The Horror List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

[domino harvey]

I assume that's in the second Anchor Bay Bava set? I haven't gotten to any of those titles yet but I'll be sure to give the commentary a listen after viewing

[knives]

It's not. VCI has the rights, but I believe the German DVD is considered better.

[tarpilot]

I have the 2005 VCI which is pretty abysmal AV-wise, but the best option if you want the Lucas commentary.

Here's the Beaver comparison

[domino harvey]

All the Boys Love Mandy Lane (Jonathan Levine 2006) Exceedingly clever twist on the genre as the slasher format is usurped for perceptive commentary on the general resentment held by both sexes towards "pretty girls" (at any age, really, but here in high school). The film's opening sequence is a stunner (never in my life did I anticipate a horror film opening with a Bedroom Walls track), showing the film's carefully captured tack of sexual jealousy and entitlement taken to a swift and grisly conclusion. The film functions more as a slow burn from there onward, but the ultimate message is a true kicker:

Spoiler

With Heard "getting away" with all of her assorted machinations, the pic both confirms and counteracts its own thesis. True to the suspicions of her peers and hangers-on, there just is something about Mandy Lane that somehow keeps her hands resolutely clean of fawning paramours from both classes, even after engineering all of their deaths. Here is a film that comments on the dangers of entitlement from various vantages (the Friend Zoned Columbine wannabe, the jocks and stoner studs, even the marginally less attractive alpha blonde all concurrently judge and desire Mandy Lane) before suggesting that yes, being Mandy Lane does mean you can walk away taller than the rest. The film dares to depict the logical extreme of a culture of entitlement, made all the more troubling by its message's ultimate ambiguity with regards to the morality of such behaviors (on both sides).

I didn't go into the film expecting to be instigated by a trenchant philosophical critique, but how fortunate that it's there amidst the blood and marrow!

the Fog (John Carpenter 1980) My experience with Carpenter's oeuvre for this project has left me with an uneven impression, but to his credit he begins this film expertly: a movie about vengeful shipwrecked ghosts seeking vengeance via amorphous fog necessitates an elder statesman setting up the premise over a campfire. And the film proper has a good atmospheric first act, lit entirely by found light sources. It's all downhill from the second day on, though, as Carpenter makes great pains to overexplain what was best left to simply being a ghost story come to life.

I Spit On Your Grave (Meir Zarchi 1978) I'm not sure why the feminist reclamation of horror has decided to expend so much energy on this, but I remain unconvinced of the defenders' arguments. Zarchi never hesitates in showing his alleged heroine in stages of undress, which while understandable (though not necessarily defensible) in its first half becomes increasingly leering during the "revenge" segments. Take the pre-castration sequence, wherein Keaton poses fully nude in front of a full-length mirror while primping herself. There are numerous ways to present this strained idea without giving the audience the same lecherous vantage. But it can hardly be surprising in a film that furiously thrusts the audience into an imagined series of rapes, all perfectly lit and framed and set apart with just enough time for the raincoat brigade to get it back up again.

Like most film lovers, for better or worse I've been exposed to countless onscreen rapes at this point, but the film's chorus of apologists do it no favor when they use the worthless personas of the attackers as evidence that the film doesn't side with them. Oh sure, not outwardly and not personality-wise. But the film does everything but show actual penetration of its actress, forces her to endure countless indignities and violations on-screen in full view of the camera, and then claims to be "feminist" by giving her the upper-hand in her summary executions, half of which also involve her getting naked and/or having sex. Take the sick joke of the first murder, that of the mentally retarded delivery boy, where she gifts him the experience of ejaculating in her before hanging him so that she can crudely allude to the act later in conversation with her next victim. This is all progressive how?

