The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

[knives]

They push the term a little, but it is still pretty good.

[colinr0380]

Although there is something great about Jeff Lieberman choosing The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Ben Wheatley choosing Come and See and Scum, or the co-directors of Open Water choosing Irreversible as one of their 10, perhaps showing how easily that the horrific can seep into and 'infect' other genres! It is also nice to see Drag Me To Hell and especially the wonderful ghost film The Changeling doing so well in those lists.

[Finch]

Inevitably the individual contributors' lists were more interesting than the main list but there were a few titles I'm keen to find and see, such as Viy, Society, Lisa & The Devil etc. Personally I think it's a pity that of the James Whale pictures, The Invisible Man seems to get so little love: for my money, it's a stronger film than the original Frankenstein (by itself good but not one of the best Uni monster horrors).

[colinr0380]

Society is very interesting, sort of the Audition of its day as I remember when Mark Cousins introduced the film for his Moviedrome season that he perfectly described it as playing for much of its running time like a superficial episode of Beverly Hills 90210 (down to the TV-style lighting), with a few class tensions sprinkled throughout but nothing more than the rich kid-poor kid tension stuff you'd get in that series (or something like The OC more recently).

Yet that final act is utterly demented, turning into another of those 80s body horror films where the body shifts and melts as the upper class reveal their true selves. Like Audition, or Evil Dead Trap, there is the impression that the narrative has proceeded as far as it can in its metaphorical terms and has to take a leap into grand guignol to underline all that came before and provide new imagery to a familiar situation. You'll never be able to hear the tune of the Eton boating song again without shuddering (or giggling)!

SpoilerShow

Plus you get a human-turned-into-an-obscene-puppet stunt to rival those in Zombie Creeping Flesh and Braindead!

On checking on YouTube, here is Cousins' Moviedrome introduction

[Murdoch]

Society is an interesting choice. While most of it is like any other bad 80s slasher/mystery, the ending where

SpoilerShow

the lead is dragged into a high society orgy where he watches his friend literally torn apart is one disturbing scene.

The movie never quite manages to fully develop its theme of alienation, and it doesn't really deserve to be on the top 100 of any list, but it's such a unique horror movie that I urge anyone interested to seek it out.

[colinr0380]

You've got to love any film where the priggish father:

SpoilerShow

literally turns into an walking and talking arsehole, with his face squeezed between two buttock-legs!

[domino harvey]

A Night to Dismember (Doris Wishman 1983) I've said before that I take no great pleasure in watching a bad film and deriving amusement from mockery of its perceived awfulness (one of the reasons I co-sign with Rosenbaum's unpopular anti-MST3K position), but there are rare exceptions, like the Room or the occasional Everything is Terrible splice, that go beyond badness into Art. This is one of those films. I stumbled upon it on YouTube accidentally and after about a minute I had to Google to make sure it wasn't just a prank someone uploaded. This is a film inept beyond human comprehension, so wrong in so many ways that it truly does deserve to be placed next to Wiseau's work. The filmmakers had almost half of their footage destroyed by the lab during processing, so they had to use "creative" work-arounds to produce a coherent final product. They failed. The movie is never more schizophrenic than in its first five minutes, when the film recklessly careens back and forward in time, introducing and then executing character after character with no logic or reason. It's a good litmus test for an audience member's ability to sit through all 69 minutes-- if you aren't buckled over in hysterics at non-sequitur moments like the narrator announcing within the first three minutes, "Five years earlier," or "And then she fell on the knife," look elsewhere. The constant narration and horrendous looping, the misuse of limited sets (most noticeable in the stairwell chase that uses the exact same hallway and staircase and simply reverses the shot over and over and over), and amazing shoddiness of the production itself (a detective picks up a scarf and saves it for evidence by stuffing it inside a business-sized white envelope) all add up to a giddy good time. It's like the kids in Super 8 grew up and made a slasher flick. This is the kind of film Number 50s were made for!

Baba Yaga (Corrado Farina 1973) Better than you'd expect, not as good as you'd hope. This is a silly and utterly non-erotic sex film masquerading as horror flick, and why anyone would hire Carroll Baker and then direct her to underplay is beyond me. The most interesting aspect seemed to be the hints at the political environment surrounding much of the action, but this ends up merely being a period detail and not any greater commentary.

Black Christmas (Bob Clark 1974) Yes, this is a very strong early slasher that, with Halloween and Friday the 13th, provided the blueprint for these sorts of films, but I don't think it renders all subsequent attempts invalid-- it just isn't that good, and it suffers from some of the post-studio system looseness that derailed a lot of cinema in the seventies.

Eyes of a Stranger (Ken Wiederhorn 1981) Quite a slimy film, made all the worse for its attempts at respectability outside of its leering, overlong, and grossly misogynistic scenes of rape and slaughter. The film can put on a brave face all it wants, but when the time comes for the splatter elements, there's no doubt where its allegiances lie. Poor Jennifer Jason Leigh is called upon to do some ridiculous things in this one.

