Horror Fest: To Conclude on this Movie Bloodbath

The last fortnight has been simultaneously depressing, boring and un-adventurous. It is surprising to think that when a director has the power to frighten an audience, how uninterested the majority go about it. I feel this is the case with most films, particularly horror. The majority of horrors which I watched didn’t seem to exploit the fact that I am a human, that I have fears, that I have weaknesses. Some merely came across as an exercise in killing, and others managed to make murder and rape as disturbing as a five year old, pink-dress-wearing-pig-tailed girl holding a placard saying ‘Boo’. Good horror is about style not content. Getting a serial killer to murder someone isn’t necessarily scary, but rather: the context, the atmosphere and the way the scene is constructed.

To contrast this, some of the films I viewed this fortnight were quite memorable. The majority of these were the camp B-movies ones. The horror-comedies, or just the comedies which had a grizzly subtext. I think I might re-watch Teeth and The Terror. I’ve also come to the conclusion that Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth is one of the greatest ‘so bad it’s good’ films ever made.

Frontiers is a landmark of extreme-political cinema and I desperately wish I was in the correct mood for watching it during viewing; I also wish there were more films like it.

Now what? Well, now I’ve listed all 18 films from worst to best. Oh, and The Terror is below Detention even though The Terror got 0.5 stars higher in my mini-review of it. I think I was too generous when I wrote it.

ANYWAY. Enough of the rambling. Here goes…

18. Bloodlust

17. Detention

16. The Blood on Satan’s Claw

15. The Blood of Fu Manchu

14. All the Boys Love Mandy Lane

13. 99 Women

12. The Final

11. Red Mist (aka. ‘Freakdog’)

10. Scream 2

9. The House on Haunted Hill

8. Night of the Living Dead

7. Ju-on: The Grudge

6. The Beyond

5. Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth

4. The Terror

3. Bloodbath at the House of Death

2. Teeth

1. Frontiers

Horror Fest: DAY 5

After the first five minutes of watching Mist, I was happy to see that the character, Gwen from Merlin was in it, and rising TV-actor, Andrew Lee-Potts starred as well.

Red Mist (aka ‘Freakdog’) (2008):

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1185264/

Plot:

Hospital staff abuse a man with a stutter. They make him consume lots of alcohol, he has an epileptic fit and goes into a coma. He is then injected with a miracle drug and his soul goes into other people’s bodies so he can take his revenge…

Review:

Red Mist (2008)

Red Mist is essentially a conventional slasher film wearing the disguise of a possession-horror. It’s all rather silly and has lines where Merlin-girl says jokingly says “I’ll be next”, and hoh-hum she is. Perhaps I’ve just been desensitised because I watch too many horror films, but this bordering on the inventive horror isn’t particularly scary or tense, in fact I laughed at certain sections at its rubbishness. It is essentially an exploration of mal-practice and how one bad decision leads to serious consequences. I picture the writers chuckling away and guffawing constantly because they think that somehow this is deep.

The plot starts off with a party, where hospital staff are drinking and consuming drugs which they’ve stolen from the Hospital. Unfortunately for them, Kenneth, records one of them stealing the drugs. So, they make him consume all of the alcohol filled with the drugs in order to somehow make him forget. He has an epileptic fit. They dump him on the side of the road. He is then in a coma. These are doctors and nurses you do not want to be treated by.

A wonder drug has been discovered, but is currently in the development process – it is said that this drug may help coma patients. Our main heroine then feels guilty, and uses mal-practice to save him by forging signatures to get access to the drug. However, the drug then ups his brainwaves, and allows his soul to enter other people’s bodies, who now act out as mere vessels for his scheme of death and destruction. Using these carriers, he kills off the doctors and nurses who abused him in the beginning one by one.

Inventive yes, but original it is not. As I have said before, horror films should pray on basic fear, and this film doesn’t. Also, for a slasher film to work, you must at least care about some of the characters who are slaughtered by the killers. This is hardly the case here. Perhaps, I just never took it seriously from the beginning because I’m progressively getting more desensitised, but I just felt that it was rather silly.

I just want to see something 5 stars…now…please.