Last House on the Left (Wes Craven 1972) Craven surprised me here (in part due to low expectations following I Spit On Your Grave) by presenting what could have been a rote rape-revenge film and instilling in it a bizarre tone bordering on comic that makes the periodic sequences of sexual menace and violence all the more brazen and unnerving. Craven's motley gang of convicts are given distinct personalities and behaviors and this humanization infuses their later actions with more weight and interest than the generic hillbilly ciphers of ISOYG. The film suffers from many of the aesthetic blights of early seventies' cinema, but it also addresses the era's fears of rampant bohemianism and "free love" without ever exploiting the rapes themselves for possible arousal purposes. It's a grimy, low-rent film, but it thankfully lacks Zarchi's "Who, Me?" prurience.

Pontypool (Bruce McDonald 2009) --YnEoS Spotlight-- Big on atmosphere and full of confidence that it all somehow makes sense (outlook not so good), this semiological horror flick is a novel and entertaining variation on a filmed radio play that has a lot of fun with the silliness of its premise before hitting the reset button at the end. I liked the scattered moments throughout where the assorted plot threads seem to hint at larger implications and complications before dismissing them outright, a working trial and error approach to an unforeseen apocalypse, and not just for the de Saussurians in the audience.

[knives]

I'm certainly not going to talk you out of Strait-Jacket which I should note I love a bit even if I think it is not as great as Castle at his best. Perhaps its just a case where I really love when he puts his lurid empathy toward characters with no redeeming traits (Mr. Sardonicus, Price in House on Haunted Hill). Its almost like a kid in a candy store seeing him take these genuinely disgusting characters and allowing them to have all of the dignity in the world. If I may be so bold what he accomplishes on a character level is often similar to what Breaking Bad does for its terrible people.

[Dr Amicus]

Horrors of the Black Museum (Arthur Crabtree, 1959) This has been on my want-to-watch list for ages, and courtesy of the Horror Films channel have finally managed it. One of the first wave of Hammer cash-ins - and pretty much the first in colour and scope (probably - anyone manage an earlier one?) - and a suitably sleazy, gory psycho thriller as a maniacal genius bumps off single women around London using a variety of ingenious contraptions. Or at least, that's the theory... The BBFC snipped out a lot of the gore by all accounts, and after the first couple of killings they become more mundane. Still, it's all pretty good nasty fun with a glorious performance by Michael Gough as a crime writer who gets panic attacks after each killing. BUT... after the wonderful Fiend Without a Face, this is a bit of a letdown from Crabtree who seems overwhelmed by the scope format. Time and time again, it's all rather prosaic when the film is crying out for some style - most notably, and unforgivabley, the climax which completely throws away

Spoiler

the fairground setting including a tunnel of love and a hall of mirrors.

All in all, worth watching for its central performance and some good moments - but maybe its cult reputation is a bit excessive.

[colinr0380]

The Darkest Hour (Chris Gorak, 2011)

...is just before the dawn, I guess!

This was a very pleasant surprise of a film, one which I had inititally passed over and then on the basis of the special effects reel on the BUF site decided to try. This is a film that I find it difficult to assess outside of the context of all the other similar films surrounding it that don't deal with the material as effectively, but I felt that it captured a specific balance of tension and hope that I found lacking from other sci-fi/horror/disaster films, walking a very delicate balance throughout.

I'll start with the references first: elements reminded me of the alien attacks in Spielberg's War of the Worlds (people exploding into dust as they are killed); the initial setup had a kind of 'young people milling around before disaster strikes' feel similar to the opening of Cloverfield (but not as tricksy and, a commendable element that characterised events in the film as a whole, doesn't drag such a scene out); and the Russian setting felt as if it was tying in with the current craze for Russian-set horror films (from Chernobyl Diaries to something like the much lower budgeted After... . I'd like to think this revival is coming from those S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games (and of course going further back than that, from the Tarkovsky film) in which, while there are monsters about, a good deal of the tension comes from just negotiating the crumbling buildings and the landscape itself. Similarly Darkest Hour has a really nice sense of its characters simply having to travel through a hostile environment throughout)

In particular I was reminded of that problematic American remake of Pulse - invisible beings trapping a group of youngsters in a futile post-apocalyptic situation. The big problem with the Pulse remake was that it was redoing an existential horror tale and turning it into a war film. The Darkest Hour is doing a similar kind of thing, but doesn't have the handicap of reworking material that was created for an antithetical purpose into its 'we must fight back against this menace' template.