Home Sweet Home (Nettie Penn 1981) This is a pretty rare early slasher and so I poked around to see what the general consensus was and everyone who has managed to see it seems to say about the same thing I would: This is an impossible film to defend on grounds of objective qualities, but there's something oddly endearing about it that makes it easy to like. Body By Jake stars as the giggling musclebound murderer who just escaped from an insane asylum and is now picking off an odd-ball collection of friends who may or may not be celebrating Thanksgiving. The young actors were clearly told to ad-lib many of their scenes, which leads to Improv 101 exchanges that are more revealing of the uselessness of acting classes than anything else, because there's no doubt that's where they learned to do this so poorly. All of the scenes between the two girls who get lost on the way back from the wine shop belong in a Goofus and Gallant acting practicum. One of the characters is named Mistake. He is dressed as a mime, carries around a portable electric guitar, and performs magic. It's that kind of movie. The film works best when it allows its villain to use his buff body to enact his crimes, as when he picks one girl up and just throws her on the ground with enough force to kill her, or, in the single funniest on-screen murder I can think of,

SpoilerShow

Body By Jake, knife in hand, watches as a man first siphons the gas from his car, then tries to steal the battery. While he's poking around the engine under the hood, we see BBJ approaching, holding the knife, holding the knife, holding the knife, and then… BBJ runs as fast as he can and takes a flying leap onto the hood of the car, crushing the man under the hood. Brilliant misdirection and I'm still chuckling just thinking about it

Inferno (Dario Argento 1980) My favorite Argento yet and the closest I've seen him come to abandoning complicated plots and giving us only the barest necessities, so as to not hinder the beautiful aesthetic approaches he takes here. There are too many great set pieces to choose from, and I liked Argento's comical thumb to any audience member trying to find a human way in by constantly killing off whoever seemed like the new protagonist. I see Mr. Sausage referred to the film earlier on the board as fatalistic, and while I'd agree, I wouldn't go so far as he did in calling it depressing. Every action is only empty and meaningless on a human level, and there's something to be said for the sheer beauty of how so much nothing is presented. That's not depression, it's fashion.

the Stuff (Larry Cohen 1985) Something to be said for a horror film that remembers how to exude a pure and unapologetic sense of fun. There's no way to be serious about Killer Cool Whip, and playing it too silly would make the film precious and a chore, so I admire how the film hits the required mark: mildly satirical and not particularly ambitious. Michael Moriarty's "Southerner" is hilarious, and as I understand it he has quite a history of larger-than-life performances under Cohen-- I look forward to seeing more of them for this project!

[Mr Sausage]

Glad you liked Inferno! I think it is simultaneously one of his most flawed and one of his most amazing movies. For me, the movie is depressing to contemplate (more so than any of his others), but, you're right, it is exhilarating to watch. Perhaps its nihilism struck me more forcibly because I can only think about it in the context of all the giallos I've seen (Inferno is essentially a giallo in construction), so I'm all the more aware of how Argento subverts the ways that a giallo typically creates meaning, and then only to refuse to put anything in its place. After watching so many mysteries be resolved through death, you kind of feel the bottom's been opened under you when the antagonist turns out to actually be death, and therefore unvanquishable, robbing the final character of even that chance at restoration or fulfillment. Mark is the apex of the clueless and ineffectual Argento protagonist: he does nothing, accomplishes nothing, and gets nothing as a reward (does he even discover the fate of his sister?).

[Murdoch]

A Night to Dismember (Doris Wishman 1983)

This was something else, like if Manos had instead been a slasher flick with cuts every five seconds. It's almost like the crew began filming several different horror movies, partially settled on one idea and spliced in the rest of the footage to make it over an hour. I liked(?) how the soundtrack sounded like a record skipping between the Halloween soundtrack and some dollar-bin jazz instrumental compilation, and how Vikki's family was eating what looked like wet napkins for dinner at one point. If there were ever a movie that deserves a place among the Troll 2's and Plan 9's of the world, this is it.

[domino harvey]

I loved it when the soft jazz hold music would come on in the middle of a tense scene, like they played a mix tape while tracking the film and forgot to hit "Stop"

From a Whisper to a Scream (Jeff Burr 1987) An early cash-in on the late-80s/early-90s anthology horror craze, this collection of four gory stories framed by Vincent Price presenting historical occurrences of evil in his small Tennessee town plays like an R-rated coterie of rejected Tales From the Darkside segments. The worst comes first with a terribly misguided tale of elder love, corpse rape, and zombie babies. There's nowhere to go from there but up, and while the following two segments are both still pretty bad, they're at least operating under better auspices. But then out of nowhere the film drops bonafide good ideas into its final segment, a period piece set immediately following the Civil War. A scalawag commander lost from the majority of his regiment happens upon a group of displaced children who lost their parents to the crimes of war. The kids imprison the leader and a few of his straggling men and begin mutilating their captives' bodies, as the children have become so deadened to the horrors of bloodshed that they don't see human beings, merely new playthings-- and a ready food source for a starving nation! This is such a bold contrast to anything else in this awful film that it still merits a recommendation, even if the good part is surrounded by garbage.

