The 13 Days of Halloween: Psycho Killers

I watch a lot of horror movies, even bad ones.  Sometimes, especially bad ones because I’ve found that even a terrible horror movie is still more entertaining than a good romantic comedy.  Nothing frightens me more than the prospect of sitting through another Jennifer Aniston Rom-com or pretty much anything with Julia Roberts, for that matter.  Terrifying!

Over the years, I’ve consumed hundreds, if not thousands, of horror movies.  Even the bad ones can offer something unique or interesting to take away.  Much like Hamlet’s line, “The play’s the thing…”, in horror, the killer’s the thing. Without an interesting killer, your movie is ultimately doomed.

I have watched some horrible films over the years that have interesting or unique killers, and I find that I’ll watch them again just for that element, despite the fact that I know the movie itself, frankly, sucks.  It’s sorta like listening to an album with two or three good songs but sitting through the lesser 10 anyway just because the good tunes are worth it.

So, here are seven of my favorite horror movie killers from over the years.  Some of the films they were featured in were pretty good, but some were admittedly lousy.  It doesn’t really matter, though, because, as I said, the killer’s the thing.

Jigsaw

Yeah, I know, everybody’s sick of the Saw franchise, myself included.  Besides, the guy died, like, four movies ago.  But think back to the original, do you remember that it was actually a very good film, and unique for its time?  I know sequels can sap the life out of a movie, especially a horror movie, but let’s not forget how cool the original concept was.

How can you not love a killer who turns people’s weaknesses on themselves but gives them a possible chance at redemption and survival, albeit with sometimes horrifying sacrifices?  Jigsaw wasn’t so much a mass murderer as he was a psychologist.  But rather than simply having his patients drone on endlessly about their problems hoping to stumble onto an epiphany, Jigsaw gives you 60 seconds to cut the key out from behind your eye before the apparatus strapped to your face tears your head in half.  Now that’s what I call therapy!

John Doe

What’s in the box?  Can anyone ever forget the immortal words of Brad Pitt in Seven when first suspecting that his wife has become a victim of a nameless, religious minded serial killer acting out the seven deadly sins to “turn each sin upon the sinner”?  John Doe was somewhat like Jigsaw in that respect, with one key difference:  there was no redemption in Doe’s machinations, even for himself.

Kevin Spacey played the role to perfection, and the intricately plotted out series of killings was as impressive for their inter-connectedness as for their sheer brutality.  The best part is, he won in the end.  Doe led the police by the nose throughout the entire film, and his plan worked out precisely the way he wanted it, down to the very minute.  And how can you not love a guy who gave Gwynneth Paltrow the most emotionally affecting moment of her career, as a head in a box?

Victor Crowley

Unlike the first two killers on this list who were obsessive and intricate planners of elaborate, meaningful deaths, Victor Crowley was a straight-up force of nature.  The movie Hatchet wasn’t a great film, but it was an awesome horror movie.  Crowley reportedly died as a deformed boy when he  accidentally took a hatchet to the face from his father when he was desperately trying to save Victor from a house fire.  Now he’s back, living in the family home in the secluded Louisiana swamps, and woe be unto anyone who crosses his path.

Crowley wasn’t creative or thoughtful with his prey.  He pretty much just tore people apart with his bare hands, ripping off limbs, snapping necks, breaking people in half across trees, all while groaning and growling indecipherable sounds from his horribly deformed face.  Yeah, it’s not great acting work, but it was certainly entertaining.

Jason’s Mom

The original Friday the 13th movie didn’t have Jason as the undead, unkillable monster as protagonist, it was his mom.  An otherwise sweet looking older woman, dressed in a nice sweater, stalking Camp Crystal Lake slaughtering the teen-age counselors to get revenge for a group of horny teenagers letting her son drown at camp years earlier because they were too busy drinking, smoking weed and hooking up to pay attention. 
This woman was flat-out nuts, going around spouting “kill her mommy” in her best squeaky five-year-old-boy voice.  This movie was truly great, combining horror with murder mystery.  It was like a psychopathic version of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.  Not to mention a very young Kevin Bacon getting skewered through the throat with an arrow.  In the end, Jason’s mom lost her head, quite literally, unleashing a 30 year rampage of Jason’s vengeance that took him to Manhattan, Hell, outer space and back again.  Talk about influencial!

