Arena (1989)

In the late 1980s a subgenre of martial flick that I’ll call “fighting tournament” movies sprang into being.  They tend to follow a pretty stock formula: there’s a shady organization holding organized martial arts bouts, the hero becomes involved - usually out of the need for money to save a family dojo or because of one his friends got hurt/killed competing, the hero trains or has already been trained in an “old style”, then comes in and beats the bad guy.  You get bonus points if the hero has a buddy who’s also tough enough to beat the bad guy but gets crippled/killed due to some kind of chicanery.

“You’re exaggerating, Skippy”, I can hear you say.  “I bet you can’t name ten movies with that plot without naming any sequels or the movie we’re talking about today.”

Kickboxer, Bloodsport, Bloodfist, No Holds Barred, Lionheart, The Best of the Best, The Quest, Ring of Steel, Circle Man (aka Last Man Standing), and No Retreat, No Surrender.

“I’m not convinced,” you say. “Name five more.”

Shootfighter, American Samurai, Gladiator (the 1992 underground boxing one), Mortal Kombat, and Champions.

“Okay, but you’ll never be able to name 7 more recent ones.”

The Circuit, Redbelt, Damage, Never Back Down, Ring of Death, Ong Bak: The Thai Warrior, and Man of Thai Chi.

Now that I have that out of my system, today we’re going to talk about Arena - Yet another fighting tournament movie from the late 1980s.  This time the hook is that all the action takes place aboard an orbiting space city and that most of the fighters are special effects-laden spacemen.  Like American Samurai, this movie is near and dear to me, as it was a staple of my HBO-watching youth.  I recently got a copy of it in a “Sci-Fi Movie Marathon” set put out by Shout Factory, and I could barely wait to get it into my DVD player.

The film opens on a montage of spaceships coasting by the camera as viewers hear isolated snippets of commentary from a prizefight being broadcast in English and in alien languages.  Apparently everyone in space is watching the bout we’re about to see.  Finally the camera settles on a space station and we find ourselves in an Arena (Ding-ding!  We have a title, people!) as two bizarre aliens duke it out.  In one corner is Spinner, a weird robotic lizard that looks like Admiral Akbar cosplaying R2-D2.  His opponent is Horn, the evil champion of the Arena.  Half-minotaur, half-Robocop, and all foam rubber, Horn looks like something out of The Guyver and constantly emotes through his arms like a Power Rangers monster.

In the Arena, fights are kept competitive using a machine called the Handicapper, which can decrease the speed and strength of a physically superior combatant to ensure that bouts are won or lost on skill alone.  (We learn this because ring announcer reminds the crowd of this in the middle of the fight, presumably for the benefit of those of us joining the event already in progress.)  Horn, however, is able to bypass the Handicapper by way of stealthily delivered steroid injections from his corner men in between rounds.  Aided by his anabolic pick-me-up, Horn runs through Spinner, literally ripping his arm and taking it with him when the fight’s over.

Meanwhile, ultra-buff short-order cook Steve Armstrong is forced to intervene when an argument between his four-armed boss Shorty and an angry Arena fighter becomes physical.  Steve saves Shorty and beats up the alien fighter, but causes so much ruckus in doing so that Shorty’s restaurant is permanently shut down by the space authorities.  Shorty, played by Hamilton Camp¹ and dressed liked Frodo Baggins, isn’t too bummed about losing his business, and even brings Steve home with him after Steve’s landlord kicks him out.

Steve Armstrong, by the way, is played by Paul Satterfield, who horror fans will recognize from Creepshow 2 and soap opera fans will recognize from…just about all of them according to his IMDB.  When I looked this guy up I was not expecting to see multi-year runs on half a dozen popular TV shows in his bio.

In any event, we learn that Steve was a prizefighter on Earth and that he came to space to fight in the Arena.  However, since Earthlings are so fleshy and soft compared to robot minotaurs, human fighters simply can’t compete in the Arena. (This despite the fact that the Handicapper exists for this specific purpose and is already used in every fight.)  Now Steve just wants to go back to Earth, but while trying to get money for his space shuttle ticket, he and Shorty end up in hot water with Rogor, a crime boss who also happens to manage Horn.

With Shorty held hostage, Steve is forced to compete in an Arena bout.  Managed by the plucky female trainer Quinn², Steve must fistfight Sloth, a gigantic cricket-slug who is also easily the best special effect in the movie. We’re about 45 minutes into the movie at this point, but things are about to really pick up.  Or are they?  It’s at this point that my childhood memories of this film deviate vastly from reality.  For, you see, child Skippy believed the fight scenes in this movie to be amazing.

They are not.   

It’s kind of amazing, in some sense of the word, to see Steve Armstrong in his fight wear: A piecemeal mix of Tae Kwon Do sparring gear, shoulder pads held on by a glistening gold man-bra, and a gigantic sculpted codpiece worn atop a shiny gold speedo.  (Seriously, someone had to design that costume, someone had to make it, and the Paul Satterfield had to put it on.  There were multiple stages in that process where somebody could have stepped in.)  However, the actual fight between Armstrong and Sloth is sub-Walker, Texas Ranger quality.  It’s mostly flailing and the occasional front kick, but luckily the camera’s cutting around so much we can’t really see it anyway.  The Sloth puppet/costume isn't exceptionally mobile - at one point Steve has to grab Sloth's arm and put it around his own neck so Sloth can "choke" him.

As you might have guessed, Steve wins the day and eventually works his way to a title match with Horn.  As you might have further guessed, the bad guys sabotage the Handicapper to put Steve at a disadvantage.  And as you might have finally guessed, Steve still wins the day, proving that humans are awesome and that if you try hard enough you can punch out a 7-foot alien bull-man with a half-robotic body…even if you’re being shot with a strength-sapping laser and only hours ago you were near-fatally poisoned in a scene Skippy didn’t bother to mention.

It’s a leverage thing, mostly.  And chi.  You gotta have chi.

In any event, it’s hard for me to honestly judge this movie.  The fight scenes, this film’s selling point to me as a kid, are actually pretty bad.  However, the sheer amount of effort that obviously went into Arena is still sort of impressive.  The cast isn't an A-list roll call by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s not filled with throwaway actors.  The acting’s not terrible considering the material, but some of the plot devices are pretty laughable.  Notably, almost everyone in the movie is a special effect, since only a couple of characters are plain ol’ humans.  Granted, some off the aliens are just wearing Halloween masks and bodysuits, but you get the idea.

The only full fights you see with Armstrong are the bouts with Sloth and Horn, but clips of several others are shown in a montage, meaning that a number of elaborate monster suits were made for just a few seconds of footage.  Heck, at one point we see Armstrong sparring with a big lobster-lizard in the gym – He’s a pretty good effect that obviously took some work to pull off, but he’s around for all of 3 minutes.  I can't help but wonder if they filmed a bunch of bouts, realized they looked awful, an the pared the fighting down to a bare minimum in editing

Overall, Arena isn’t amazing, but it still might be worth a look if you’re interested in a semi-brainless sci-fi flick with some martial arts elements.  If that sounds up your alley, then you should check it out.