Drag Me to Hell (Sam Raimi 2009) Orally-fixated horror romp that stops being mildly-diverting fun thanks to its horribly distasteful ending.

SpoilerShow

If there's one thing that still leaves a bad taste in my mouth about this genre, it's the morality of some horror films regarding characters who "deserve" violent punishment. In a film like this, it becomes particularly noxious, since the entire film follows Lohman and appears to have her back, only to turn on her in the cheap and obvious ending, but not before she admits that she could have helped the woman. So it's her fault? Uh, it was the woman's third application for a stay on her mortgage and she had no means of income, why the hell would anyone approve her request? Am I supposed to nod my head with liberal smugness and say, "Yep, that's what you get for being a businesswoman and expecting people to follow through on their adult commitments: you get your soul torn apart for all eternity in Hell. That'll show ya"? Fuck that message, and fuck this film.

Dolores Claiborne (Taylor Hackford 1995) By complete serendipity, here's the perfect rebuttal to what I find so cavalier about Raimi's flick, a film that intelligently asks us to consider the impetus behind murderous acts, some of which match our presumptions, and some which do not. The script by Tony Gilroy does its best to sort through Stephen King's unusual novel concerning the alleged crimes of the titular protagonist, a role that was undoubtedly written with Kathy Bates in mind, even in print, wisely dropping (for the most part) the first-person narrative of its source to allow for a fuller part for Jennifer Jason Leigh as Bates' returning daughter. The two make a good pair of sparring partners. One of the film's strengths is in how fully formed the film's feminist backbone is. While the three primary characters, all female, repeat the same line about the necessity of being a bitch, it's still better than being a bastard like every single male character in the film. It's an honest approach that avoids heroes, but not villains.

Single White Female (Barbet Schroeder 1992) This is a perfect film of its type. Popular enough since its release that even its title has become a short-hand reference-point, I think the film connected and continues to connect so strongly with audiences because it taps into far more elemental human fears and concerns than just the surface familiarity of the "Roommate from Hell." The fragility of identity and our importance and differentiation in the eyes and hearts of others is underlined by Jennifer Jason Leigh's cohabitational usurpation of Bridget Fonda's life, not to merely imitate or live it for her but to co-opt her strengths while "fixing" her weaknesses. There's a latent sexual charge to everything in the film, but isn't this really just a form of narcissistic aspiration reflecting back on the would-be paramour? Beyond the fascinating psychology inherent in the material, the film works from every surface angle: the central performances by Fonda and Leigh are fearless, the intelligent direction by Schroeder eclipses anything else I've seen from him, and the script by Don Roos is so tight and well-constructed that it could be taught in a class on how to plan out and execute a film like this. Easily the best thing I've seen for this project.

[knives]

Been a whole since I properly posted in here. Not much in the way of greatness seen though. Also as just a curiosity does Marathon Man count as a horror picture?
Raw Meat
Going in all I knew was that this film has Lee and Pleasence in it (what more could you need for a movie?) and while Lee only gets one great scene the film still comes out great if a little schizo. All of the scenes with Pleasence have this lovely droll comedy sense to them with loads of real gut busters on display while the rest of the film is a genuinely creepy and touching bit. Technically there's a third romantic storyline with the two real leads but it quickly gets caught by the really weird horror plot. Actually the first time in the subway there is a real horror moment went so against the rest of the film I managed to jump about four feet. Normally speaking I actually don't like this sort of thing (loath it in Last House on the Left, but that's a terrible film anyway), but the movie manages to make this disastrous set up work. Perhaps it is the continuous interaction between the different lines or just a high quality from each part makes the differences in tone negligible, but whatever the case the film manages to be very good.

The Abominable Snowman
Being that this is a Guest film I knew I wasn't going to get a masterwork, but this is a bit of a nonstarter even by his standards. Cushing is of course genius, but the material he's given shows its television origins big time and feels stuck on a stage.

Murder by Decree
I think Alan Moore owes Clark a big paycheck as this very fun historical mashup is basically From Hell. It is not as smart as that novel, but it keeps everything real while showing some great performances by Mason and Plummer who both bring the characters back to their original forms in really one of the best cinematic uses of the characters I've seen. The horror designation is pushing things as this is pure murder mystery, but the air of creep Jack the Ripper gives the film works well enough to keep it in genre.

StageFright
Not as good as Cemetery Man and while it does show some real fun set pieces here and there with a typically great score the film really just fails to build any forward momentum not using the white space of the talking scenes well at all. The characters are at best exciting stereotypes with a lot of dullness floating around. Really the only thing separating this from your average Friday the 13th snoozefest is the talent behind the camera. On a last note typically I'm fine with the nonsensical logic in giallo and the like, but this film pushes it too hard even for me. The characters so actively note they should get out of dodge that there is no way for me to forgive their callousness and stability.

