Monster Mash Movie Marathon Month - Week 3

A day late, sure, but the content's all here, my lovelies.

This was a much more middle-of-the-road week (most of the entries are Cs or Ds. Sigh.), but there were some laughs to be sure.  Quite a few garnered a C+, but that seems kind of too convenient at the time of this writing (something, something, bell curve at the end of the month). An odd trifecta of 'show-biz' movies happened quite by accident (Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence > Madhouse > Targets), but was a pleasant surprise. The latter two films were more poignant in this regard, but don't be fooled, HC2 is also very much about show business (revolving around one specific film, but more on that later).

Here's how the grading system works:

A = Excellent, a must see

B = Very good, I’d watch it again

C = Worth Seeing

D = Maybe don’t bother

F = Worthless

+ = Superior for this grade

- = Just barely makes it into this grade

I caught some cross-talk for grading again (happens every year), so, I'd like to take this opportunity to remind you folks that if it's not an F, I liked the movie at least a little (D's are usually a single element). So don't fret if I gave a movie you love a poor score - I'm just one man, with one set of tastes. 

On the subject of movies you love, I SPOIL EVERYTHING this week. It might not be in the first paragraph (see below review), but I absolutely do not care to hold things back. If you have a problem with this, close your browser and come back after you've seen the film (or maybe just skip to the next one... that's probably better for me). 

Let's get to it: 

The VVitch (Robert Eggers) - C+

It's early in the process of colonizing America, and William and his family choose to be exiled from their plantation somewhere in New England. They build a cabin and are fine, for a time, but events conspire to turn against them when baby Samuel vanishes while in the care of their eldest daughter, Thomasin. The family is overwrought, but it only gets worse when eldest son Caleb goes missing too. The family turns on one another, mostly blaming Thomasin (she's the perfect age for witchcraft). She hopes her name will be cleared once she finds Caleb, naked and hanging off the goat pen. The family rallies their frontier medicine to try and save the boy, but he dies, leaving the mother aghast, and the remaining children point fingers at one another desperately to escape punishment. William boards the rest of his children in the goat pen for the night, but the next morning, he wakes to find everything in the pen, except Thomasin, dead.  And that’s when the goat comes at him…

Look, straight up, this might be a better movie than I'm letting on. I can't argue that it's beautifully shot, nor that every single actor in it does a great job (even the child actors, who drive a good portion of the story). The supernatural effects are sparing, but effectively done (Caleb spitting up an apple was my favorite). The gore effects are few, but effective and realistic when they appear. The technical aspects of the film are nearly flawless.

Where it lost me was the story, especially the ending, in which everyone but Thomasin dies, and she wanders into the wilderness after she makes a pact with the devil (who suddenly appears on screen and is… some kind of thespian?) to becomes a witch herself. I've heard theories that this implies she was indeed a witch the whole movie, but I don't see how that's possible when a different woman takes Caleb, and another woman is in the goat pen when she and her younger siblings are boarded inside. Even the fact that Black Phillip, one of the family goats, was a conduit to Satan was an idea introduced too late into the movie that I can't help but feel it was a lazy decision (the only possible lead up to this choice was it having the same color eyes as the witch rabbit that was running around the woods). If you take the ending literally - that they're being plagued by a witch - then a bunch of the choices made by the characters are puzzling. For example, why not scour the woods for evil before immediately declaring your children the pawns of Satan? It all feels a little convenient, which, in a movie with strengths in so many other ways, is almost tragic. I felt cheated. It's still worth watching for its merits, though, and they are ample.

Elves (Jeff Mendel) - F

Kirsten, and her friends Amy and Brooke, go out into the woods to perform a ritual. It seems not to work, but – surprise, surprise - it does. Meanwhile, Mike, an ex-cop/ex security guard manages to get a job as a Santa after the last Santa mysteriously gets his balls cut off. The two characters unite when Kirsten's after-hours party at work is gunned down by some Germans. Mike, who happens to have been one of the greatest detectives on the force, quickly uncovers a Nazi conspiracy to crossbreed the creature with a perfect genetic sample to engineer a master race. Things get dicier still when it is revealed that Kirsten just so happens to be that perfect genetic sample (her ancestry, as it turns out, would make the Lannisters look normal), and she must be the mother of Elves. The only possible hope of salvation for Kirsten comes in the form of shoving a crystal back into the original hole she summoned the Elf out of in the first place. Gotta love when these things come full-circle.

