The Six Weeks kicked off with tall ships and pancakes. The daughters and I drove up to the northern port town of Traverse City to check out the Michigan Schooner Festival and visit with my pal Greg and his daughters. I couldn't ask for a better journey into autumn. As we traveled further and further north, the temperature cooled and the trees began to show larger and larger splashes of color in their canopies. Signs of the harvest season abounded, with roadside pumpkin stands around every curve and orchards laden with ripened apples and cherries dotting the landscape. A cider mill provided a perfect rest stop, refueling us with donuts and apple cider.
The Cabin in the Woods (2011) directed by Drew Goddard
Once the girls had finally calmed down and gone to sleep, I kicked off the movie season with one of my favorite recent horror flicks. Greg had never seen the film, nor had he any idea what it was about. This, of course, filled me with glee.
While I don't have anything to add beyond what I wrote last year, Greg did come up with an interesting take about 20 minutes into the movie. Attempting to predict what twist was coming -- since the movie shows most of its hand right away -- Greg picked out the new security guard posted in the operations room. He guessed that the guard was in league with the Ancient Ones and would cause this year's sacrifice to fail. Which, thinking on it, might well have been the case.
Who tampered with the wiring to delay the tunnel cave in? It's implied that Marty did this playing with the wires in the elevator, but it's hard to imagine why elevator wires would cause issues with explosives miles away. Meanwhile, the guard's reactions to the goings on seem to be professionally hidden disgust. He seems to be an audience proxy in this, but what if that disgust is aimed not at the torture of the teens and, instead, aimed at the ridiculous degree to which humanity has pre-packaged and calculated and dissected and scheduled this ancient sacrificial process? Perhaps the Ancient Ones are less than thrilled at these highly controlled rituals, longing for the chaos of the old days? Maybe "Truman" the security guard was their way off making these things more authentic?
At any rate, it's something new and interesting to mull among many other neat thoughts this film provides, which are sure signs of a strong movie.
This was another film I'd been wanting to show Greg, and to re-watch myself. After Bug, I am forever a Michael Shannon fan. Whatever else people may think of this film, everyone agrees Shannon does an astounding job as the paranoid schizophrenic Peter. Only slightly less convincing was Ashley Judd, who gives her all into the part as well.
While I'm not entirely convinced by Agnes's relatively quick transition into full-on madness, the idea itself is fairly terrifying. What if insanity were infectious? What if exposure to crazy ideas made it more likely those ideas would soon become your own? Isn't that how things work, anyway? How can we know that what we believe is sane, or makes sense, or wasn't implanted in our brain by generations of crazy people sharing their nutty thoughts? But, then, wouldn't that imply the entirely of society is insane?
Tired from a long journey home today, these are the things floating in my head.
Let Me In (2010) directed by Matt Reeves
I know it's never a hip thing to say, but I think I like this American remake as much as the Swedish original. I watched the original a couple of years ago, so my memory is a little fuzzy, but the movies seem to be very, very similar. The differences are small but affect the tones of the films quite a bit. The largest difference between the two that strikes me is that the American movie is pretty clearly a romance. In the Swedish version, I liked to think of Eli as a manipulator: an ancient soul using her youthful appearance to ensnare a new helper when her former helper grew too old to be of any use. The brief shot of her with an old woman's face seemed to reinforce this. There is no such shot in this film. Instead, Reeves has Owen reading Romeo and Juliet for school and Abby sentimentally keeps an old photo of her and Håkan (unnamed in this film) from when Håkan was a child.
