Non Canon Review: Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)

DECEMBER 18, 2007

GENRE: HOLIDAY, SLASHER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REVIVAL SCREENING)

At long last... I have seen Silent Night, Deadly Night in its proper context: in a theater, with 300 other people in various levels of sobriety (I was sadly completely sober, having flew over to the New Beverly from work and parking so quickly that I didn’t notice the no parking sign; my devotion to the film has now cost me an additional 45 dollars). Of all the times I have seen the film, it has never been with more than one or two others, and seeing it with a big group of like-minded folks is of course is part, if not most of the fun.

The film was actually picketed against when it was released in 1984, mostly by mothers (or, more likely, embittered women who never managed to put their shrill and sad attitudes aside for long enough to get knocked up) who objected to the ads depicting Santa Claus with an axe. Clearly, this could damage a young child, one who would be much better left at home alone while his mother picketed a movie she hadn’t seen so she could avoid basic parenting. This resulted in the film being pulled from theaters after a week or so, so thanks a lot, whores. Hell, according the liner notes in the DVD, the film never even played in LA, making this screening all the more exciting.

For the rest of the people in the world who aren’t complete idiots and at least WATCHED it before making an opinion, this movie is a delightfully wretched piece of mean-spirited cinema. Bad Santa could only WISH it was as gleefully cruel as this movie. “I’m on my lunch break”??? That’s got nothing on a group of kids seeing not one but TWO Santas (one a kindly deaf priest!) get shot to death in front of their eyes on Christmas day.

Of course, the most terrifying scene in the film is the one early on with the kid’s grandfather, a man who momentarily springs out of his comatose state to warn his grandson that Santa is coming to kill him later on. The look on this guy’s face and his delivery is nothing short of astounding, and sets the tone nicely for the classless joy that follows. Over the course of the next 80 minutes, we get plenty of gratuitous nudity, 30 year old bullies stealing sleds from 20 year old children, a truly bizarre montage of our eventual killer learning how to work in a toy store, sadistic nuns, a beheaded snowman… GOD I LOVE THIS FUCKING MOVIE.

I also noticed for the first time how many ties it has to the Halloween sequels. The Lily Tomlin-ish chick from part 4 who transfers Michael in the opening scene shows up as the toy store owner’s girlfriend, Leo Jeter (aka Curse’s Barry Simms) plays the boyfriend in the infamous antler scene, and Don Shanks (Part 5’s Michael) did some of the stunts. Weird. Speaking of the antler scene, the other day I pointed out how Jeter’s terrible peripheral vision was topped in Toe Tags, but looking at it again, I think it might be a tie:

How the FUCK does he not see her???

When I first saw this film as a 6 year old (I’ll say it again – my mom rules), I seriously believed that the filmmakers had to wait years to finish the film in order to give time for the kid playing Billy to age from 7 to 12 to 18. Of course, looking at it now, even if such nonsensical filmmaking tactics were true, they certainly wouldn’t be the case here, as the 3 actors couldn’t look LESS alike. I also like how my 6 year old self was smart enough to understand that it was only a movie (I still believed in Santa for another 3 years) but yet was stupid enough to think a film would be filmed in chunks over the course of a decade to accommodate the actor’s aging.

Maybe it's the habit... but I think Sister Margaret is hot.

This classic was just re-released on DVD, with some excised footage restored (though from a different video source, so it looks kind of stupid), but the original release had the sequel on the other side. Since I’ve only seen the sequel once (when I was like 8) I think I’ll make it tomorrow’s regular movie. Sadly, none of the other sequels (including part 5, which starred Mickey Rooney, who was one of the biggest protesters against the first film, going so far as to call the filmmakers “scum”) have ever hit DVD, and I think the pressing with 1 and 2 is now out of print. But really, in the end all you need is the original. The upcoming remake is wholly unnecessary, because unless they get someone with the appropriately sick sense of humor (like Joe Lynch and the Wrong Turn 2 team, or maybe even someone without any horror 'cred', like Louie CK), they will likely opt to make it more accessible to mainstream audiences and thus less awesome. As far as I am concerned, we already got a remake of sorts with Black Xmas (which thematically had more in common with this than the original Black Christmas, in my opinion). And if any of the people reading this review knew (or in fact, IS) someone who protested the film back in the day, I have a message for them/you: Get a sense of humor.

What say you?