This is a notoriously awful direct-to-video effort, starring Dan Haggerty, aka Grizzly Adams. His delivery is pretty unbelievable on some lines, but this might be the only charming aspect to the movie. There are kill scenes, but the gore is cheap. You get the occasional look at bare boobs or lingerie-clad ladies, but given the material they're disrobing for, you kind of feel bad for them. Everywhere Elves tries to win you over, it fails.

The premise, Nazis using mythical elves to form a master race, is pretty out there. The story happens on a pretty small scale, though, so it barely strays into irreverent Nazi humor. The only actress that pulls out a decent performance is Kirsten's reprehensible mother (who drowns the family cat, Agamemnon, in the toilet). She is a woman you'll absolutely love to hate, until she gets electrocuted in her bathtub. It has some wacky moments for sure, but there's better low budget efforts that achieve this end more successfully.

ZaAT (Don Barton & Arnold Stevens) - D-

Dr. Leopold will be laughed at no more. He injects himself with glowing goo, and turns into his ultimate weapon; ZaAT. A human/catfish hybrid. While still flying under the radar, the nightmarishly slow ZaAT first disposes of his colleagues that ridiculed his ideas, and injects his mutating agent (which, naturally, is highly radioactive) into local waterways to further his wicked schemes. But when he changes his focus to procuring a bride (by stealing ladies and giving them the ZaAT formula), he attracts the attention of the local sheriff, and Rex, a marine biologist. Finding that the local lakes and rivers are filthy with radiation, Rex calls in Walker and Martha from INPIT, a dedicated ecological survey organization. Will the combined forces of local law enforcement combined with INPIT be able to stop ZaAT? Or will he kill them all and spread his plague to the ocean?

It's the latter. And while this film is amateur to its celluloid bones, there's a lot of fun to be had with ZaAT. From the endless footage of marine life that pads the film's run-time, from the actor wearing the ZaAT suit (it's a rubber suit, in case you couldn't tell) constantly stumbling, to the most superficial wounds being fatal, to a soundtrack with lyrics written about the film, this baby is packed with the very best of b-movie charm. The sexual tension between the two INPIT employees is atrocious. The sheriff is a surprisingly charming character, who sits in on hippie love-ins, and then persuades the whole pack of them to get locked up in the county jail overnight - for their protection, of course. These gives the film a bit of goofy color, and I could not fail the film outright.

But, at the end of the day, ZaAT is a rubber-suited monster almost falling over, and terrorizing people around a body of water. It has heart, and it's certainly not the most godawful piece of crap under the sun, but it is definitely limited. But, when you compare it to something like Elves, ZaAT definitely feels like a cut above.

The Human Centipede 2: Full Sequence (Tom Six) - C-

Martin is a deeply troubled man that works the security desk in a parking garage. He is also obsessed with the original Human Centipede movie. So obsessed, in fact, that he's been cooking up his own little plan: a human centipede made out of twelve people (four times the original number). Using his trusty gun and crowbar, Martin manages to get his dirty dozen - including an actress from the first film, Ashlynn Yennie, by lying to her agent and claiming she was up for a Tarantino audition - killing his mother, psychiatrist and a few other rotten apples in the process. Of course, Martin isn't a surgeon, like Dr. Heiter in the first film, so a lot of the work he does is... Let's say... Shoddy. He knocks teeth out with a hammer, injects them with laxatives so he can watch them poop, and otherwise torments them. Eventually, one of the pieces does manage to escape (a daring escape it is, though it is not without penalty), and then the damn thing comes apart, so it's back to the drawing board for Martin, and nighty night for the big centipede.

You're probably not going to believe this, but Centipede 2 is actually a pretty engaging movie. I absolutely can't recommend it, as it is blatantly disgusting in many, many different ways (if you've seen it, you might notice I pulled some punches in the above synopsis), yet, thematically, it's more interesting than its predecessor. Martin (who despite being a gross, little bastard is arguably our protagonist) never utters a word through the film, and the look and mannerism of actor Laurence R. Harvey is spot on. Martin has been tortured endlessly through life, and, if he wasn't on this reprehensible killing spree, probably would be subject to any number of awful fates himself (his mother attempts to murder him on screen BEFORE she finds out about his obsession, his psychiatrist is angling to use his sexually abusive past to rape him, and I'm sure that’s just the tip of his life's iceberg). You never feel bad for Martin (he is too disgusting to identify with), but you understand that a life so tragic has consequences. The first hour of the film is kind of sickly fascinating. You don't want Martin to succeed, but literally everyone he comes across is also a piece of shit, and with few exceptions, you don't feel bad for them either. It moves along at a good clip too, largely without dialogue. Add all this to the black and white filming, and you almost feel like you're watching the most intense student art film ever made