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1.) The voice of Gizmoduck from Duck Tales.

2.) Played by Babylon 5  stalwart and prolific voice actress Claudia Christian.

Pretty Good Movies With Pretty Bad Endings

            It turns out that writing movies isn’t easy.  As anyone who reads this blog -or, more likely, actually watches movies- knows, there are a lot of pretty bad ones out there.  A bad movie in and of itself is pretty innocuous.  After all, truly, truly bad movies are easy to spot, and most people who watch them know what they’re getting into.  Seriously, nobody in 2014 is watching The Gingerdead Man vs. Evil Bong without some personal culpability for the act.  Watching the movie is the viewer’s crime and punishment rolled into one.

More insidious, however, are movies that start out promising but just can’t clinch the final act.  These are movies that you get invested in, that you want to like, but in the end they just plain let you down.  With that in mind, here’s the first installment of Pretty Good Movies With Pretty Bad Endings.  These are two films that I can honestly say I liked 90% of, and one of them is near and dear to a buddy of mine.  Unfortunately they both have unforgivable endings and must be brought to justice. Needless to say, spoilers abound. 

The Last Broadcast (1998) – Despite being overshadowed by The Blair Witch Project, this was one of the films that sparked the “found footage” revolution in horror movies.  With a budget of reportedly just $900, filmmakers Stefan Avalos and Lance Weiler managed to create a film with a surprisingly effective and suspenseful atmosphere.  Shot in the style of a TV documentary (think “Sightings” or “Forensic Files”), The Last Broadcast details the violent deaths of a pair of public access TV hosts (played by the filmmakers) in the remote pine barrens of New Jersey.  The two men were filming an amateur hunt for the mythical Jersey Devil, only to disappear and later be found horribly mangled in a veritable ocean of blood. A local weirdo and self-styled psychic was with the men at the time of their deaths, and given his history of erratic behavior –including no small amount of it caught on film – he was eventually convicted of the crime.

The film’s narrator (remember it’s a “documentary”), in a brilliantly executed “Unsolved Mysteries” style, hints at a supernatural explanation for the killings.  Some of the early evidence seems flimsy and this adds an effective level of verisimilitude.  More than once I found myself forgetting that it was a film and arguing with it as if it were intended to be a presentation of facts.  Slowly, more compelling evidence begins to surface, and the viewer is drawn into the notion that there may be something unnatural lurking in the woods.  It’s a great premise, and it’s a lot of fun watching the mystery unravel…until the last five minutes.

            The third act of the movie constantly references a piece of video from the night of the murders that’s being restored by a media expert.  When it finally comes time to see this image…it’s the documentary host.  Suddenly the film switches to cinematic camera angles and the apparently evil narrator slap-fights the media restoration tech before suffocating her with a piece of plastic.  Then he drives back to the woods and keeps filming the documentary.

Fade to black.

The viewer is left to wonder: Is this guy a serial killer?  Is he working with some supernatural force out in the woods?  Is he the Jersey Devil?  Why the hell is he making a confessional documentary, let alone one that beats around the bush so much?  If he knows he did it, why the hell does he act surprised when it’s him in the video?  What does any of the preceding 95% of the movie actually mean now that this plot twist has come up?

 I'm sure this all sounds like I'm just poking fun at a cheap indie film, but that's just not true.  The Last Broadcast flirts with being great, but the ending is catastrophic.  The sad fact is that the climax of The Last Broadcast effectively renders the rest of the film nonsensical.  The ending of this film would be a howler if it were attached to a bad movie, but given that the rest of the movie is actually good, the boner of an ending is doubly disappointing.

The Lords of Salem (2012) – By far the best of Rob Zombie’s films, The Lords of Salem hearkens back to the weird “coven of witches” genre that briefly existed in the 1970s.  Taking all of the best queues from films like Rosemary’s Baby, and The Wicker Man, The Lords of Salem is a disturbing, uncomfortable film that benefits immensely from its surprisingly effective cinematography. It also has an oddly likable cast, anchored by Sherri Moon Zombie but also including the always-welcome Ken Foree of Dawn of the Dead fame.  The film centers on radio DJ Heidi Hawthorne (Zombie) whose life is upended by a mysterious musical album that fills her head with frightening demonic visions. The film becomes increasingly bizarre throughout, and by the end it’s not always easy to tell what’s meant to be real and what’s meant to be hallucinations and fever dreams.


            All of this works pretty well, and the movie is certainly enjoyable, although some of the plot elements are arguably a bit predictable.  The film’s greatest strength is its refusal to go for the cheap scare; there aren’t really any “jump scares” or silly tricks like that to be found.  Instead, Heidi’s world becomes progressively stranger as the evil influences pressing in upon her intensify.  There are scenes in Heidi’s apartment where there are gruesome monsters simply lurking in the background, with no musical stings or camera tricks to call attention to them, while Heidi is seemingly so entranced as to pay them no notice.  This approach feels pretty original and works nicely.

            By the time the end of the film draws near, the viewer probably has a pretty good idea of what the long and short of the climax will be…and then, even as the expected ending comes to fruition, we’re subjected to…a music video?  The viewer is aware that Heidi has become the vessel for the Antichrist, but this is expressed by way of goony montage sequence featuring Heidi writhing around on a stuffed goat, lots of shots of religious iconography being warped with Paintshop Pro effects, and just a smidge too much strobe light.

If the triumph of evil over good really does come down to a bunch of 1990s rock video tropes presided over by some rhythmically masturbating monster-popes, then good needs to redouble its efforts to make sure that never comes to pass.  The trippy ending of The Lords of Salem doesn’t ruin the movie, but it undeniably takes away from it. 

American Samurai (1992)

When I was in middle school in the mid-1990s, I got bitten pretty hard by the Highlander bug.  You know the movies and attendant television series about immortal guys fighting with swords?  I was totally into those, and I have a collection of stamped steel flea market samurai swords in my closet to prove it.  Because of Highlander, there was a period of time when I was extremely interested in anything that to do with swordfighting, from playing those Bushido Blade video games to standing out in the woods with my buddy Josh and cudgeling each other with sticks.  This interest led me to look for other movies in a similar vein, but my resources at the time were basically limited to checking the weekly TV schedule each Sunday to see if anything with a sword-fighting-ish title would be playing on HBO.

It was this process that led me to today’s movie, the 1992 martial arts offering American Samurai.  It’s directed by the ever-prolific Sam Firstenberg, who also gifted the world of cinema with the American Ninja and Cyborg Cop franchises and directed the celebrated opus Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo.  The titular American samurai is played by martial artist David Bradley, whose other credits include three of the American Ninja movies (though weirdly not the ones directed by Firstenber) and an episode of Murder, She Wrote.  A bit of disclosure here: I'm reviewing the 2005 Warner Bros. DVD release of the film, which is cropped like crazy to the point that it's functionally edited for violence despite carrying an R rating.