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Holiday, Non Canon, Slasher,

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Non Canon Review: Black Christmas (1974)

DECEMBER 18, 2007

GENRE: HOLIDAY, SLASHER
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (REVIVAL SCREENING)/DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Black Christmas, Horror Movie A Day’s first dual source movie!

As I was stuck at work, I missed the first 50 min or so of the film’s annual screening at the New Beverly. Of course, the two years before I missed it entirely, so at least I am improving. Anyway, I rewatched the first part of the film on my DVD, which, now that I have an HDTV, I notice has quite a bad transfer. Overly grainy and suffering from frame stutter (not to mention an over-matted transfer, though you can’t really tell), it’s pretty disappointing, especially coming home from seeing a pristine film print.

Anyway, the film itself is of course, quite revered, and rightfully so for the most part. While I never shined to the film’s odd pace and tonal shifts (the silly “F-E-llatio” scene is immediately followed by Peter practically threatening to kill Jess for considering an abortion), the phone calls remain suitably frightening, and the POV scenes, unheard of at the time, hold up quite well despite 30 years of being copied to some extent.

I also kind of dig the movie’s insistence on not resolving a goddamn thing. The killer is never identified or caught, the subplot about the dead little girl in the park is never really proven to be a red herring or a related incident, there are no characters named Billy or Agnes, etc. I’m surprised they even bothered revealing the source of the phone calls, since by that point it’s largely incidental and obvious anyway. But one thing I DON’T care for is the abrupt conclusion with Peter suddenly showing up and then exiting the film offscreen. I guess it’s supposed to add to the ambiguity, but it doesn’t quite feel that way. It feels more like they didn’t have time or just plain forgot to film the whole scene.

Margot Kidder (way hotter here than in Superman, for the record) plays one of my favorite slasher characters of all time. Often drunk and swearing, she’s pretty much the type of girl I’d hang out with and get rejected by for being too nice. A shame she goes to bed like 20 minutes into the damn movie and doesn’t appear again until her death scene. The guys who did the remake tried to get her to play the house mother, but she declined, so we had to settle for Andrea Martin.

Seeing the film with a crowd is pretty joyous – especially final scene, when everyone just suddenly up and leaves poor Jess by herself. The crowd was in stitches, and for good reason; it’s fucking hilarious. Of course, the ineptitude of the cops provides a lot of the film’s highlights (not to mention the fact that if they were doing their jobs right they would have found poor Claire and Ms. Mac up in the attic and thus prevented most of the film from ever occurring). Nash in particular is the dumbest movie cop of all time, making even Dewey from Scream look competent in comparison.

Bad transfer aside, the DVD has a lot of good extras, though sadly no commentary and very little input from Bob Clark, who died a few months after this non-definitive release (making this year’s screening all the more somber, as he often attended for Q&A; this year was John Saxon as well as Zach Ward who was in Clark’s other holiday classic, A Christmas Story). Maybe in 2009, for the 35th anniversary, they will compile all of the releases into one whole 2 disc package, with a new transfer that does the film better justice. Here’s hoping!

Also, according to the IMDb and Wikipedia (two of the most reliable sources of information in the world), NBC pulled this off the air during a showing because people complained it to was “too scary”, which is like taking MST3k off for being too funny. Considering that the phone calls, the only scary parts of the movie really, had to have been edited down to nothing for a primetime broadcast, you gotta wonder just how lame people were back in the 70s.

What say you?

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Holiday, Non Canon, Slasher,

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Rosemary's Baby

DECEMBER 18, 2007

GENRE: PSYCHOLOGICAL, RELIGIOUS
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

Well as many of you correctly guessed (almost 50% of the total vote!), Rosemary’s Baby is indeed the classic horror movie I had never seen. There are many reasons for this. One is that the movie is too damn long to watch before work (which is when I watch many of my films), so I had to get myself up early to watch it (and I STILL didn’t finish it time, and had to watch the conclusion at work and pray Mia Farrow didn’t appear nude again in the final 15 minutes).

Another reason is that it’s just been built up so much. Being a lover of horror, I read a lot of Fangoria, Rue Morgue, etc. And whenever they interview a big star who is doing a horror movie, they always have the same canned answer in regards to their opinions on horror films: “I don’t usually like horror movies; though I do like Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, and Silence of the Lambs.” Well, that’s fine; maybe you should get together with all the two thousand other “serious” actors who said the same thing. I’ll be over here making my own opinions.