Verdict: 2/5

Horror Fest: DAY 3

When writing about this challenge, the concept was to discuss each film in a minimalistic almost diary-entry kind of way. I think I failed with Bloodlust, because I just had to take out my sheer anger out on that film. Either way, I think Bloodbath at the House of Death saved my sanity after such dreariness. Today involved two polar opposites: I saw the best and the worst film of this challenge.

Bloodlust (1961):

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054691/

Bloodlust (1961)

Plot:

Four unsuspecting people spot an island and decide to go to it, but later regret it when they realise that they are being hunted down.

Review:

I don’t think words can quite express how I feel about this film. Let’s just say there are moments in this film which are just about bearable, one moment is good, and the rest is just staggeringly terrible. It’s like staring into an abyss of awfulness, where all of the walls are made of vomit and clunge, and every so often you see a dead leprechaun ride a unicorn – some bits of hope, but not a very high amount of it. I think there’s something very bitter about this idea, something being terrible but having potential to be good. The one thing you can praise Manos: The Hands of Fate for is the fact that it as least its dreadfulness is consistent. Here, not so…and that paradoxically makes me almost prefer Manos.

Almost.

Rambling aside, the quality of the image is like staring into the backside of a haemorrhoid-suffering, McDonald-loving truck driver – and not because it’s pixelated. I can forgive that. Amateur filmmakers then and now have to use the cheapest cameras, camera with low quality that they will inevitably record overly-pixeled images. The problem with the image here is the outlines of the characters. It’s as if some twit picked up a sharpie and drew around the characters constantly to somehow make their shapes more define…in every single frame. I imagine there was such a twit who did this, there always is.

Anyway, our characters see an island at the beginning of this movie, and decide to go to it. They get to the island. They walk across the beach. One of the characters falls into a hole. His friends then attempt to take him out of the hole. They are then spotted by a man wearing a suit, who has a sinister goatee. He is our villain, and he plays this mad character with such enthusiastic woodenness, it’s delightfully charming in a very bizarre sort of way. This character is the dead leprechaun riding the unicorn in the abyss of infected bodily fluids. Every time he appeared on the screen, my heart slightly rose, just slightly, nothing more, nothing less. Just a slight movement. Slight, you got it?

He then offers them a place to stay and then as the film unfolds we discover that he’s a complete maniac who kills people, and puts the dead victims on display in his murder-victim trophy cave. It is essentially a display cabinet for necromantics. Anyway, when we see this cave with his trophy dead people, a glimmer of hope appears, something slightly good. A man with a cave full of dead people, who also has a chair in this room with switches to control the display lights for each unfortunate victim. This is such a wonderfully gothic idea. But then of course the film decides to urinate all of this by making everything that surrounds it so impossibly dull that the thought of being clubbed to death by Mitt Romney seems invariably exciting…and not because it’s Mitt Romney who’s doing the dirty-work. This is a film where I begged for the movie to end.

Then there are the characters. I’m sorry, I know that horror characters have pitiably low IQs, but this just takes the biscuit. If you discover that you’re on an island with a nutter who will kill you and then put you in a display cabinet in his trophy cave, surely you would develop some sense of urgency? The characters manage to find a wardrobe filled with guns. But they’re so idiotic, they don’t even check if they’ve got ammunition, let alone take ammunition with them. As far as I’m concerned now, they deserve to die. Idiots.

The film then gets progressively duller. Evil-goatee man offers them a challenge. He allows his captees to run off into the forest with a head-start before he sets off about to kill them one by one with a crossbow. I don’t quite know what vulgar powers the filmmakers have to somehow make this final section dull, but like the rest of the film, it is so monotonous it’s like staring into a black hole of doom. It’s like they’re sucking the life out of a potentially edge-of-your-seat concept.

Oh I can’t be bothered anymore. This is just dreadful.

Verdict: 0.5/5

Bloodbath at the House of Death (1984):

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0086981/?ref_=sr_1

N.B. I needed this to recover from the awfulness of Bloodlust. Thank God for me having bothered to record this on Horror Channel.