The setup of the movie is as simple as it is nonsensical: A private plane carrying a rich family crashes in the mountains of Japan.  Everyone on board is killed except for baby Drew, who is found and rescued by Tatsuya Sanga, modern Japanese swordsman and easy-going guy.  Rather than, say, contacting the proper authorities and reconnecting the boy with his surviving family overseas, Sanga adopts Drew as his own and trains him to be a samurai warrior.  Drew progresses quickly with the help of a training montage and eventually surpasses Sanga’s own son Kenjiro in skill.  Kenjiro is bitterly envious of Drew, and when their father passes on the family katana to Drew instead of him, Kenjiro vows revenge.

Several years later we find Drew living in the United States as a reporter, while the sinister Kenjiro has gone on to become the Chairman of Iron Chef America a dangerous yakuza assassin.* Kenjiro sends goons to Drew’s apartment to steal back the family sword.  Drew beats up several members of the gang but is eventually shot, losing the sword and punishing viewers with an extended, weirdly shot dream sequence.  After finding his samurai will to survive in dreamland, Drew sticks his fingers into his own abdomen and pulls out the bullet, after which he is somehow just fine.  Because the presence of the slug itself is what’s harmful about being shot, apparently.

Shortly thereafter, we find Drew back on his feet and on his way to Turkey to investigate a murder related to the drug trade.  (This is the one and only time it is ever salient to the plot that he’s a reporter.)  Drew is convinced that only Kenjiro could have committed the murder, as the victim was apparently killed with special technique known only to the Sanga line of swordsmen.  Alongside Drew is photographer Janet Ward, with whom he bickers unconvincingly for ten minutes of screen time before they shag in the least titillating love scene ever filmed this side of National Geographic.  In all honesty, if you like boobless, buttless sex scenes using obvious body doubles, dubbed voices, and creepy art-house lighting, American Samurai is your kink.  It may also be worth noting that this pallid humping comes immediately after Drew has a waking nightmare and Janet finds him swinging a sword in an empty hotel room while wearing nothing but tiny red man-panties.

The two eventually follow Kenjiro’s trail to a nightclub connected to a known drug trafficker.  While subtly looking for clues about Kenjiro by directly asking every shady-looking guy in the bar if they known his brother by name, Drew finds himself drawn into a bar brawl between the local talent and a big beardy guy dressed as a cowboy.  Drew is shot with a taser during the struggle and he and Janet are captured by the bad guys.  Drew awakens chained up in an old-timey dungeon, with Kenjiro waiting to inform him that Janet will be killed if Drew doesn’t take part in a Tukish swordfighting tournament filled with pirates and guys dressed like Conan the Barbarian.

At this point I feel like I should point out that I’m not skimming over the plot in this review, it’s just that this movie has all the coherence and structure of a fever dream.  I don’t know for sure if the final product represents the film as it was originally intended or if a bunch of plot elements somehow ended up on the cutting room floor, but American Samurai is not overly concerned with forming an intricate narrative.  Or any narrative.  Instead, it wants desperately to get to the fight scenes as fast as possible – Which is fair enough, because they’re the only good parts.

Drew reluctantly agrees to fight in the tournament, which is apparently being held so that the super rich can bet on mortal combat.  There’s a million dollar prize up for grabs to the winner, but the price of defeat is death or dismemberment.  A video game roster of costumed combatants has shown up, including the aforementioned barbarian and pirate, some kung fu guys, a Viking,  and (shock of shocks), the bowie-knife wielding cowboy from the bar.  The cowboy introduces himself as Ed Harrison, a down-on-his-luck guy who views the tournament as his last shot at the good life.  He and Drew share a long moment as they both realize that Ed is going to fill the “good guy’s pal who gets killed by the bad guy” role in this picture.

I actually don’t want to say too much about the fight scenes, as they’re really what the movie exists for.  The viewer gets to see pretty much all of the tournament fights and many of them are pretty interesting, although honestly the ones without the main characters are arguably the best.  There’s a fight between a couple of kung fu-ish guys that’s quite a bit of  fun, as well as a battle between the oft-mentioned Conan clone and a guy dressed like an American gladiator that scratches the itch pretty well too. 

Drew’s fights are odd because, since he’s the good guy, he doesn’t want to kill anybody.  This means he’s doing a whole of ninja-kicking bad guys while they’re trying to run him through with halberds and whatnot.  In one fight he turns his sword around and fights with the spine of the blade (kind of like that old samurai anime Rurouni Kenshin), which is pretty cool, but I wish we got to see more swordplay out of him.  He also constantly gets ghostly, Obi-wan Kenobi advice from the disembodied voice of his dad.  Well, not really advice, just his dad’s voice constantly telling how bad-ass samurai are, but I think we’re meant to take it as advice.

The tournament sequence, which takes up around 60% of the movie, is for some reason divided up into days that the viewer is made aware of through subtitles at the bottom of the screen.  I guess this is meant to give us some sense of verisimilitude – Nobody would physically be able to handle half a dozen death duels in one day while still putting on a show for the crowd – but since the editing is so bad that you can see guys who got disemboweled earlier in tournament walking around in the locker room later it all becomes kind of a moot point.

At the end, of course, Kenjiro and Drew must duel to the death.  Again, it’s hard to escape the video game vibe here.  Both guys are dressed in opposite color outfits like Ryu and Ken from Streefighter and, dun-dun-dun, Kenjiro is evilly using the sacred family sword against his own brother.  Before they begin, Kenjiro announces that once he’s killed Drew, he’s going to go back to Japan and kill their dad too.  Since the dad had only appeared as a magic ghost voice since ten minutes into the movie, I’d assumed he was dead already.  Silly me.

Unfortunately, the climatic battle is probably the worst fight scene in the movie.  A number of sequences consist of one combatant flailing away at a disembodied sword blade poking in from off-screen, and in general it’s just shot so badly that it’s hard to tell what’s going on.  There’s even some cropped stock footage from a previous fight.  In the end Drew pacifist spares his brother’s life by hacking gigantic gashes out of both of his ankles and leaving him to wallow in a pool of his own blood.  Drew reclaims the family sword, then magnanimously gives Kenjiro his own katana so that the wicked brother can commit seppuku and reclaim his samurai honor.  Of course, once Drew has his back turned Kenjiro gets other ideas.  Once Drew is approximately 15 yards away, Kenjiro lawn-darts a full-sized katana at him with an angry villain yell, only have Drew knocked it back at him (from 15 yards away, I must repeat) such that it impales him perfectly through the center of the chest.

The end.

What can I say about American Samurai?  It’s bad.  I remember being extremely impressed with this movie when I saw it on cable as a 12 year-old, but it just doesn’t hold up well at all.  If I’m honest, I also had it mixed up pretty badly in my mind with Circle of Steel, a 1994 movie with more or less the same plot.  I couldn’t in good conscience recommend it to anyone, but for the curious, there’s an edited version of it on Youtube that only has the fight scenes.  I still wouldn’t recommend it, but what you do when I’m not looking is your business.

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*  But seriously, that actor went on to become the Chairman of Iron Chef America.

