NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1957)

Wow. This movie…just wow. NIGHT OF THE DEMON is about this British sorcerer guy Dr. Julian Karswell, who starts off the movie by offing someone who threatens to expose his Satanic cult. Karswell had passed a small parchment with runes inscribed on it to the guy, and it disintegrated after 3 days. This seals the guy's fate and a huge demon materializes and kills him. Shortly after, a skeptic from the US of A shows up to prove Karswell a fraud, and Karswell doesn't take well to this. Karswell passes another rune-filled parchment to the American asshole (and hey, WAY TO GO in representing us over here, douchenozzle!), and a tense story of investigation sets itself into motion.

I don't want to say too much about this movie because it's just WAY TOO GOOD to spoil. It had me bouncing around the room the entire time. It's just that suspenseful and scary. It's not that much of a spoiler to say this, but the demon that does show up is a little awkward-looking in close-up, and the story goes that director Jacques Tourneur was VERY against it being shown on-screen, and that you should never really know if the demon was real or not. But man, when the demon materializes from out of nowhere, it scares the living hell out of me. I've got this thing about giant monsters – the thought of seeing them suddenly looming over the horizon freaks me out when I think about it too hard. Sometimes, riding in the car, I'll imagine Godzilla or something suddenly popping his head up from behind a mountain or something, and it seriously gives me the willies. And seeing this giant demon pull itself into existence on this plane just freaks me right out.

I can't recommend this movie more. It's just amazing. The acting is all top-notch, the atmosphere is heavy as can be, the script is really, really smart, and the ending packs a huge jolt. They don't make movies like this anymore, and I guess we just lucked out that they made this one THEN. Crazy, crazy, crazy good.

ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1932)

Okay, I’ve been wanting to see this for a while now. It’s never been available on DVD, and it’s hard to find on VHS. I guess the print that Universal had was incomplete, or in bad shape or something, because according to the Criterion Collection, they had to assemble this from several different sources to present it complete. You wouldn’t be able to tell it, though…it all looks great.

Anyway, here’s the situation: Edward Parker, a guy on his way to meet his fiancé, gets dumped from a cargo ship by the drunk asshat captain jerk, and he winds up being taken to the first port of call – the island of Dr. Moreau. When he gets there, he spots all of these weird-looking guys running around in the jungle, but can only catch a glimpse. Dr. Moreau introduces him to Lota, the only female on the island, and they hit it off even though he’s got a girlfriend already (who is getting pretty mad that Parker hasn’t shown up yet, has found out what happened, and is on her way to Moreau’s island). Parker finds out that Moreau has created the island’s natives by experimenting on animals shipped to the island by the cargo ship he was on earlier.

Parker keeps getting left alone with Lota, who is falling for him. But see, Moreau has created her from a panther, and wants to see if she’s capable of displaying human emotion and having human kids, so he’s trying to get Parker and her to mate. Eventually, Lota kisses Parker, and as they hug, Parker feels claws on his back – her claws. She’s growing panther hands back, and Parker freaks right the fuck out. He yells at Moreau at how disgusting his experiments are, and Moreau decides to “burn the animal out of her,” which sounds HORRIBLE. About this time, Parker’s fiancé shows up, and they plan on leaving. When Moreau finds this out, he orders one of the beast-men to kill the captain that brought Parker’s fiancé to the island. This breaks one of the laws that Moreau has laid down (“What is the law? Not to spill blood!”), and the beast-men decide to revolt, realizing that Moreau can die, too. In the revolt, Lota is killed and Parker and his fiancé escape as the natives take Moreau into his laboratory (the “House of Pain”) and proceed to rip him to shreds.

It’s taken me a while to put this review together, and it’s because it’s taken that long for me to put together the right words for it. For when it was made, this movie is REALLY disturbing. There’s a lot of implied stuff about surgery on the beast-men that Moreau does without anesthesia, a whole bestiality thing with Lota and Parker maybe eventually hooking up, Charles Laughton as Moreau enjoying playing with his whip a whole hell of a lot, and a lot of beast-men (led by Bela Lugosi as the Sayer of the Law!!!) going around like they’re in total agony the whole time. This pushes things a lot more than FRANKENSTEIN did the same year, and wound up banned in a bunch of countries.