Anatomy (Ruzowitzky)
That said watching something like this makes me forgive StageFright for all of its flaws since at least it is gorgeous and with a killer soundtrack. This film takes any interesting moment it may have and craps all over it with stupidity and boredom. Lord is it vile in how dull it is.

[colinr0380]

domino, re your comments on The Stuff and Michael Moriarty, his biggest Larry Cohen role is as the petty crook discovering the nest in the roof of the Chrysler Building in Q-The Winged Serpent, and turning that discovery to his advantage in order to knock off a few of his antagonists!

I really think that The Seventh Victim is a big influence over Inferno, with that sense of nihilistic futility and the coven targeting people for death feeling very similar. Plus one of the henchmen playing drunk with the body of Irving August in the subway sequence of The Seventh Victim is the same actor who plays the wheelchair bound Dr Varelli in Inferno!

On Single White Female, apparently according to the Alan Jones and Kim Newman commentary track, this film has a a sequence inspired by one betweeen Jessica Harper and Stefania Casini in Suspiria! I think it was something about the bright coloured lighting being similar. I'm afraid Single White Female came too late in the 'evil lodger' cycle (Hider In The House, Pacific Heights - a film which features a brief scene between Melanie Griffiths and Tippi Hedren - etc) to really hold my interest the first time around, but I might have to revisit it.

Dolores Claiborne is really good and, as domino says, it really handles some of these issues quite sensitively while adding the material with the daughter was a great move in finding the emotional heart of the piece. Though the film does feel like it ends up demonising all men to the point of irrelevancy, which takes the film out of the regular King motif of sexually abusive dominating figures (to whatever gender) and interestingly resituates the film as another in the cycle of the early 90s 'empowered women' films such as Thelma & Louise and Fried Green Tomatoes.

[Siddon]

Inevitably the individual contributors' lists were more interesting than the main list but there were a few titles I'm keen to find and see, such as Viy, Society, Lisa & The Devil etc. Personally I think it's a pity that of the James Whale pictures, The Invisible Man seems to get so little love: for my money, it's a stronger film than the original Frankenstein (by itself good but not one of the best Uni monster horrors).

Invisible Man is great film, I don't know if it's going to make the cut for my top fifty, it's the fifth best horror film I've seen from the 1930's.

1. The Most Dangerous Game (1932)
2. Black Cat (1934)
3. Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
4. Mad Love (1935)
5. The Invisible Man (1933)
6. The Vampire Bat (1933)
7. Dracula (1931)
8. Frankenstein (1932)
9. Island of Lost Souls (1933)
10. Vampyr (1932)

Been a whole since I properly posted in here. Not much in the way of greatness seen though. Also as just a curiosity does Marathon Man count as a horror picture?

I think of it as more as an "action" film, I think Thrillers are either "Action" or "Horror". If it's not classified at "horror" on Wikipedia, Netflix, or IMDB then I think that's enough to declare it not horror.

Thrillers I would classify as horror films

The Most Dangerous Game (1932)
Rebecca (1940)
Gaslight (1942)
Rear Window (1954)
Night of the Hunter (1955)
Wait Until Dark (1967)
The Hitcher (1986)
Silence of the Lambs (1992)
Seven (1995)
The Sixth Sense (1999)
The Others (2001)

[Lighthouse]

The Sixth Sense (1999)
The Others (2001)

These 2 are surely horror films, for the others I agree

[swo17]

1. The Most Dangerous Game (1932)
2. Black Cat (1934)
3. Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
4. Mad Love (1935)
5. The Invisible Man (1933)
6. The Vampire Bat (1933)
7. Dracula (1931)
8. Frankenstein (1932)
9. Island of Lost Souls (1933)
10. Vampyr (1932)

From the '30s, don't forget Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Testament of Dr. Mabuse, loads of great Karloff films (The Man They Could Not Hang, The Black Room, The Mask of Fu Manchu, The Invisible Ray, etc.), Dwain Esper's Maniac, and anything with Tod Slaughter. Which reminds me...

I'm trying to compile all the horror films that are only available in the UK (Blu-ray or DVD) for easy reference when ordering from Amazon.co.uk &c-- please post other titles below or PM me and I'll just edit this post and link to it in the first post of the thread

I don't know why this didn't occur to me at the time, but I highly recommend this set including three great Slaughter films looking much better than the PD releases available in the U.S., especially the best of the lot, The Face at the Window.

[Mr Sausage]

Knives, swo17, and I give our recommendations of some of the essential 30's horror films here. It probably contains what everyone would've said in this thread had they not already said it there.

An essential period for horror.

[knives]

Been a whole since I properly posted in here. Not much in the way of greatness seen though. Also as just a curiosity does Marathon Man count as a horror picture?

I think of it as more as an "action" film, I think Thrillers are either "Action" or "Horror". If it's not classified at "horror" on Wikipedia, Netflix, or IMDB then I think that's enough to declare it not horror.

Figured as much, though it still has one of the scariest scenes ever in my opinion.