Anton Phibes

The Abominable Dr. Phibes was a Vincent Price take on the intricately planned revenge murder sequence.  Phibes was in a horrible car accident that disfigured him and killed his beloved wife.  Years later, Phibes comes back to kill everyone involved in allowing his wife to die on the operating table.

What makes this great is that Phibes didn’t just kill them, he planned each death to correspond to one of the biblical plagues on Egypt.  Brilliant!  To wrap it up, he created a very Jigsaw-like challenge for the lead surgeon to remove a key from near the heart to free his son before having his face eaten off by acid.  Phibes definitely had style.

Pazuzu

Pazuzu was the demon who took up residence in sweet little Reagan in The Exorcist.  Not only did he twist people’s heads around and toss them out windows, but he turned a nice little girl into a drunken, foul-mouthed sailor, and made projectile vomiting cool.

Pazuzu really came into his own in the Exorcist III, though, when he possessed a patient in an asylum.  During that film, he bounced from patient to patient, sending them out to lop off people’s heads with those giant, stainless steel clipper things morticians sometimes use.  Has anyone ever invented a perfectly legitimate tool that looks more like something from a homicidal maniac’s Christmas list than those things?  They’re spring-loaded hedge clippers from pruning people’s limbs.  Totally creepy!

Death

Death is the ultimate psycho killer.  And if you’ve seen any of the Final Destination movies, you know that he also sports a creative side for taking out his victims.  Death doesn’t just toss a little cancer at you, he creates a freaky chain of events, sort of like a gory version of the game Mousetrap, that culminated in his intended victim being disembowled, crushed, exploded, impaled or otherwise dismembered in new and interesting ways.  Has there ever been a series of films with more moments where viewers have to turn their heads suddenly and shout “whoa!” at the sudden carnage than these movies?

You also can’t beat death, no matter how hard you try.  In all these movies, the group of survivors desperately try to defeat death’s plan, but everyone ultimately ends up dead anyway.  It’s the ultimate exercise in futility.  And say what you want about Saving Private Ryan, but I’ll take the opening car crash scene in Final Destination 2 as the pinnacle in awesome movie-opening carnage and mayhem.  Death is a total bad-ass killer, and he definitely has his plans in order.

For more scares and your otherwise generally creepy reading pleasure, check out my new short story collection Devil’s Dozen.  And if that’s not enough for you, try my earlier collection, Bad Timing.

Click below for more fright-filled stuff.  And come back tomorrow for even more of my favorite time of year as The 13 Days of Halloween concludes…

The 13 Days of Halloween

Day 1: Scary Movies to Spend a Cold, Dark Night With

Day 2: The Ghosts of St. Mary’s County

Day 3: Vincent Price–The Last of the Great Horror Icons

Day 3: A Few of My Favorite Vincent Price Films

Day 4: Some Fiction For The Season–One Step Ahead

Day 5: Horror Literature–A Truly Unappreciated Art Form

Day 6: Hauntings of the High Seas

Day 7: A Few of My Favorite Horror Books

Day 8: More Fiction For the Season–The Trail

Day 9: Edgar Allan Poe–The Greatest American Writer

Day 10: Horror Anthologies on Film and Television

Day 11: Halloween Rituals and How They Originated

Day 12: Alfred Hitchcock Presents Horror

Day 13: My Favorite Works of Edgar Allan Poe

Happy Halloween: Even More Fiction for the Season–This Old House

The 13 Days of Halloween: Alfred Hitchcock Presents Horror

Alfred Hitchcock is one of those Hollywood types whose films can be associated with various types of creative work.  Thrillers are probably what he’s best known for as, over the years, Hitch cranked out many excellent films with espionage, murder and other general all-around mayhem as the main component to their plots.  Hitchcock even frequently discussed his use of the MacGuffin, put simply, whatever it was the protagonists were fighting over, be that secret plans or, typically in his films, some vague, unspecified crucial thing that sets up all the thriller elements.