Darkest Hour probably works best when seen as a disaster film with the structure that implies of a group of characters being whittled down one by one. However again, while it doesn't stray too far from this well-worn template, I was impressed by how well it dealt with the material (I particularly like the time taken to sketch in the days spent hiding in the cellar of the club after the first attack, showing various key moments in an almost silent montage) and the attendant moral aspects, getting much closer to the affecting moments of classic 70s disaster movies than many recent films have.

By 'moral aspects' I mean that the film does throw in character flaws that contribute to situations that feel believable (rather than characters having to act in a dumb manner to push the plot forward, as in the 'going to get my dog' scene from the Dawn of the Dead remake; or the recent trend of characters just simply having a single 'asshole' characteristic that means we can't wait for them to get their comeuppance, with no more nuance than that) - for example a key moment that ends in a few deaths is caused by one character not trusting the judgement of another and running for a much more distant safe room. It is both an action that is understandable even if it is a wrong one, and the speed of events helps there to be no time to rectify this mistake.

One of the aspects that I like the most about the film is that it has a really strong arc for the main character - after a business deal goes wrong he holds his friend back from arguing in the boardroom and his friend later on is shocked as how lightly such a huge failure is weighing on him. This laid back pragmatism ("I'm just more used to screwing up than you are!") to such a big setback is a neatly laid in character trait which stands him in good stead to tackle a full on apocalypse and become a kind of key figure in a resistance movement by the end of the film. (In a way making it the film that best shows the growth of an anonymous person into an effective leader that films such as Terminator 3 and Terminator: Salvation seemed to be trying to stretch towards but were unable to become - they just had people talk about how the lead character was a saviour and a great leader, rather than actually showing that process of becoming)

And by affecting moments I mean the handling of deaths of characters, which are never dwelt upon in detail, yet feel much more powerful for that sense of the characters struggling with their horror yet knowing that they have to push onward (the way that the male lead is there to push the female lead on to safety and then she performs that function for him at a similar moment of being briefly paralysed by shock of a loss is also a nice structural touch).

I also particularly like the way that the film walks that precarious line of sketching in a full-on post-apocalyptic world where there is slim to no chance of survival against insurmountable odds versus a sliver of hope. The hope angle can be too overplayed in this kind of film, in the sense that if things do not feel threatening there is nothing really at stake and then the deaths of the more minor characters really do just end up play as callous narrative contrivances. In Darkest Hour there feels like there is a hard-won, yet tenuous hope at the end that is deserved rather than just tacked on to send everyone out happy. After all the world is still under alien occupation!

The way that the characters never let themselves get mired in despair and try to carry on even in the worst of circumstances I think is the key element that I responded to in this film compared to something more action set-piece oriented. Also the time taken to give moments of silence and contemplation, even if they are brief (the cup of coffee in the engineer's apartment; the scene on the sub; the poring over maps (which is something that Aliens did well to add verisimillitude to the situation) and so on). I don't really say this lightly, but it put me in mind of the novel of The Day of the Triffids - an inconceivable, crazy event has happened so now how do we, first individually survive it, and then organise collectively to continue surviving and maybe eventually counter what has happened.

[Mr Sausage]

Tonight (Sunday) on TCM they're showing what appears to be most (if not all) of the film versions of the story about a murderer's hands being grafted onto someone else's arms and running amok. It goes Hands of a Stranger, Beast with Five Fingers, Mad Love, and the original Hands of Orlac.

At least one, Mad Love, is essential viewing for this list.