Anyway, out of those three, I don’t like Silence much at all and I think Exorcist is only pretty good. I can certainly see why people like them so much, and they are at least technically near flawless (though I HATE all the looking directly into camera stuff in Silence – way overused), but for the most part they are not my cup of tea. So I always kind of figured Rosemary would leave me with the same impression, so I opted to go out of my way to see shit like Hallowed Ground (a film with a similar premise) instead. Real smart, huh?

Luckily, I actually enjoyed Rosemary. It’s certainly not one of my 3 favorites (then again, that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who knows where my tastes lie), but it really works, and even holds up well, 40 years later. The pace is a bit uneven, but it’s forgivable, as it sort of lulls you into thinking everything is fine only to deliver something sort of shocking (her friend’s ‘suicide’ early on, for example).

Strangely, for a film that’s 2:20 long, the editing is almost TOO tight. Several scenes end right at the instant the last word is said, when you would expect it to hold on a reaction so that the words sink in a bit before we move on to something else. Of course, those same folks who claim this film is the 2nd coming will be the first to complain about a Bruckheimer film being edited too fast, but I’m used to that sort of hypocrisy by now.

And I SWORE this guy was a time traveling Geoffrey Lewis.

As this is a Polanski film, there’s a lot of quirky humor to enjoy as well. I love the husband’s complete laid back manner of revealing to Rosemary that he fucked her in her sleep. “I thought it was exciting in a sort of necrophile way,” he says, as casually as he might mention that he was considering buying a new tie. There’s also a catty cult member who sticks her tongue out at Rosemary for getting her in trouble with the main cult guy. And William Castle shows up in a fake scare, which is pretty awesome (he produced the film).

Also, I never knew Mia Farrow was once hot. Good to know.

On a final note, I’d like to point out that the 2nd place “winner” in the poll was John Carpenter’s The Thing, a film I have professed my love for a couple of times on the site. Does this mean that you HAVEN’T memorized the contents of all 300+ reviews? Why, I am insulted!!!

What say you?

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Based On Novel, Psychological, Religious,

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Toe Tags (2003)

DECEMBER 17, 2007

GENRE: SERIAL KILLER
SOURCE: DVD (BUDGET PACK 3!!!)

Man... there should be some sort of warning on these movies. “This was filmed with the same camera your uncle films family gatherings with and the acting within isn’t quite as good as that of porn.” Once again being marginally better than the previous film from the Decrepit Crypt set, Toe Tags is still a miserable excuse for a film that doesn’t deserve to be commercially available. If it was free on Youtube (which the video quality often resembles) it would be one thing, but come on guys.

Like Before I Die, these guys didn’t even bother using sound recording equipment for their film. Thus, when people are close to the camera, you can hear them, and when they are not, you can’t. If you for some reason decide to watch this film, be prepared to keep your finger on the volume button.

And these guys are supposed to be cops.

Also, this one is quite short. It lists a running time of 68 minutes, but the film itself is only 60. The other 8 are bloopers and behind the scenes footage of the (bad) makeup effects. The only interesting thing about any of them is hearing someone genuinely laugh at a guy’s terrible (and confusing) Tony Montana/Travis Bickle impression. Note to the world – saying either “Say hello to my little friend!” or “You talking to me?” in any situation or capacity is not funny, ever, and you really should just fucking stop doing them (and witnesses to them should not under any circumstances encourage them by laughing).

The movie also manages to top Silent Night Deadly Night’s antler scene in regards to how bad the character’s peripheral vision is. In SNDN, a guy doesn’t notice his girlfriend hanging by a pair of antlers, because she’s at his, let’s say, 4 o’ clock. Well this one is even stupider:

The blond chick doesn't see the woman walking up to her. Un-fucking-believable. Seriously, I’m about to throw this entire fucking set into the trash.

What say you?

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Decrepit Crypt, Serial Killer,

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Scarecrows

DECEMBER 16, 2007

GENRE: ZOMBIE
SOURCE: DVD (OWN COLLECTION)

“Hey Curry: how are we gonna live in Mexico, if we’re dead?”

That line is hilarious, but unfortunately, like about 80% of the (less funny) dialogue in Scarecrows, it is spoken by an off-screen actor. It’s really jarring to hear a bunch of disembodied voices over shots of houses, cornfields, and airplanes throughout the film, and you never really get used to it.