A few of the scenes I felt were done better than the original. Towards the end, I liked that Owen actually closed the door on the policeman while Abby was eating him. It gave him more of an active roll in his first experience at helping Abby feed. A greater special FX budget likely accounts for a more intense version of the scene in the pool at the end of the movie. We watch from underwater as the bullies are dragged upside-down through the water while body parts float past Owen in a red storm. It's beautiful. Also beautiful was an entirely new scene of Håkan's final kill. In it, he hides in the backseat of a car. Unfortunately for him, the driver stops to pick up a friend and get gas. Suffice it to say, when Håkan decides in a panic to try to steal the car, things don't work out well. He gets into the most brilliant POV car crash shot I've ever seen, with a Slurpee-obscured windshield only giving us a hint of the violence going on outside of the vehicle.
Though I prefer the vampire in this tale to be an soulless schemer as she was in the original, the remake has a lot of other good things going for it to make up for that loss. (7/10)
The Simpsons: "Treehouse of Horror XXII" (2011) directed by Matthew Faughnan
Ugh. Every once in a while, I'll watch a random Simpsons episode on Hulu just to see if the show has gotten any better. It never has. This remains sadly true for the once-beloved Halloween episodes as well. In this one, there's a joke about the ill-fated Spider-Man musical and a parody of Avatar, which only serve to remind me of how slow the show is in comparison to South Park. Also, 10-year-old Bart -- in a alien body -- loses his virginity to an alien and gets her pregnant. C'mon, man, I don't want hear about it.
Ghoulies (1985) directed by Luca Bercovici
Here's another one of those '80s movies with tiny, toothy creatures in it that I've always meant to watch but never got around to. I had no idea what it was about, so I was thinking it'd be like Critters and feature creatures running around biting people (probably on the butt as they used the toilet, as the poster seems to suggest). Nope. Turns out this is a pre-Full Moon Charles Band production, so the ghoulies are pretty much just like the toys in Puppet Master, running around a mansion killing guests at the behest of their dead master.
It's still kind of fun in a bad movie way. By far the best part is when the ever-lovable Jack Nance pops out of nowhere dressed in a wizard's outfit and proceeds to do magic-battle with the main bad guy. They grab each other around the necks and then take turns shooting lightning bolt/lasers out of their eyes while Nance cackles madly. It's pretty awesome. The rest of the movie... not so much. (5/10)
Cemetery Man (1994) directed by Michele Soavi
AKA Dellamorte Dellamore. This was quite an interesting Italian zombie flick, completely different from a Fulci or Bava film. Hard to pin down, Cemetery Man swings from zombie horror to romance to black comedy to fairytale. Francesco is a caretaker at a cemetery in which the dead seem to return to life. Unable to get anyone in town to believe him or to convince the mayor to investigate, Francesco simply finds it easier to shoot the zombies as they pop up. When he loses the love of his life -- the widow of one of his clients -- to his own eagerness to shoot zombies, Francesco begins to leave reality behind. Soon he's seeing visions of the Grim Reaper, attempting to get his penis surgically removed and shooting nuns through the eye. It's a wild ride. I'm going to need to watch this one again soon to absorb more of it. (7/10)
The X-Files: "Home" (1996) directed by Kim Manners
Often called the most horrific of The X-Files' horror episodes, I hadn't seen this one since it originally aired. It's essentially the story of everyone's favorite federal agents encountering The Hills Have Eyes family in a small town. For horror veterans, this is nothing particularly shocking; we see inbred rednecks cast as monsters all the time. But, I can imagine why the more normal sci-fi audience for this show found it disturbing. I have to admit, the image of the limbless mother being pulled out from under a bed screaming is pretty powerful.
The Exorcist (1973) directed by William Friedkin
I'd been itching to watch my new blu-ray of this classic and Halloween seemed to be the perfect night to do so. I'd forgotten how intense this picture is. It builds nice and slow, like movies used to, showing us Regan's normal life before her troubles and Karras' troubled life before his sacrifice. By the time we get to the actual exorcism, we've earned it. We've seen how utterly horrible Regan has become and we've completely exhausted every rational explanation for her predicament and every excuse not to try the Catholic rite. Also, holy cow, Jason Miller as Karras is absolutely amazing. I'd probably go out on a limb and declare his performance in this film as the best in any horror movie ever made. Haunted and skeptical and guilty and tired and angry, Karras finds unlikely meaning in his life when tasked with helping Regan.