Curse of Chucky (2013)

Child’s Play was, as much as any horror movie, a pretty big deal back in 1988.  Based around the chilling concept of the soul of a serial killer inhabiting the body of a large “Good Guy” doll (closely resembling the then-popular “My Buddy” and “Kid Sister” line of toys), Child’s Play received generally good reviews and ended up making over $44 million worldwide – nearly five times its budget.  Two more sequels appeared in 1990 and 1991 to diminishing returns and less favorable reviews before going on to play on the USA Network every weekend for the next fifteen years.¹  After a long hiatus, the franchise re-emerged in 1998 with a more comedic sequel¸ Bride of Chucky, that rode the wave of popular self-aware horror/comedy films to a $50 million box office.  Another long break followed and then in 2004 came Seed of Chucky, a full-blown dark comedy.

I won’t lie – I pretty much wrote this franchise off when it started switching to comedy.  I’ve never made it all the way through Bride and I’ve not seen Seed at all.  You may well imagine the eye-rolling on my part when I heard that yet another sequel, this time entitled Curse of Chucky was headed straight to DVD.  Who wants another dumb, comedic Chucky movie anyway?  But then a strange thing happened – I started reading interviews with series creator and writer Don Mancini in which he talked about his desire to return to the roots of the series with a serious, frightening vision of the character.  My interest was piqued.

Curse of Chucky begins with a simple set-up: A paraplegic woman named Nica and her mother Sarah live alone in a huge, isolated house.  One day a package containing a Good Guy doll is delivered to Sarah.  By the next morning Sarah is dead, the victim of what appears to be a gruesome accident.  Soon Nica’s sister Barb and her largely dysfunctional family descend on the house to settle Sarah’s affairs. It soon becomes apparent that Barb is up to no good, hoping to talk Nica into selling her share of the estate and pressuring her to move into a supported living facility.  In the meantime Sarah’s daughter Alice has latched onto the Good Guy –Chucky, of course - which is still floating around in the house.  As the night goes on, Chucky begins killing his way through the household as the truth behind his vendetta against this particular family is slowly revealed.

I don’t want to talk too extensively about the plot here, because there are actually some fun twists that I wouldn’t want to spoil.  I’ll say that the kills are generally well done, if not extraordinarily inventive.  The exception to that is a dinner sequence at the beginning of the film in which Chucky has managed to spike just a single bowl of chili out of a table setting of six with rat poison. That scene, with its Russian roulette feel, is a lot of fun.  I also like the choice to have a wheelchair-bound protagonist, as it adds an extra element of physical danger from Chucky.  After all, an adult who is actually aware of Chucky should basically be able to kick a field goal with him and be done with it.  By having Nica in a wheelchair, it makes Chucky nearly her physical equal and really ups the tension of their encounters.

Special effects-wise, there’s a lot more puppet and prosthetic work than I’ve come to expect out of a modern film and it all looks great.  Even during the scenes in which Chucky is CGI, he moves right – which is to say “wrong” I suppose, because puppet Chucky has always had a distinctive gait.  These effects look far better than I would’ve expected from a straight-to-video movie.  There’s perhaps not as much gore as I would’ve expected, but I guess the Child’s Play movies have never focused too much on actual blood and guts.  I also admire the decision to play it slow with revealing Chucky – sure, the audience knows what’s up, but you don’t see Chucky speak in his own voice or move full-body on camera until pretty deep into the film.  It’s especially easy to rush the pacing in horror sequels, but they did a good job here.  When you finally see Chucky speak to Alice in Brad Dourif’s voice for the first time it’ll give you the willies, even though there’s been a quarter century of Chucky films before this.

Acting-wise…this is a horror movie.  Brad Dourif, of course, returns as the iconic voice of Chucky and is great as always.  That said, I watched Child’s Play 2 scant hours before watching this one and his voice has noticeably changed through the years.  It’s unavoidable, but you can certainly hear it.  Nica is played competently by Brad Dourif’s daughter Fiona.  Nica's paraplegia gives her a unique feel for a horror heroine, but unfortunately she doesn’t get very much character development through most of the film.  Summer Howell portrays Alice, the young child, and she does a good job, though the director has made what I feel is the right choice by largely keeping Alice off-camera throughout the film’s final act.  Pretty much every other character comes across as a terrible douche, so it’s hard to judge the actors on their performances there. 

If this movie has a serious flaw, it’s the ending…or rather, the endings.  It feels a little like Mancini had a “maybe” pile of several potential endings and then decided “what the hell, I’ll just use them all.”  Pretty much any one of them would’ve been okay, but taken together they actually kind of don’t make sense, especially the (otherwise fun) after-the-credits scene.

The ending notwithstanding, Curse of Chucky is not only one of the better Child’s Play films, it’s one of the better slasher movies to come out in the last decade.  It’s refreshing that they opted to do a true sequel instead of a reboot like so many other venerated horror franchises and that they didn’t try to reinvent the wheel by adding tons of extra mythology to the character.  It’s a Child’s Play movie –a recognizable, good Child’s Play movie- that feels right at home with the first three films in the series.  While Curse of Chucky may not be groundbreaking, it’s an unexpected return to form for a series I’d given up for dead.  It was a lot of fun and I recommend checking it out.

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1.) Well, maybe not, but it sure seemed like it.

Quickies: Three Part 3s Worth Checking Out (And Two Part 2s Worth Avoiding)

Three Part Threes Worth Checking Out

Halloween III: Season of the Witch – This movie has enjoyed something of a rehabilitation among fans in recent years.  The “proud nail” of the Halloween franchise, Halloween III was, as everyone knows by now, the beginning of an abortive attempt to shift the series away from the Michael Myers character.  The plan was to establish an anthology series, releasing a movie each year under the Halloween title, with each film set on Halloween but otherwise unrelated to the other films in the series.

The result is a bizarre but entertaining film that centers on a plot by modern druids to use a stolen piece of Stonehenge to send out a magical television commercial that will cause any children wearing a certain brand of magic Halloween masks to dissolve into a writhing pile of snakes.  Also there’s robots.  The movie makes about as much sense as tits on a cactus, but it also accomplishes a surprisingly creepy mood and has better special effects than you’d expect.  Also, who doesn’t like Tom Atkins? Just beware of the extended shot of his naked ass halfway through the film.

A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors – Nightmare on Elm Street was a hugely successful and influential horror film that got a rather…uneven, shall we say, follow-up.  With Dream Warriors Freddy finally got the sequel he deserves.  This film represents the best combination elements from the Nightmare franchise – Freddy’s snarky but has not yet descended into comedic parody, the dream elements are wildly imaginative, and the special effects are inventive and fantastic.  Heather Langenkamp returns as an adult Nancy Thompson, now trying to help a group of teens in a mental hospital defend themselves from Freddy using lucid dreaming techniques.  It’s a fun idea, especially when a D&D fan faces off with Freddy using his wizard alter ego.

Also returning from the original film is John Saxon as Nancy’s father Lt. Thompson.  He’s not around quite as much as I’d like, but his Harryhausen-inspired battle with Freddy Kruger’s razor-gloved skeleton towards the end of the movie is great.  (Come to think of it, if Freddy’s glove was in the furnace of Nancy’s house in the first movie, how is it with his skeleton at the end of this movie?)  I've heard stories that this film's original treatment was a pretty dark and serious affair centered around teen suicide. I'd love to see how that movie would have turned out, but what we got instead is still a lot of fun.