But, the last 30 minutes (the fateful surgery, and the events following it) are gross beyond measure. Definitely not for the faint of heart. Supposedly, Tom Six was given carte blanche to be as repugnant as he wanted, and he went big. Given the bleak world the characters live in, you don't expect anyone to make it (the escape was a genuine surprise), and sure enough, no one really does. As I've said, this is not a popcorn movie or something to watch on a date night, this one is for tortureporn fanatics, gorehounds and horror movie aficionados. I might not have given it an F, but John Q. Public almost certainly would.

Madhouse (Jim Clark) - B-

Paul Toombes seems to have it all. His Dr. Death a character, a fixture in 50s and 60s horror, is doing quite well, he has an excellent partnership with his writer, Henry, and he has just gotten engaged to Eleanor, a co-star. But, at a Hollywood party, Eleanor is decapitated, her body discovered by Paul, causing him to have a psychiatric break. Three years later, Paul is released, and Henry begins to push him back into his film franchise. Almost immediately though, the starlets working in his reboots are murdered. The film wants you to believe Toombes is hypnotized by seeing his old character on screen, compulsively causing him to slay people, but he's actually being framed by Henry. Henry had written the Dr. Death character for himself, and has carried a grudge against his old friend ever since Toombes got the part. Toombes only find this out by spectacularly faking his own death in a fire, and coming after Henry once everyone assumes he was done for. Classic Price.

Made by the same team that made MMMMM favorite The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Madhouse stars Vincent Price and Peter Cushing, and offers a silly, if not effective, look at the life of a horror star in the 70s. It's unlikely the character of Toombes is directly allegorical to Price, but one can't help but wonder, as the character rubs shoulders with genre icons playing themselves (friends of Price, like Basil Rathbone and Boris Karloff have fun cameos), if there's not a bit of Price in Toombes. The script is more or less a formality, with the slayings serving to drive the mystery ever onward. What you're really here to see is Price ham his way through confrontations, and otherwise be a darling of the silver screen.

But there's more to like: some of the gore effects are strikingly well done (like Eleanor's head coming off), and some of the kill scenes are downright hysterical (the killer skewers two grieving parents attempting to blackmail Toombes on a sword). This is all in keeping with Price's other 70s AIP efforts, and while Madhouse has more polish, I'd still say watch Phibes first, as it is arguably more entertaining (if not formulaic). Nevertheless, Madhouse is just good fun, and goofy to the extreme.

Targets (Peter Bogdanovich) - C+

Byron Orlok is a Hollywood horror star that long for retirement (played by horror movie legend Boris Karloff in the twilight of his own career). Bobby is a young man that has a few screws loose. These are our two protagonists, and they drive the movie in very different ways. Byron deals with trying to mysteriously get out of all acting-related appointments (including introducing one of his old movies at the local drive-in). Bobby, seemingly inexplicably, goes on a killing spree, first blowing away his inattentive wife, his mother, and some young fella helping them bring the groceries in. The two plots come together in the final act, when Byron has a change of heart and decides to make his drive-in appearance after all. Bobby just so happened to hole up at the same drive-in to lose the cops after the last leg of his shooting affair. Bobby, a crack shot thanks to his conservative father, has problems with fleeing his sniper nests, and an angry mob seeks him out after he causes more carnage. Byron finds him first, literally slaps him silly, and then the police take him away. The End.

It feels almost like you're watching two different movies. Bobby's story feels like pure exploitation cinema (how many people can this man gun down before he's stopped?), While Byron's story feels almost like an anachronistic drama. Who cares why grandpa doesn't want to make movies anymore? There's a dude taking shots at motorists on the freeway! Don't get me wrong, most of the fun moments in the movie happen in the Byron storyline. But that's not why anybody saw this movie - they came to watch a man snap and start shooting people. Surprisingly, however, for such a violent film, it's pretty light on gore (perhaps not that surprising, in 1968 gore effects were unheard of, except in super obscure gorehound features, such as the works of Herschell Gordon Lewis). All you get are smears of red paint, and even those are sparse.