While I do seriously enjoy Hitch’s various array of thrillers, I’ve always been more of a fan of his horror films.  While many of his most famous works straddled the line between multiple genres, there are a few that I feel fall squarely into the horror category, and I believe they include some of the very cream of his cinematic efforts.

Before I get into my list, though, I want to give a specific shout out to four of his films, in particular, that simply straddled that line too far on the thriller side to be considered horror.  I also very briefly considered The Lodger, which is definitely in the horror genre as it’s based on Jack The Ripper, but ruled it out immediately.  It was Hitch’s first film, a silent one at that, and simply doesn’t hold up to the standards set by the other movies listed here.

I really wanted to have Vertigo on this list, mostly because it’s my single favorite Hitchcock film.  Jimmy Stewart gives simply an awesome performance as the troubled and almost creepy-obsessive main character.  And the plot, with its hints at ghosts, dopplegangers and an all around unhappy ending really had me struggling to overcome what I knew was true.  Vertigo is a sublime example of a richly textured psychological thriller, not a horror film.  It pained me to do so, but Vertigo is out.

Speaking of great performances from Jimmy Stewart, I had nearly a carbon copy internal conflict over the fantastic Rear Window.  Stewart was again wonderful, this time as a curious but helpless man stranded in his apartment, only able to watch a murderous plot unfold through his telescope, powerless to do anything about it.  In the end, though, even more than Vertigo, Rear Window was just too clearly a psychological thriller to make it on this list.

Another film I was compelled to leave out despite myself was Grace Kelly’s fabulous turn in Dial M For Murder.  A husband’s ruthless plot to have his wife murdered in a fake robbery goes awry when she manages to kill her would-be assailant.  Unfortunately for Kelly, she herself ends up being arrested for murder.  This is truly a great film, but after her arrest, the movie plays much more like a murder mystery than a horror film.  Despite my initial consideration, deciding to leave this one off was actually easier than either Vertigo or Rear Window.

The fourth film I seriously considered was Strangers On A Train.  In this one, Guy meets a mysterious man on a train trip who offers a bizarre bargain: he’d kill Guy’s wife in exchange for Guy doing away with the man’s father, thereby solving both of their problems.  Guy says no, but the man carries out his end anyway soon thereafter, by killing his wife.  While the setup has some elements of horror, this movie ultimately becomes a thriller/blackmail film.

So, which of Hitchcock’s films did make the cut?  Here are what I consider to be his five best actual horror films:

Psycho

Ok, so this one is obvious.  Psycho may well be the best horror movie ever made, and if not, it’s on an extremely short list.  Written by horror great Robert Bloch, Psycho set the standard for quiet, unassuming nice guy cum serial killer stories.  There’s a creepy old house, a creepy rundown motel, split personalities, cross dressing, desicated corpses and more.  Do I even need to mention the shower scene, quite possibly the single most famous scene in cinema history?  This is a totally creepy masterpiece of horror, no doubt about it.

The Birds

Like Psycho, there is simply no question that this is first, foremost and completely a horror film.  What starts as a seemingly innocent romantic flirtation turns downright frightening as a small coastal California town becomes ground zero for an all-out war on mankind by the area’s bird population.  Made well before the current environmental “green” movement, Mother Nature is pissed in this horror classic and she’s not gonna take it anymore.  Has there ever been a creepier scene than the end of this film, where the birds perched on every available surface magnanimously provide a brief reprieve from their all-out assault to give the few remaining people an opportunity to give up and get out?  If there is, I haven’t seen it.

Rope

Some may say that this film is a thriller, but I disagree.  It is very much a horror story.  Two college friends decide to kill a third friend before a graduation party just to see what it’s like to murder someone.  They then proceed to stuff the body into a trunk, put a table cloth over it and serve the party guests refreshments on it.  If that’s not horror, then I don’t know what is.  The cold, calculated manner of the killing, and the way in which the stronger of the two friends totally relished every moment of the tension during the lead up to and throughout the party was just simply psychopathic.  Besides, I already ruled out two great Jimmy Stewart Hitchcock films, no way I was leaving off a third.