Exorcist III – The Exorcist was one of the best horror films of all time.  I know, I know, that gets said often, but only because it’s true.  On the other hand, Exorcist II was 118 minutes of crap.  I think it’s pretty fair to say that because of the enormous difference in quality between the first two films, Exorcist III is widely overlooked.  Based on the novel Legion by William Peter Blatty, Exorcist III is the tale of a priest and a cop trying to capture the person responsible for a series of murders that are eerily similar to those committed by a long-dead killer.

This movie is weirdly shot and oddly paced at times, but it’s probably the second best of the five Exorcist movies.  I don’t want to give too much away – There are some pretty satisfying twists and I feel like this movie is little-viewed enough that I could actually spoil it for someone.  While it never aspires to the heights of the original, Exorcist III is certainly worth a couple of hours of your time.

Two Part Twos Worth Avoiding

Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh – Remember how Candyman was a mournful, dreamlike tale exploring the way people rationalize the chaos and violence of urban life through the social construction of modern legends while also calling to mind the effects of the de facto segregation of modern society through the splintering of cities into rich and poor neighborhoods?  Yeah, well, Candyman 2 is about Tony Todd killing people at Mardi Gras.  Inexplicably set in New Orleans despite the original film’s narrative being tied directly to the socioeconomic disparities of inner Chicago, Candyman 2 is no longer a ghostly morality tale but instead is just another slasher flick. 

This film’s greatest sin is that of over-explanation.  There’s a backstory to the Candyman in the original movie, but like any good urban legend it’s lacking any names and is by turns weirdly specific and frustratingly fuzzy in its details.  In this movie it’s all spelled out for us.  Daniel Robitaille was a black guy who knocked up a white lady back when you got lynched for that sort of thing; he promptly got lynched for that sort of thing, and then – blammo! – his soul gets stuck in a magic mirror and now he’s the Candyman.  Is that fun?  Are you using your imagination to fill in the blanks and becoming more attached to the story because of it?  No?  Didn’t think so.

Pumpkinhead II: Blood Wings – The first Pumpkinhead is one of my favorite horror movies and I’ve talked about it at length in the past.  Featuring amazing special effects work by Stan Winston and possessing a bit more intelligence than the average horror film of the time, I would say that Pumpkinhead is a definite much-watch for fans of the genre.  Pumpkinhead II, on the other hand, goes out of its way to cater to all the stock horror tropes, even going so far as to rewrite the history of the titular monster to do so.  Whereas in the first film Pumkpinhead was literally a demon – the living embodiment of vengeance and all the sinister glee associated with it – in this movie he’ a disfigured boy who was killed by cruel teenagers only to later be resurrected after his mother is murdered.  So basically in this movie Pumpkinhead is…Jason?

Boobs, bad gore effects, and worse acting abound.  Directed by Jeff Burr, who also helmed several other horror movies of the era such as Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, and Puppet Master 4 & 5 – all of which are alright but forgettable – Pumpkinhead II feels like a mad-lib.  It feels as though the script was written with a placeholder where the monster’s name should be and then Pumpkinhead was pulled in at the last minute in order to attach the movie to an existing franchise.  Watching this one isn’t torturous, but you won’t miss anything by skipping it either. 

Quickies: Two Fun Part Twos (And Three Crappy Part Threes)

Two Fun Part Twos

Zombi 2 – Maybe, just maybe, this one’s a little bit of a cheat, as it’s really only a pseudo-sequel to the Italian cut of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.  Still, Zombi 2 is not only one of the best (pseudo-) sequels out there, but it may well be the definitive Italian zombie flick.  The plot, about a woman and a journalist traveling to a cursed island in search of her missing father, might not be especially memorable, but the movie’s special effects and menacing atmosphere certainly make it worth a look.

Italian horror movies of this era were often forced by budget constraints to employ painfully primitive special effects.  There’s certainly nothing fancy about the effects work in Zombi 2, but in this case it’s probably to the movie’s benefit.  The zombies, caked as they are in layer upon layer of makeup, have a dirty, moldy look that’s worlds apart from the comic book-colored ghouls of Dawn of the Dead.  Every single special effect in this film looks grotesque and genuinely unpleasant; I really can’t think of any other films from the same time period that were quite so willing to show the audience such extended and explicit scenes of zombie violence.  The film’s famous eye-gouging sequence, for example, is honestly not easy to watch.

Also a zombie wrestles as shark.  What else do you need?

House II: The Second Story – The first House was a pretty weird film – part slapstick horror-comedy, part meditation on the psychological toll of war.  It was also a hell of a fun movie.  House II, which has little to do plot-wise with the first movie save for the title, plays up the comedy even more.  The plot is fairly unique – Jesse and his girlfriend move into an old house with a pair of their friends, only to find passages to alternate dimensions hidden in the walls.  Their explorations lead to the reanimation of Jesse’s zombified cowboy ancestor, as well as Slim, an evil cowboy zombie who they must fight for control of a magical crystal skull.  Along the way they must also fight their way through caveman times and then rescue a human sacrifice victim from a Mayan temple with the help of an adventurer electrician.

This movie inexplicably scared the crap out of me as a kid.  Slim, with his gaunt, rotten frame accentuated by his ridiculously red hair, somehow got under my skin.  As an adult I can see it for the comedy it is, albeit comedy with a great Henry Manfredini horror soundtrack.

Three Crappy Part Threes

The Howling III: The Marsupials – The first Howling was one of the best werewolf films of all time and combined groundbreaking special effects with a genuinely interesting story.  The Howling 2 had…um…lots of nudity.  The Howling III, however, is an unmitigated turd of a film.  Although the idea of were-thylacines running amok in Australia is admittedly a little bit cool, this movie has laughable special effects and a plot that somehow manages to be simultaneously bizarre and predictable.  That notwithstanding, I can remember defending this movie to my brother as a teenager, largely because it portrayed the werewolves in a sympathetic light and I was, at the time, really into that old Werewolf: The Apocalypse RPG.

To its credit, it’s not as bad as the four sequels that came after it (Howling IV-VI and The Howling Reborn), but that’s like saying that one kick in the groin is more pleasant than another. 

Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth – Following hot on the heels of the groundbreaking Hellraiser and the significantly less groundbreaking but still fairly enjoyable Hellbound: Hellraiser II, Hellraiser III showed definitively that the franchise had succumbed that ravenous plague of the horror genre: infinite sequelitis.  Whereas the previous films in the series offered at least some meditation on humanity’s dark side and the sinister symbiosis of pain and pleasure, Hellraiser III can be summed up as follows: Pinhead jumps out of a haunted statue then tries to conquer the world. 

Gone are all of the other iconic Cenobites like Chatterer and Butterball from the first two movies – they were all killed off at the end of part two.  Instead we get Camera Head Guy, CD Face Dude, and Firebreathing Barbed Wire Man.  Even Pinhead says on camera that the new Cenobites suck…so I guess this movie gets a few points for honesty.