Bloodbath at the House of Death (1984)

Plot:

Many years ago, a group of people were murdered by a satanic cult in the ironically named ‘Headstone Manner’. Years later, radiation is detected near the sight, and a group of scientists go to investigate. However, the satanic cult has continued down the generations as many people in the village are part of this cult…

Review:

Ingenious black comedy written by comic-genius, Kenny Everett. This film works because of the constant jokes it makes, it’s like a conveyor belt of surreal black comedy. It also works because the jokes are clever, inventive, and so ludicrous – yet completely played with a straight face – that it’s impossible, at the least, to not pull a cheeky grin whilst watching. Perhaps the most ridiculous section in it is where an extremist christian’s head is quite literally opened like a can of soup with can-opener

Death by can-opener

…or maybe the section where an invisible spirit has sex with a girl until she climaxes, the spirit then smokes a cigar and then leaves through the window, leaving our blonde heroine to say the great one line: “I get it, I’m just another one night stand”.  I think the funniest death goes to a group of people in a bed who were killed with a single spear going through them – the joke being: HAHAHAHAHAHA, IT’S A HUMAN KEBAB. Oh the amount of moments in this movie which I could tell you about could fill up a graveyard (see what I did there…*winks*)….but rather than telling you, I’ll let you find out for yourself and laugh just like I did as well.

However, all of this ingenious comedy is then slightly damaged by the somewhat overused caricature humour. There are some characters who are reduced to mindless things to laugh at, and that’s all they are there for, some characters are simply a walking pun and it’s as if Kenny Everrett couldn’t think of any more jokes and simply got these out of the bad-joke recycling bin. We’re meant to laugh at a woman with a lisp, a disabled man with a ‘funny walk’ because he has a metal leg, and two gay men – who yes, have limp wrists. HAR-HAR. Comedy by its nature is subversive, and I don’t care what anybody says, it should be used to ridicule those who have higher statuses, or people in positions of power, not those who are ridiculed everyday. Kenny Everett should know better. It could’ve been a masterpiece.

Verdict: 4/5

Horror Fest: DAY 2

The second day of my pointless ‘challenge’. A challenge which isn’t particularly challenging, albeit that the majority of films on Horror Channel are dreadful. Either way, I’ve managed to record a few more which will be seen in the next few days of this challenge. I even managed to find that infamous film, Teeth, a film I can really sink my teeth into…or just never want to go near a vagina again. Either way, the night started off reasonably fun and camp with a Roger Corman B-movie, and then descended into silly torture, blood and vaginal pubic hair with the two ‘dead teenager movies’ that followed.

The Terror (1963):

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057569/?ref_=sr_3

The Terror (1963)

Plot:

A man sees a mysterious woman on a beach who then miraculously disappears. He then investigates into this and gets caught up in a ghost mystery.

Review:

I want Boris Karloff’s eyebrows. They’re just so bushy and amazing, and the emotions he can convey with them are simply spectacular. Maybe I just really like Boris Karloff. I’ve never fanboyed about a particular part of B-Movie star’s body, I think I’ll soon want Bela Lugosi’s eye-lashes, or maybe Tor Johnson’s retina. I dunno.

Either way…this film has all the trademark’s of a camp B-movie castle-ghost story by Roger Corman. A castle – obviously -, bad weather, Boris Karloff as the main, and a random death of a character who dies by being struck by lightning. However, the film doesn’t unfold in a ‘so bad it’s good way’, I actually took the story pretty seriously. This doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t fun though. Surprisingly, the story wasn’t very predictable, and the path of the narrative span around itself a few times in the final third. The movie drawed me into its mystery about the ghostly beautiful woman: why is she there? Why is she haunting Boris Karloff’s character? Who is the old woman? Who’s Eric? The film’s mystery is further intensified by its setting, the castle: dark shadows, doors which are difficult to open, a drawstring gate, and the intense waves of the sea nearby which are threatening and dangerous.

Perhaps the mystery and intrigue is created by the fact that behind the camera was a skilled young Francis Ford Coppola – yes, the man who made The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. But, this isn’t surprising, as B-movie fans will know that he also directed Dementia 13 – a film which at first confuses because when viewed, you realise that it isn’t the 13^th installation in a series, and because it is completely unrelated to dementia.