[domino harvey]

If you think it's a horror film, vote for it. Under no circumstances use IMDB or Wikipedia to decide

[zedz]

Glad you liked Inferno! I think it is simultaneously one of his most flawed and one of his most amazing movies. For me, the movie is depressing to contemplate (more so than any of his others), but, you're right, it is exhilarating to watch. Perhaps its nihilism struck me more forcibly because I can only think about it in the context of all the giallos I've seen (Inferno is essentially a giallo in construction), so I'm all the more aware of how Argento subverts the ways that a giallo typically creates meaning, and then only to refuse to put anything in its place. After watching so many mysteries be resolved through death, you kind of feel the bottom's been opened under you when the antagonist turns out to actually be death, and therefore unvanquishable, robbing the final character of even that chance at restoration or fulfillment. Mark is the apex of the clueless and ineffectual Argento protagonist: he does nothing, accomplishes nothing, and gets nothing as a reward (does he even discover the fate of his sister?).

I have a soft spot for Inferno too, on the grounds of its howling silliness. Argento just piles up a trainwreck of stylish not sequitur set pieces with no concern for coherence or character motivation, then caps it all with that ridiculous score. It's a hysterical film in almost every conceivable way. It's probably neck and neck with Apaches for my coveted / dreaded number 50 slot.

As for Single White Female, I happened to watch its precursor 3 Women on the weekend and was struck by how well it plays with horror movie tropes and expectations. Just at the point where you think the film is going to take a left turn into horror proper, it instead takes a turn into some other dimension. And I agree with domino that Single White Female maintains a lingering cultural relevance because it's an archetypal set-up that's really well executed, and that's actually much rarer than it ought to be.

[domino harvey]

Anguish (Bigas Luna 1987) This horror film hinges on an insanely high concept that the picture does not immediately reveal, so I'm spoilering the majority of my comments. In short, Anguish is an audacious commentary on how audiences received the slasher cycle of the seventies and eighties and is highly recommended (especially for fans of the "Can Anything Be Justified" thread), even to people who don't usually agree with my tastes.

SpoilerShow

Anguish at first appears to be a (not bad, actually) normal eighties slasher film starring bit player Michael Lerner as a momma's boy nurse whose mother hypnotizes him into cutting out the eyes of those she feel have wronged her son. Then twenty minutes or so in the print quality changes and the camera pans out and we see an audience on-screen watching the same film we the audience have been experiencing. There's a fantastic sequence (this is by far the best-edited horror film I've ever seen and I've mentally noted for future reference to teach the audience hypnotism scene) showing the assorted reactions of teenagers and couples on dates to the on-screen gore-- some are delighted, others horrified, a few bored, etc. If the film just stopped here it'd be interesting enough, but Luna is preoccupied in how we (the actual audience) receive on-screen horrors versus "real life" horrors, and so one of the audience members is revealed to be a repeat viewer of the film who has co-opted the depicted storyline for himself, substituting a .38 for Lerner's scalpel. As the film cuts back and forth between the slasher on screen and the other slasher (shooter?), the pictures takes its time and builds several sequences of unbearable tension, the best concerning a teen girl hiding in the same bathroom the shooter is using to store his corpses. In doing so, Luna arrives at some basic actualities of the mechanics of slashers. This isn't safe fun, because this killer has a gun and doesn't need to sneak up behind you or jump from behind a corner. The film presents real and false horrors but then blends them as the film wears on. With the film within a film's finale taking place inside a movie theatre, the line is blurred (leading to masterful shots like the one below) and Anguish eventually begs my favorite discussion question: is any cinematic violence "justified"?



Though the film bears more than a passing resemblance to Bogdanovich's Targets, Anguish has different concerns and critical commentary more explicitly relevant to the horror genre. It is a film with ideas to match its style- and what ideas and what style!

[Cold Bishop]

I think Anguish is an excellent film, and its largely helped by the fact that Bigas Luna is not a "Euro-horror" director. I think this was has only entry into the horror genre. Someone who was inundated with the commercial mechanics of the genre might have forced himself to indulge the prurient aspects a lot more: it may still have been a fine film, but the effect would have been different. Luna, on the other hand, just goes for broke, and doesn't look back, and its a a film that often gets by on audacity alone.

But as far as Spanish-Art-House-Horror-films-of-the-period-concerned-with-the-nature-of-cinema-itself goes, I'd probably rank Ivan Zulueta's Arrebato a little higher, although given our often differing tastes, I'm not sure you'd agree.

While we're on the subject, I definitely have to plug Targets for anyone here who may still not have seen it. Horror film have never scared me, but occasionally they can genuinely unsettle me. Bogdanovich's film did. I've almost been afraid to rewatch just because I'd hate to find the initial effect has wore off on repeat viewing.

[colinr0380]

Humongous (Paul Lynch, 1982)

The director of the original Prom Night followed up with another horror film, another slasher film but this time set on a deserted island. A pre-title sequence set in the 1940s shows a woman looking at some dogs in a pen during a party, then running off after rebuffing the attentions of a strange Canadian drunkard. He runs after her, catching her when she breaks stride for an ill-advised cigarette break, tells her that they "need to have it 'oot'" and proceeds to viciously rape her (in quite a horrific scene played from the woman's point of view), before the dogs who have made a commotion throughout proceed to escape from their (very insecure!) pen and rip his throat out in graphic detail. The woman calls the dogs off just in time, only to bash the rapist's head in a few times with a rock.