I picked this film because it was highly regarded, and yet very few people bring up Targets in casual discussion of 60s horror cinema. I theorize that this likely has to do with the frightening rate at which many Americans seem to be saying 'fuck it', and gunning down as many people as they can these days. In the modern landscape of reality, Targets may hit a little too close to home. Most of the literature I’ve read on the film claim that Bobby was a Vietnam vet, but for the life of me, I do not recall seeing a scene in which this is explicitly stated or alluded to. At the time, this was a fresh premise that was likely seeking a new way to scare a movie-going audience. Now movie-goers need to watch out for a Bobby of their own.

So, how was the movie? A little uneven. Karloff steals the show as a doddering old star that wants to be done with his life. The implication of the ending is that he faced death (Bobby only grazes him in the head as he comes in for the slaps), and no longer has to worry about it. That's fine, I suppose. Ironically, Madhouse also deals with the story of an actor past his prime struggling to remain relevant. The difference is Madhouse comes at this theme from a fun angle, as opposed to a dramatic one. Writer/Director Peter Bogdanovich (who would go on to direct The Last Picture Show) also plays the part of Sammy, an aspiring nebbish scriptwriter that is incensed by Orlok not reading the screenplay he wrote before his sudden retirement. He's dating Orlok's assistant, Jenny (who happens to be Chinese - something the script reminds us endlessly). None of these goings-on are overly dramatic or captivating, and are a world away from the actions of Bobby, who, once he starts killing people, doesn't really say another word. What we end up with is almost a Hitchcockian thriller, but without a lot of the flair of the renowned master of suspense. Bogdanovich has a good eye for framing and unique cinematic shots, but the editing is kind of wacky here and there (This was a very early film in his repertoire, and today is considered the peer of directors like fellow Hitchcock-“Borrower” Brian de Palma and Francis Ford Coppola). Ultimately, Targets is a worthwhile film, but our modern expectations of this sort of violence make it feel awfully tame.

Cat People (Jacques Tourneur) - C+

Oliver and Irena fall in love after a conversation. Within a couple of months, they are married, but there is a problem: Irena, a native of Serbia, believes she will turn into a ferocious panther if she is roused by passion or jealousy, so no kissing (and presumably that goes double for making whoopee)! Oliver sets her up with a psychiatrist, Dr. Judd, but he's got other issues: his coworker Alice tells him she's in love with him, and darn it, he might just love her back. Irena gets wind of this, and begins stalking Alice. Oliver, wanting a simple annulment of his marriage attempts to reason with Irena, but instead, she almost ambushes him, along with Alice at their workplace. They manage to get Irena to come to her senses, and she flees to Dr. Judd. The good doctor attempts to make a move on her, leading her wild side out, and she slays him as a panther. Distraught, she runs to the local zoo, where she commits suicide by freeing a hungry, regular panther. Panthers, man! They'll fuckin' kill ya.

Cat People has all the charms of a well-made film of its day, but its supernatural elements are ill-defined. Director Tourneur is a visionary of camerawork (and possibly the best horror director of the 40s and 50s), but this feels inferior to his film I watched last year, Curse of the Demon. While you cannot argue that the film is breathtaking, both in set pieces and camera work, it's story is just a little slow to develop. Scenes that happen by midway through the film dispel any notion that Irena is wrong about what she is, so why continue to try and fool us? It would have been impossible for a 1940s film to reasonably fake a panther, but the tamed panther in the movie looks bored and confused. That's kind of how I felt too.

It's a rich film, full of dazzling sets, and a cracking romance. Scenes that seem inconsequential upon first viewing likely foreshadow later scenes (Irena feeds the zoo panther a dead canary earlier, likely a nod to her later slaying by that same panther). There are even some genuinely frightening moments (such as when Alice senses someone, or something, following her as she walks the streets at night. Visually, this is the best sequence of the entire film) But as grand as all this is, it has trouble holding up to other films of its ilk (I Walked With a Zombie, another superior Tourneur film, springs to mind). The leading actors do a good job, but much like the VVitch, I found myself wanting more from the story.

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The next week is already underway, starting with 1970's The Vampire Lovers. We're only just halfway through the month now, but the choices are getting fewer and fewer. For sure, this week, I'll be checking out the Canadian coming-of-age werewolf movie Ginger Snaps (Thursday!), and much, much more. 