But here’s the thing that’s kept eating at me. There was something about the movie that I just couldn’t put my finger on that was bothering me. At first, I was just thinking that the movie was just so good at being a horror movie that it kept making me think about it. But after reading the essay that’s in the Criterion Collection Blu-Ray of this, I think they put a finger on what it is…it’s that the movie is all about Black folks hooking up with White folks. It’s easy to see Moreau, in his white suit and carrying his whip, as a slave master, with a bunch of “savages” living in the area away from the estate, and with a select few serving him in his home. And he’s all curious from a Mad Scientist point of view to see what will happen when the “savage” woman (that he’s passing off as a “pure Polynesian”) mates with the new White guy on the island. And while I guess it’s good that they try to show that the “savages” deserve as much respect as anybody else (or at least that they don’t deserve to be cut open on operating tables while they’re still freaking AWAKE), they’re still not even human, but closer to animals. And when you add in this whole thing about how revolting it is that he’s experimenting with having a “savage” mate with a visiting White Guy, it just gets all kinds of creepy. I mean, Moreau wants Parker to have kids with Lota so he can see if they’re more “human” than Lota is, and as someone from an interracial marriage, I guess maybe I take it kind of personally.

It’s obvious that the movie is a classic among horror movies, because it does what it does REALLY WELL. And when I first saw it, it blew me away because it stuck with me for days. But the more and more I think about it, the more and more it bothers me. Dad keeps telling me that this was 1932 and that I should remember that things were a LOT different back then, but there’s so much about it that bothers me that I don’t think I can watch it again. I’d never say that nobody else should see it. I think it’s important to know how bad things used to be, at least as some kind of WARNING or something. And if some people can get over the really weird issues it seems to have and enjoy it as something that’s come from the views people might have had back then, then that’s great. There are a lot of things from back then that you have to look at like that (like DUMBO, or some old Bugs Bunny or Mickey Mouse cartoons). And some of that stuff I can even get past because it’s so ridiculous. But this one, over the past few days, has just gotten more and more under my skin.

I’ve had a lot of talks over the weekend with my dad about this. It’s really weird for him that he’d want to talk with me about a single movie for days, but he says that it’s important that we have these talks, and that if the movie has led to us talking about it, that it’s done something positive in the end. I guess that’s true. I just wish that we didn’t have to have these talks in the first place, you know? Dad says I should be optimistic, and that maybe one day we’ll all be living in a time where this kind of thing doesn’t matter any more, and we can just look at a movie like this as a reminder of a long time ago when people got all worked up about who was gonna be screwing who. If so, it’s taking its damn time getting here.

ZOMBIE (1979)

Lucio Fulci! I've been reading a lot about this guy, and I finally got around to watching some of his movies over the past couple of weeks. Probably his best-known is this one, though, so I thought I'd start with it right off the bat.

ZOMBIE was made to cash in on George Romero's DAWN OF THE DEAD. It was a HUGE success in Italy, where it was released as ZOMBI. So Fulci was enlisted to make a quick rip-off that would get released as if it was a sequel. For some reason, this kind of thing happened in Italy ALL THE TIME. They'd put out movies that were fake sequels to ALIEN, re-title movies that had nothing to do with other movies to make them seem like sequels, etc. I don't know how they could do it without getting their pants sued off, but there you are. Anyway, Fulci was known in Italy mainly for making mysteries and comedies, but I guess the producers thought he was stylish enough to pull off a straight-up horror movie. And they were ALL KINDS OF RIGHT.

Now, Romero's movies are mostly city-based, and it's never really clear what's brought the dead back to life (and in his movies, they're the unburied dead). So if George made movies that updated the zombie flick to modern urban times, Fulci's movie goes back to the original zombie myths. These zombies are brought back by a scientist in the tropics experimenting with voodoo rites, and they're not just dead folks who happened to be lying around the place. These are also the long-buried dead, like old Conquistadors and stuff.

It starts out (after a short opening on the island) with a ship washing into New York harbor. Cops come to check it out, and there's a zombie on board. One of the cops gets munched on and killed, and the other one shoots the zombie and he falls into the water. We find out that the boat belongs to the father of this woman in New York (so it's lucky that it sailed right into the city like it did), and she teams up with a local reporter and a seafaring couple (the wife scuba dives TOPLESS! YOWZA!) to find the tropical island and her father. Of course, they find the island right when everything's going to hell, and there's an ongoing slaughter for the rest of the movie. The zombie makeups are GREAT, and the gore flows like maple syrup on the pancakes that are our cast. There's an eye-poking scene that nearly made me throw up, and one of those twist ending things that all of these movies seem to have.

I loved this movie! It's kind of skimpy on the story, and it takes a little while to get really revved up, but you can't say no to a movie where a zombie fights a shark! It takes a crazy person to make a movie where that happens, and Fulci is a total madman.