Either way, watch this and gasp at the fact that it’s directed by Francis Ford Coppola, the fact that Jack Nicholson stars in it, and simply divulge in the sheer wizardry that is Boris Karloff’s eyebrows.

Verdict: 4/5

 

The Final (2010):

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1390535/?ref_=sr_2

The Final (2010)

Plot:

A group of outcasts are bullied repeatedly every day. They then organise a party for their bullies to attend. They drug the bullies, shackle them and begin to psychologically torture all of them, and then physically torture them one by one…

Review:

Films like this make me wonder what has happened to the horror film, or to be more precise: the revenge flick? This film, with all of its torture, acid-cream, tongue-chopping, finger cutting, stomach-stabbing and the fact that anyone who holds a gun with the intent to use it gets ‘punished’ has a deeply blunt anti-violence message. But that’s all this film is ever about: the violence. It is all finger-cutting and no substance. Anyone who has been bullied will know that it’s not the punch that hurts more, but what the punch leaves you with. Psychological damaging is more horrifying than physical. Sure, the opening scene explores this (in a rather unintentionally funny way, mind you), and we see the victims cry and beg endlessly due to the amount of reaction shots…but reaction shots don’t particularly dig deep.

Halfway through the film, one of the outcasts gives a key to a friend who wasn’t supposed to be there. Using the key, he escapes and gets help. I think this is another fatal flaw with the film. This subplot distracts from the main philosophical issues of the film: how far can revenge go before it can be considered morally dubious? Is what the gang doing right? And of course, the repeated bully-victim-cliche: what did they do to deserve this? A statement which can of course be placed on the bullies and the victims.

I think the film would have had a bigger impact if the question wasn’t answered at the end, and instead left the viewer with a gory moral dilemma. The opening scenes where we see the outcasts being bullied should last longer so that we get a precise 50-50 split, and if the sub-plot was ditched, it would make this film even more challenging. The subplot provides a glimmer of hope halfway through. I don’t think this is the sort of film which requires that. It should be harsh and unforgiving. But of course, the film didn’t do this. What do you expect from a film which attempts to scare the audience from that so renowned fear: the fear of having all of your fingers cut off with a pair of garden sheers?

Verdict: 1.5/5

 

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (2006):

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0490076/?ref_=sr_1

Plot:

Mandy Lane is hot, and boys would – quite literally (as you’ll find out in the opening sequence) die for her. 9 months later, she’s got hotter and her and a few friends then go to a farmhouse for a fun weekend of sex, drugs and banter. But one by one, the teenagers are hunted down.

Review:

The characters include a jock, a loner, a stoner, an angry man-whore, two female sluts, a virgin girl and a shy innocent male. Now guess who survives and who dies. These characters have sexual relations, as well as drinking alcohol, taking drugs, and then playing truth or dare – it’s as if they’ve been taken from the writers straight out of a crappy horror film. There is a moment where one of the characters goes outside to investigate a mysterious gunshot fire, followed by him pretending that he sees someone and scaring the whole group because he can. There are uses of slow-motion for no reason I can think of. There’s also a charmingly bizarre scene where we see one of the girls cut off her pubic hair with a pair of scissors, for no other reason than to ‘explore the issue of teenage body-image angst’…or something. N.B. Previously in the movie, this girl took a piss in front of all of her girly-friends – as you do – and one of her bezzies mocked her by saying “you really need to cut that thing, it’s like a forest!). Either way, all of this adds up to form an impressively predictable film, and even ‘the twist’ at the end isn’t surprising. I also don’t care about any of the characters. After all, they’re all popular and pretty and handsome and oh so perfect…and so thick it’s as if they’re stock characters taken straight out of a crappy slasher film…oh wait……………

Well, the cinematography was very artsy so at least the deaths had an aesthetic sensibility to them. Whoopee.

Verdict: 1/5

GREAT MOVIES ESSAY: Pulp Fiction (1994)

***CONTAINS SPOILERS***

What I love about Quentin Tarantino more so than his style and his panache for good, quotable, punchy dialogue, is the fact that each time I watch one of his movies, they seem to just get better. I re-watched Pulp Fiction yesterday and realised that it isn’t just a good movie, it’s a great movie, this is mainly because it’s very layered. It’s layered in the sense that in each individual scene there’s so much to like, and the genius of it is, is the fact that none of the direction or the writing ever seems forced, but quite natural. Pulp Fiction is a crime film with an almost charmingly elegant flow to it.