This is a shame, because otherwise, this movie’s pretty good. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Quentin Tarantino and/or Simon Barrett are fans of the film, since both From Dusk Till Dawn and Barrett's Dead Birds (a great flick, if you haven’t seen it yet you should) are very similar (Birds moreso than Dawn), and in certain aspects, superior. Scarecrows has a father and daughter taken hostage by the robbers (like Dawn) and is a very atmospheric, low-key effort set entirely in a farmhouse (like Birds). And both are about robbers being killed by monsters (note - I am dubbing this a zombie film because the guys that get killed by the scarecrows come back as murderous, mindless drone things).

I was surprised to see Peter Deming’s name in the credits, as he is one of the few directors of photography whose name means a damn thing to me (he also shot the Scream sequels, Evil Dead 2, From Hell, and a few David Lynch films). His career is uneven at best (he also shot Son In Law and Joe’s Apartment), but he does great work here. The shots of the scarecrows creep me out throughout the film. Take a note, Lionsgate – killer scarecrows CAN be scary!!!

And this guy is awesome.

It’s sort of a shame that writer/director William Wesley has only one other film to his name (Route 666, which was a complete disappointment, to put it mildly). He knows how to stage scenes and keep a film moving despite an obvious low budget (I suspect many of the voiceovers are the result of needing to deliver exposition without filming a whole scene), and it would be good to see what he could pull off with the necessary resources. None of the actors are particularly memorable, but they aren’t bad either (one guy kind of looks like Nathan Fillion, which is always a plus).

Also the dog in the film is “awwww” worthy.

What say you?

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Zombie,

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Graveyard Shift (1990)

DECEMBER 15, 2007

GENRE: BASED ON NOVEL, PREDATOR, MONSTER
SOURCE: CABLE (FEARNET)

I blame Fearnet for the one time I ever missed a movie. I was on vacation last February, and planned to use their online site, which offers crappy movies for free, for my daily film. But the horrible presentation and terrible buffering errors caused me to give up trying. Since their actual channel is not available on Time Warner, which is my cable provider, that was my only real experience with Fearnet until today, when I went to a friend’s house in Massachusetts. She had the channel, which offers about 40 movies “On Demand” per month, including Graveyard Shift, which is the one I opted for out of all the choices.

As I said in my 1408 review, a Stephen King short story usually translates into an awful film. Not that all of his full length novels have been successfully adapted, but the problems with the ones that don't usually stem from leaving out “favorite parts” more than anything else. With the short stories, the filmmakers have to pad the idea out in order to make a 90 minute narrative, which is no easy task. Sometimes, like 1408, this works. Usually, like Children of the Corn, The Mangler, The Lawnmower Man, etc. it doesn’t. So I was happy to see that Graveyard Shift came out pretty decent, if far from perfect.

The odd thing about the movie is that it’s about Brad Dourif and some other guys killing rats, only to discover that the REAL monster is a giant bat fucking thing living in the rat nest, and yet no one seems to be having any fun. The whole concept is pretty ridiculous, why not laugh it up? Even in the finale, when a Diet Pepsi can is used to save the day (best product placement ever?), director Ralph Singleton and writer John Esposito play the whole thing maddeningly straight. Even Dourif gets little scene-chewing to do outside of a long Vietnam speech early on (which has a line about Bruce Dern that sounds EXACTLY like something King would write, though I do not think that the line, or even Dourif’s character for that matter, are in the book), but that's about it. The rest of the film is kind of dour, if (heh) not entirely serious.

But it’s still enjoyable once it gets going, and the gore is sufficient. The acting is pretty decent for the most part as well. Brad Andrews, of “I guess they couldn’t afford Tom Berenger” fame, plays the lead, and Andrew “The Djinn” Divoff plays one of the other mill workers. The girl looks like Marisa Tomei, and her character’s final scene is pretty surprising. There’s also a howler of a final line by the requisite “evil human” character, who yells “We’re going to hell.... TOGETHER!!!” (“together” sounds like the chorus to a song, he shouts it for so long).

Also, they give some nice King nods – the mill is named after Richard Bachman (who wrong “The Long Walk”, my all time favorite book, and I am pretty sure that the mill is supposed to be the same one that the Pete McVries character in “Walk” worked at prior to joining the Walk), and there’s a Plymouth Fury glimpsed here and there. Of course, it’s not very likely that King is a fan of the film, though I think he should be impressed that they got as good of a movie as they did from his source story, which is hardly one of his better tales to begin with and also is only about 8 pages long if memory serves.

So, if you have Fearnet, and have never seen the film, give it a watch or two and tell us what you think. Otherwise... I dunno. Make a sandwich or something.

What say you?

