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I never thought of Close Encounters as a horror movie.

the Addams Family (Barry Sonnenfeld 1991) / Addams Family Values (Barry Sonnenfeld 1993) A series of grotesque one-liners and half-assed Tim Burton-aping is about all that the first Addams Family movie has going for it, and while I enjoyed it as a kid (and I wasn't alone-- I was shocked to discover it was the seventh highest grossing film of 1991) this just did not amuse me at all. The film is sloppy, the central conceit obnoxious, and the only time the film really comes alive is when it removes the Addams from their weirdo gothic surroundings and forces them to clash with the outside world. No wonder the superior sequel is devoted primarily to doing just that for an hour and a half rather than the last ten minutes as in the first pic.

Weirdly, though it's a much better film, the sequel was a bomb. Maybe because it took the rather safe faux-dark jokes of the first film to their logical next step and managed to come up with some legit dark comedy for a mainstream film-- even in a jokey film like this, a gag about baking a stripper into a birthday cake is pretty damn morbid! It helps that the sequel is actually funny, with much much much better one-liners and a new sense of urgency grossly missing from the sluggish first film. Though it's such an easy target, the sequel shines brightest when it focuses on Wednesday and Pugsly wreaking havoc at a "camp for privileged kids," but Joan Cusack is also quite good as the gold-digging black widow who, in one of the films better jokes, is more or less still accepted as part of the family despite her being a murderess because, well, she's got a lot of competition! Luckily, outside of a couple non-essential references to the events of the first film, there's no need to see the original to enjoy the sequel, and I'll give it a mild recommendation on the off-chance you stayed away because of how the first one went over.

Idle Hands (Rodman Flender 1999) Mean-spirited horror comedy concerning Devon Sawa's demon-possessed hand (hmm, where have I seen this before…), which wreaks havoc in all the predictable ways. Of special note is two of his early victims, who are so lazy that they just refuse to walk into the light when they die and therefore come back as zombies who mostly just sit around on the couch and watch MTV. It's a funny idea, at least. Luckily a young Jessica Alba is on hand, pun definitely intended, to add a much needed alternative aesthetic to this otherwise ugly, standard-issue late-90s horror flick.

Repossessed (Bob Logan 1990) Get thee behind me, bad non-ZAZ parody films.

Stay Tuned (Peter Hyams 1992) My favorite film as a kid. I was there opening day (though I can't believe I was only nine at the time). I rented it seemingly every other weekend. I doubt I'd seen it in fifteen years and yet I discovered I remembered every beat while rewatching it. Obviously there's no being impartial or logical on this one. Couch potato John Ritter and harried wife Pam Dawber find themselves sucked into Hell's satellite dish, where they must survive in different programs on different channels for a fixed amount of time or else their souls are claimed by the Devil. I thought it held up quite well to my memories and the parodies, while not always funny, were certainly weird enough to push it to interesting places. Even people who hate it seem to at least like the Chuck Jones segment. But if that describes you, that would then imply that you don't like seeing Jeffrey Jones in early 90s hip hop gear spinning records in a Salt N Peppa music video, and so to you I must say just who do you think you are?

The possessed hand film that I'd be most interested to see adapted would be the one from the manga Parasyte. And what do you know, on searching it out for this post it is aparently getting a Gantz-style double live action film adaptation and an anime series soon!

I do agree on Repossessed and it is obviously broad with too many easy gags about PMS, but it was the only way I got to see some kind of version of the Exorcist before the original film got reissued in the UK, and I do love the media-savvy televangelist couple who are obviously inspired by Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, with the silly running joke about their obnoxiously cute dog, Fru-Fru!

Plus a decade later in its opening sequence Scary Movie 2 did a weirdly similar, but much more unamusingly scatalogical, parody of the Exorcist with James Woods in the priest role (and Veronica Cartwright in the Ellen Burstyn part ) that wasn't much better!

domino harvey wrote:Stay Tuned (Peter Hyams 1992) My favorite film as a kid. I was there opening day (though I can't believe I was only nine at the time). I rented it seemingly every other weekend. I doubt I'd seen it in fifteen years and yet I discovered I remembered every beat while rewatching it. Obviously there's no being impartial or logical on this one. Couch potato John Ritter and harried wife Pam Dawber find themselves sucked into Hell's satellite dish, where they must survive in different programs on different channels for a fixed amount of time or else their souls are claimed by the Devil. I thought it held up quite well to my memories and the parodies, while not always funny, were certainly weird enough to push it to interesting places. Even people who hate it seem to at least like the Chuck Jones segment. But if that describes you, that would then imply that you don't like seeing Jeffrey Jones in early 90s hip hop gear spinning records in a Salt N Peppa music video, and so to you I must say just who do you think you are?

I haven't seen this in... twenty years, maybe? (Also: we're almost exactly the same age, apparently.) But I still think of the Yogi Beer commercial and "I... warship... satin!?" on a nearly daily basis. I'd be very curious to watch it again.

Although I'm three years older than you young whippersnappers, I too watched Stay Tuned in the theaters. There was actually a big fight in my family over it since my older sister wanted our mom to take us to see A League of Their Own (because she liked the Madonna video for it). Things got so bad that she had to take us separately to see the films to prevent us from clawing each other's eyes out. I loved the heck out of it as a kid, and like Domino, rented it several ties on VHS and probably watched chunks of it on HBO all the time.

I was shocked to discover upon watching the DVD that the film was in 'Scope-- we'd all had such fond memories of butchered P+S VHS/HBO airings that took out almost half the image!

domino harvey wrote:the Addams Family (Barry Sonnenfeld 1991) / Addams Family Values (Barry Sonnenfeld 1993)

While I agree in general that Addams Family Values is the overall funnier movie, nothing beats the delightfully surreal scene in the first film in which Thing gets a job at Federal Express and nobody gives a second thought to this disembodied hand scampering through the office pulling a little red wagon behind him.

Tucker and Dale vs Evil (Eli Craig, 2010)

Spoilers:
What is that adage that an amateur psychologist applying their irrefutable logic to a situation is worse than there being no psychologist at all?

This is a fun film that swaps around the hillbilly killer vs nubile teens stereotypes (from Wrong Turn, Hills Have Eyes etc, etc), as much of the earlier mayhem comes about through presumptions, lack of understandings and just plain bad luck between the two groups causing them to made wrong assumptions of each other.