See you next week, horror homies. 

Monster Mash Movie Marathon Month 2014 - Week 2

Well, it's Sunday, so it's time to tell you all about the movies I watched this week, and how I felt about them. But first, here's another friendly reminder of the grading scale.

A = Excellent, a must see

B = Very good, I’d watch it again

C = Worth Seeing

D = Maybe don’t bother

F = Worthless

+ = Superior for this grade

- = Just barely makes it into this grade

I know many of you don't agree with some of the grades I give out, and it just goes to show you how personal the horror genre can be. And, as usual, please be aware that THESE REVIEWS MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS!! So, without any further ado, let's get into the reviews...

Insidious (James Wan) - C+

Josh and Renie have just recently had their third child, and have moved into a beautiful new home. Almost immediately, though, after their eldest son, Dalton, slips into a coma, Renie starts to have horrifying experiences and seeing figures that no one else can. She convinces Josh that they need to move. At first the new house seems to have done the trick, but it isn't long before Renie has the same old problems. Renie hires a psychic, someone Josh's mother knows. The psychic immediately informs the couple that their son is the source of their haunting, and from there, it gets complicated.

This film received a lot of positive hype when it was released, but probably only because it was being made by the creators of successful horror franchises like Saw and Paranormal Activity. It did a very good job of making both houses feel very sinister. The usual format of ghost movies, in my experience anyway, is that the paranormal aspects enter the film slowly, revealing the restless dead piece by piece to the viewer, often not letting the audience see an active ghost til the final confrontation (though, many times, this is probably due to budget-related reasons). Not the case here! The ghosts haunting Dalton physically appear very early in the picture. While at first I found this to be a refreshing change, it didn't leave much suspense for the finale. And while the monsters were very cool to look at, it's hard to be scared of ghosts that always smile. Or of a demon that looks like Darth Maul.

The film's pacing suffers. While it does reveal some of the ghosts early on, you only get frustrated when the reveals end too quickly. It feels like you're just waiting for the next scene that features something other than the protagonist family. It picks up somewhat when the psychics and her lackeys enter the picture, but then it gets real Poltergeist. You know somehow that things are going to be OK, and it seems kind of silly on the film's part to try and convince you otherwise. Still, the presentation and visual effects are good enough to keep you going.

The Thing (2011) (Matthijs van Heijnengen) - D+

A remote Norwegian science team has made the discovery of the century! Frozen in the ice near their base is a friggin' alien! The leader of the Norwegians, Dr. Sandor Halvorson, enlists the help of some American scientists, led by Kate Lloyd. Once back on the scene of their discovery, Halvorson cracks the ice to get a tissue sample, and it’s not too long after that the alien wakes up and parties like its 1982! Before long, only Kate and Carter, her crackerjack pilot ally, are all that stands between the Thing and the end of humanity.

Sound familiar? It ought to. This prequel to John Carpenter's version of The Thing examines what happened to the Norwegian science base that the Americans find destroyed. While it nicely sets up many tie-ins with Carpenter's movie, it also borrows almost every tense moment from it too. The famous blood test scene, the old dead-body-coming-back-to-life-at-an-inconvenient-moment trick, all the classics are there. It also prefers a more direct approach with its monster, rather than relying on building a character story to play off the paranoia of the premise. You get to see a lot of CGI Thing creatures running around in this movie. Big ones, little ones. And most, not all, but most of them have pretty grizzly vagina dentatas.

Maybe that's sour grapes. Carpenter's Thing is one of my favorites in the genre. This movie takes a neat premise - what happened to the last guys that found this impossibly hard to kill alien? - and bungles it. The reason Thing 82 was such a good movie was because there was a decent build up to the meat of the plot, thanks to having strong characters. Macready was a cynic who hated having authority thrust on him, Childs was skeptical of everyone, Blair was paranoid of the legitimate threat to humanity, Palmer was a chuckle-hungry stoner, Windows was a fuck-up who deserved to be badgered through the whole movie and so on. In Thing 2011, you really only get to know Kate as your protagonist, Halvorson as the asshole who was in it for fame, and you kind of got to know Lars, the only Norwegian at the base who doesn't speak English. The trouble is, there's probably over 20 living characters at the peak of people being alive in the film. That's a hard number to keep track of. There's really no chance to get to know many of the characters before they start getting eaten. I think a solution to this problem would have been to dispose of the American team all together. True, Kate is your protagonist, so the story would have to be retooled a little, but the Norwegian characters were all solidly done, so it seems clear they could have done this and still managed to make an excellent film (though it would have been a reader).