This film may actually be more famous for the way it was filmed, presented in real-time, cleverly masking cuts to make it appear as one long continuous shot.  Those elements helped to build up the tension right from the start, opening as it did with the last gasp of the dying man, strangled by the title character, the rope.  Murder, madness and unfeeling evil sounds a lot like a horror movie to me.

Shadow of a Doubt

What many people, including the man himself, consider to be Hitchcock’s finest film, this is another thriller that I believe totally fits the bill as a horror movie.  Joseph Cotten is charming Uncle Charlie, come to pay a visit to his namesake niece in California.  What the young girl doesn’t know is that sweet Uncle Charlie is also the Merry Widow Killer, seducing and killing a series of wealthy widows, and part of his visit is motivated by a need to flee one of his recent bloody conquests. 

During his visit, young Charlie begins to suspect and finally confirms her Uncle’s murderous ugly side, and has to survive an attempt on her life, leading him to a gruesome face-first meeting with an on-coming train.  Serial killer, beautiful young girl marked for death, and a brutal comeuppance for the killer at the end.  Yup, this is a horror movie.

Frenzy

Hitchcock’s final film and one of his most horrifying.  The Necktie Killer is stalking London, strangling unsuspecting woman with, you guessed it, a necktie.  This film features one of the most disturbing scenes of rape and murder ever put on film, at least up until 1972, when this movie was released. 

Frenzy follows the killer as he plies his deadly trade all over town, and even leads police to pursue and arrest an innocent man for his crimes.  The murder scene alone, and I mean alone as it was so effective that it was the only actual murder shown in the film, rates this as a definite horror movie.

For more scares and your otherwise generally creepy reading pleasure, check out my new short story collection Devil’s Dozen.  And if that’s not enough for you, try my earlier collection, Bad Timing.

Click below for more fright-filled stuff.  And come back tomorrow for even more of my favorite time of year as The 13 Days of Halloween continues…

The 13 Days of Halloween

Day 1: Scary Movies to Spend a Cold, Dark Night With

Day 2: The Ghosts of St. Mary’s County

Day 3: Vincent Price–The Last of the Great Horror Icons

Day 3: A Few of My Favorite Vincent Price Films

Day 4: Some Fiction For The Season–One Step Ahead

Day 5: Horror Literature–A Truly Unappreciated Art Form

Day 6: Hauntings of the High Seas

Day 7: A Few of My Favorite Horror Books

Day 8: More Fiction For the Season–The Trail

Day 9: Edgar Allan Poe–The Greatest American Writer

Day 10: Horror Anthologies on Film and Television

Day 11: Halloween Rituals and How They Originated

Day 13: Psycho Killers

Day 13: My Favorite Works of Edgar Allan Poe

Happy Halloween: Even More Fiction for the Season–This Old House

The 13 Days of Halloween: Horror Anthologies on Film and Television

Perhaps as much as any genre out there, horror caters to the short story format.  In fact, I would argue that horror actually does the short story format better than most.  Given that is the way it is in print, then it is no surprise that their equivalent will show up in the movies and on TV.

I love horror anthologies.  I have shelves full of them in book form in my dining room.  I have copious anthology films on dvd, and even entire tv series on dvd, and some older ones on VHS, if you can believe that.  The horror story has always had the capacity to get its point across concisely and effectively, be that in a dozen pages, a half hour episode or a 45 minute 1/3 of a movie.

So, here are a few of my favorite anthology series and films.  I had a difficult time whittling this list down.  Who knew there were so many to choose from?

Tales From The Crypt

Beginning in the late 1980s and running seven seasons, Tales From The Crypt may well be the best horror series ever.  Based on the pulp horror comic of the same name from the ’50s, this show seamlessly blended scares, sometimes extreme gore and dark humor in a way that I just couldn’t get enough of.  It got to be so popular that name actors were lining up to get their turn at an episode. 

I’ve been sitting here for an hour trying to figure out what my favorite episode is, but I simply can’t.  Over the years, so many of them stick in my mind that I just can’t narrow it down.  The Christmas episode with the escaped lunatic dressed as Santa, the lumberjack episode where they literally split the only woman in camp down the middle, the struggling cafe that finds success serving a unique new menu item, the conjoined twin ice cream salesman where one twin gets killed in a robbery attempt, the escaped killer who kills the cop handcuffed to him and gets stalked across the desert by a hungry vulture, the salesman/con man who gets caught up with the most repugnant woman ever when Tim Curry played the whole backwards family, the haunted house episode with Morton Downey Jr. as an exploitation journalist, the one where Jon Lovitz wants to be a Shakespearean actor and wins a key role as Yorick’s skull in Hamlet–I could go on forever. And if I don’t stop, I will.