THE BLIND DEAD COLLECTION

Okay, sorry I've been absent. In the middle of all the school stuff, I got WAY sick, and there's been all kinds of crazy crap happening this week on top of all this that I can't even START to get into. Plus, today's my birthday! And it's Halloween! TIME CRUNCH!

But anyway, here's what I've been trying to put together lately. As you probably remember (and if you don't, just look a couple of posts down), I picked up the Blue Underground BLIND DEAD DVD box set for CHEEEEAP a little bit ago, and decided to put together a post about all of these movies.

For those of you not in the know, the box set contains all of the movies in this series made by Spanish director Amando de Ossorio. All of them are about the undead, mummified corpses of the Knights Templar, who rise from their tombs for the same reasons most undead corpses come to life – to seek revenge on the descendents of the people who killed them, to sacrifice people to Satan, to look cool riding around on undead horses…you know, the standard. The kinda cool thing about these flicks is that none of them are really sequels to any of the other movies. They all sort of do their own thing.

So we start off with TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD (1972). This is full of some seriously cool atmosphere, with a lot of great-looking crumbling old buildings and a monastery and graveyards and stuff. The setup is this: these three people meet up on vacation in Portugal: two girls and a guy. Because this is 1972 and Europe, there's of course going to be some lesbian overtones to this setup, and in this case, it's in a flashback to the time the two girls spent at school together. Now, because one of the girls is uncomfortable with this being brought back into her life, and because the guy she's with keeps making eyes at her old flame, she gets pissed and jumps off the train they're on and wanders into this abandoned part of town that everybody's afraid of. Why are they afraid of the place? Because this is where the Knights Templar were executed for their crimes (trying to achieve immortality by drinking human blood and sacrificing people). Their bodies were left out for the crows to peck out their eyes, so they're the BLIND DEAD! They operate completely on SOUND! So they can hear you breathe, hear your heart beat, etc., to track you as you try to escape them. Because our guilt-ridden heroine is making all kinds of racket as she camps out for the night in their old monastery, they rise from their eternal slumber to get her to shut up. And while they're at it, they wreak all kinds of crazy havoc. Guilty Gal gets turned into a zombie for some reason (this NEVER happens in any other of these movies), and between all of these undead folks running around, plenty of people get offed, and it ends on a pretty sweet "we're all gonna die!" note. It moves a little slowly, but there's enough atmosphere and Scooby-Doings going on to keep things interesting.

RETURN OF THE EVIL DEAD (1973) (which has NOTHING to do with any Sam Raimi movies) is the next one up, and it's a lot more action-packed, but not quite as atmospheric. It's a trade-off, but both work out to be equally entertaining. In this one, the Templars were executed for being the same kind of jerks they were in the previous movie, but in this case, the citizens of the Portuguese town killed them and burned out their eyes so that their spirits could never find their way back from Hell to seek revenge. They shoulda done something to their ears, though, because 500 years later, they're back to kill everybody. There's not a whole lot of plot going on in this, but that's actually kind of okay, because it's full-on Templar massacre time. Everybody involved winds up holed up in a church, and from there, they get picked off one-by-one and it's like NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD all over again. The only real disappointing thing about this is the ending, which just sort of…happens. It just ends. Like they realized that there wasn't anywhere to go from this, and said, "well, let's just let the survivors walk away like nothing's happened." This isn't really spoiling anything (because generally speaking, there's gonna be survivors), so don't get mad that I ruined the ending. There's not one to ruin!

Then there's THE GHOST GALLEON (1974), and it BLOWS. You'd think that this would be great – in this one, the Templars are on a ghost ship which is in some ghostly dimension that you get to by going through some ghostly mist. I LOVE the idea of a ghost ship picking off unsuspecting seagoers. That's all kinds of spooky! But man, this thing moves like a concrete block. It just sits there like a lump. A couple of models wind up being stranded on their boat, and get picked up by the Ghost Galleon, and are never heard from. Some folks head out to find them, and find the ship, and the Templars wake up, and not a lot else happens. Total yawnfest.

And it wraps up with NIGHT OF THE SEAGULLS, which has one of the most WTF? titles I can imagine. But the movie is probably as good as the first one, which surprised me! This time, things take place in a small fishing village, where some newcomers discover that every seven years, the townspeople must offer up seven local virgins for sacrifice to the Templars (who feed the girls' hearts to some stone statue of a monster demon thing they worship) or else the Templars will kill everybody. Of course, things don't go as planned, and people have to die. Amando de Ossorio seems to be trying to get back to the feel of the first movie here, as it's a lot more atmospheric than the two middle ones, and feels a lot like an HP Lovecraft kind of story, what with seaside setting and the tight-lipped locals trying to hide some ghoulish secret of the supernatural. I liked it a lot.