Most of the early deaths are (often quite funny!) accidents that look like horrible murders, and I liked the implication from the film that the group of teens are so deluded that they seem actively trying to get themselves killed by their reckless horror-movie behaviours, leading to speculation on the 'college kids' being part of some sort of single-minded suicide cult from our hillbilly heroes! And I also liked that the film has to incapacitate the two teens who act reasonably quite early on by knocking the heroine unconscious with a shovel and causing the guy who naturally assumes that there has to be a reasonable non-psychopath explanation for events (i.e. the guy who in any other 'straightly played' horror film would be playing the oblivious idiot character) to die first so there is nobody left to counter the wild speculation!

I also liked the comic, genial tone. Sure lots of people die horribly, but then our heroes are OK, and there is a fun Tremors-style class and science-versus-street(wood?)smarts banter between the two hillbillies and the teen girl they 'capture'.

However that also leads me to my main criticism of the film, which is that it has just swapped the stereotype around, rather than actively subverting it, and (even in its title) seems to be reinforcing the notion that purely 'good' versus 'bad' guy conflicts are necessary elements both in filmic terms and also to allow characters inside the fiction to define themselves and grow through adversity. So the teens are now the horrible one-dimensional characters rather than the hillbillies, and the film seems content to let those newly placed stereotypes stand, and punish the characters for embodying them. Sure, that is the comedic point of the film but perhaps a smarter film, along with good naturedly standing up for the regularly demonised underdogs, would come to a kind of mutual understanding that didn't involve all the teens but the love interest having to die. (However I did like there seems to be an anticipation of Tarantino's current trope of having a scene of an intimate roundtable discussion followed by immediately chucking all of the potential subtletly out of the window!)

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And I think that criticism all comes to a head in the backstory of the main teen villain, with the 'twist' that he was descended from a hillbilly rapist himself that seems to explain(?) his psychopathy. That is my issue with the film in a nutshell: it throws up satire on pat psychologisms and assumptions yet at its critical moments ends up falling back into relying on them for 'explanatory' genre reasons.

It could be suggested that there is an even more meta-satire going on because of that (there does seem a need for an extra third act heightening of the issues to the next level that just never comes), but because of the sincerity of celebration of the good guys in their misunderstood situation, I don't think the audience is meant to be considering a further irony beyond the main one of the swapping of stereotypical roles of the two groups. (A more successful film would, once bringing them up so explicitly, maybe feel it had more of a responsibility to explore class, gender and social tensions a little deeper than just their superficial signifiers. In a way this is where the 80s slasher films work better, as they aren't self aware of their subtext enough to hamfistedly bring it up. They might have less on their minds than this film, but in some ways they let more be read into them through that absence. Or take Tremors, which has similar archetypal character-types but doesn't make social conflicts a part of the film except on a subtext level, and is much more successful for that. Plus Tremors is a bit more compassionate to its characters as individuals beyond just stereotypes).

So while the film plays fine (the acting is great, lovably endearing in its lead performances even, and the filmmaking is technically fine, and there are some nice horror fan spins on production design, such as the Evil Dead/Texas Chainsaw Massacre-style creepy cabin in the woods) on its surface, I do think there is something a bit wonky that is underlying the narrative in the final third. Something that is leaving events on a too tidily happy and flippantly uncaring note for all the carnage that has just gone on.

Stephen Thrower's massive book NIGHTMARE USA - The Untold Story of the Exploitation Independents has just been reprinted by FAB Press.
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Creep (Christopher Smith) - Having re-watched Triangle and finding it just as enjoyable as the first time through I decided to explore Smith's other films. This one follows the beats so many monster/slasher movies have although it does so in much less time and with very little ceremony around each kill. The film has that frustrating fixture of so many monster/slasher films where the protagonist is given several opportunities to kill or at least seriously maim the monster but instead chooses to discard the weapon she's using and flee. Still, I did like the movie's mixture of both selfish and likable characters, with the likable characters often suffering the worst fates!

The gore was thankfully minimal, with Smith often cutting away or obscuring the murders in some way, and the monster a cross of Gollum and the cave-dwellers of The Descent. Actually, this would probably do well as a double bill with the Marshall film as both deal with a woman desperately going through dark pathways in order to find an escape from acrobatic half-breeds. Still, the film is more a parable than anything else, with the protagonist seemingly being chastised for her retort to a homeless man's plea for money by having to rely on the homeless to escape,

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only for her to stumble dirty and ragged away from the now dead monster at the end and seat herself at a subway platform, holding the dog of a dead homeless woman while strangers give her change.

I'll admit I was never bored, and despite the sometimes frustrating actions of the characters it was interesting to see one act purely out of self-preservation, such that another was left behind to face the monster because of it. I can't say it's a film I'll ever re-watch, but it wasn't a bad way to spend an afternoon in October.

I hope no one minds me using this thread as a personal tracker this Halloween, but it's a genre I've neglected recently so I wanted to document my viewings.

Noroi: The Curse (Shiraishi Kôji) - The found footage genre has never clicked well with me - the ugly shakey cam-style, while sometimes effective, usually detracts from the film rather than create a more "authentic" experience. This film is an obvious benefactor to The Blair Witch Project, following a documentary filmmaker as he and his cameraman explore the background of a demon known as Kagutaba. I hadn't heard of it until googling "underrated horror movies" and variations on that, then finding it pop up several times under the usual hyperbole that accompanies those lists. Unlike most found footage horror movies though, which often rely exclusively on the camera held by a character or security footage, Noroi mixes up that formula by using TV interviews and talk show segments. It's a welcome diversion from the shoulder-mounted camera and makes the movie feel more like a docudrama or TV special.

Supernatural horror has rarely done much for me (so that's two strikes against it already!), but Blair Witch was deeply unsettling to me so I was hoping for the J-horror equivalent. For the most part, expectations were met. Noroi moves along very deliberately, focusing more on laying the groundwork for its demon subject in a slow series of reveals. The pacing feels somewhat like The Ring as the filmmaker is mostly gathering information about the series of odd occurrences so overplayed in horror - weird neighbors, mysterious deaths, etc. The investigation itself is quite procedural, for lack of a better word, and consists primarily of the filmmaker interviewing witnesses and victims of the titular curse.

Despite the rather slow pace, the film's explanation for its events felt underwhelming to me, likely because the climax of the film involving the same ritual performed on a boat led to little more than a shrug from me. Also, I had to wonder at a part when the filmmaker visits his wife over halfway through the movie for the first time - also the first mention of him having a wife - if she was added late in the writing process out of convenience for the narrative. Still, I will admit the reveal of a monster within the film's final minutes ranks high among the most disturbing images I've seen in this genre,

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even if it was a bit deflated by the fact that, when another character attempted to kill the child hosting the demon immediately before the reveal of the monster, the filmmaker stood idly by filming and even kept holding the camera when he was attacked! Perhaps he's simply passionate about getting all the details, but it always rings false to me in these found footage films when a character will hold the camera during the most inconvenient times just to make sure the action is within frame.