Creepshow

This may be my favorite anthology movie.  The cast was loaded with big names–Ed Harris, Ted Danson, Leslie Nielson among many, and told a variety of tales.  Father’s Day where a murdered wealthy patriarch returns from the grave for some cake, The Lonesome Death of Jordy Ferrill where an alien weed consumes everything in its path, including Stephen King, They’re Creeping Up On You where eccentric germaphobe E.G. Marshall gets overrun by bloodthirsty cockroaches, and The Crate where Hal Holbrook and friend find a unique way to dispose of his unbearable shrew of a wife.

But my favorite of the bunch is Something To Tide You Over.  Ted Danson is screwing around with Leslie Neilson’s wife, so to get even, Neilson buried them both up to their neck on the beach and watches via closed circuit tv as the tide comes in.  Needless to say, things take a horrible turn for Nielson, and he ends up the one buried neck deep in the sand.  I will simply never forget the end scene when the waves started to lap over Nielson’s head, with him cackling insanely, “I can hold my breath for a long time!”

There were two lesser sequels to this movie, but other than a brief high point or two–The Raft, for instance, from Creepshow 2 where the creepy oil slick in the secluded lake ate the stock group of horny, stoned, drunken teenagers–but neither film came close to the original.

Tales From The Darkside

This show from the early 1980s followed on in a tradition established by Rod Serling’s
excellent work with the Twilight Zone and later Night Gallery, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and the Outer Limits and preceded
The Ray Bradbury Theater and the harsher, more graphic Tales From the Crypt that I referenced earlier.

Episodes were written by a plethora of great writers, including Robert Bloch, George
Romero and Stephen King. One of King’s episodes, in particular, based on a short story of his, The Word Processor of the Gods, had a unique impact on me. Good horror tales are always morality fables, and this one was no different.  What would you do if you had a word processor that would make whatever you typed come true?
Would you use that power for good or let it destroy you? It was that kind of ethical quandary and commentary that brought me to horror fiction. In fantastic situations, would people stay grounded or would they get drunk on the new-found abilities?

Later on, they also made a Tales From The Darkside film that ranks among my favorite anthology movies, as well.  An all star cast that included Christian Slater and Steve Buscemi told three tales wrapped around a more modern take on the old witch in the gingerbread house, capturing small children and fattening them up for supper.

Watching David Johansen as a high end hitman struggling to put down a small black cat or Rae Dawn Chong as a tormented gargoyle were great, but Lot 249 was my favorite.  Based on an Arthur Conan Doyle story, of all things, what could be better than watching Steve Buscemi reanimating an ancient Egyptian mummy and having him act out the mummification ritual on unsuspecting victims?

The House That Dripped Blood

In the late ’60s to early ’70s, a British film company called Amicus cranked out an array of horror anthology films, many featuring Peter Cushing, loosely based on the horror comics of the ’50s.  Some even sported the titles of the comics, like Tales From The Crypt and Vault of Horror.  Most of them were surprisingly good, but my personal favorite is The House That Dripped Blood.

This film is a collection of four stories, all written by the great Robert Bloch, wrapped around the gruesome history of one particular house.  Starring Cushing and horror film great Christopher Lee, this movie has one of the better wrap-around stories in horror anthology film history.  Including tales about a muderous fictional character come to life, a creepy wax museum, some voodoo and a haunted cloak, The House That Dripped Blood isn’t just a movie with a very cool-sounding title, it backs it up in terrifying substance.

Masters of Horror

This series, which appeared on Showtime in 2005, took the Tales From The Crypt precedent a few steps further.  Running for two seasons, Masters of Horror featured individual episodes directed by some of the biggest names in horror cinema.  Admittedly, the episodes were a little uneven at times–the one where dead soldiers came back from the grave to vote stands out as particularly awful–but overall, there was more good than bad here.