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Based On Novel, Monster, Predator,

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I Am Legend (2007)

DECEMBER 14, 2007

GENRE: BASED ON NOVEL, POST-APOCALYPTIC, REMAKE, VAMPIRE
SOURCE: THEATRICAL (IMAX)

It’s sort of a lie to say I saw I Am Legend in IMAX, as it was pretty much a fake IMAX. The screen was about the right size, but the theater setup and sound system were identical to any stadium seated theater. The whole point of IMAX is to be engulfed in the film with a curved screen that you are close to and sound that comes at you from all sides. This was not the case. So if you are in the Hooksett, NH area, and are considering going to their IMAX screen for the experience, don’t. Make the extra drive down to Reading, MA.

It was sort of fitting for the film though. It had the right intent, but it was missing key ingredients. Like the book itself and Last Man On Earth, the first half hour or so is the best part. Watching Neville go about his regular routine in a sort of half survival, half fantasy scenario is always the highlight of this particular story. In this version, Neville is in New York, and the scenes of him navigating the empty city are truly effective (though the effect is a bit dulled after Devil’s Advocate and Vanilla Sky did the same thing to a degree). There are some great “future” sight gags in these scenes as well, and the idea of a guy literally watching every movie ever made (in alphabetical order no less) has obvious appeal to me.

But, like always, the 2nd half flounders. Why can’t anyone, even Richard Matheson himself, ever come up with a good way to wrap up this story? Deviating from the book (even moreso than Last Man) is fine, but only if they improve on things, which isn’t the case here. Surprisingly, the film contains far less action than you’d expect from the trailers and pedigree (Michael Bay himself was once attached to this film, and the first scene with Smith is probably leftover from his involvement), though that isn’t really the problem. And considering how awful the CG vampires look, the less of them we see, the better. No, the problem here is that the movie fails to give Neville a real antagonist like his neighbor Cortman in the book. Here, the “big bad” is simply a slightly better rendered CG zombie-vampire thing (“played” by Dash Mihok, who is a recognizable character actor I usually enjoy), and he is given very little to do. There is very little sense that the vampires fear him (making this film’s use of the book’s title, the first adaptation to do so, all the more puzzling), rendering (no pun intended!) them largely inconsequential. Neville’s own crumbling sanity seems a bigger threat than the vampires ever do, with the exception of one (terrific) sequence set in a pitch black building.

They also include some truly idiotic “spiritual” nonsense (spoiler alert!). Early on in the film, during one of the flashbacks (the movie scores a few points by splitting these flashbacks up, Lost-style, but loses a few of those points for focusing pretty much on one night/scene), Neville’s kid randomly says “Look at the butterfly!”. Later, Neville sees a butterfly tattoo on a fellow survivor, and realizes what he has to do to save humanity. So, yes, this film essentially rips off “Swing away, Merrill!” and manages to make it even dumber. Who knows which writer is to blame on this though, since the film has had so many false starts and different creative teams over the past 10 years. This results in what has to be a cinematic first (at least for a film based on a book), as we are given a “Based on a screenplay by” credit in addition to the story/screenplay credits (and, of course, Matheson for his novel). And that’s just the credited writers!!!

So while it was far from a bad film, it was really disheartening to watch as the film went from great to merely OK. Like 30 Days of Night, this has the potential to be one of the years’ best genre films (luckily, the PG-13 rating is of no real consequence in relation to the film’s flaws), but the lazy script prevented such a thing from happening. Still, I was entertained for the most part, thanks in part to the antics of my fellow moviegoers. Going to get a snack, I witnessed a man screaming and yelling about his pretzel, which resulted in a refund, and then the guy went back to his movie... which was Alvin and the Chipmunks. I didn’t think anything would top that, but then I saw a girl buy a soda and Sour Patch Kids, and then throw the soda into the trash without even as much as putting a straw into the lid. What the hell kind of person pays 4 dollars for a cup of colored water and then immediately throws it away?

My enjoyment was also aided by a 6 minute preview of The Dark Knight (aka Batman 2). We watch pretty much a whole scene, detailing a bank robbery orchestrated by the Joker, who is believed to be pulling the strings from an unknown location, and not the 5th robbery member whose face we never see. The scene also includes William Fichtner brandishing a shotgun and generally being awesome. Someone get this guy a starring role!!!

UPDATE – the movie made 80 million over the weekend, beating even Return of the King for a December opening. So who cares what I think?

What say you?

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Based On Novel, Post-Apocalyptic, Remake, Vampire,

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