To drag this back to Blair Witch again, what I found so unsettling about that film is it felt like one of those campfire tales that you can't quite tell if there's truth behind it. My problem with this film is largely too much is shown, and the non-diegetic score and occasional CGI only detract from the experience. Much of what works with Noroi is the exploration of what's going on, and that final scene is unsettling. but it takes a bit too long to leave its point.

I thought that I'd throw the original 1986 version of The Hitcher on this Halloween evening. I wrote earlier in the thread that this was an "excellent horror-thriller-road movie, able to work as everything from a chase action film to a race from the devil movie, to a (not very) veiled gay panic movie. It is no accident that the hero lights up a symbolic cigarette over the end credits!"

One aspect that I particularly like about this film is that it kind of anticipates later films in which the protagonist is terrorised by a maniac who then turns out to be a figment of their imagination (e.g. Switchblade Romance/Haute Tension and so on). The first three quarters of this film could easily play out as Rutger Hauer's character being entirely a figment of C. Thomas Howell's imagination, even down to Hauer appearing when other character's backs are turned (or appearing to other characters who are marked for death from that point), or when our hero gets distracted or falls asleep, almost as if our hero is willing his nemesis into existence at his most desperate and/or unguarded moments.

Yet whether this is by conscious design or simply the filmmakers not thinking up a clever twist like "the hero and villain are the same person!", the lack of such a twist ends up working in the film's favour. This is perhaps one of the plus points about horror films before they got too 'self aware' about wanting to manipulate the audience over and above the coherence of the structure of the story of their film itself: sometimes films could touch on interesting ideas or themes by 'accident' rather than consciously setting out an obvious subtext for their film. That allows spaces for audiences to project their own ideas, feelings and fears onto a film, rather than just understanding that the filmmakers intend that their subtext "is a metaphor for sexual insecurity/parental abuse/PTSD (delete as applicable)" and leaving it at that.

The Hitcher is an interesting case study as it is a strange mix of extreme bluntness (as in the gay panic moments, or the almost sadomasochistic dualistic relationship between hero and villain) yet also ambiguity in what particular meaning or final outcome that the film seems to be aiming for. It seems to be always subverting the audience's expectations and feeling of having figured out what is going on, usually through the plot twisting itself into a new and fruitful direction. A mixture of bluntness and ambiguity shouldn't really work, but it does extremely well here and eventually creates a feeling of unclassifiable reasons for why a serial killer is doing what he is doing, why he picks out who he kills, and exactly why he finds C. Thomas Howell's character so fascinating and enjoys toying with him so much. Does he recognise a kindred spirit? Is the antagonist jealous of our protagonist's normal life, and that's why he wants to destroy it? Is it a sexual longing? An aloof father/rebellious son relationship? A death wish of an older man faced with the younger generation? A transference of a curse of killing on the highway? The film allows the space for a number of different interpretations to be placed on the action. The protagonist and antagonist might not be revealed in a final twist to be one and the same, but they do have a strange bond together that takes precendence above every other character in the film who might try to protect, or arrest, or pull them apart.

And anway would 'understanding' the antagonist's motivations particularly matter, or sudddenly mitigate his actions, if they were made explicit?

In addition to all of the above this is a great landscape film, regularly punctuated by extreme wide shots of barren deserts or lights of cars tiny in the frame moving through an expanse of darkness (I particularly like the moment of the hero's attempt at suicide when after he cannot pull the trigger he looks up from his kneeling position and we cut to a shot of the sun through the clouds. The world impassively surrounding him, yet also somehow that shot emphasises our hero's decision to not end it all there and then, but to endure). All the buildings feel like strange intrusions against that bleak backdrop. Only the road seems to feel as if it compliments the landscape. (I also wonder whether the strange discussion about fishing with a couple of diners in a restuarant in the middle of the desert, or the family towing a boat with their car, is meant to be a kind of comment about people lugging around inappropriate equipment or being singularly unprepared for the environment that they are in!)

The film also has a wonderful final shot under the closing credits (one of my favourite final shots, or at least up there with the final shot of A Brighter Summer Day!), in which a perfect silhouette performance against the shattered police car is accentuated by the beautifully eerie, yet somehow mournful, score.

An excellent write up on one of my own favorite horror films, Colin. You get at here a lot of what makes this picture great and distinctive. Your comment at the end about the final silhouette is precise and dead on. Another thing I love about the ending is that the Howell character really does seem to have "matured" in a sense via his exposure to the Hitcher. He's no longer the scared boy but has acquired a believable, hard won sense of centered strength. But it's also already started to harden into a callous kind of disregard that is genuinely scary.

Having said all this, I wondered what you thought of the remake (not the horrendous quasi-sequel with Jake Busey)? I suppose there's a general consensus that it's "worse" than the original and though I don't like it as much I do think it has some things going for it (full confession: I like most of the Platinum Dunes horror pictures, even the much derided ones such as this, Bayer's Nightmare on Elm Street and Nispel's Friday the 13th--I hated Horsemen though). I'd have to see it again to make a more capable comparison between what Hauer does in that role vs. Bean but they are both utterly chilling that's for sure and that makes up for a lot of lost ground. What's very good about it is that it has that same feel for landscape as the original and really makes use of space in an impressive, cinematic way. For me the attempt to address gender politics via the role reversal of the protags kind of blunts this one simply because it feels like the opposite of dangerous or chaotic--a safe sort of studio mandate about establishing girl power or something. I don't remember the final confrontation here being nearly as disturbing in terms of implication, almost as though the female empowerment spin was enough when, in fact, that seems awfully slight by comparison to what is accomplished in the original film and where that's able to go free of the burden of making a specific reductive point (one the sequel actually anticipates anyway).

I'm afraid that I've not seen either the sequel or the remake of The Hitcher, although I know that I've got both recorded from television somewhere around. I guess I've been a little concerned about seeing the material re-done as the original film seems perfect and complete enough for me, but your comments that the remake gets the feel for landscape right sound promising, and I like the idea of Sean Bean in the Rutger Hauer role.

I guess that the film that I feel picks up and runs with the ideas of The Hitcher in an interesting way whilst being its own thing is Richard Stanley's Dust Devil. It is more obviously supernatural (and socio-political!) but The Hitcher influence also feels present in the terrorisation on the road structure, the serial killing, the tormented heroine eventually being forced off of the tarmac to stumble off into the desert, and its whole feel for landscape. And an eventual, though much more literal, transference (or hardening into a callous disregard, similar to that you note at the end of The Hitcher) between antagonist and protagonist.