There's a great little booklet about the movies included in the box set, and a bonus DVD with interviews and DVD-ROM stuff, but the best bonus feature is on the first disc. Some idiots tried to market TOMBS in the US as a PLANET OF THE APES movie! So they slapped on some footage of ruins at the beginning with a voice-over saying that before human civilization came around, intelligent apes practiced occult rituals and sacrificed humans, and there was a huge war that wiped out the intelligent apes who threatened to come back and reclaim this world. Or something. And then, the title comes on screen: REVENGE OF THE PLANET APE!!! That doesn't even make any SENSE!

Anyway, aside from THE GHOST GALLEON, you could spend your time a lot worse than by sitting back with the Templars for some good old-fashioned slow-motion slaughter.

Just so you guys know...

I'm trying to get through all of the Blind Dead movies before I put up another review, and school has been a PAIN. So I'm hoping to plow through the rest of them this weekend. I just watched TOMBS OF THE BLIND DEAD and its GREAT. Holy crap, what a movie! Mummified Templars riding Horses of the Blind Dead! In slow motion! But more later!

SCORE! SCORE! SCORE!!!!

Today while we were running around downtown, I stopped in the used game/dvd/cd store. Sometimes you can find some decent stuff in there, especially out-of-print DVDs. But anyway, somebody too dumb to live sold the Blue Underground BLIND DEAD box set back to the store! And the best part is the store didn't know what they had and had it marked at $30!!! Man, I've been hearing about these movies for forever. In case you haven't, they're all about the undead corpses of the Templars who have had their eyes burned out, so they can't see, but rely on hearing their victims. I know what we're gonna be watching all next week!

FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND (1981)

Any movie that starts out with a hot-air balloon crash is just asking for trouble.

FRANKENSTEIN ISLAND was supposedly made in 1981, looks like it was made in 1972, and feels like it was made in 1957. It's all kinds of messed up. If it wasn't so stoopidly fun, I'd say it was one of the worst movies I've ever seen. I mean, it's bad. There's nothing really good about it. But none of it is boring, and being boring is the biggest sin a movie can commit. Every five minutes, it's like it's a whole other movie. You never know what's gonna hit you.

Anyway, four idiots and a dog crash into the ocean in their beautiful balloon, and life-raft their way to lovely Frankenstein Island. There's a bunch of annoying old guys (one of them is Robert Clarke, who's been in TONS better movies than this!) and an annoying Peter Brady-looking tool named Dino. Seriously. And a dog named Melvin. Seriously. You know what you're in for when one of the guys leans onto their life raft -- which there's nothing wrong with -- and says that they need to gather wood to build a raft. SERIOUSLY.

So they wander into a cliffside cave for no good reason, there's a split-second shot of the Floating Head of John Carradine, and they wind up on the main part of the island, which is lucky for them. They could have gotten killed in that cave, and nobody would ever have found them.

Then they find Amazons. Yep, there's a tribe of jungle ladies living on Frankenstein Island, and they all use human skulls as bongs, wear leopard-print bikinis, and are suspiciously white. (Really, you know? Every movie I see where there's a tribe of Amazon jungle babes, they're all white girls. I don't know if there's any science backing this up, but something tells me that isn't accurate.) And the four idiots discover that if you try to say the name of any place that ISN'T Frankenstein Island, something that's "like telepathy" makes your arm hurt really bad. SERIOUSLY. Then there's night-time snake dancing and another appearance by the Floating Head of John Carradine who spouts off about "The Power!!!!" I think they shot all of his appearances in a half hour.

So then there's some zombie dressed up kinda like the Hamburglar that nabs one of the jungle girls, and some grizzled old guys from a pirate movie show up and laugh a lot and say that they should all be friends, and then invite the team of idiots up to "where the valleys rise to the sun." They get there and wait around at a camp outside the main house on the island, and there's a bunch more zombie guys, and then Cameron Mitchell is in a jail cell and believes he's in an Edgar Allan Poe movie, and the whole shooting match is being run by Sheila Van Helsing who's the great-granddaughter of Dr. Frankenstein, and the zombie guys wave around plastic Halloween pitchforks and turn an 8x10" glossy headshot of John Carradine into an 8x10" headshot of a SKULL, and there's a zombie fight where we cut to reaction shots FROM THE ZOMBIES (who don't have emotions), and there's a weird electronic thing that gives Sheila Frankenstein the albino white zombie eyes that the zombies have, but only for a second and it's never referred to again, and the Floating Head of John Carradine who is playing the Ghost of Dr. Frankenstein pops up and says "The Power! The Golden Thread!" a lot, and Sheila's husband is a MILLION YEARS OLD and is in bed and doesn't amount to much, and Cameron Mitchell is the dad of one of the jungle girls, and then the Frankenstein Monster shows up and waves his arms around and everyone escapes, and it was all just a dream OR WAS IT?