[knives]

They're missing at least the '60s Orlac. All the same that is a great list of films. If memory holds up Bunuel even worked a little on Beast with Five Fingers.

[colinr0380]

And don't forget the early 90s film Body Parts! Although I agree about that list - it would be particularly interesting to compare Peter Lorre's performances between Mad Love and The Beast With Five Fingers from over a decade later.

[Sloper]

It's a long time since I've seen Mad Love, but Wiene's 1925 Hands of Orlac struck me as even better: I wrote about it here for the 1920s list project. I watched it again recently and don't really have anything more to say, except that it's absolutely essential viewing, a genuinely scary film.

[domino harvey]

Tonight (Sunday) on TCM they're showing what appears to be most (if not all) of the film versions of the story about a murderer's hands being grafted onto someone else's arms and running amok.

Where's Oliver Stone's the Hand?!

[domino harvey]

the House by the Cemetery (Lucio Fulci 1981) Were there no normal children available to Italian horror filmmakers in the eighties? They always seem to pick the most obnoxious ones and then overdub them with equally obnoxious vocals. Even for Fulci this is all surprisingly incoherent-- the goings on in this film are so muddled that you could switch up the order of the reels in the middle and no one would notice. Features one of the stupidest red herrings ever in the babysitter "character." I suspect the well of my Fulci curiosity has finally dried.

the Prowler (Joseph Zito 1981) One of the better-known first wave slasher films, and with good reason. Yes, the effects are surprisingly gory, even for this genre, but the lingering attention paid gives them a weird disconnected feel, a leering discomfort which fits the horrors depicted well. Vicky Dawson's Pam fares as one of the best Final Girls, it's curious that she never really did anything besides.

Sorority House Massacre (Carol Frank 1986) Ernst attempt at making a "serious" slasher that mostly fails at its loftier aims due to the rather ponderous tone and pacing (and the regular assortment of dumb slasher plot devices, of course). I'm not sure if director Carol Frank is a woman, but either way a few minor points are awarded for undercutting the nudity requirement by placing most of it within an extended and decidedly non-erotic "Let's Try On Cool Outfits!" montage.

Sorority House Massacre II (Jim Wynorski 1990) A gaggle of scantily-clad gals with stripper physiques congregate in their decrepit new "sorority" house, which wouldn't you know it was the site of a gruesome murder years earlier. To depict these past horrors, the film inexplicably flashes back to overdubbed scenes from Slumber Party Massacre, a decision indicative of the care and thought that went into this production. The primary creative drive behind the film appears to have been not suspense but a desire for the movie to remain masturbatable for as long as possible. I have a higher tolerance for stupid eighties trash than most here and even I was questioning my decision-making abilities during this pic. The film has one redeeming running joke in the character of creepy neighbor Orville Ketchum (confusingly billed as himself) who hilariously takes an increasingly absurd series of physical traumas without expiring.

To All a Goodnight (David Hess 1980) Weak variation on the Christmas slasher that's more indebted to Friday the 13th than Black Christmas. The film has one novelty going for it in the surprise revelation of whodunnit (which the film's Wikipedia entry hilariously spoils within the lede) and just about everything else working against it.

[Mr Sausage]

The House by the Cemetery is indeed one of the worst Italian horror films to have such a high reputation among fans. Awful movie. Even if your Fulci curiosity is dead, at least give Lizard in a Woman's Skin a try. It doesn't resemble his later gore efforts at all. For one thing, you can follow what's going on. For another, it's actually visually interesting. It's the only one of his films I would unreservedly recommend.

[swo17]

Tonight (Sunday) on TCM they're showing what appears to be most (if not all) of the film versions of the story about a murderer's hands being grafted onto someone else's arms and running amok. It goes Hands of a Stranger, Beast with Five Fingers, Mad Love, and the original Hands of Orlac.

There's also this episode of Angel, tragically ineligible for list making purposes.