Fresh off a Halloween binge!

My Bloody Valentine (1981) - I've seen this title on several of those "Best Of" slasher lists so I thought what the hell, right? A Valentine's Day dance which resulted in many a murder twenty years ago is planned on being held again only for the killings to restart. The film has one of the quickest turnarounds I've seen in any horror film with the soon-to-be victims laughing off the story as local legend BS only to do a complete 180 upon seeing the first two bodies and proclaiming the killer's at it again! I wouldn't have minded this so much if this didn't happen within the span of five minutes. The writers shoehorn in a love triangle because, well, 90 minutes takes up a lot of material and you can only spend so much time displaying gore and murder. Finally, the film wraps itself up with a twist ending that it has to explain with an out of nowhere flashback sequence that raises more questions than answers. This movie also features one of my biggest pet peeves in slashers: The cop who decides to keep the murders a secret because... hell if I know! There are some very gory sequences which I guess people laud in this genre, although with all the film's flaws a few mangled bodies hardly makes this worth the watch.

Tourist Trap (1979) - The typical group of good-looking young people stumble upon a freaky wax museum owned by Chuck Connors. Despite the story veering into standard fare once it introduces the masked killer, Chuck Connors does a great job early in the film piling on the creepiness when he strolls in on a group of nubile skinny-dippers and casually chats with them while they sheepishly cover themselves. The mannequin/wax figure theme is a nice touch given how inherently unsettling those things are, too, and the robotic opening and shutting of their mouths is the stuff nightmares are made of. Although for all the film's attempt to disturb through lifelike mannequins, to me the most disturbing part came when the killer kisses and fondles the protagonist while she's forced to whimper out "I love you" to appease him. I realized when the killer was first shown partway through the film how much I dislike the masked killer horror film since I found the aforementioned rape scene and Chuck Connors' casually watching the skinny-dippers far more affecting than any of the murders.

Lake Mungo (2008) Thanks to warren oates for recommending this Aussie faux-docudrama to me. The docudrama style of filmmaking is not normally one I enjoy outside of the occasional Errol Morris film largely because of how prevalent it's become in every true crime TV special. This film, however, created a slow build-up that was quite effective in giving me the chills. Telling the story of a young woman's death through testimonials of those close to her, the story is very much in line with Twin Peaks as it exposes the secrets she left behind. What's fascinating about the way the filmmakers approach the subject is the focus is more on how the deceased's family deals with its grief and discovery of what was hidden from them than a procedural detailing of the investigation. I won't spoil anything but there is one particular visual in this film which is far more unsettling than anything from any slasher or "traditional" horror movie I've seen in years. Highly recommended and one I'll be returning to soon.

The Conjuring (2013) - After the largely favorable reaction to this from the board, this one I saved for Halloween night. While my companion was terrified by it I couldn't muster much more than a shrug to its theatrics. Ghost movies have never been my cup of tea, with the only ones I've found frightening being, and it pains me to admit this, Paranormal Activity, despite that franchise's flaws. The film does well in its early moments where the ghosts are unseen, but when it does reveal the ghouls as the same ghastly sights as just about every other horror movie on the subject whatever scares it had for me immediately went out the door.

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The family dynamics between the demonologist couple also detracted from the film for me, especially in the moments the spirits suddenly started attacking their home whereby all of that stuff about the ghosts haunting the property went out the window.

Another problem I had with the film was the general religious angle. I admit this is my problem far more than the film's, especially when it's dealing with religion and the battle between heaven and hell and all that. Still, I can't help but generally dislike any horror movie that tries to use itself as a thesis for the existence of the devil, especially when it closes with a line like "The Devil is real" and throws all manner of subtlety out the window. Although I did like the not so thinly veiled criticism of organized religion it had at the end. Still, I can definitely see the merits in the film and am glad to find a mainstream horror movie that works effectively if only for a little while.

Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010) - A decent horror comedy that, despite its attempts to subvert the genre, still falls prey to a host of Hollywood cliches and goes for audience-pleasing for its end. I would warn anyone interested in this to avoid the trailer as it ruins a few of the movie's best gags. The movie's greatest benefit is the duo of likable leads, especially Tyler Labine who plays his shy hillbilly in a lovable way that it helped me look past the film's less inspired moments. I commend the film for trying to do something new, even if at most it reversed the stereotypes of killer hillbilly and hapless college student.

Chernobyl Diaries (Brad Parker, 2012)

Spoilers:
I don't think that this is in any way an objectively 'good' film storywise. It features far too many loud jump scares, monsters that only ever get shown in flashes (though they have a couple of nice background moments), little in the way of any developing action (just picking off the characters one by one as they futilely run through areas), and is one of those films where the characters kind of deserve their fates by stupidly going on an 'extreme tourism' trip into the abandoned town of Pripyat next to Chernobyl. Also, despite a few brief mentions of it, the characters also seem bizarrely unconcerned about any kind of issues to do with radiation! (I'd have had the Geiger counter out all of the time, monsters be damned!) Although that might just be to try and blindside the audience with the final twist.

However despite all of those issues I liked the atmosphere of the film a lot, and all of the crumbling and decaying Serbian/Hungarian locations stand in quite nicely for the ruins of Pripyat and Chernobyl and always look fascinating and interesting to move through, even in half-darkness. I say 'move through' because this really feels like a computer game in which the characters are just travelling through different spaces, from the tower blocks at the beginning through arenas and tunnels and eventually and fatally into the devastated reactors themselves. This film is in no way in the league of Tarkovsky's Stalker film, or even of the three S.T.A.L.K.E.R. video games (Shadow of Chernobyl, Call of Pripyat, Clear Sky), which allow the player to actually inhabit those spaces and interact with monsters more vividly and viscerally, but it does feel clearly in that tradition, mixed up with a little of the producing team's earlier Paranormal Activity series jump scares.

One aspect of the film that I found a bit jarring at first but ended up strangely liking was that this is filmed in a kind of Blair Witch found-footage style, yet done in from a third-person perspective rather than a first-person one. This is slightly strange as the camera sort of takes the perspective of another unacknowledged member of the tour group during the film, running with the characters and shaking around and so on, yet by not being in first person it removes the need for having to have long winded and unconvincing explanations of why someone is filming all of the footage. It also allows the camera some distance from the characters, which allows for some interesting changes in perspective and identification - for example we at first feel most attached to our core group of four characters, then the group expands and the camera kind of warily allows the other three members of the party in, then the exploration of Pripyat sort of abandons the youngsters to focus more on the tour guide Yuri and his increasing suspicions, then Yuri abandons the camera and we are left with the uncomprehending youngsters, then the tour group are trapped in the disabled van and after being in the van with them for a little while the camera also starts prowling the outside looking in like a predator, and so on.

