October 2nd

Delirium (2007) directed by Mark Allen

These past few Halloweens, I've been missing my yearly dose of modern, horrible horror. I used to have eight Horrorfest films to wade through every Halloween, suffering through at least six truly terrible horror movies throughout the Six Weeks. The masochist in me needs more of that. My solution? For a mere $5 at K-Mart, I grabbed one of those awful Echo Bridge multi-movie packs. This one was called the Highway to Hell Collection. I thought it would fit in with my Texas Chain Saw Massacre marathon this year.  And, who knows, maybe there's a gem in there?

This morning, I popped in disc one and played the first selection on it without knowing a lick about what I was going to see. That's the way to do it, in my opinion. Go in blind and be surprised. Surprised I was. I think -- and I've see a lot, a lot of bad movies -- this is the worst movie I've ever seen on a professionally pressed DVD. Sure, you see a lot of this kind of stuff on DVD-Rs -- usually passed out for free at cons by budding filmmakers -- but for a real company to have purchased this film, and made a DVD master, and sent the thing to a for-real DVD replication plant in order to make thousands of copies of it... wow.

To be truthful, the style of the film painfully reminds me of me. It looks a lot like the crappy horror shorts I was making about a decade ago. Bad acting, ultra-cheap special F/X, dumb script, dull editing, a friend playing bass as the soundtrack... yep, amateur hour all the way. I've been there. What impresses me is that they got this thing out there. Mark Allen must be incredibly persistent to have sold the rights to this movie when it should be relegated to free showings at small horror conventions with the other terrible homemade horror films. Could I have gotten one of my things onto a DVD that any old person could buy at the K-Mart? I doubt it. Bravo, Mark Allen!

It does exist, I swear.

Tales from the Darkside 2.01: "The Impressionist" (1985) directed by Armand Mastroianni
The NSA recruits a comedian skilled in doing impressions to communicate with an alien they've captured. A harmless episode in the vein of E.T. -- or maybe Close Encounters -- but that alien was pretty freaky looking.


Tales from the Darkside 2.02: "Lifebomb" (1985) directed by Frank De Palma
A businessman signs up for a lifebomb device, which is surgically implanted in his back. When it detects life-threatening danger, it explodes and wraps the person in a cocoon of healing to ensure they avoid death. A sloppy episode that downplays its downer ending so much it's easy to not notice it.

September 29th

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) directed by Tobe Hopper

How do make a sequel to one of the all-time classic horror movies? Do something different. Anyone trying to semi-remake the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre in order to attempt to recapture some of that magic is doomed to fail. Another group of kids running into the Sawyers and getting slaughtered is just going to be boring. Hooper and company wisely chose a different tack.

TCM2 is big and loud and gooey and goofy. This is a movie in which Franklin's uncle Lt. Lefty -- played Dennis Hopper in the same year he starred as Frank in Blue Velvet! -- decides to visit a chainsaw shop in order to arm himself for a fight with the Sawyers. There's absolutely no reason for this. A Texas lawman is going to already have plenty of guns he could easily use to pick off the cannibals from far beyond chainsaw-gouging distance. Nope, Lefty buys three chainsaws and straps them to his body. Why? Because it leads to an awesome duel with Leatherface, that's why. The film needs no other reason, nor should we. This isn't a study in the darkness of human nature. This is maestro Tom Savini showing us what we weren't allowed to see in the original: what happens when a chainsaw plunges into someone's guts?

But, how's this for an alternate theory? The introductory text tells us that Sally sank into catatonia after telling of her experience with the Sawyers. Maybe TCM2 is actually a delusion in poor, broken Sally's head? Think it through: who would Sally think could save her from her tormentors and get revenge? Well, her daddy's dead -- otherwise, we'd expect him to be living in the house they traveled to in the first picture -- but her uncle is a badass Texas policeman. Her madness cast him as the warrior to chase and destroy her demons, and she cast herself as Stretch. Stretch finds herself in exactly the same situation that Sally did -- captured by the Sawyers with grandpa trying to bash her head in -- in an exaggerated, funhouse version of the Sawyer's original house. When all is said and done, Stretch is not cowering in the back of a pickup truck. Nope, she's dancing wildly with a chainsaw, having conquered the Hitchhiker replacement Chop-Top. Hell, I bet Sally woke up right after this, feeling much better.

Tales from the Darkside 1.20: "It All Comes Out in the Wash" (1985) directed by Frank De Palma
A businessman orders a laundry's secret special service: they have the ability to wash away your guilt. Free from any guilt for anything he does, the businessman spirals downwards into eviler acts, even going so far as to order the murder of his son's friend's dad for a small slight. A great one-room performance by Vince Edwards.


The Real Ghostbusters 1.01: "Ghosts Я Us" (1986) directed by Richard Raynis
Sets up the show nicely. Right from the start there's that classic Real Ghostbusters mixture of silliness -- the family of idiot ghosts they chase at first -- and surprising darkness. The Elder God-like entity that the ghosts wake up in the toy factory is no joke. It's initial appearance is very creepy, looking like a giant gray worm with an eyeball at the front, and it threatens to destroy all of NYC. That darkness is what attracted me to the show as a kid, as it wasn't something you saw much in cartoons (with a notable exception of the contemporaneous Inhumanoids). I appreciated that the Ghostbusters always had a serious job to do.

Why are they the "real" Ghostbusters? Because in this first episode, the trio of ghosts pretend to be ghost catchers in order to run the real Ghostbusters out of business. It had nothing to do with any crappy Filmation cartoon that may have existed at the time, no sir!

October 9th

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?

But, anyway, this a fun film.

Watched: DVD from Lionsgate.

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.

6WH: September 27th

Week 2 begins:

Tales from the Darkside: "The New Man" (1984) directed by Frank DePalma
The premise is interesting: a boy goes to his father's workplace and the father doesn't recognize him at all. The man's a former alcoholic, so his family blames that for him not recognizing the boy, though he hasn't had a drink in years. This leads to the man's divorce and the loss of his job. The boy then shows up at the same workplace, claiming to be the son of a different ex-alcoholic. I suppose he's a sort of demon that really hates ex-alcoholics for no apparent reason? The story didn't make too much sense. Creepy smile by the kid in the freeze frame at the end, though. (6/10)


Session 9 (2001) directed by Brad Anderson
I'm glad someone was able to film a movie at Danvers State Hospital. This was probably the creepiest place on the planet, until much of it was torn down a few years ago. We have a similar institution in my home state, which I was lucky enough to be able to walk around a little and film. It's hard to see how such an intense building design wouldn't make the patients even crazier.

The movie, unfortunately, did nothing for me. I had no emotional reaction to the goings on in the film. I really wanted to like it, just for the setting alone. Alas, the film is very slow and spends quite a bit of time with the men simply working on their job. I began to find myself absurdly worried that the men weren't working fast enough to get their bonus, rather than feeling any tension from how the building was affecting the men's minds.

In the end, it turns out one of the men is insane. Everything in the movie has a human explanation. Would I have liked the film better if the supernatural had been involved? I'm not sure. I can see the argument for making it a realistic commentary on mental illness. I can see that the building didn't need any ghostly help in being scary by itself. Still, there was something kind of disappointing that it was just a run-of-the-mill crazy guy responsible for the horror. (6/10)