Thing 82 largely succeeded because it didn't attach a morality to its characters, leaving the audience to make their own decisions about who was good and evil (other than Macready, who was the only obvious protagonist). Even characters that went bad, like Blair, often did it for very plausible reasons. In Thing 2011, we are supplied with this information. Kate and Lars are good guys, Halvorson is the bad guy, and anyone who supports either immediately falls into that camp for the viewer. As such, it greatly reduces the paranoia the audience feels. While in Thing 2011, there is the ever present threat that some good characters are aliens, there's a whole group of characters that we aren't supposed to like, and whether they're Things or not doesn't add anything to the narrative.

I'm also not sure how to explain this, but the advanced CGI effects somehow seemed more fake to me than the creature effects in Thing 82. Especially the scene in which we first see a character turn into one of them. He's just talking, then his face ripples and then he morphs suddenly into a monster. But you can almost tell when he stops being just an actor. I found several of the effects, specifically when transitioning from human to monster, to look extra fake. This movie had a real tough act to follow in the special effects department, though, so maybe I should be less critical.

Race with the Devil (Jack Starrett) - D-

Frank and Roger, along with their wives, have got a plan to go skiing up in Aspen. They have this new-fangled RV, you see, so they hitch up some dirt bikes, and they get traveling. One evening, thinking they've managed to spy on a hip, young orgy, the pair are horrified when they discover what they witnessed is in fact a ritualistic sacrifice. Those hippies are Satanists, who are pretty pissed off when they realize Frank and Roger saw their misdeed. From there, the RV crew races desperately to flee pursuing bad guys who manage to be around every corner.

There's not much to say about this one. It billed itself in the trailer as one long car chase, but this really only happens for about 12 minutes towards the end. This chase scene is the only scene in the movie of any note. It does contain a lot of shots of Roger and Frank's RV getting smashed, a few car tricks, and some spectacular crashes. I imagine a good portion of this films budget went into pyrotechnics, as more than one car goes up in a huge fireball.

But the majority of the movie is spent watching the characters go through an increasingly frustrating series of attempts to get help. Everywhere they turn, they meet resistance. They, and by extension, you in the audience don't trust anyone they meet. The wives tend to handle every challenge by going hysterical (earlier they try to help by stealing some books on witchcraft from a local library, but this moment of helpfulness is overshadowed by every scene that follows having them scream and cower). The locals are colorful, but you can immediately tell that they are up to no good. In fact, when you realize that every scene in the movie leading up to the car chase is the same thing done over and over again, you lose interest. This is compounded by the film not even taking the time to explore its antagonists. Once you see the sacrifice and our heroes get back on the road, very little is discovered about the satanic society. All you get to know is they're everywhere. But not why. Or to what end. Ho-hum.

The Wizard of Gore (Herschell Gordon Lewis) - F

We open on a monologue from Montag, the Magnificent. Montag is a magician that butchers lady volunteers during his act in just the bloodiest ways possible. Each night of his show he does a different "trick". These tricks are obviously fatal (being sawed in half, having a metal spike driven through a brain, swallowing swords, etc.), but somehow the volunteer is miraculously unharmed after some trippy editing. At least, until about an hour after the show, when the women suddenly die in the same fashion that Montag killed them on stage. Sherry, a day time talk show host, and her fiancée, Jack, see Montag's first show, and Sherry is determined to have the wizard on her program. He agrees, but only if she keeps attending his performances.

This film was completely a vehicle for its gore effects. You can tell by the emphasis the film puts on its gross-out scenes, and by the lack of talent with any other aspect of the movie. Microphones pick up wind in outside scenes, there are millions of jump cuts giving the picture a terribly disjointed feel, and none of the actors are particularly good at acting.

So let's talk about these gore effects. Since it’s obvious by the lack of any sort of talent through the rest of the film, and Lewis used to be considered quite the gore-maker of his day, the special effects have to be kind of impressive. But the way in which they are presented - with uneven, repetitive music, confusing jump cuts, and Montag leering and running his hands through their wounds - leaves a lot to be desired. Nevertheless, fans of bad horror will be delighted by the acting here. Some of the lines are comedic gold, including a little piece in which Jack panics about his friend’s hands.