These are techniques of perspective that couldn't be done in a purely first-person found footage film, and I also liked that the continually changing distance from the characters seemed to affect the camera's perspective on them: close up we are first person shaking and panickily running through corridors; as the characters get farther away or are in the distance approaching the camera the shot is calmer and steadier. Again I wonder whether this was a technique borrowed from video games when you can have a visceral 'you are there' first person experience, or pull back a little for a more detached third person point of view on the action.

Anyway it might be worth a watch for the interesting locations and camerawork. The actual plot and action is fine too but nothing particularly groundbreaking, and similarly the characters aren't intensely irritating but still rather unmemorable, so I wouldn't recommend going to this one for the story!

Deadly Eyes (Robert Clouse, 1982)

Or Night Eyes as the title card on the film itself would have it. This is that infamous loose adaptation of James Herbert’s The Rats that exchanges inner-city London for wintery Canada and foists a bunch of cute dogs wearing black fur coats (and in close ups feral-looking muppets) standing in for giant rats onto the population.

Major spoilers:

I assume that this film was produced by Hong Kong’s Golden Harvest company due to Robert Clouse having made the Bruce Lee exploitation film Game of Death (aka the film that used body doubles, long shots and documentary footage from Lee’s actual funeral to contextualise the ten minutes of actual Bruce Lee footage left behind after his death) and therefore having a pre-existing relationship with the company. Based on Deadly Eyes I’m not sure that Clouse is any better at tackling a horror film than he was at re-visioning a Bruce Lee one. James Herbert is namechecked in the opening credits and a lot of the major set pieces from the book are in there, but they’ve been played around with to create a more linear narrative. The book is a bit more about unconnected, almost nihilistic, set pieces – for example the great underground train sequence in the book happens about half way through to a bunch of characters who never interact with the hero and heroine, whereas here our heroine is in the train with our hero’s son and he has to fight to get to her and escape alive, with the whole train sequence being used as the climax to the film.

Unfortunately many of these changes seem to miss the point of the book. Particularly making our hero a teacher of older teens rather than of young children as in the book. It seems a shame to lose the attack on the school that was another big set piece of the Herbert book (it cannot be for reasons of squeamishness about showing children getting eaten by rats, as the other notorious set piece gets adapted!), but I guess it was done in order to throw in the incredibly unnecessary and icky subplot about our hero getting inappropriate advances from a flirty, obsessed female student and having to rebuff them. She doesn’t take no for much of an answer though, from calling up his answerphone to sigh over his voice and then planting kisses down the telephone, to walking into the men’s lockerroom whilst he is in the shower and then declaring her love and kissing him (to which he responds “come back in ten years”!); to eventually just breaking into his home and lying semi-naked on the bed waiting for him to return! Which of course causes the usual complications with the real love interest!

And the notorious scene from the book of the baby in its highchair in a kitchen getting dragged from it and eaten by the rats whilst the mother is helpless to get to it gets almost hilariously diluted here! I give the filmmakers credit for actually daring to do the scene, but any ironic social commentary on harried and overworked single mothers being preyed upon in an uncaring urban jungle gets lost here when the scene in the film involves at least seven people in the house, including both teenage parents of the baby (and the girl with the crush on the teacher hero), all having a loud music and pot party. Then everyone leaves to “go and get burgers”, including the father and apart from the mother, although the group tell her to leave the baby alone as what harm could come to it! The mother declines, stating that she has homework to do anyway (!) and then we cut back to the baby in the kitchen and find that not only has the mother left the baby alone, she has left the back door open. In the middle of the night! Whereas I could empathise with and feel for the horrible tragedy befalling the mother in The Rats, this film is really making it impossible to do anything but say “it serves you right that your baby got eaten!”, having shown such a hilarious unrealistic disregard for it! I suppose it is just showing how obnoxious this shoehorned into the narrative group of teen cheerleaders and jocks are supposed to be though (the now childless mother being the first to be eaten for her…neglect?), but don’t worry they all pay for their crimes of being young and reckless by the end of the film!

Weirdly half of the cast kept reminding me of someone else: our hero is played by a chap called Sam Groom who looks very much like a more emotional Stephen Lack, which along with the Canadian setting just adds an extra sense that this looks similar to but isn’t in the same league as Cronenberg’s early horror films. The cheerleader trying to seduce him looks uncannily in a few shots like a young Shelley Duvall! And, even stranger, the jock basketball playing boyfriend that she throws over in order to pursue the teacher looks like a young Julian Sands! (Perhaps it is the flowing blonde hair?). Luckily Scatman Crothers turns up to add some name value to the cast, although he proves just as ineffectual in this film as he did in The Shining! (I cannot remember for sure but I think that the exterminator in James Herbert’s book was actually one of the main trio of characters along with the female health inspector and the hero teacher, so it is strange to see Scatman Crothers’s role here reduced to an early victim).

Although his presence here is worth it just for this hilarious shot under the opening credits:



This is also one of those films in which the killer animals are given a loud noise sound effect whenever they appear (in this case it sounds like a wounded crow crossed with a cat) and have their own threatening music cue that is best described as Psycho meets Jaws. You'd think that all of the victims would know something was wrong by the over the top music cues! It made me burst out laughing in the scene in which the poor old gentleman gets stalked and eaten (or rather gets licked to death by a bunch of friendly dogs!)

Shockingly the film actually has the gall to get exciting in the final section, and weirdly turns into a kind of premonition of that Peter Hyams film from a decade and a half later, The Relic. We get the kindly professor who, after confirming that giant mutant rats are running about the basement of his university and after leaving a message on our hero’s answer machine to confirm his findings, goes back down into the basement purely to get killed. Why did he need to actually see the rats if he knew they were there? Why go alone? Why is he a noted rat professor when he is obviously insanely dumb? But I guess he is a bit like the similarly stupid professor played by James Whitmore in The Relic!

While this is going on the cheerleader and her friends have trooped off to the local cinema which is conveniently running a Bruce Lee marathon and just happens to be screening Clouse’s classic film Game of Death to much joy and excitement in the theatre. Of course the rats run amok here (so only the second worse thing to happen to people stuck watching Game of Death), therefore cue people tumbling over seats or standing up only to get a couple of dachshunds thrown into their arms to struggle with whilst falling over screaming. There is a surprisingly great stampede scene here (something which also made me think of The Relic’s own stampeding patrons, although this kind of stuff goes back to the original The Blob) although I think a couple of people get bodily thrown through the same stained glass window (which all cinemas have) at separate times! I like to think that one industrious employee has carefully replaced the window in between shots only to have someone else get thrown through it yet again!