Paranormal Activity 3 – I have in past spoken of Paranormal Activity as a great movie that should never ever have a sequel.  Well, it turns out that Paranormal Activity 2 was alright, even if it was more or less just a rehashing of the first flick’s scares with a silly “hold the camera while I fight the monster” finale. Paranormal Activity 3 on the other hand is a little harder to describe.  I’m of a mind that prequels pretty much always suck, but to be fair the first 90% of the movie is actually pretty alright.  It’s got a kind of The Entity vibe to it and it does a pretty good job of conveying the paradoxical childhood feeling that your room is both the safest and most dangerous place of all.  Overall it’s solid, just kinda’ predictable.

Then we get to the climax.  The best part of the first movie was that neither the characters nor the viewer ever knew exactly what was up.  We have no idea what the motivation of the entity is, or even what the entity is.  Then Paranormal Activity 3 shows up and tells us in no uncertain terms that, yup, it’s cult stuff.  Also, things happen in this movie that undoubtedly would have been mentioned in the previous films had they been established in the fiction at the time those films were made, and that makes this movie that  much harder to swallow.  Spoiler Alert: If a ghost breaks your stepdad in half and sticks his head up his own butt, then 15 years later your boyfriend is picking a fight with that same ghost, tell him about your stepdad.  

The Giant Claw (1957)

The forties, fifties, and sixties spawned something of a pantheon of schlock movie producers, men whose names are still spoken of in hushed tones even today: Samuel Z. Arkoff, Henry Saperstein, K. Gordon Murray.  Also standing astride that B-movie Olympus is "Jungle Sam" Katzman, whose enormous body of work includes everything from Mark of the Gorilla to the Elvis Presley flick Harum Scarum.¹.  Katzman is well-known for producing a number of very influential sci-fi flicks in the 1950s, including a pair of Ray Harryhausen classics, It Came From Beneath the Sea and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers.  Still, you can't have your hands in that many films without leaving your fingerprints on a few steamers, and today we're going to talk about one of them: The Giant Claw.

If you've ever seen the (much better) film Rodan, you've pretty much seen the The Giant Claw.  Both  films structure their action around hazy sightings, close calls, and finally destructive attacks by an impossibly huge avian monster.  In both cases the creatures are too fast to be tracked by aircraft and in any event are nearly impervious to conventional weapons.  I'm not making any claims that The Giant Claw was influenced by Rodan, but I will point out that Rodan debuted in Japan a year before The Giant Claw and in fact came out in the U.S. just a couple of months before it in 1957.  Just sayin...

In any event, The Giant Claw centers on ace test pilot Mitch McAffee, who's the first man to encounter the bird during a training flight.  Initially unable to convince his bosses in the military that he actually saw something and isn't just losing his mind, it's McAffee who eventually figures out the bird's flight pattern and allows the armed forces to intercept the beast.  You see, McAffee is able to deduce that the bird is flying in an enormous spiral pattern...despite the fact that all of its attacks, as shown on an on-screen map, take place in a line moving directly southeast. ²



Now that they can predict the bird's course, the air force sends a flight of jets to engage the monster.  This marks the first time in the film that the audience really gets to see the bird...and it's a noodly mass of feather dusters and flaring nostrils topped off by a huge white mohawk.  As anyone who watches these sorts of movies no doubt expects, conventional weapons are "worse than useless" against the bird.  In the best sequence in the movie, the bird swats the aircraft out of the sky and then devours the pilots as they try to parachute to safety.

We soon find out that the vulture-like beast is a space monster.  It's nearly invulnerable because it can project an anti-matter force field for reasons that are only half-explained.  In any event, worldwide air traffic is completely grounded in the hopes of cutting off the bird's food supply.  Unfortunately, this only provokes the monster into attacking targets on the ground, gulping down cows like popcorn and laying waste to cities in its quest for food.  Eventually McAffee, who's the only character in this movie that actually does anything, tracks the bird to an enormous nest in the forest.  He discovers the beast roosting on a huge egg, which he immediately shatters with rifle fire, provoking a series of terrible reprisals.

Finally, McAffe - who at this point is apparently also the smartest theoretical physicist in the world - single-handedly builds a ray gun that fires muonic atoms.  In the movie world, this is somehow the only thing against which space birds are vulnerable.  The weapon is mounted onto a B-52 and stock footage ensues as the heroes rush to destroy the bird as it lays waste to New York City...but also specific buildings from L.A. and Washington D.C. because they had some footage from War of the Worlds and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers laying around.  With its force field disrupted by the muonic ray, the bird is anticlimactically felled by about three bottle rockets and the film very abruptly ends.

Although it's pretty infamous these days, The Giant Claw is pretty much par for the course in terms of cheap 1950s monster flicks in terms of its mad-lib of a plot and ultra-cheesy "science".  Although it's honestly not that much worse than a lot of other flicks from the era, The Giant Claw has gained prominence in the internet zeitgeist in the last few years thanks in no small part to its inclusion in the 2009 edition of James Rolfe's extremely popular Monster Madness series of Halloween film reviews.  If nothing else, it's known for its utterly laughable monster design, which looks like a cross between Jimmy Durante and one of those old Limber Louie marionettes  Legend has it that at one point in the film's production the creature was intended to be a stop-motion effect, but budget issues forced the use of a puppet monster that looks, to borrow a phrase from Chaucer, totally flippin' ridonculous. 

Make no mistake, The Giant Claw is a bad movie.  I'm just arguing that it's not as -uniquely- bad as some folks would have you believe.  I really can't recommend going out of your way to see it, especially since the only licensed DVD version of it available in the U.S. is part of a relatively expensive Sam Katzman boxed set.  More than anything else The Giant Claw is just kind of boring; just another paint-by-numbers 1950 sci-fi flick.  If you're a huge fan of giant monster movies then maybe The Giant Claw is worth a look, but there are a lot better "death from the skies" flicks out there.  For your average Joe looking to scratch that specific itch, I'd recommend either Rodan or Q, the Winged Serpent.

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1.) Mark of the Gorilla was a Jungle Jim film, one of several Katzman worked on and which were based on a popular adventure comic strip. It was due to his early work on these sorts of films that he came to be called "Jungle Sam".
2.) It's the McAffee character who first refers to the monster as "a flying battleship", a phrase that will be uttered at least a dozen more times throughout the film and which has now become something of an internet meme.

Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)

Over the years there have been a number of Christmas-themed horror films.  From Bob Clark’s proto-slasher film Black Christmas in 1974 to the surprisingly funny Santa’s Slay in 2005, Christmas horror is a subgenre with a long – but not particularly illustrious – history.  Still, if you bring up Christmas slasher flicks in casual conversation most people’s minds immediately jump to 1985’s controversial cult classic Silent Night, Deadly Night.

Silent Night, Deadly Night is one of those movies that a lot of people have heard about but a relatively small number have actually seen.  Yeah, it’s one of those movies.  It’s famous (to use that term in the loosest possible sense) due the controversy surrounding it, while the actual film is really fairly obscure.  As one might imagine, a film in 1984 depicting a guy in a Santa suit killing people really riled up a number of parent’s groups.  Even then, sometimes the outrage about this movie tends to be overstated – many parents, understanding that any children young enough to be disturbed by the film would also never actually see it, were instead angry about the placement of commercials for the movie on television.  Of course, you also had the good ol’ “War on Christmas” brigade waiting to leap out and be angry, but if they hadn’t had this movie to be angry about they’d have found something else to complain about.  Ultimately the film only lasted about two weeks in theaters, supposedly as a result of the public outcry.

