1st October 2009

A Month Of Malevolence – Part 1

“31 more days to Halloween, Halloween, Halloween, 31 more days to Halloween, silver shamrock.”

If you’re reading this then you’re one of two things: a devoted Frightfest fan or a glutton for tortured syntax. Or possibly my wife. Either way, I’ve no doubt that, every year, each of you experiences the same spasm of giddy anticipation as I at the prospect of the thirty gore-drenched nights leading up to Samhain. What better way to scratch that itch, then, than with a few frightful features?

Back up a second. We’ve been here before.

Back in 2006, I concocted list of Halloween horrors much like the one you’ll see below. Being viewed as some kind of purveyor of the macabre, I’m often asked by horror-shy friends and relatives “what’s a good horror movie to watch”, not just at Halloween, but anytime. (Of course, I tell them, Halloween is the *best* time. Always will be.)

It’s a difficult enough question to be asked by a horror nut, let alone someone less familiar with the genre. One man’s “Braindead” (Peter Jackson) is another man’s…er...“Braindead” (Adam Simon). And regardless of relative merits, how do you judge what the right level of intensity is for a prospective viewer? How could I, in good conscience, recommend, say, “From Beyond” to a virgin, lily-white fright fan knowing that it’s more than likely going to scar them irrevocably if they’re not familiar with Stuart Gordon and Dennis Paoli’s unique ability to combine carnal terror and visceral flesh-ripping to queasy, if poetic, effect.

So I normally play it safe and tell them “Halloween” or “An American Werewolf In London” will do very nicely, thanks for asking. Yes, that’s right, it’s funny *and* scary. No, neither of them is in black and white. Yes they are old. Okay, you should watch “Scream” then.

The following list is, in a way, dedicated to and inspired by my gem of this year’s Frightfest, Michael Dougherty’s “Trick ‘R Treat”. I think most viewers of that Saturday night screening would attest as to how well it captures the anarchic autumnal anticipation of evil’s arrival every October 31st. Dougherty’s truly terrific movie is now, and forever will be, a classic to sit beside the greats on the video shelf of the afterlife: “The Fog”, “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, “Halloween”, “The Haunting”, “Creepshow”, “Alien”…now this.

It should go without saying that you, you readers of this indulgent flimflam, are the receptacles for just that sort of wicked celluloid delight. You open-minded souls, you aficionados, you crazies, you zombie magnets, you repositories for wretchedness, you glowing beacons for all things dark, demented and damagingly deranged: *you* guys, I can advocate to. This Halloween season I want to celebrate the spirit that “Trick R Treat” instils in all of us.

Perhaps I’ll be able to prod and poke you toward something new or jog the memory of an old favourite. Maybe you’ll encounter something you’ve heard about or considered from afar but have yet to take the plunge on. Some of these pictures will be no doubt familiar to you and yours, others may be obscure. They’re certainly off the main highway upon which many film-lovers travel. Some are even off the beaten track of mainstream horror, stuck in a dingy, seldom trod alleyway rife with blood and carnage. They’re all favourites to somebody somewhere, though. And they’re precisely ones to which I like to draw some indulgence with this column.

That is what this list is designed to do. Indulge: me; you; mayhem in general.

Thirty one days of Halloween. Thirty one pictures to satisfy your hunger for horror. A Month Of Malevolence, if you will. With our embrace of DVD, every October becomes our own festival of fright, perhaps enough to last until next August comes around? Unlikely, knowing you miscreants. But that’s what Frightfest’s Halloween All-Nighter is there to assuage.

After all, our television networks in the UK pay little lip service to Halloween itself, let alone the rest of the month... We’re starved of the kind of AMC Monster Marathons filmmakers like Lynch, Green, Gierasch, Anderson and Parker grew up on. I won’t lie: I feel nothing but envy for that.

So, please indulge me a few moments over the next four weeks to offer you a humble (if highly subjective) program that might make October a festive season to celebrate, week by wicked week, day by bloody day:

WEEK ONE

October 1st “Retribution” (zombies): a brazen cheat this, as Guy Magar’s tale of, well, retribution by the spirit of a dead gangster who hops into the weak-willed body of milquetoast suicide victim Dennis Lipscomb isn’t strictly a zombie movie. But our anti-hero is most certainly back from the dead, wrecking bloody revenge on behalf of the dead gangster upon the criminal lynchpins who wronged him in life. It’s a reassuringly neon-flecked 1980s relic with a brutal, blood-thirsty bent and single-minded desire to make the victims and the audience squirm at regular intervals. Sadly, the obviously talented Magar would go on to diminishing returns as a kind of poor man’s Jeff Burr (not actually a slur on either of these steadfastly diligent genre gentlemen) in spiky but ultimately doomed instalments of “The Stepfather” (Part 3) and “Children Of The Corn” (Part 7).