[colinr0380]

Triangle (Christopher Smith, 2009)

This is another neat little 'ghost ship' film (in fact probably one of the best ghost ship films I have seen compared to the disappointments of Virus, Ghost Ship and Death Ship!) which is kind of a ghost story and kind of a feature length Twilight Zone-style moral tale.

Spoiler

The moral being not to abuse your autistic child and then go on murder yourself for being abusive, thereby propelling yourself into an endless purgatorial limbo. And to perhaps stop to consider once in a while that killing off all of your crewmates for the nth time doesn't seem to be getting you anywhere, rather than immediately grabbing that shotgun and blasting away!

This is another film that really needs to be cross-referenced with a whole host of other titles although it wears many of its influences well. The director mentions The Shining as a big one - on display in the confusing corridors, blood-red message in the mirror and the use of cabin 237 as the room in which much of the action revolves around - but also talks of taking the sack-head killer look from Friday The 13th Part 2 along with influences as diverse as the 1940s Dead of Night, Memento and A Matter of Life and Death for the beach sequence.

With the ever increasing looping structure to the events of the film I was also left thinking that this would also be a fun film for anyone who enjoyed the multiple versions of characters inhabiting the same space in Back To The Future 2! Triangle at least briefly shows what happens when the bodies start piling up from the various iterations of events!

Spoiler

I especially liked the idea at the end of the film that Jess is being given an opportunity by the taxi driver to leave this limbo but instead asks to be taken back to the begining of the story again. Is she consciously doing this or just going for it as the only thing she can think of to do? There seems little chance to change anything to influence the outcome of events, even when small moments were changed during a loop of events, so is making the decision to continue a futile act? It made me think of those ideas in ghost stories where ghosts are left on Earth because they cannot escape from the decisions they made whilst alive, yet also cannot break the cycle of doing them over and over again, so while this isn't exactly a true ghost film, it is a novel perspective on that idea.

While the director in the commentary puts forward a lot of theories about the events in the film, I would personally like to think of it as a kind of statement about cinema - that a film, any film, is a self-contained piece of work with a finite end point. Great films can suggest that there is a world going on beyond the frame and leave themselves open ended, or at least suggest that their characters go on, but all films are eventually and inevitably just a fixed sequence of events and the audience is left to fill in the gaps. Even the gaps in the edits between shots.

It isn't just the MC Escher-style closed loop of Triangle's plot that makes me take this train of thought, but also the way that the title sequence showing Jess at home preparing for her trip intercut with the credits along with the first 'loop' of events elide certain events. This doesn't really seem too strange on a first viewing, just a normal filmic technique. The trip preparation section intercut with the credits seems done in the way of many other films - a way of briefly setting the scene with minimal fuss. Similarly the events skipped over in the first loop of events seem as if they are doing that classical horror thing of letting characters disappear for a scene only to turn up fatally injured or dead. But then the looping back over events begins and starts filling in the blank spaces with previously missed action. And then events are re-covered yet again. It left me feeling that Triangle illustrates in a neat way how hugely important, narrative re-defining events can have occurred within the space of a single edit in a film.

[domino harvey]

Thanks for reminding me about Triangle, Colin, I keep forgetting to track it down! Will definitely try to fit in a viewing soon.

As for Fulci, a few days later and I'm already tempted to seek out more even though I've liked so little of what I've seen. The academic completest in me can be such a hassle sometimes!

[Mr Sausage]

As for Fulci, a few days later and I'm already tempted to seek out more even though I've liked so little of what I've seen. The academic completest in me can be such a hassle sometimes!

You've just about seen all of his 'major period' gore films. You only have the first of his Gates of Hell Trilogy left, City of the Living Dead, which is the eighties gore flick of his I like the best/dislike the least. After that, don't go any later than 1985 with him. Even Fulci fans can't get behind the stuff he made post New York Ripper.

Instead, go earlier. His 70's stuff tends to be more competent. So check out his giallos, the aforementioned Lizard, The Psychic, Perversion Story, and Don't Torture a Duckling.

