Waxwork II: Lost in Time (1992) directed by Anthony Hickox
Silly as all get out. Despite the title, there's no waxwork in this film. Rather, Hickox has discovered an even better method of jumping from setting to setting: a mystical-magical necklace that points the way to invisible doorways connected to other worlds. In effect, he gets to have his characters wander a series of movie parodies without worrying too much about the thin plot line driving them. It sounds like a recipe for creating pure z-grade garbage, but I found the movie pretty funny.
Without a doubt, the best bit is the Haunting parody starring Bruce Campbell. Inspired, I think, by Bruce's presence, they go all Evil Dead with the segment. Campbell's character John ends up tied to a cross with an exposed rib cage. John is calm despite his predicament... that is, until main character Mark releases the wrong rope and drops him directly on his chest. After that, it's a Three Stooges-like parade of calamity on the poor guy: Mark picking chunks of floor out of the ribs, a possessed girl throwing hammers and boxes at his head, a bag labeled "bag of salt" being thrown into his chest, and Mark accidentally grabbing a bottle of vinegar to wash the salt away. All the while, Bruce is giving each blow his broad Ash-like expressions of pain. It's all very goofy and both Jack and I were cracking up loudly.
The movie slows considerably when they get stuck in the medieval period. There, the evil black magician guy wants to impersonate the king and take his place. He also wants to marry his own sister for some reason. Compared the rest of the film, this section isn't anywhere near as fun and much of it is played rather seriously. Mark decides to become a standard movie hero here, freeing prisoners, sword dueling, and saving the king. I liked it better when he was accidentally torturing an exposed rib cage.
I can see why some people were disappointed with this sequel to the original -- it's way over the line into I-don't-care-how-silly-this-is territory -- but I had a lot of fun with it.
Tales from the Crypt 5.11: "Oil's Well That Ends Well" (1993) directed by Paul Abascal
Notable because it's the first and only time John Kassir, the voice of the Cryptkeeper, played a character in the story. He's hilarious in this episode and full of manic energy. The plot is a standard "scammer gets her just desserts" deal, but it's populated by enough entertaining characters -- also including Alan Ruck and Priscilla Presley -- to make it entertaining.
Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat (1989) directed by Anthony Hickox
A fun Western/vampire movie. In it, the world's vampires decide to all move into a small desert town where they vow to drink artificial blood. But, not all of the town's bloodsuckers are happy with never being able to sink their teeth into tender, human flesh again...
My mind wandered a bit during the movie and I started to wonder about the diet of vampires. So, these creatures can only survive on human blood. I think it's generally thought that they drink the blood of one person per night (I could be wrong here). A person has about 5 liters of blood in them and each 500 mL has about 450 calories, so vampires are consuming 4500 calories per night. That seems reasonable: it's more calories than a human needs to eat per day, with all that extra energy going towards their super-strength, speed, healing factor, bat-changing ability, etc.
But, they're killing a person per day! That's a horrific murder rate for any city in the country. My town is about 100,000 people and has about 1 murder per year. A single vampire moving here would skyrocket that rate to 366 per 100,000. The murder capital of the US is New Orleans, with a murder rate of 49 per 100,000. Just one vampire would make my city 7.5 times more dangerous than the most dangerous city in the country. People would be going bonkers trying to find this guy. No vampire would be safe anywhere with this kind of bump in violent crime. Yeah, sure, some of his victims wouldn't be found and would be counted as disappearances, but 365 people disappearing per year wouldn't go unnoticed or un-panicked either.
And that's just one vampire. A clan, like in Near Dark, would be eating 35 people per week. It would take them a mere two and half years to fully consume the small town I was raised in. A nearby largish cemetery recently said they have room for 17,000 more bodies and they expect that to last 200 to 300 years. With the five vampires from Near Dark moving to town, that plot space would be eaten up in just over 9 years. There simply couldn't be very many vampires in the world without them starting some kind of large-scale human farming operations. Hmm. How about a film about a vampire farmer?
Tales from the Darkside 1.11: "All a Clone by the Telephone" (1985) directed by Frank De Palma
Ah, ubiquitous '80s comedian Harry Anderson. Where did you go? Back in 1985, he found himself the owner of a sentient answering machine that liked to call people using his voice. The answering machine claimed to be him from a parallel universe, but it really just seemed to be a possessed electronic device to me. At any rate, it makes his life miserable until the machine offers something he can't refuse. A decent episode, but still not dark.
After half an hour of deliberation, Jack and I settled on this little '80s gem. I'd forgotten how much I liked this movie. It's kind of the Cabin in the Woods of its time. People are sacrificed to a great evil and the end of the world is threatened, but really it's an excuse to let loose every cool monster possible and have them go nuts. I've got no problem with that.
I don't know what it is about waxworks, but they're one of my favorite horror movie settings. I guess it's the uncanny valley-ness of the wax dummies combined with the funhouse-like setup of the place that works so well. They're also great for movies as they give you an easy excuse to include a bunch of characters who normally wouldn't be in the same film together. Want Dracula, a werewolf, a mummy, the Marquis de Sade, zombies and a rip-off of Audrey II in the same story? No problem: make 'em wax dummies who come to life.
Besides the monster mania, I like this film quite a bit due to some of the really memorable scenes it contains. Burned into my head from when I watched this as a kid is the scene with the vampire victim chained to a table. His eaten leg, tibia and fibula exposed and raw muscle hanging out of his thigh, remains one of the grossest things I can remember seeing in a horror movie. I also love: the werewolf ripping a guy in half from skull to groin, the police inspector digging into the wax China's face and finding wax muscle and tendon underneath (truly disturbing), Sarah's ecstasy when de Sade tortures her, and the end in which the monsters fight an army of old men (including butler Jenkins!). Just a film full of great fun and great gross-outs.