So with the supporting cast mostly dead we get to the big climax which repurposes the stalled underground train from Herbert’s novel into a newly introduced slimy mayor figure holding a “Subway Inauguration” party that involves a select group climbing onto the subway train and riding it to the next stop where the real party is taking place. Of course the rats gnaw through the electric cables and bring the train to a stop in the middle of the tunnel. I know that this is just as much a Jaws idea but this really reminded me of themes that The Relic did later, especially the idea of the dignitaries evacuating the carriage and wandering in a group through the dark tunnel before getting massacred en masse, and the satirical idea of this being incredibly bad publicity, with the mayor getting some great lines like “I didn’t spend $100 million of taxpayer’s money to arrive at the ribbon cutting ceremony on foot!” . I also love that the reception party at the other platform gets informed of technical difficulties and we get a shot of the guests all sighing and rolling their eyes! Then later they hear some muffled screams and just barely react too! This is all setting up for the final kicker though!

Anyway after finding the nest and defeating the rat menace (lucky that they made their home in a corridor lined with flammable cans!) our happy family gets back onto the subway car, ‘somehow’ starts it up (I think the power came on) and drives it into the station where the reception party is being held. Given that all of the fifty or so passengers of the train have just been massacred on the tracks in front of it I was quite disappointed that there wasn’t a brilliantly shocking image of something like a blood smeared front half of the train pulling into the station pushing a huge mound of body parts in front of it! But the ending that we do get is just as amusingly nasty! (But why wasn’t the nasty mayor the one to briefly escape only for the final shock ending, rather than just some anonymous aide? That’s yet another example of a missed opportunity by the film)

So, I think that this film is far, far too flawed to be called a hidden gem or forgotten classic or anything like that. It’s not very ambitious in any respects. But it is a fun film to laugh along with! I especially liked the cheesy, clichéd but surprisingly explicit ‘sucking nipples in front of the fireplace’ love scene to cement the bond between our two leads! (We also get perhaps the ultimate ‘made in Canada’ signifier just before this as during their hot date our couple have a happy late night stroll hand in hand and pass by a group of hockey players with their sticks casually held over their shoulders!)

I didn’t really have any unanswered questions left by the film plotwise (I would like to see James Herbert’s Rats trilogy tackled better in the future though! Though I know that my hopes for the trilogy being given Lord of the Rings-style care and attention is unrealistic!) However I do have a number of burning questions about the set dressing:

1. Why does one of the pot smoking, music playing teens wear a T-shirt that seems to be advertising the 1967 film The Fox? Was that a hip film that all the kids were into in early 80s Canada? Or is there a band named The Fox that I don't know of?

2. Why does the boss of our Health Department heroine have a framed picture of Mickey Mouse as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in Fantasia on the wall of his office?

3. Why does our hero have a photograph of Charles and Di at their wedding stuck into the frame of his bedroom mirror like a lovelorn schoolgirl? This is even more weirdly incongruous than the Charles and Di dedication in An American Werewolf In London!

Amok Train (1989, Jeff Kwitny)

Or Beyond The Door III as the title on the front of the film suggests, despite the film having nothing to do with the previous two Beyond The Door films (and Beyond The Door II was itself an opportunistic retitling of Mario Bava's great film Shock!)

Anyway, this film ends up being far less interesting than any film featuring a possessed steam train has any right to be!

There is a weird sense of fatalism about the story, which involves a teen girl going on a school trip with a bunch of 'friends' to Yugoslavia to visit her ancestral home town, only to find that the whole thing has been manipulated in order to use her in a ritual that involves a virgin copulating with Satan to create the antichrist! The group get to the creepy village (which looks uncannily like the one from the much later video game Resident Evil 4! Even with the creepy villagers!), escape the ritual and jump onto a passing passenger train, which then gets possessed and goes on a long looping journey back to where we began.

Unfortunately the fatalism aspect of the narrative ends up working against the film, turning what should be shocking events into extremely unsurprising kill sequences. There is a fun premonition of the opening of Final Destination 2 where our heroine's mother leaving the airport after seeing her daughter off to Yugoslavia enters a taxi and getting caught up in a bizarre skewering death sequence on the motorway. But it doesn't help that none of the expendable teen characters act believably, or indeed humanly, at all. This sometimes works quite well, as in the sequence in the village when the kids wake up to find their rooms on fire with one just sitting smiling in his burning bed whilst the others escape. Other times it doesn't work well at all, as in the scene in which the burly jock character gets killed off because he for some reason decides to hang laughing from the carriage door, which 'inevitably' ends up with him being skewered on a level crossing barrier. That was a death that seemed likely to happen in a Darwin awards manner with or without the added supernatural angle!

I don't want to be so rude as to call the entire cast (including the 'harried Sandrine Bonnaire'-looking female lead) wooden, because there is this strange possession thing going on in the story, but nobody reacts properly to anything! From talking to a possessed train through its intercom to kissing someone whose face melts off (in a surprisingly impressive effect compared to the model train stuff elsewhere!), to actually being horribly killed, everyone has a strange deadpan "Oh no. This is terrible. I'm going to die. How awful" line delivery! It is funny but didn't really inspire much of a connection to the characters and their situation!

There is also an extremely long, eventually pointless sequence involving two of the kids who didn't manage to get on the train struggling through a swamp and eventually crossing a lake, until they eventually get run down in the middle of the lake by the train! The intercutting of the main action with this then gets replaced by an even more pointless set of scenes involving train controllers trying desperately to stop the train from moving by throwing trucks in its way. These scenes, especially when the controllers are stuck watching screens helplessly whilst trains are about to collide with each other, are obviously inspired by Runaway Train and The Cassandra Crossing. Though again the problem is that there is absolutely no tension to any of this - the train just barrels into the obstacles, there is a big explosion, and we cut back to the possessed train just chugging along fine. (I suppose in a film in which a train can jump off the tracks and barrel through a lake or the nearest field before getting back onto them, crashing through a truck or train isn't going to hold it up much either!)

However there is a hilarious ending once the cult gets their hands on the heroine again that suggests both the corrupting influence of America on ex-pats and that the tour guide-cult leader really shouldn't have believed the other friend's teasings of our lead! Major spoiler follows:

Spoiler

The train comes to a stop and the townsfolk surround the heroine Race With The Devil-style. She gets taken to a horse drawn carriage and sprited back to the village (in some nice shots) and the ritual commences in a big town square with all the black-robed townsfolk in attendance. The heroine (after the hair and makeup department have spruced her up a little) lies on an altar whilst the ritual is completed and Lucifer arises.