Post-credits the film proper starts. Five kids (two brothers with assorted girlfriends) pick up a mysterious shipwrecked sixth person who proceeds to tell them the story of the spooky island with only one old lady living on it and from which the howls of dogs can sometimes be heard (The writer on the commentary track talks of a better title for the film being 'Dog Island', raising ideas of this being a film in a similar vein to The Pack, though nothing really comes of the dog angle beyond the pre-credit sequence and this one mention!)

Then the nasty brother (we know this because he has been pestering his girlfriend for sex during their break-up fight in which we were introduced to them!) gets resentful of his girl fawning over the shipwrecked chap and at his 'good' brother for being the capable one, and so decides to prove his worth by getting drunk, grabbing the controls and proceeding to ram their yacht into the island, causing it to catch on fire and explode!

After this, the film goes into the usual 'Texas Chain Saw Maccacre crossed with Anthropophagous The Beast' mode of the characters drifting off in ones and twos to investigate the island and stumbling across the now dilapadated house from the pre-credits sequence before getting picked off by a humongous presence. The three main young characters of the group struck me while watching the first time as extremely Scooby-Doo inspired, taking on the investigative qualities of Fred, Velma and Daphne! (The characters have other names in the film but I'll refer to them by these names for convenience for the rest of this post! It was amusing when listening to the commentary track afterwards that the director and writer get the same impression and had not realised it at the time!) So if you have ever (spoiler) wanted to see Fred get crushed in a giant's bear hug, or Velma's head get crushed until her glasses fly off, this may be the film for you!

During the commentary a lot of talk is made about the relationship between this film and Friday The 13th Part II, which came out the year before. There is a similarity in the way that the final girl (Daphne) takes the place of the dead mother at one point, speaking to the son in a stern tone in an effort to ward off the humongous thing, though I guess we could also see Velma's head crushing as having an influence on the 3D head crush in Friday The 13th Part 3! But there is a big Texas Chain Saw influence in the sense of seeing the non-Scooby Doo half of the cast hanging on meathooks half way through (and the commentators do point out a neat scene where Daphne is being chased by the beast where they are both struggling really close together rather than miles apart from each other, which captures some of the tension of the chase scene from TCM), along with a sense of Anthropophagous in the beach scenes with the injured shipwrecked chap and one of the other girls ending in murder that is reminiscent of the opening sequence of that film.

Perhaps the most interesting element of the film is the way that the humongous killer is sympathised with by Daphne, who gets to explain the backstory in painstaking detail after the characters find the diaries and notebooks of the woman describing how the outside world will intrude on the island to kill her son, so she brought him up to fear any intruders (plus Daphne gets to explain away the murders by suggesting that their party came along just as the son had run out of meat and animals on the island to hunt after his mother's death)

However this doesn't stop her from setting him on fire and stabbing him through the stomach with the pointed end of a sign in the finale!

So an interesting, if rather generic, slasher. The opening harrowing rape and dog attack sequence aside the film is rather low key throughout, cutting away from most of the early murders and with even the 'bodies hanging on meathooks' scene and Fred's bear hug death being bloodless (Velma's death is a little bloody but again when compared to the eyeball popping out of the skull being crushed in Friday The 13th Part 3, is far tamer!) I think that I prefer the film to Prom Night, but then that might just be because I like films where characters explore spooky islands to ones where they disco dance in a school hall!

By far the best part of the film is the beautiful title sequence (which also reveals that Carol Spier, regular production designer on David Cronenberg's films, was the Supervising Art Director here), perhaps better suited to a drama than a horror film and creating the expectation of a deeper delve into the backstory than we get from the rest of the film, and the excellent moody jazz over the end credits. The same score also runs over the DVD menus for the Scorpion release, so I have had that on rotation whilst typing this post up! (Apparently the film was, like Rituals, almost unwatchable in its original VHS release because of the many pitch black scenes in the latter half of the film, but the DVD looked fine and so seems to be the first time outside of the cinema that the film has been made available in a decent quality version!)

[Mr Sausage]

Since the Giallo guide is on a bit of a hiatus, I decided to throw together a Bava guide for fun (and because I realized I'd seen all of his horrors).