Tales from the Crypt 5.10: "Came the Dawn" (1993) directed by Uli Edel
A decent episode with the old villain fake-out. A bit of a Psycho rip-off in that way, but it creates a nice atmosphere with some tension as to what form the inevitable violence that ends the episode will take. I was disappointed that Michael J. Pollard didn't have a bigger roll. I was expecting him to show up as the cross-dressing wife or something equally funny.
The Munsters: "Herman, Coach of the Year" (1965) directed by Norman Abbott
L'il K was refusing to eat her lunch, so I suggested we head downstairs with lunch and watch some Munsters. That did the trick. I'm not exactly sure what she sees in this show, but she seems to love it. This one had her cracking up over Herman's pathetic attempts to train Eddie in track. It's a bit of weird episode, in that Grandpa whips up some drugs (he calls them magic pills) that give Eddie super track-and-field powers. Though it turns out in the end that Eddie wasn't even taking the pills, it's not really a message you'd see in a sitcom these days.
The Munsters: "Happy 100th Anniversary" (1965) directed by Ezra Stone
Herman and Lily decide to secretly buy each other a present for their 100th wedding anniversary. They each think the other has forgotten the day and comedy ensues. What stuck me is that they each decide to spend $1000 on the present. According to the inflation calculator, that's $6800 in today's money. Wow! Hmm... look at this: on Wikipedia, there wedding anniversary chart does indeed go to 100 years (?) and they say that's supposed to be a 10-carat diamond gift. According to Wikianswers, a 10-carat diamond ring costs between $250k and $1.1m. So, I guess they really weren't spending enough, then...
The Munsters: "Operation Herman" (1965) directed by Norman Abbott
Eddie has to get his tonsils out. Guess what happens when Herman goes to the hospital to visit him? Yep, they think he's an accident victim who needs surgery. Best part is Fred Gwynne acting drunk after Herman is given nitrous oxide at the hospital.
The Munsters: "Lily's Star Boarder" (1965) directed by Ezra Stone
Over Herman's objections, the family posts an ad to rent their spare bedroom. A policeman takes the room in order to conduct surveillance on the criminal operation going on in the house across the street. What crime are they committing? They're selling stolen furs. That's right, there's a suburban house filled with grim-faced, sharply-dressed mobsters, all stuffing furs into garment boxes in the manliest way possible. Crime was different back then, I guess.
Taken by L'il K using a Fisher Price camera. Modern art museums: call me. We have dozens of these things.
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992) directed by Anthony Hickox
I hadn't seen this one in many years and now I remember why. Pinhead just won't shut the hell up in this movie. He has seemingly endless speeches about pain, flesh, desire, etc. There's also the laughing. Pinhead is constantly cackling like a typical horror movie monster, sounding a helluva lot like Freddy when he does so. At best, Pinhead should only chuckle dismissively, as he does in Hellbound when Kirsty tells him she's come for her father. And then there's the killing. Why does Pinhead massacre an entire club full of people? Isn't he supposed to be an "explorer in the further regions of experience"? Shouldn't he have chained them all up for later play time? In short, the character's just completely wrong. Yeah, yeah, he's been separated from both Hell's rules and his human side... whatever. He's still acting like a typical slasher villain and a parody of his former self.
Also: CD Cenobite. Enough said. (5/10)
Clive Barker: The Art of Horror (1992) directed by Christopher Holland
Paramount was thoughtful enough to throw this on the Hell on Earth DVD. Back in the day, you could buy a VHS two-pack with both movies together. Basically, it's Barker talking about his philosophy of art for half an hour. I found it pretty interesting, particularly his thoughts on the tedium of being trapped in flesh.
The Walking Dead: "Days Gone By" (2010) directed by Frank Darabont
Though The Walking Dead comic series is my favorite zombie story of all time, I waited an entire year to start watching the show. Why? Well, I don't have cable and it seemed like Halloweentime would be the time to watch such a show instead of last November. It was worth the wait. This a tremendous first episode and probably the best piece of made-for-TV horror ever.
One thing they've gotten really, really right is the emotional aspect of the story. Rick collapses in pain on the floor of his house upon finding it empty and realizing the gravity of the situation he's woken up into. I love the tears in his eyes as he speaks to the half zombie crawling in the field before shooting her. If the show follows the arc of the comic, it was quite important to see where Rick's reaction to killing starts off at. Lennie James, in particular, does a helluva job as Morgan. The scene in which he tries and fails to shoot his zombie wife was astoundingly good.
The introduction to the zombies was also perfect. These are Romero-style slow walkers. At the start of the episode, we only see one or two at a time. They're annoying, but not a problem. But, damn, when Rick turns a corner on that street in Atlanta and sees hundreds of the things, that's when you realize the full extent of their threat. And then when he hides under the tank, with zombies crawling towards him from all side... wow, great suspense.
I'm hoping the TV series has the iron balls that the comic series does. In the comic, anything could happen to anyone at anytime. That is one of the things that is so special about it. No other series has shocked me as much as Walking Dead. Rick is the only character who will never be killed off, and even that doesn't help him much. The introductory scene of this episode, in which Rick is forced to kill a poor zombie child, seems like a good sign that they won't be holding back at all. At any rate, I'm crossing my fingers that the level of quality seen in this episode somehow continues.
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