Pulp Fiction: influential, funny, stylish and oozing with cool

It’s often been commented on how Pulp Fiction is (sorry for the cliché) ‘laugh-out-loud hilarious’. Indeed, there has been a lot said about how this is partially to do with the absurd/sly/darkly-comic nature of the film, and more importantly, it’s very quotable dialogue (“I’ma get medieval on ya ass”; “Oh man, I just shot Marvin in the face”). Yet, I think it’s more than that. There’s something about the way Tarantino has written Pulp Fiction that induces a laugh in a line, even though this line never even ‘asks’ for a laugh. Take the section in the beginning where Jules and Vincent are discussing all manner of irrelevant subjects on their way to the next job: drug laws in Amsterdam, names of burgers in Paris, television pilots. The back-and-forth feel to the dialogue and it’s fast-paced snappiness creates an element of humour in some of the dialogue, even though there are no puns. It’s like having banter with a best mate and occasionally smiling or laughing half-way through a sentence, you’re having such a good time that you’re giggling for no apparent reason. Of course, Pulp Fiction does provide puns: later on, Jules and Vincent discuss the monumental difference between eating our a girl’s “holiest of holies” or giving her a foot massage.

Indeed, what further adds to the joy of the film is the fact that Tarantino knows that the essentially aimless dialogue puts it above other films. So much so that he uses dialogue to manipulate the audience in very unexpected ways. Jules and Vincent have just arrived at the flat, they’re about to open the door, yet stop and suddenly move up the corridor to discuss the ethics of massaging the feet of a married woman. To add to this further is the fact that the camera simply pans around and then lingers in the same spot near the door. All of this builds up a sense of comedy, and more importantly: intrigue, about what’s behind the door.

Camera pans around and lingers

Such directorial techniques are one of the many aspects which make the film effortlessly drip moments of greatness throughout. This is one of the many aspects of the film which is often overlooked, as the script is often the main thing that gleams into our eyes when we are first fused and engaged with Tarantino’s film. This directorial style is usual down to the camera work in the film; yet, even though each individual shot doesn’t strike us immediately like an image from a Kubrick or a Lynch or a Nolan film – each shot still maintains some form of intensity. This intensity is created by the clear precision it is created in, Tarantino takes his time with each shot, he doesn’t edit them away like Michael Bay does, one single shot may last from thirty seconds to two minutes. The dance sequence between Mia and Vince is a good example of this, as the dance itself lasts for a seemingly long period of time, and each shot lingers on them, however, it never becomes boring, because…well…it’s a strange dance, yet it oozes cool and style.

Vince and Mia dancing

Vince pulling some moves...

Pulp Fiction has often been criticised for being very violent. Yet, it’s not as violent as everyone makes it out to be. To give a completely blunt and famous example, it works in the same way that Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho works in: we never see the knife go in, or in the case of Pulp Fiction, we never see the samurai sword stabbed into the toe of a pervert. Tarantino is very good at directing violence. We see violence so much in the movies that it rarely affects us; fight scenes make us doze off to sleep or just want them to immediately end. Tarantino keeps us on our toes. He directs violence in such an energetic style that it actually does something: it shocks, surprises, evokes comedy, and occasionally makes us cringe.

An example of this, is when Mia is injected in the heart due to a drug-overdose, although perhaps not violence, it works by the same method as a knife going into Janet Leigh’s stomach does: we don’t see it. It’s all implied. There’s a chilling low-angle close-up of the needle which lasts for a few seconds and the counting from 1 to 3 seems to last forever, until we eventually see the needle go in and wince as doing so, there’s a build-up to the moment of injection before we here the bumff of the needle shred through the skin and sink in. “Trippy”, eh?

Howard Hawks once said that a great movie involves: “Three good scenes. No bad scenes.” Pulp Fiction goes a step further: all good scenes, not one bad scene at all.

Pulp Fiction...Tarantino's best film?...