            Before we begin, I’d like to point out that the version of the film I’m reviewing today is the 2003 Anchor Bay unrated DVD release.  It’s unfortunately a two-sided disc (the second side holds one of the film’s four sequels), but it does have some deleted scenes that didn’t make it into the theatrical cut of the film.  The extra scenes are from a badly degraded source, but it’s nice to have them included.

            The film opens on Christmas Eve 1971 as young Billy, his baby brother Ricky, and their parents have set off to visit their ailing grandpa in a mental institution.  Anyone who went against my advice and watched Enter the Ninja will recognize Will Hare, the actor playing catatonic grandpa, from his appearance in that film as Dollars the street merchant.  I like to think that it’s the same character in both movies – That Dollars from Enter the Ninja was so traumatized by the nonsensical insanity of that film that he ended up institutionalized back in the States.

            In any event, the instant Billy’s parents leave him alone with crazy ol’ gramps, the old man suddenly snaps out of his trance just long enough to spout off some crazy gobbledygook about Santa Claus killing people.  Needless to say, Billy's little mind is blown and he spends the drive home fretting to his parents about Santa coming to kill him.  It just so happens that his parents encounter a stranded motorist in a Santa suit on a remote back road, so they pull over to help him – and to defuse Billy’s fears by letting him “meet” Santa.  Unfortunately, this Santa Claus is actually a psychopath who only moments ago blew away a gas station attendant over $31 during a robbery.  Santa shoots Billy’s dad, then inexplicably tries to rape his mom before cutting her throat.

            Billy and Ricky end up in a church orphanage in a sequence that lasts far too long.  Billy’s unable to put his trauma behind him and has violent outbursts every single Christmas.  His mental problems are exacerbated by the harsh Mother Superior, who delivers brutal beatings to anyone who’s “naughty” under her care.  (The tottering old woman even somehow manages to deliver a beating to a pair of nearly-grown teens she catches humping.)  A sympathetic nun named Sister Margaret tries to provide him with a gentle upbringing, but is constantly at odds with the authoritarian Mother Superior.  The entire orphanage sequence takes up way too much of the film, though it’s highlighted by an uproarious sequence where Billy lays out a costumed Santa with a Hail Mary haymaker.

Billy ends up outwardly fairly normal, but he’s internalized bizarre ideas about what’s naughty and what’s nice.  “Punishment is absolute, punishment is necessary, and punishment is good,” has been the Mother Superior’s creed, and this idea is always lurking on the periphery of Billy’s psyche, even after he’s grown up into a hulking teen played by Robert Brian Wilson in his lone theatrical role.  Although he still apparently lives at the orphanage, Billy finds a community job working at a local toy store.  Everything’s going pretty well for him (as the audience sees during a happy montage set to the incongruously cheerful song “The Warm Side of the Door” by Morgan Ames), but then Christmas time rolls around again.  The upcoming holiday, combined with his guilt surrounding his burgeoning attraction to his coworker Pamela, starts bringing Billy’s neuroses to the fore once again.

When Billy is forced to play the role of Santa Claus at the toy store on Christmas Eve, his mental state is pushed to the absolute limit.  Playing Santa is bad enough, but the ensuing naughtiness of the office Christmas party manages to shove him over the edge of insanity. (Hasn’t that happened to everyone?)  When he walks in on his supervisor Randy trying to force himself on Pamela in the stockroom, Billy totally loses his shit and strangles Randy to death with a string of Christmas lights.  He then decides that she too was naughty and eviscerates her with a box cutter.

So begins about 40 minutes of Billy wandering the streets in his Santa suit bellowing “naughty” and dispatching people in the usual slasher movie ways.  The most creative sequence in the film, and one which was apparently heavily edited in the theatrical cut, involves Billy impaling a woman on the antlers of a deer’s head hanging on a wall.  Horror fans will recognize the antler victim as Linnea Quigley from such films as Return of the Living Dead, Pumkinhead II, and The Guyver.  Otherwise it’s a lot of hammer-to-the-face, arrow-in-the-back, axe-to-the-neck 1980s horror staples.  It’s not bad, but they didn’t run with the Christmas theme as much as they could’ve.

Silent Night, Deadly Night is one of those odd early-ish slasher movies that tries to take itself super seriously.  I’m not opposed to that per se, but this movie spends a lot of time early on trying to establish Billy’s character only to immediately have him devolve into more or less your standard slasher villain. Also, making a good “serious” horror movie requires a fair amount of finesse that this movie just doesn’t have.  The ultra-dramatic music and camera work at the ending are textbook examples of unintentional humor.  Also, the violence in this movie is pretty lingering and uncomfortable at times.  That’s kind of a staple of early slasher flicks, but it doesn’t work especially well here given the ludicrous subject matter.  I’m not saying that this movie should’ve been a comedy or anything, but I think it might have been more enjoyable to watch if hadn’t tried quite so hard to be a brooding, serious film. 

I’d also be curious to know the details of the filming schedule for this movie.  See, even though it’s set at Christmas, there’s not much snow to be seen.  In fact, in some sequences you can see that snow has been laid out in a fairly small area while yards and trees in the background are completely clear.  It’s kind of an odd thing to note, but the unseasonal weather is something that always sticks out to me about this movie.  The other special effects are pretty simple as well, though the antler murder is done nicely.  For a sense of perspective, this movie came out the same year as Friday the 13^th: The Final Chapter, which has vastly better visuals (and, to be fair, twice the budget).

            Silent Night, Deadly Night isn’t an easy movie to judge.  It doesn’t approach the quality of genre classics like Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street, but it’s also head and shoulders above films such as Happy Birthday to Me or Sleepaway Camp.  Like so many horror movies, this is kind of a case of personal taste.  I kind of like it, but if someone were to walk up to me on the street and ask me to recommend a good Christmas horror film (Hey, it could happen.) I’d probably recommend Santa’s Slay over Silent Night, Deadly Night, as the former is just plain more fun to watch.  Silent Night, Deadly Night is kind of interesting for the history behind it and it’s certainly not unwatchably bad…but it’s not necessarily easy to recommend either.  Also, a remake of this flick, with the abbreviated title Silent Night, came out at the end of November…so there’s that.

           As I alluded to in an earlier post, most of the movie reviews I’d planned for December are instead getting the podcast treatment over at Joe’s Awesome and Tommy Hates Everything.  The first two episodes of the 2012 Christmas special are already up, so go check it out.

Santaclysm!

Last year I got the chance to take part in a really awesome Christmas episode of Joe's Awesome and Tommy Hates Everything.  That particular Christmas episode is currently unavailable for download, but happily brand spanking new Christmas episode just went up!  It's first part of a fairly long special JATHE presentation we're calling "Santaclysm" and it deals with various offbeat film incarnations of Santa Claus through the decades. The first episode, wherein we discuss the portrayal of Santa in a couple of beloevd Rankin-Bass specials, was a ton of fun to tape.  Plus I got upgraded from regular guest to temporary guest host (kind of) for this one.  Check it out!