Shock That Rocks: death by slaughterhouse buzzsaw while trussed up in the carcass of a pig.

Would Go Well With…: “The Exorcist Part III”
 

October 2nd “Wolfen” (werewolves): it’s a real tragedy that Michael Wadleigh made just a single horror film. His brilliantly shot and evocatively scored (by James Horner warming up motifs he would later use in “Aliens” and warming *over* ones he’d just used in “Humanoids From the Deep”) occult lycanthrope yarn lacks the charm and stunning transformations of “An American Werewolf In London” or “The Howling”. Instead, it possesses a stark, arresting tone, weaving cerebral horror in amongst a decrepit wasteland of suburban New York tenements that’s utterly at home with the isolation ultimately engendered by the story. Based on a tale by Whitley Strieber it smashes lycanthropes together with Native American mythology and the kind of quasi-spiritual, touchy feely message beloved of 50’s sci fi and is the kind of movie Larry Cohen might make were he less inclined to satirise each and every detail of time and place within his pictures.

“Wolfen” is an arty, sometimes uneven horror picture that’s made whole by the ripe gallows humour, frosty cynicism and vibrant eccentricity possessed by all its vividly scripted characters, from Gregory Hines’ spry soul brother coroner to Tom Noonan’s introverted wolf expert still living at home with mother. But the picture belongs to Albert Finney’s embittered police captain Dewey. Strung out between professional pragmatism and world-weary accommodation of even the strangest criminal M.O, with a face like a rumpled pillow-case and a cascade of scorching, pithy wisecracks, Dewey is what would happen if Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade or Dick Powell’s Philip Marlow fell asleep and woke up as a disgruntled hippy in the bureaucratised New York of the 1980s. Finney grounds the slightly absurd nature of the plot, selling the alienation of a spiteful city who’s Big Apple allure is conspicuously absent from the film’s cold, nihilistic portrait of 20th century civilisation. It’s the crackpot-counterculture version of the werewolf movie, but no less endearing because of it.

Shock That Rocks: aside from a lengthy appearance by Edwards James Omlos’ shadowy penis, there’s a particularly delicious and juicy payoff to Gregory Hines’ speech about severed heads (which is startlingly similar to -- and far more eerie than -- the gag that turned up recently in “Severence”). Top marks to Special Effects make-up artist Carl Fullerton.

Would Go Well With…: “The Manitou”

October 3rd “Innocent Blood”(vampires): even John Landis is startled to find fans of this little seen, wildly uneven, but fantastically entertaining cross-pollinating horror-comedy. In an attempt to do with the vampire myth what he had so successfully accomplished a decade earlier with the werewolf, Landis conjures up the tale of a brooding French nymphomaniac vampire who has discovered that phony Mafia hits make the perfect cover for her life-sustaining bloodlust. Working from Michael Wolk’s script, Landis crushes together noir voiceovers, unconventional vampire heroines (10 years ahead of “Amelie”, Anne Parillaud was a far more alluring elfin Gaul) and in vogue post-“Goodfellas” gangsters with lashings of the mahogany-voiced Chairman Of The Board himself, Mr Frank Sinatra ending up with a picture so self-indulgent, so oddly paced and so curiously schizophrenic that it can only have come from the minds of people who dearly love pulp cinema in myriad wonderful and distinctly weird ways and want to put every ounce of that surreal experimentation in genre-breeding on-screen.

Peppered with some terrific and most unexpectedly horrific gore sight-gags and set-pieces, brief but rewarding cameos (Argento’s well-meaning but utterly creepy paramedic cooing “eeess ookaaay” to an unfortunate victim is a highlight) and a central conceit that’s just delicious, Landis’ sly wit, as was the case with “An American Werewolf In London” is undeniable in the supporting characters. But unlike that masterpiece, the leads remain sadly inert, brought life only by the agreeable charms of Parillaud, love interest undercover cop Anthony LaPaglia and the volcanic Robert Loggia. As if Frank Lopez never let Tony Montana take him out in Miami, Loggia’s over the top mob swagger threatens to derail the entire satire with its genuine menace on more than one occasion, but the gusto with which he attacks the role of Sallie The Shark in undeniably the high point of a picture filled with many, many little moments of horrific (and jazz-vocal) pleasure.

Shock That Rocks: smarmy Mob laywer Don Rickles’ delightfully cruel and deliriously hysterical comeuppance that’s entirely in keeping with the nature of the picture and accompanied by a magnificent scream from the Scream Queen’s grande dame herself Linnea Quigley.