Mario Bava:

I Vampiri (1956) R1 Image
Caltiki: The Immortal Monster (1958) R2 NoShame (OOP)
Black Sunday (1960) R1 Anchor Bay Mario Bava Collection 1 (OOP)
The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) R1 Anchor Bay Mario Bava Collection 1 (OOP)
Black Sabbath (1963) R1 Anchor Bay Mario Bava Collection 1 (OOP)
The Whip and the Body (1963) R1 VCI (OOP)
Blood and Black Lace (1964) R1 VCI (seek out the 2000 release; avoid the 2005 release)
Planet of the Vampires (1965) R1 MGM (OOP)
Kill, Baby, Kill! (1966) R1 Anchor Bay Mario Bava Collection 1 (OOP)
Five Dolls for an August Moon (1969) R1 Anchor Bay Mario Bava Collection 2 (OOP)
Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1970) Image (OOP)
Bay of Blood aka Twitch of the Death Nerve (1971) R1 Anchor Bay Mario Bava Collection 2 (OOP); R2 Arrow Video (Blu)
Baron Blood (1972) R1 Anchor Bay Mario Bava Collection 2 (OOP)
Lisa and the Devil (1974) R1 Anchor Bay Mario Bava Collection 2 (OOP)
House of Exorcism (1975) R1 Anchor Bay Mario Bava Collection 2 (OOP)
Shock aka Beyond the Door II (1977) R1 Blue Underground

Bava is considered the grandfather of Italian horror. His position regarding it is rather like that of Leone's in regard to the spaghetti western: while there were Italian horror films before Bava, it wasn't until his first real turn in the genre that they began to be produced in earnest, and a good many of the films and filmmakers in the genre bear his influence, sometimes indirectly (he pioneered the giallo and the gory-body-count slasher). Bava's chief attributes were his gift for fantasy, his creative exuberance, his baroque, gaudy style, and his ability to make a lot out of a very little. He began his career as a cinematographer before taking jobs as an assistant director. It was as an assistant director for genre filmmaker Ricardo Freda that Bava made his first horror films, albeit only in part. Bava was uncredited co-director of two of Freda's early horrors. The first, I Vampiri, is a Lady Bathory/Dracula's Daughter amalgam, not terribly interesting, but well-made and of historical interest as one of the first Italian horror films. Caltiki was the second, a dull, po-faced fifties sci-fi imitation that borrows heavily from Hammer's The Quatermass Xperiment and X: the Unknown. Bava's first film as credited director, Black Sunday, was also his breakout hit and the film responsible for igniting the Italian horror boom. A gorgeous and stylized gothic horror about witches/vampires/wurdalaks, it infuses its well-worn folk-tale story with a restless sense of visual invention and some explicit violence. Lots of fun. Bava's next film, the proto-giallo The Girl Who Knew Too Much, was originally intended as a Hitchcock send-up, tho' it was actually suspenseful enough in its own right to be presented, with minor trimming, as a straight thriller. This movie pioneers the common giallo atmosphere of reality giving way imperceptibly to delirium, with the protagonist never quite sure how to distinguish between fantasy and reality. An excellent movie. Black Sabbath was Bava's first horror film in colour, so naturally he went wild with the colour pallette, painting the movie with outrageous blues, greens, and purples to reflect the rising phantasmagoria of each entry in this triptych of horror tales. Karloff's segment is still one of the best vampire movies ever made. The Whip and the Body is both excellent and maddening: excellent because it's a gleefully perverse tale of psychosexual obsession and insanity; maddening, because while it contains one of Christopher Lee's best performances, Lee did not participate in the dubbing. It's a bit like watching Orson Welles or James Earl Jones speak with the voice of a flat, toneless studio dubber: disconcerting and unsatisfactory. Blood and Black Lace more or less kicked off the giallo proper. It's a gorgeous technicolour fever-dream where faceless killers dissolve in and out of the shadows and the world strobes gaudy pastel colours. The murder-mystery as phantasmagoria. Planet of the Vampires continued Bava's obsession with outrageous colour designs. The plot bears enough resemblance to Alien that it is often credited among its influences. It's fun and strange and full of great set-pieces, but it still feels like a minor work. Kill, Baby, Kill! on the other hand is a flat out masterpiece, a totally hermetic fantasy in which you pretty much get to watch Bava at play. It is essentially the story of a perfectly rational, unimaginative person suddenly finding himself thrust into a fantasy world that he can neither comprehend nor combat. Meanwhile, we get to enjoy all the dizzy sights. Bava returned to the giallo (but as a director for hire) with Five Dolls for an August Moon, whose plot makes about as much sense as its title. As I wrote elsewhere: it has, like just about every Bava, "scattered moments of excellence and creative exuberance, but unlike his best never manages to sustain these flights of visual invention and save the mediocre script." Hatchet for the Honeymoon gets nowhere near the attention it deserves for being a genuinely unusual and inventive take on the serial killer portrait. You're never quite sure where it's going as once again the veneer of reality is slowly replaced by a growing phantasmagoria that ultimately turns the movie into a highly original ghost story. A personal favourite of mine. Not a favourite of mine is Bay of Blood, one of the first hack-and-slash gore movies in what would become the Friday the 13th mould (the second one would even crib two kills from this film). Opening with a masterful sequence of pure visual story-telling, the movie peters out into routine stalk-and-slash. The ending is pretty outrageous, tho', even if it still fulfills the narrative conservatism these kinds of movies favour. Baron Blood is a life-less, overlong gothic horror film about a centuries dead evil Baron being resurrected and resuming his habit of torturing innocent people in his dungeon. Somehow, from under two of his less inspired films Bava created his masterpiece, Lisa and the Devil. Here Bava got to create a world that was entirely his own: closed off, unaccountable, free to operate according to its own whims. This is a movie in which everything makes perfect imaginative sense, even when you can find no explanation for it. The pieces just feel appropriate. It's bewitching and inexplicable. Naturally, producer Alfredo Leone had no idea what to do with the movie, so he chopped it up, had Bava film some extra footage, and released it as an Exorcist rip-off called House of Excorcism. If you feel like watching shit get smeared all over something beautiful, watch this dreck. Ugh. Bava's last horror film, Shock, was made in collaboration with his son, Lamberto. Marketed in the United States as a sequel to the popular film Beyond the Door, it's a lacklustre haunted house movie that bears no trace of the director's famed visual style. Indeed it more resembles the kind of film his son would direct. Argento's then squeeze/muse, Daria Nicolodi, stars, furthering the connection between the two filmmakers that would culminate in Bava directing certain parts of Argento's Inferno.