The Beyond (Lucio Fulci) - C+

Liza purchases a fixer-upper hotel somewhere in Louisiana. Decades previous, however, a murder had taken place, the body boarded up in room 36. As it turns out, room 36 contains a doorway to hell. When Liza has an ill-fated plumber begin to work on the pipes, it sets off a chain of events that threatens to bring hell to Earth. With the aid of smarmy, nonbeliever, Doctor John and the mysterious blind woman, Emily, Liza attempts to find out exactly what is going on with her hotel.

Now, the above paragraph sounds pretty straight forward, but this movie is kind of all over the place. From our first on screen death, the kill scenes are varied and even somewhat confusing. Early it becomes clear that deaths are not confined to the hotel, but it’s not exactly explained how. The special effects are oddly inconsistent. In scenes where ghosts arrive to haunt Emily, you can tell that what you're looking at are rags and paper mache made to look humanoid. Yet not five minutes later, some excellent gore effects happen. Sometimes this can be quite the contradiction (such as a scene where a man who has fallen off a ladder is beset by tarantulas. While some of the spiders are real, others are unabashedly fake). But then, at the same time, some of the gore effects are awesomely done (I howled with laughter and rewound several times when Doctor John offs a character in the last few minutes of the film).

But Fulci is no hack. The cinematography is pretty wonderful. The visuals of the film make up for some of the shoddier special effects. But some of the scenes go on too long. The aforementioned spider scene goes on about three times longer than needed. This movie could be a good time, as long as you don't take it too seriously.

The ABCs of Death (Various Directors) - B+

This collaboration is an anthology film quite unlike any other. 26 contemporary horror directors were each given a letter, and got to pick a word (or phrase) that corresponded to their letter. The result: 26 different short films in which at least one character dies. I couldn't possibly give you the premise of each film, so I'm not going to try. Besides, it’s best to go into a film like this knowing as little as possible.

These films are truly all over the map. The feel of ABCs runs from satirical to hilarious to gory to disturbing. But it evokes these emotions skillfully. It is an international effort, bringing several different languages to the table.  It also includes different formats such as animation, claymation, puppetry and found footage. But the common thread through most of the anthology is talent. Say what you will about the content of some of the pieces, each one is done particularly well.

While not every short could be considered horror, those that are are fairly disturbing. People that can't stand the genre (or violence) will probably not be able to stomach it, but overall, I found ABCs to be an excellent appeal to the horror geek in me. And people like me are most definitely the film's audience.

And while I really don’t want to talk about the specific shorts, I will let you know my favorite letters: D, F, Q, S, U & Z (Which is perhaps one of the strangest things I have ever seen. Thanks Japan!).

Carrie (Brian De Palma) - B

Nobody likes Carrie White. Though she may have secret telekinetic powers, she gets pushed around daily in just the most unthinkable ways by her high school peers. And when her almost-definitely-a-lesbian gym teacher interferes in the pranks against her, ringleader Chris decides Carrie must suffer even more. Of course, it doesn't help that Carrie's mother is a religious fanatic who makes her daughter's private life hell too. What's a girl to do? Hey, I know! After getting pushed to the limit at her prom, she goes berserk (mentally) and annihilates as many people as possible.

Director Brian De Palma tackles the celebrated Stephen King story, and he does a good job of it. True, much of his style is borrowed from Hitchcock, but he still shows a lot of class here. Many of the girl gym sequences are dazzlingly choreographed, and De Palma even brings his signature split screen effect to the table for Carrie's famous meltdown (though, personally, I found he used this technique to greater effect in Sisters). Some of the performances, including Piper Laurie, of Twin Peaks fame, as Carrie’s devout mother are excellent. The film also features a funky, electronic-sounding soundtrack that adds to some of the more surreal scenes.

Parts of Carrie are baffling to me (why does the house implode?), but the film is captivating enough that these details don't matter. Even knowing exactly where the story is going, watching Carrie discover new experiences in life only to have it all crash down around her is a satisfying experience. At points she seems to climb impossibly high, so high that you can't believe that she doesn't realize it's all a ruse. But she needs to climb that high in order for her fall to have the correct emotional impact.

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That does it for another week! This coming week, I think, will be my found footage marathon, including Afflicted, Cloverfield and Cannibal Holocaust. Tonight, though, I'm going to be checking out 2009's Pandorum, starring.... Dennis Quaid? Am... am I sure about this? Aw, mannnn....