Would Go Well With…: “Dead Heat”

October 4th “The Brood” (body horror): written amid the emotional upheaval of his own divorce, David Croneneberg’s “The Brood” is a picture that *hurts*. Known mostly for his uncomfortable prognostications of the humans body’s eventual moist defeat by virus, mutation or by its own perverse psychology, “The Brood” is a relative anomaly amongst Croneneberg’s oeuvre: it is one of the few of his films that actually contains, not a mutant pathology our hero is battling against within his or her own body, but a tangible and sinister foe, here in the shape of a boogeyman, or boogeymen, or… boogeycreatures? Something is systematically slaying prospective friends, lovers and associates of Frank Carveth, a man in a bitter custody battle for his young daughter with a wife undergoing a course of intense ‘psychoplasmics’ rage-therapy at Oliver Reed’s progressive new age clinic. My wife, who as you may remember is probably reading this and who is not horror’s greatest advocate, could tell you it is unlikely to end well.

“The Brood”, alongside “The Dead Zone”, contains moments of Cronenberg’s most conventional horror. Which I am at pains to point out is not to slight the impact of the scares or belittle the skill with which he deploys them. True generic suspense in horror, effortlessly sustained unease, is a skill possessed by only the most competent of filmmakers, from Tournuer to Hitchcock to Carpenter. In the set pieces of “The Brood”, Cronenberg proves himself every bit their equal. Conventional scenes of besieged victims are shot through with that uncanny chill so distinctively Cronenenbergian, practically surgical in its cool detached precision. The “child in peril” scenario is a gut punch under this filmmaker’s control, a unique psychological battleground: Frank and the audience don’t know who or what is perpetrating this campaign of blood-letting and the eventual revelation is legitimately unthinkable by anyone except David Cronenberg.

Unsurprisingly, there’s incisive allegory at work beneath the surface of the horror; perhaps less surprising still, what it has to say about intimate domestic relations, as seen through the prism of this most cerebral of directors’ mind, is as fascinating as it is bold and devastating. As is the case with every depiction of the body’s fragility in the face of sudden violent trauma in his films, this is violence that it really, truly hurts.

“The Fly” has the breathtaking pathos, “Dead Ringers” the ingenious psychology but this is terror at its most upsetting.

Shock That Rocks: Carveth’s friend and daughter’s teacher is attacked in the cold light of day in a deserted classroom. A brutally effective moment of desolate horror.

Would Go Well With…: “Grace”

October 5th “Slumber Party Massacre” (slasher): so the legend goes, feminist author and activist Rita Mae Brown, so incensed by the maladroit maliciousness invoke by audiences clamouring for an hysterical production line of fast and sleazy slasher knock offs in the wake of “Halloween” and “Friday 13th”, decided to write her own. It was to be a parody, a wicked send up, a savage indictment of all that was wrong and phallocentric about these titillating tearaway terrors. It would shame the studios, or at least render their lust for profit at the expense of teenage dignity risible and lamentable in the public consciousness. Only it didn’t really work out that way.

Instead, what we got was almost prototypical in its salacious naivety, catastrophically bad acting, crudely generated suspense and, even at barely 76 minutes, a hulking, characterless and mostly formless excuse to corral nubile teen girls into an enclosed space for the purpose of stalk ‘n’ slash. Even J.P. Simon’s “Pieces” had a mystery for Cthulhu’s sake! So why mention it here? There is a single reason and it’s the film’s one truly iconic addition to the genre as a whole, a jaw-dropping piece of leaden metaphor, a clumsy, a cack-handed attempt at sub-textual commentary and one assumes the visual gag around which Brown’s entire undertaking was based: the drill as dick.

The film’s charmless villain is a predatory peeping tom, an escaped murderer with no mask or mythology. Unlike the killer of “Toolbox Murders”, a single, comically oversize power tool is his weapon of choice so that he’s more send up of the Driller Killer than a standard slasher villain, another trend of the genre the picture is unable to successfully lampoon. Add to that the fact that he’s supposedly impotent and you’ll soon be relishing the intellectual stimulation of “Scream 3” as a way out of the tortured satire employed by Brown and director Amy Holden Jones (wife of famed cinematographer Michael Chapman and who would go on to write vastly more incisive mainstream confections “Mystic Pizza” and “Indecent Proposal”). Less blame lies with Jones, who brought as much style and atmosphere as budget would lend. One can shoot anything to look voguish and moody, but when that “something” involves a symbolic castration as the villain has his drill bit snapped off, moody atmosphere suddenly takes on the subtlety of deftly hurled brick…

Yet the film is, however deficient, a precious relic of a boom time for exploitation the likes of which we disciples of the genre will never see again. Ever. These were grungy knock offs, self-proclaimed fingers to the face of marginal, but wildly successful popular culture, created by a righteous, if eccentric, activist simply to make a blunt, obvious artistic point. And it was shot on film, projected in cinemas, treated as a feature film, playing first run on top of a double bill with “Maniac Killer”. The endless “Hellraiser” sequels would do well to have that treatment today. Hell, our friend Joe Lynch made a picture that had to make do with going straight to video when it’s plainly many severed arms and legs better than many of the pictures sent up by “Slumber Party Massacre” in the first place. It was a golden age of schlock. And this picture is emblematic of that era when a picture headlined by an as alluring but second tier scream queen as Brinke Stevens was a cause celebre for the briefest of moments and whose poster of girls cowering in front of an enormous drill poking out from between the legs of a malevolent murderer was the height of wicked, censor-bating infamy.