[colinr0380]

Planet of the Vampires is great - although its influence on Alien feels more apparent in the first half involving the landing and exploration of the planet and the various space ships on the surface, whether crashed or alien ones, whereas It! The Terror From Beyond Space could perhaps be considered the bigger influence for the 'monster running amok on a spaceship and picking off the crew one by one' second half.

[domino harvey]

This may be of interest to exactly no one, but I remember with some fondness Bravo's 100 Scariest Movie Moments series of specials, and was surprised that it's basically disappeared from the internet. I was able to dig this up from an internet archive, but just barely-- the backup kept redirecting to a phony URL, but I eventually managed to C+P the full list using stealth internet skillz. Not as fun as watching the clips and talking heads, but hey, it's something

The 100 Scariest Movie Moments counts down the most bone-chilling moments in cinematic history. Featuring interviews, film clips, and production stills, Bravo's series of fright nights looks at scenes from a variety of movie classics. From cunning raptors stalking the children of Jurassic Park to bees pouring from the killer's mouth in Candyman, to the attack of the muderous clown in Poltergeist, this mini-series explores what went into the making of these scenes and searches beyond the conventions of the genre to uncover the number one scary movie moment of all time.

During the course of five nights, fans will see over 100 exclusive interviews with film greats such as Wes Craven ("The Nightmare on Elm Street"), Stephen King ("The Shining"), Peter Jackson ("Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King"), Courtney Cox ("Scream"), John Carpenter ("Halloween"), Clive Barker ("Candyman"), and John Landis ("American Werewolf in London").

100 Scariest Movie Moments Countdown
Revealed in Episodes 1 - 5
100. 28 Days Later
99. Creepshow
98. Zombie
97. Cat People
96. The Birds
95. Jurassic Park
94. Child's Play
93. Pacific Heights
92. Village of the Damned
91. Shallow Grave
90. Night of the Hunter
89. Alice Sweet Alice
88. Invasion of the Body Snatchers
87. Black Christmas
86. Wizard of Oz
85. Blood & Black Lace
84. Blue Velvet
83. The Others
82. Terminator
81. The Howling
80. Poltergeist
79. Dracula
78. The Brood
77. Signs
76. Evil Dead
75. Candyman
74. Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory
73. Blood Simple
72. Them!
71. The Sixth Sense
70. The Stepfather
69. Re-Animator
68. The Black Cat
67. Duel
66. The Tenant
65. Marathon Man
64. Near Dark
63. Deliverance
62. The Wolf Man
61. The Devil's Backbone
60. The Beyond
59. Fatal Attraction
58. Cujo
57. House of Wax
56. Single White Female
55. The Vanishing
54. The Changeling
53. Demons
52. The Phantom of the Opera
51. The Dead Zone
50. The Last House on the Left
49. Diabolique
48. The Thing
47. Nosferatu
46. The Sentinel
45. The Wicker Man
44. The Game
43. It's Alive!
42. An American Werewolf in London
41. The Hills Have Eyes
40. Black Sunday
39. Dawn of the Dead
38. Peeping Tom
37. House on Haunted Hill
36. Cape Fear
35. Aliens
34. The Hitcher
33. The Fly
32. Pet Sematary
31. Friday the 13th
30. Blair Witch Project
29. Serpent and the Rainbow
28. When a Stranger Calls
27. Frankenstein
26. Seven
25. Phantasm
24. Suspiria
23. Rosemary's Baby
22. Don't Look Now
21. Jacob's Ladder
20. The Ring
19. Hellraiser
18. The Haunting
17. A Nightmare on Elm Street
16. The Omen
15. Freaks
14. Halloween
13. Scream
12. Misery
11. Audition
10. Wait Until Dark
9. Night of the Living Dead
8. Carrie
7. Silence of the Lambs
6. Shining
5. Texas Chainsaw Massacre
4. Psycho
3. Exorcist
2. Alien
1. Jaws