If I have any complaint at all, it's that I can't figure out how these events were described to Lt. Kinderman in a way that didn't make him immediately throw someone in jail. Two people died on the steps outside of Regan's window and one person died in her bedroom. Regan has cuts all over her body and bruises from being tied up. Her bed is padded and covered in vomit. From the outside, it's looking like the butler or maid went insane and terrorized the family. I don't know. Maybe Kinderman was Catholic? (9/10)
Halloween (1978) directed by John Carpenter
My 13th Halloween watching Halloween. In recent years -- I suppose ever since Scream -- it's been hip to analyze slasher movies in terms of conservative values asserting themselves against rebellious youth. We all know the score: the kids who smoke pot and have sex are the ones to die at the hands of the monster. The virginal innocent is the one to defeat the monster and survive to the end. Halloween is often pointed to as the originator of this theme, but I really don't see it in this film.
It is true that Michael seems to have a problem with sex. He began his career as a murderer by killing his post-coital sister and continued 15 years later by killing Lynda, Bob and Annie after or right before they had sex. However, Michael is also fixated on the non-sexual Laurie just as much (let's not get into the long lost sister BS from the sequels). Laurie, we should remember, is not quite so innocent. Right before going to the Doyle house to babysit Tommy, she shares a joint with Annie. Babysitting stoned would be a death sentence in an '80s slasher, but not quite so here. Not-so-innocent final girl Laurie also does not defeat Michael. All she does is manage to hide from him long enough for Loomis to shoot him. She does stab him a couple of times, but this doesn't slow him down. Nor do Loomis' bullets. In Carpenter's universe, morality has nothing to do with it: evil exists, it will always be here, and it'll come for you whether you've gotten laid or not. (9/10)
I ended the night and the Six Weeks by popping in a childhood favorite. The Real Ghostbusters is one of those things that helped form me into a horror fan. This episode was the sequel to the popular "When Halloween Was Forever" episode that introduced Samhain, the pumpkin-headed spirit of the holiday. While this one is not as good, it's still some fun with dozens of goofy ghosts gathering at the transformed firehouse to help Samhain on his quest to make every day Halloween. Can the Real Ghostbusters, Slimer and the Junior Ghostbusters defeat him and return things to normal?
I had a good Six Weeks. I watched 61 1/3 movies and 27 TV episodes this year, not a bad effort. I got to go to two differenthorror cons and had a blast at each. I got to take both of my daughters out for some major trick 'r treating this year. There was pumpkin pie and apple cider and Halloween cupcakes to eat. My Freddy sweater kept me warm at work. It was a good Six Weeks.
Tales from the Crypt: "This'll Kill Ya" (1992) directed by Robert Longo If you find yourself in a tale from the crypt, never, ever fool anyone about anything. If it's a surprise party, someone will end up dead. If you're going to treat your wife by coming home from work early, someone will end up dead. And, especially, if you trick an arrogant coworker into thinking you've poisoned him to teach him a lesson, you're gonna end up dead and being carried into the police station by your ankle. (6/10)
Tales from the Crypt: "On a Deadman's Chest" (1992) directed by William Friedkin The director of The Exorcist takes a stab at a Crypt, but I think he was just collecting a paycheck. There's no real evidence of that prior horror effort here (outside of a stylized poster hanging on a wall of it). The lead singer in a rock band gets taken to a Haitian tattoo artist (played by Heavy D!) who gives him a custom tattoo that looks a lot like his band's Yoko, played by Tia Carrere. He eventually looses it, kills the Yoko and cuts the tattoo off of his own chest. Nothing too special, except for when the lead singer's girlfriend's snake tattoo sticks it tongue out at him, looking like nothing else but a weird third nipple. (6/10)