Jennifer was a particularly creepy episode about a smoking hot girl with a demonic face who enchanted men to look over her and had a taste for fresh meat.  The Fair Haired Child told of a boy’s parents who engaged in an intricate ritual to bring their deceased son back to life.  The child itself, crawling around all herky-jerky still gives me the shivers.  Pelts with Meatloaf as a fur coat maker taken in by some enchanted raccoon pelts has a particularly gruesome ending.  And Pick Me Up is a great mano-y-mano duel between two serial killers.

My favorite episode, though, is The Black Cat with Jeffrey Combs as Edgar Allan Poe struggling to stay atop his sanity with no money, a fatally ill wife and a heavy drinking habit.   Combs descends into a surreal madness before emerging with one of the most famous tales ever written.  This series may have been short-lived, but well worth the time.

Friday the 13th: The Series

This series, from the later part of the ’80s, has always been among my fondest memories of childhood tv. The Friday the 13th television series (no, it’s not about Jason) was an entire show based on the morality play.  The main characters had to go around hunting down cursed objects from their deceased uncle’s antique store, objects with the power to grant the owner their inner-most desires, at the cost of their souls.  Every week, we’d see the consequences of giving in to temptation.

The show was really very 1980′s, big hair and all. On one episode about a scarecrow who beheaded its owners’ enemies, there was even a macrame owl hanging on a bedroom door. I haven’t seen one of those
since, well, since 1987.  I think my favorite episode was about a woodchipper that would spit out cash depending on how much the person stuffed in the business end was worth.  Drop in a rich heiress and oodles of money came flying out.  But in the end, the guy who used it was sucked in himself, and all that came out was ground up gardener.  The episode was so cool, it never occurred to me to ask why the hell an antique store was selling a woodchipper in the first place.

Cat’s Eye

This is a 1985 film based on some short stories by Stephen King.  The title comes from a cat that serves as a unifying character, appearing in all three separate stories.  Previously, I mentioned how much I enjoyed King’s early short stories, and this film is made up of two of those. 

In The Ledge, a former tennis pro is made to traverse the thin ledge around a mobsters penthouse apartment after being caught screwing around with his wife.  The cat plays a tangental role, helping the tennis pro and working against the mobster.  Then, in Quitters Inc., James Woods signs up for a smoking cessation program only to discover that the primary motivation to quit is the threat that his wife and child would be brutally tortured if he continued to partake.  To hell with the patch and nicotine gum, cutting off one of your wife’s fingers every time you puff is a plan for people very serious about laying off the smokes.  The cat appears only briefly in this one, just long enough to have some electro shock demonstrated on him.

Finally, the cat plays a lead role in The General, battling it out with a soul-stealing troll to protect a young Drew Barrymore.  In the end, the cat wins and finds a permanent home as Barrymore’s guardian.  This isn’t the best movie ever made, but I definitely have a soft spot for it in my memory.

For more scares and your otherwise generally creepy reading pleasure, check out my new short story collection Devil’s Dozen.  And if that’s not enough for you, try my earlier collection, Bad Timing.

Click below for more fright-filled stuff.  And come back tomorrow for even more of my favorite time of year as The 13 Days of Halloween continues…

The 13 Days of Halloween

Day 1: Scary Movies to Spend a Cold, Dark Night With

Day 2: The Ghosts of St. Mary’s County

Day 3: Vincent Price–The Last of the Great Horror Icons

Day 3: A Few of My Favorite Vincent Price Films

Day 4: Some Fiction For The Season–One Step Ahead

Day 5: Horror Literature–A Truly Unappreciated Art Form

Day 6: Hauntings of the High Seas

Day 7: A Few of My Favorite Horror Books

Day 8: More Fiction For the Season–The Trail

Day 9: Edgar Allan Poe–The Greatest American Writer

Day 11: Halloween Rituals and How They Originated

Day 12: Alfred Hitchcock Presents Horror

Day 13: Psycho Killers

Day 13: My Favorite Works of Edgar Allan Poe

Happy Halloween: Even More Fiction for the Season–This Old House

The 13 Days of Halloween: A Few of My Favorite Vincent Price Films

Earlier, I wrote a tribute/lament about the late, great Vincent Price and how there hasn’t been a true horror movie icon since his passing in 1993 and doesn’t appear to be one coming any time soon.  Well, in honor of my favorite scary movie actor in this, my favorite time of year, here are a few of my all-time favorite Vincent Price films.  I don’t pretend to be all-encompassing–he did so many films during his 50+ year acting career, that would be next to impossible.  But when I’m looking for a Price-fix, as it were, these films come to mind more often than not.