On a semi-related note, Tommy can apparently read my mind, because the next three episodes of Santaclysm just happen to be the exact three movies I had planned to review for my holiday festivities for the blog.  That said, I've been forced to change up my plans a bit.  I had intended to kind of avoid the most obvious Christmas horror movies this year, but my hand has been forced...so screw it.  Coming up soon will be my review of the grand-daddy of all Christmas horror flicks, that oft-maligned but rarely viewed cult classic Silent Night, Deadly Night.  Please come back and join me for it!

Halloween Horror Countdown #1: The Evil Dead (1981)

Halloween is nigh.  We've talked about a lot of great horror movies this month, and I hope you've had fun along the way. We've come to the end of our list and now there's only one movie left.  It's a film that exemplifies what a horror flick should be.  It was made for practically nothing by a group of buddies who just wanted to make a scary movie, not concocted by an unholy mishmash of focus groups and mad-libs like so many recent flicks..  Shot in an isolated Tennessee cabin using jury-rigged equipment and homemade special effects, this film proved to be a genre masterpiece.  It's not only my top Halloween Horror Movie, but it's one of my favorite scary movies of all time.  Coming in at number one in the Halloween Horror Countdown is The Evil Dead.

When I was a kid, I used to hear my older brothers talk about The Evil Dead with something akin to frightened awe.  When I was old enough to buy these kinds of movies on my own, I picked up a VHS copy of The Evil Dead 2 at a local Target.  Frankly I was a little disappointed at the time with some of that movie's absurd humor, though I eventually grew to appreciate it.  I soon went back to Target and found the original film, also on VHS.  I hadn't seen that many horror films at this point in my life, but the night I watched The Evil Dead in my parents' darkened basement, I knew I was seeing something special.

Evil Dead is not a film that's heavy on set-up.  A group of five friends travel to a cabin in the woods for a vacation.  While fooling around in the basement of the cabin, they find a gnarled old book and a strange skull-hilted dagger.  Investigating further, they listen to an old audiotape that reveals that the book is in fact the Naturan Demanto¹, an ancient Sumerian compendium of demon resurrection spells and other nasty stuff.  The voice on the tape recites some of these spells and all hell breaks loose as demons begin to possess members of the group and even the trees themselves spring to malevolent life.



Okay, maybe that doesn't sound so unique.  So what makes this movie so good? Evil Dead succeeds in spite of its simplistic plot and shoestring budget by playing the horror straight and to the hilt.  Once the movie gets going, it doesn't break up the atmosphere with humor or irony.  The viewer gets precious little room to breathe.  This isn't a film where there's a creepy killer skulking in the shadows, it's a movie about monsters - demonic zombies - trying to rip people apart in a foaming frenzy of violence.  No one is ever killed with a quick knife in the belly.  Every single monster attack quickly turns into a brutal wrestling match, always festooned with veritable buckets of gore.  It's visceral stuff, not entirely dissimilar in tone to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and it works extremely well.

The movie does allow for some creepier moments.  When Linda, the girlfriend of our protagonist Ash, is possessed by one of the demons, she doesn't bother to attack Ash outright.  Instead, it torments him by switching back and forth between Linda's regular appearance and its grotesque demonic visage.  When Ash is attacked by another monster, the possessed cadaver of his own sister Sheryl, Linda doesn't bother to join in - she just sits in the doorway and laughs and laughs and laughs....It's unnerving stuff.  It also goes to show that even though the demons are flesh-tearing murder machines, they're also possessed of a malevolent intelligence.

Evil Dead's does a great job of allowing the setting to play naturally into the pacing of the film.  We learn early in the film, thanks to a surprisingly graphic sequence in which a woman is assaulted by animated trees, that the cabin is the only remotely safe place available to the protagonists.  Unfortunately, one of their number is soon possessed and thus the shelter is compromised.  It forces the characters to face certain death in the woods or take their chances with the monsters already inside the cabin.  There's no real safety, no time to stop and think.  In the few sequences when any of the characters are forced to venture outside of the cabin, it's a pretty harrowing experience.  The audience knows that there are things in the woods, as we've spent much of the film watching the "evil cam" streak through the darkness in first person, shattering windows and knocking down trees.  We have no idea what they look like or what they're capable of, but we know these things are there.  Thus it makes sense for the characters to remain in the cabin to face the demons inside - they aren't stupid horror movie characters, they're just choosing the lesser of two terrible options.

I've avoided mentioning him so far, but Ash is kind of the elephant in the room here.  This character is, of course, the most famous role of Bruce Campbell, b-movie actor extraordinaire.  Most viewers think of Ash as a snarky, sarcastic bad-ass.  That's true of his later incarnations in the sequels, video games, and comics that Evil Dead would eventually spawn, but in the original film nothing could be further from the truth.  Ash is portrayed in this film as the most unlikely hero of all; a lanky, uncoordinated fella' who spends most of the initial demon attack pinned under a bookcase.  He's not a  pre-destined monster fighting machine, he's not the chosen one, he's just a guy. 

If anyone in this movie seems like a likely hero, it's Ash's knife-toting buddy Scott.  Hell, Scott fistfights his own possessed girlfriend, then hacks her carcass apart with an axe.  Pretty awesome, huh?  Unfortunately he also abandons his friends and tries to flee to safety through the woods.  Ash is left to fend for himself until Scott, torn to shreds by his possessed trees, staggers back to the cabin.  The moment when Scott expires, leaving Ash, and the audience, to realize that he's the last one left, is a chillingly despairing scene.  For the rest of the movie he's not so much fighting the monsters as he is just trying to survive until morning.  Alone, desperate, and frankly scared shitless, Ash may be one of the most genuine horror movie protagonists ever.

Evil Dead's special effects have a crude genuineness to them.  Caked on makeup, makeshift prostheses, and more Karo syrup blood than you can imagine all combine to create something more than the sum of its parts.  Everything looks gritty and tangible.  Granted, some of the effects look pretty primitive, such as the sequence in which Ash slices off a demon's head with an shovel, but in this sort of movie it works.  Keep in mind that this movie was made by a relatively small crew that was more or less making up the special effects as they went along.  In that context, it's pretty impressive stuff despite the occasional rough edges.

As you may have guessed, I strongly recommend this movie for anyone with even a passing interest in the horror genre.  It's been imitated, parodied, and has even spawned an upcoming remake, but the original Evil Dead remains a titan among horror films.  I've spent many a Halloween night sitting around with the lights off watching Evil Dead and passing out candy.  In terms of mandatory Halloween viewing, the only film I can imagine ever supplanting this one in my own pantheon is a certain John Carpenter flick...

Well, there you have it.  The Halloween Horror Countdown is complete.  It's been a lot of work, but it's also been a lot of fun.  I hope you've enjoyed spending October here with me.  Thanks for reading and Happy Halloween!

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1.) It's not called the Necronomicon until the sequel, much to the annoyance of those of us who've tried to make "super-cuts" of all three films put together.