See? You get ALL THIS for less than the price of most other movies. Nothing in the movie is related to anything else that happens in the movie, and nothing makes any sense, but I COULDN'T STOP WATCHING. Sometimes just knowing that a movie like this exists makes you glad to be alive.

FRIGHT NIGHT (2011)

Okay, so I know that I've been typically posting about older movies, but sometimes something new comes along that deserves the attention.

There have been WAY too many remakes of older movies going on lately. It seems like every horror movie that comes out is a remake of something that was done better before, and just shoved out onto movie screens because the name is familiar enough to fill some seats. That's why I was really skeptical about a remake of Fright Night. The original is SO GOOD. Chris Sarandon is great as Jerry the vampire. He's a total badass killing machine. And while the original is *funny,* it's not really a *comedy.* It's a horror movie with a lot of comic relief. And that's okay. When I saw that they'd cast McLovin from Superbad as Evil Ed, I thought that they'd screwed this whole thing up and made it into a wacky comedy about a vampire neighbor.

MAN, I WAS WRONG. The changes they made to the story worked completely. Changing the location to Las Vegas makes total sense -- so many people there work at night, people are always moving to and from there, and you can imagine the place being surrounded by half-empty subdivisions like the one Charley Brewster lives in. It's the perfect place for a vampire to set up camp. And the relationship between Charley and Ed makes sense, too. Charley is trying to be one of the "cool kids." He's got a hot, popular girlfriend, and he's started to try and put his geeky past behind him, so Ed feels neglected and left out. And it makes sense that Ed would be the guy to suspect the truth right off the bat and try to convince Charley instead of the other way around.

One of the things that really worried me was knowing that Peter Vincent wouldn't be a horror movie host in this one. In the original, Roddy McDowell plays a pretty thinly-disguised Peter Cushing variation who's washed up and reduced to hosting horror movies on TV. But today, we don't really have horror movie hosts. Elvira is back after being gone for FOREVER, and you can catch Svengoolie if you're lucky on syndicated TV, but most people aren't familiar with horror movie hosts. (Actually, if it wasn't for the fact that I READ EVERYTHING about horror movies, I probably wouldn't know anything about them either. I've only seen Elvira and Svengoolie in action. I've seen some other hosts on YouTube clips and some bootleg DVD compilation things, but it's mostly through reading about these guys that I know anything at all.) But they wound up changing the character to a Las Vegas celebrity magician, like Criss Angel. They give him the completely put-on "coolness" of Criss Angel (who HAS TO BE THE BIGGEST PAIN IN THE ASS IN THE WORLD), and the actual coolness of Penn & Teller (namely the HUGE collection of occult memorabilia). And David Tennant plays him! The 10th Doctor! He's hilarious, and his relationship with his "assistant" is amazing. I want to see another movie about this guy. I told Dad that he kept drinking Midori all through the movie, and Dad's reaction was "this guy is a hangover just waiting to happen." I guess if you just *stay* drunk all the time, that you don't ever have to worry about that, though. I should ask Cady.

But it isn't a vampire movie without a vampire, and Colin Farrell plays Jerry to the hilt. We've had enough of sparkly brooding emo vampire assclowns, and Jerry is just a predator. He's charming enough when he has to be, but you can always see that just under the surface, that he's always scheming and trying to outwit those around him. He's dangerous, and you never are allowed to forget it. He's not going to be going vegan like some other vamps I could mention.

The tone of the movie is just right, too. It hits just the right balance of tense horror and light humor. You never feel like what's going on isn't seriously life-threatening. Things are BAD, and the laughter comes from things that happen naturally from the characters, not cartoon-y wackiness (even though there's nothing WRONG with cartoon-y wackiness...I'm a BIG FAN of cartoon-y wackiness, just not where it's not going to work, and it wouldn't work here).

So I'm gonna say that YOU NEED TO SEE THIS. It isn't often that a good horror movie comes around, especially one that's a remake of a movie you'd never think would need to be remade in the first place. This one does it right.