Then suddenly one of the townsfolk sticks her hand up the heroine's dress, screams that "She's not a virgin!", everyone runs off screaming, Lucifer disappears in a disappointed puff of smoke, the tour guide-cult leader collapses and melts into a bone heap, and we get left with the fantastically hilarious final long shot of the heroine propping herself up on the altar and looking around the deserted town square with a "where the hell did everybody go?" expression as the film fades to black! Brilliant!

The only library in the world where it's more rewarding just to go and stare at the covers.

The ABCs of Death 2 (Various, 2014)

The obvious problem with anthology films is that they are at the mercy of strength or weakness of their individual episodes. Sadly while I found the first ABCs of Death to be mostly great with a few middling, but interesting, entries, the second film has a couple of great segments, a lot of average ones and a few really poor ones. Also, apart from a couple of exceptions (K, W and Z) this series of shorts is also far less disturbing and shocking than most, if not all, of the segments from the first. There's a strange conservatism to this selection of tales, which seem content to just re-tell well worn stories with rather obvious twists, even in the very best segments.

I'll do the same as for the first film and briefly go through the letters with my recommendations coloured blood red. There'll be less of them this time around!:

A: Amusing piece about a hitman going on a job, which begins like a highly stylised, perfectly designed Michael Mann or Leon The Professional-style (or even Abel Ferrara with the topless girls dancing around the luxury apartment!), polished piece of highly controlled violence to show our hitman's fantasy idea of what the job will be like and then rewinds to show the dirty, dangerous act of crawling through air vents 'for real'! He still manages to carry out the job though! Although more by luck than judgment and perhaps on the wrong target!
B: A pompous and obnoxious reporter doing a piece on environmental pollution abuses his director and camera crew then gets eaten by mutated badgers. It's OK but nothing special (although with it all being through the shaky lens of the cameraman I did like the occasional whip pans to the cooling towers, which seemed to be trying to broaden out the story a little)
C: Quite literally 'wrong headed' mob justice in a small British country town due to its protracted beheading scene taking place in Miller's Crossing-esque woods. This sadly pales in comparison to something like the White Bear episode of Black Mirror, which dealt with all these themes much more powerfully, although I did amuse myself during it by thinking that Midsomer Murders has certainly gotten quite extreme nowadays!
D: The first animated one, and it is perhaps the weirdest segment on the set, so I'm borderline on colouring it red. A man strapped to a table gets murdered by three insect covered killers, then a giant insect jumps onto the body, eats its arm and somehow resurrects the man Crow-style to get his revenge on his murderers. However "you pay for life". Weirdly Eraserhead-esque in its stream of consciousness and industrial environments, more of which to come later.
E: A goofy shipwreck comedy in which two men and one woman trapped on a desert island end up having the usual quarrels. Silly fun.
F: A weird political allegory piece (though the director in his brief commentary track calls it a 'Garden of Eden' story) in which a female Israeli soldier is stuck hanging from a parachute on a tree and gets involved in a threatening encounter with a gun-wielding Palestinian teen. What could be a kind of encounter bridging a gap between the two sides is undermined by the teen every other sentence throwing out misogynist invectives at the soldier. And the ending is muddled: why go back to the boy's body and cry over it only to be caught by another bunch of gun wielding Arab men? There wasn't much of a love story there, so is it just to show that our female soldier is more caring than the Arab boy, and that it is pointless to explain that she only 'accidentally' killed him? A deeply problematic piece.
G: This is just weird, but in a pointless rather than intriguing way. A young man staying with his grandfather finds that they are beginning to look alike. Part of the a worrying trend in this film of unconventional-looking people being the monsters (something that Xavier Gen's X in the first film severely critiqued. Later in this film see I and M for other examples of the problem, and U for another repudiation of the attitude)
H: The Bill Plympton animation! Yay! It is definitely him and a fun piece equating kissing with other battles, but its not exactly a new idea in his work, just more of the same. It does get into some impressively weird imagery at the end, and I love the shot-countershot cut from the 'viewpoint' of one protagonist to the other, so I'm giving it a borderline red grade!
I: Broadly caricatured piece about grasping relatives trying to kill off their unkillable elderly relative. There is a slightly interesting 'mythical' element here with the introduction of a life-prolonging stone that the elderly woman has ingested, but its really just about nasty people getting their comeuppance
J: This is another wonky political-religious piece from Brazil, which starts off as a kind of disturbing satire on homosexuals being abducted and forcibly re-educated with the full support of their families. Then it turns into an exorcism-torture porn film. Then the main character starts getting stigmata and his previously murdered lover returns clad in a Biblical-times loin cloth to instead brand the religious nutters with an upside down cross, before saying his goodbyes (and leaving a less painful tattoo) on his lover. This is a strange piece, to the extent that I'm not sure I understand the deeper message (That gay people are the equivalent to the second coming of Jesus? Or that only through being tortured like their Saviour can homosexuals come to some form of grace? Perhaps in a country in which religion is so predominant even if you are tortured by religious maniacs, you still only look to your faith for salvation?), but it is interesting to consider the issues of this one, that even in darkest moments (as in an abusive relationship) it might seem as if you only have the faith that is in the process of destroying you to fall back on.
K: This is the best segment in the film, a brilliantly abstract, enigmatic piece of alien invasion(?) in which a woman painting her toenails black hears a noise and goes out onto the balcony of her flat to see a strange object floating in the sky. This is full of strangely disturbing (the opposite tower block) yet beautiful imagery, often about juxtaposing fluids. It is directed by Kristina Buozyte and Bruno Samper and it is in the same vein as their previous feature Vanishing Waves, which I talked about more here. I actually like this short more than Vanishing Waves, due to the characterisation being left more enigmatic. Highly recommended. It also features a great 'alien broadcast' commentary track (similar to W in the previous set) in which an electronic whine almost drowns out a voice reading an uninteligable mantra-style poem.
L: One of the poorest and most inexplicable segments, as an African tribeleader refuses to sacrifice a man only to unleash a strange demon on the local townsfolk.
M: The message I got from this is that hairy, bearded, balding men running screaming down the street in just their underwear with their fat jiggling in slow motion are scary. The thing that this segment strangely reminded me of was that Spike Jonze music video, just with flab instead of fire. Just say no to drugs, kids!
N: And while I'm on the subject, this next segment plays out similarly to another Spike Jonze short, as yet another group of young people get their comeuppance for being annoyingly quirky! The Jonze short is better (and funnier) though!
O: This has a great premise: a courtroom drama about people being held to account for their shooting spree actions during a zombie apocalypse, when there was apparently a life-restoring drug that could have been used instead of shooting them in the head! This is the one short where the subtext actually works (that in a society where everyone has been a zombie and returned back from the dead, the living person in the dock isn't really going to get a fair and unbiased trial!), so I'm colouring this red too, but it is borderline as everything is played rather broadly!
P: Another weird piece seemingly harking back to 30s and 40s scaredy-cat criminals on the run in their striped pyjamas ending up in an enormous black cavern and meeting a strange dancing man. This is Lynchian in all of the ways that David Lynch goes absurdly weird: the long papier maché noses, the quirky stammering dialogue, the dance sequence, the repetition of lighting a match which immediately gets snuffed out. Cute and vaguely disturbing but I'll have the real Lynch stuff, please.
Q: Finally someone has the nerve to revisit the man getting his brain transplanted into an ape subgenre! Goofy, but I liked this one, and its sense of humour, so I'm giving it a pass.
R: Narratively fairly unambitious, but I loved the style and story of this one and it is another one of the best segments. It is a black and white piece in which three people in glamorous evening wear are sat in a basement playing a Russian Roulette game with each other.