As such it is required viewing

Shock That Rocks: one of the first victims of the massacre is dispatched in a rather mean-spirited, genuinely grim piece of slashing/drilling in a deserted gymnasium. But it’s not misogyny because it’s made by women, see? For fun, though, the pizza boy without his eyes is a neat gag.

Would Go Well With…: “Body Double”

October 6th “ The Lady In White“ (ghosts): the perfect accompaniment to Michael Dougherty’s “Trick ‘R Treat”, for me, would be this charming, chilling tale of the supernatural from consummate craftsman and Terrence Malick of the horror genre, Frank LaLoggia. Set on Halloween, it’s the reminiscence by a grown up kid named Frankie Scarlotti, of the October in 1962 when he was confronted by a terrifying apparition while locked after hours in the eerie, cavernous corridors of his high school.

With shades of what M. Night Shyamalan would, a decade later, turn into part of a calculated blockbuster, LaLoggia’s conceit is that the ghost is in need of something, something only our young hero Frankie, played with heart-breaking charm and vulnerability by “Witness”’s elfin child star Lucas Haas, is able to give her. She is a young girl, murdered 10 years earlier by someone. Someone close to the town, someone who might kill again, and soon.

Awash with the crackle of brittle leaves and the auburn gleam of dwindling sun in autumn’s mid-afternoon sky, “The Lady In White” is a film that luxuriates in the quintessential sights and sounds of Halloween season. But its considerable charms go deeper. Dark, beautiful and poignant it shares with the classic “Something Wicked This Way Comes” a cynical view of the closed community of rural small towns, until so recently held up as the bosom of family and fidelity, community and decency. In these worlds, youthful innocence doesn’t mean that nothing sinister is going on. Youth merely shields you from the often unconscionable truth that behind Norman Rockwell’s picket fences, the white-washed vision of Americana are harboured the swirling unhappiness and brooding, unspoken secrets of a Hopper painting.

So, LaLoggia’s film remains terrifically affecting for two reasons: not only is it a deft, sublimely frightening tale of the supernatural and the gloriously ghoulish horrors of Halloween night; it also vividly confronts a child’s coming of age. Finally, we all have to grow up and confront the very real, very treacherous horrors of the adult world. .

Shock That Rocks: Frankie’s initial supernatural ordeal in the locker room, evocatively lit by Oscar-winning “Titanic” cinematographer Russell Carpenter, with subtly deployed practical effects and pre-CGI optical f/x makes for a sequence of bracing old fashioned chills.

Would Go Well With…: “The Woman In Black”

October 7th: “Fright Night” (Halloween’s heyday): in a decade marked by big-haired, gaudy, f/x heavy noise, this is a monster mash of almost unequalled invention, wit, full-bloodied mayhem. Yet “Fright Night”s most vital ingredient is something so simple and something of which ardent horror fan Tom Holland is plainly reverent from its appearance in everything from Hammer to Hitchcock: good old fashioned charm.

Genuine, straight-played erudition is what marks out not only Chris Sarandon’s oleaginous villain but also Charlie Brewsters’s aging foil, a career defining turn from Roddy McDowell. Bumbling, comical but laced with dignity and pride for his love of, and fate within, schlock, McDowell’s Peter Vincent is wonderfully written blend of not only his namesake’s most appealing qualities (Peter Cushing’s vim and vigour and Vincent Price’s knowing camp), but also that other titan of terror Boris Karloff’s wistful melancholy. Another noble, if not necessarily “great” thespian stuck in a career ever to be defined by “lesser” pictures, the long shadow of fading horror star Byron Orlock played by Karloff in Peter Bogdanovich’s “Targets”, and who fights a far more insidious foe than Sarandon’s suave creature of the night, surely falls across Holland’s creation of Peter Vincent. He is a gentlemen, for all his faults as a hero. He remains one of the great modern horror creations.

Shock That Rocks: the genuinely moving fate of Stephen Geoffrey’s Evil Ed, a masterful confluence of f/x work, direction and genuinely emotive performance.

Would Go Well With…: “Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman”

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