLY REPRESENTS ON THE STREET

Just went around the corner for some dishwashing liquid and saw this guy out walking his dog.

I didn't realize what was on his shirt until I walked past him and then I stopped and asked, "Hey, is that M.O.D.O.K.?" to which he delightedly answered, "Yeah!" His girlfriend then said — in that weary tone that only long-suffering girlfriends and wives have — "Okay, the shirt is awesome..."

THE SILVER MISTRESS (1973)

A group of professional scumbags fake the death of Sir Gerald Tarrant and hold him hostage, subjecting the ageing intelligence administrator to brutal torture at the hands of the sadistic Mister Sexton, a martial artist of the first order who knows how to work human pressure points to excruciating advantage. If you've read this far you know what this series is about, so do you think Modesty and Willie are going to to tolerate that bullshit?

THE SILVER MISTRESS is a tough book to critique because it's not so much a proper novel as it is a short story stretched to novel-length, and therein lies the problem. The basic plot is quite good, but there was really no need to pad it out into what amounts to a lot of slow-moving hoo-haa leading to the action not really getting underway until the book's nearly halfway over. Sure, there's the usual rich characterizations and the first full appearance by Willie's steady girlfriend, the charming and one-legged Lady Janet Gillam (previously seen briefly in the short story "I Had A Date With Lady Janet" in the PIECES OF MODESTY collection), but Henry Quinn, a former airline pilot, tested my patience by being rude and obnoxious to an annoying degree and to no great effect, and once his role as a concussed witness to Tarrant's kidnapping is over there's really no need for him to be in the story. There's much made of two "outsiders" to Modesty and Willie's (and to no small degree Tarrant's) danger-fraught world being allowed to accompany them on a mission, something I had an extremely hard time believing Modesty and Willie would ever allow to happen, and of the two only Lady Janet really adds anything to the proceedings. Sure, there's some business about Quinn getting over a severely traumatic event and butching up when push comes to shove, but frankly I just didn't care about the guy.

The only real bright spot in all of this over-extended mishegoss is Mister Sexton, hands-down the most formidable physical threat ever faced by Modesty and Willie, even moreso than Willie's own personal demon, the diabolical Simon Delicta (from book four in the series, A TASTE FOR DEATH). He's a master of hand-to-hand combat whose skills render both of our heroes unconscious in seconds when he first encounters them and, being aware of their considerable reputations as all-around badasses, he decides to keep them alive so he can finally have opponents worthy of his talents. When Modesty does finally throw down against this asshole it's the one bit where the book pays off, their savage battle allowing the story to reach a thrilling climax set in a cold, dank cavern in which Modesty strips nude, coats herself from head to toe with axle grease, and hands Sexton his ass in a fight that I doubt even Willie could have won.

As Modesty Blaise books go I'd have to rate this as middling — except for Sexton — and it's also the first entry where I really noticed O'Donnell's formula. The entries I've read previously all work from a set template, but they each had something going on that allowed me to ignore the beat-for-beat setup and enjoy the books nonetheless, but THE SILVER MISTRESS wears its by-the numbers construction on its sleeve. It makes me wonder if this is where O'Donnell began to weary of the series, or if he was having trouble coming up with the tense and exciting yarns that he seemed to spin with such deceptive ease.

THE IMPOSSIBLE VIRGIN (1971)

While making an emergency stopover in Rwanda, Modesty Blaise meets Giles Pennyfeather, a slightly dotty medical practitioner with an almost uncanny knack for healing his patients under the most dire of conditions. During her time with Pennyfeather, Modesty serves as his nurse — and later much more — and they soon find themselves accosted by two vicious thugs, Adrian Chance and Jacko Muktar, who seek to shake down the doctor for any information he may have gleaned from Novikov, a Soviet defector with a lucrative secret. The problem is Novikov died after escaping grueling torture at the hands of Chance, and Pennyfeather may have inadvertently overheard him babble the one bit of information vital to the plans of the thugs' master, a diminutive and icily evil international criminal named Brunel. Of course Modesty kicks Chance and Jacko's asses like a motherfucker, humiliating them mercilessly, but lets them live after stranding them miles from civilization, a huge error in judgement that comes back to kick her ass — along with the collective ass of Pennyfeather and her right-hand man, Willie Garvin — in a way that makes most of her previous brushes with death or worse pale by comparison...

That's just the setup for a majorly harrowing adventure, a story that puts both Modesty and Willie to some serious tests of all of their many skills, and even if you're a fan of the series and know for a fact that Willie is the co-lead in every book in this series, there's a sequence that will have you on the edge of your seat and believing along with Modesty that Willie has been taken out of the picture once and for all; I mean, what else could you possibly think if you witnessed your best friend engage in savage combat, while strapped to a steel chair no less, and escaping from a straight jacket as he gets thrown out of a plane flying at three thousand feet, sans parachute? I won't say anymore, but Willie's missing for about the next third of the book, and when he shows up in the nick of time, his explanation of how he cheated death is so ludicrous and over-the-top that you have believe every hilarious word of Willie's account.

And speaking of hilarity, there's a great bit in which Modesty and Willie decide to steal some vital stolen documents from Brunel because their sale would lead to the inevitable sacking of their pal Sir Gerald Tarrant from his position in the secret service, and they just can't let that happen (plus Modesty wants to give the papers to Sir Gerald as a surprise birthday present). After days of intense scrutiny of the defenses in and around Brunel's London home our heroes determine there's absolutely no way to break in without tripping all manner of alarms and getting shot in the process at the very least, even given their world class talents, so they come up with a plan both brilliant in its simplicity and downright sidesplitting in its audacity. I won't tell you how they pull it off, but it's so simple that you'd never think of it, and when it happens you'll smack yourself in the head for not thinking of something so obvious.

Simply put, the heroes are in top form, the villains are among the most heinous human vermin ever to (dis)grace the prose page, and the supporting characters, Pennyfeather and the cruelly abused albino Lisa, are worthy of books in and of themselves. And, no, I'm not going to tell you what the title refers to. RECOMMENDED

A FORGOTTEN CLASSIC

Dear Vaulties-

My life at the moment is a cavalcade of boredom and frustration, so I haven't been inspired to write anything new. There's stuff coming for next month since Halloween is looming and I hope to have something of interest to discuss sooner than that, but until then here's an inspirational ditty from good ol' El Duce and The Mentors.