Spoiler

It is context-less at first, worrying me that it was just going to be purely that, but the final moment makes this short, as the bullet through the head turns out to have been the least horrific way of death (and the game just a way to try and dole out the single bullet 'fairly') compared to whatever is trying to get into the basement from upstairs!

S: Hmmm, another short in which homosexuality, rather than adultery, is used for a zinger. Not a great one, and the split screen isn't up to the De Palma standard! It also features that always annoying twist of having a burly male figure be the threatening masked figure for the majority of the story only to pull the mask off and reveal a woman underneath. Too many smug, facile, audience button pushing 'gotcha!' moments with this one to be successful.
T: A woman being slapped around and abused on a rough sex porn shoot turns the tables on the filmmakers. Again, someone's obviously seen a music video - in this case the Samantha Morton-starring, Chris Cunningham-directed video for Sheena Is A Parasite.
U: Vincenzo Natali's short is excellent, as an average looking man is hounded through a shopping mall full of beautiful people until he is caught and 'disposed of'. Up there with X from the previous film as a blunt and damning critique of body image fascism.
V: A Skype-based webcam relationship breakdown as a girl finds out over a webchat that her boyfriend has been cheating on her on a lads holiday and then witnesses the consequences of them antagonising the local prostitutes! Rather too contrived and a bit muddled in condemning the two guys for their depravity whilst glorying in the nudity at the same time. But I did like the obviously carefully considered and choreographed break-ups in the images.
W: The funniest and most disturbing segment! It starts like a 1980s toy commercial but then gets steadily crazier as two 10 year old kids get whisked down into their fantasy world and find that their exciting fantasy battle toys are full of guys getting decapitated and tortured (Brandon Cronenberg turns up being tortured by the Soska Twins). The hunky male model He-Man hero immediately makes a run for it on their arrival, pushing the kids out of the way! Then the kids get captured and taken to the villain's palace (in impressive effects which add actors into environments that keep that sense of obviously plastic playset castles), where the worst happens to them. Strangely, since a couple of previous shorts have the obvious superficial look of David Lynch films about them, this segment really captures the sense of child abuse being recontextualised into a disturbing fantasy world. It was also fun to learn from the commentary track that the filmmakers were trying to also capture the same tone as Lucio Fulci's Conquest, the film that mashed together then in vogue Conan fantasy with Fulci's trademark gore!
X: Béatrice Dalle reteams with her Inside directors Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury for another disturbing piece about a woman appropriating someone else's child. It is a bit too simple a story but pulled off well and I amused myself by wondering if Dalle was doing a slight homage to the final section of the Dawn of Man sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey!
Y: This is borderline red coloured for me. It is an interesting piece about a girl stuck between two uncaring parents and feeling unloved by them, with her text message diary entries getting visualised in a quite extreme manner! It also ends with a quite blunt middle finger! I quite like the message of this one, but the gore and special effects rather overwhelm it. Perhaps the closest tonal comparison is that segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie in which the kid is able to manipulate his parents according to his whims.
Z: Luckily one of the best segments is saved for last for a dark little drama about pregnancy, motherhood and the problems that come from being too possessive. Despite having its own twist and gory set piece, this is (perhaps damningly for the rest of the shorts), the only segment that feels as if it is telling an actual story rather than entirely existing for the zinger moment, and that final low key scene between the 'wife' and the returned husband is fantastic.

So my favourites are: K, Z, R, W, U. But sadly I couldn't recommend this second film just to see those few good segments, unlike the first. But that is the inherent issue with anthology films, so I'm not too harsh about the variation in quality here. However I do think the entire concept is sound and I hope that the ABCs of Death keeps going as it throws up a whole bunch of new and established directors with each entry (I do like the notion mentioned in the commentary of never having the same director on the series twice. That works in order to provide space for new talent, but also perhaps once that 'one shot and you are done' mentality sinks in, perhaps the quality of the entries might rise a little too!)

Colin, if you ever make your way to the states, be sure to not show these films to high school students, or you'll get thrown in jail

Yes, that story actually inspired me to bump ABCs of Death 2 to my next order! While it is crazy that she went to jail for it I don't know how that teacher thought it could be worthwhile screening the first film to her Spanish class! I suppose the first segment "A is for Apocalypse" is actually in Spanish but most of the other segments are not! And the first film is really extreme at times.

That actually reminds me of a story from my own schooldays. At my school we all had 'bases' in different areas of the school to go to outside of classes and mine was in the Art Department. One day I came back from a long Maths lesson only to walk in on the end of the Art class in which all of the kids (my age, around 15) were watching Peter Jackson's Bad Taste! I was surprised that a teacher would have put that on at all, but trying to make sense of it I guess they wanted to show a film with practical effects?

Teachers, and not just subs, are notorious for misusing films as "rewards" for students, so these kind of stories don't surprise me. The only sub I know of who got fired from where I used to teach got booted for showing the Wire when the principal walked in mid-drug deal. It's clear from the news-story that this woman almost surely knew better and thought by showing kids a high-interest film (ie a horror movie), she'd be able to peacefully get through the day without having something lobbed at her head. Unfortunately, she couldn't dodge the judge throwing the book at her!

I was teaching in North Philadelphia about a decade ago, and a teacher was fired when, out of frustration at his students' constant use of profanity in class, showed the documentary Fuck, which - in addition to repeating "fuck" and its many derivations and competitors about 1000 times - also features various people, cartoons, dolls, etc. acting out the titular word as a verb. Needless to say, this film presentation had not gone through the usual administrative clearance channels beforehand.