After that, you're more well-versed in Fulci than any non-hardcore fan needs to be.

[colinr0380]

I don't think I'll be much help with Fulci since I quite liked House By The Cemetery, mostly for the lovely score, the chance to sigh dreamily over Catriona MacColl and the beautiful Ania Pieroni as the red herring babysitter (just after her appearance stroking a white cat in a lecture theatre in Argento's Inferno and before she had the opening murder in Tenebrae of shoplifting a novel and then getting the pages stuffed down her throat) and well as enjoying an appaearance by Dagmar Lassander as the pokered-to-death estate agent (although Lassander gets a far meatier role in Werewolf Woman as the slightly concerned sister of the title character in a film that, with its whiplashing tone, manages to be the ultimate megamix of 1970s horror tropes, seeming to cover period Hammer horror, asylum set Exorcist-style possession, a rape-revenge section and even spaghetti western!)

If you do go for The Psychic, try and double bill it with Cronenberg's Scanners from a couple of years later, since they both feature a superpowered Jennifer O'Neill! (The Psychic also has a role for Gabriele Ferzetti of L'Avventura and the train magnate in Once Upon A Time In The West fame)

[knives]

Kubrick must have loved the living hell out of The Legend of Hell House given how many of the techniques employed here for tension (most notably the time codes, but also some of the weirder cuts) is identical to The Shinning. This film isn't as good as that later one though I found it to be scarier. For the most part the film is your generic The Haunting type of movie right down to skeptical male lead and young lady who is treated like a nut, but it plays with expectations enough and is well cast enough (dear god does Roddy McDowell give Elisha Cook a run for his melancholy maddened money) to make it seem rather fresh which means a lot with these repetitive stories. The thing that shook me though was the editing which refuses to hit any sort of rhythm. Consistently the film will cut at a moment or to an angle that simply does not fit leaving otherwise harmless sequences maddening and violent.

[colinr0380]

It also does the thing that I can only remember the original Japanese version of Ring doing by having the mystery seemingly solved and then continuing on with the the inexorable appearance of the time codes to signify that nothing the characters have done has yet stopped the clock.

I also remember the film fondly for the way that one of the shots from it was used for ITV late night continuity programming in my local region for most of the early 90s!

[domino harvey]

Tonight (Sunday) on TCM they're showing what appears to be most (if not all) of the film versions of the story about a murderer's hands being grafted onto someone else's arms and running amok. It goes Hands of a Stranger, Beast with Five Fingers, Mad Love, and the original Hands of Orlac.

Having recently been reminded of its existence, Idle Hands would also have fit the bill. It would have been worth TCM airing it just to blow the minds of all the old biddies who leave the channel on in the background!

[Mr Sausage]

Tonight (Sunday) on TCM they're showing what appears to be most (if not all) of the film versions of the story about a murderer's hands being grafted onto someone else's arms and running amok. It goes Hands of a Stranger, Beast with Five Fingers, Mad Love, and the original Hands of Orlac.

Having recently been reminded of its existence, Idle Hands would also have fit the bill. It would have been worth TCM airing it just to blow the minds of all the old biddies who leave the channel on in the background!

I also vaguely remember a Clive Barker (adaptation?) tv movie about a guy whose hand gets a mind of its own, frees itself from his body, and then assembles an army of likewise freedom inclined hands. They all jump off a roof at the end, leaving the police to collect hundreds of severed hands and place them into evidence bags, which surely counts pretty high in the "reasons my job sucks" list.

[domino harvey]

That's "the Body Politic" and it was one of two segments in the Fox TV movie Quicksilver Highway. I too vaguely remember watching it when it first aired and thinking it was better than the Stephen King adaptation that made up the first half

[Murdoch]

I may be remembering something else, but did that segment end with a girl's nose beginning to twitch and her raising a pair of scissors ready to cut it off?