House of Wax (1953)

Professor Henry Jarrod was a genius in wax.  He lovingly created some of history’s most famous people in unbelievably lifelike detail.  That is, until his business partner torches the wax museum for the insurance money with Jarrod and all his creations inside.  Somehow, he managed to survive but is horribly disfigured and unable to resume his work.  Jarrod, with the help of two apprentices, eventually makes a comeback with a new house of wax and a decidedly darker approach.

This one, along with House on Haunted Hill, later were ignominiously given horrid Hollywood remakes, somehow managing to miss the point of both original films completely.  Stay far away from those, unless you want to be horrified in a totally unenjoyable way.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

Anton Phibes was a brilliant organist, scientist and equally brilliant muderous mastermind.  A group of nine doctors and nurses presided over the death of Phibes’ wife after a car accident that disfigured Phibes himself.  The good doctor executes an elaborate sequence of hideously clever murders based on the ancient plagues of Egypt, knocking off those Phibes blamed for the death of his wife one at a time, leading up to a grand finale the jigsaw killer would be proud of. 

This film earned a sequel, Dr. Phibes Rises Again, which falls well short of the original, and another similar film, Theatre of Blood.  In that one, Price is an actor bent of destroying his critics in elaborately themed Shakespearean ways.  It’s not as well-done as Phibes, but still pretty entertaining.

The House on Haunted Hill (1959)

Frederick Loren is an unhappily married millionaire hosting a party for his wife, Annabelle, in a presumably haunted house.  The guests of honor at this ostensibly supernatural shindig are five strangers who each have been offered $10,000 if they can just make it through the night in the house.  Betrayal and death ensues, leading to an unexpected twist ending.  Are there really restless spirits at work in the creepy house or fiendish motives of a more earthly sort?

Like House of Wax, this one suffered a terrible remake that played up the supernatural at the expense of the whole point of the original film.  Where this version was about deception and all-too-human greed and aspirations, the newer model traded much of that for special effects and many haunted house cliches.  It was just sad.

The Fall of the House of Usher (1960)

Roderick Usher is a man resigned to his fate.  He lives in the crumbling estate of his family, a fitting mausoleum for the quickly approaching end of the Usher line.  His sister, Madeline, is torn between a desire to marry and flee from her past and the belief instilled in her by her brother that she, like all the Ushers, is cursed and will meet a foul end sooner than later.  When his sister appears to have died, the whole tenuous foundations holding up the Usher family, and the house itself, come crumbling down.

This is one of several adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe tales, and I believe the best of the bunch. Some of the better films in Price’s Poe series include The Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of the Red Death, Tomb of Ligeia and a couple mentioned further down this list.  In Usher, Price expertly presents a man’s descent into madness, dragging his sister with him in the process.  He even sports some unique violin stylings that are among the creepiest things I’ve ever heard.

Tales of Terror (1962)

This film presents a series of three stories also adapted from the works of Poe.  Morella is a story of a father and his estranged daughter’s reunion that blurs the line between life and death.  In The Curious Case of M. Valdemar, Price plays a man on his deathbed who agrees to be hypnotized at the moment of death as part of an experiment to try and stave off death itself but soon finds his soul held hostage by the hypnotist.  In the Black Cat, Price plays a wealthy socialite whose taste for fine wine turns to a taste for the wife of an unemployed drunkard with fatal consequences.  This one is a mix of the title story and The Casque of Amontillado, and includes a fantastic performance by Peter Lorre.

Lorre also appeared in the adaptation of The Raven, along with Price and a superstar cast including Boris Karloff and a very young Jack Nicholson. The Raven is more comedy than genuine horror, but it is still an overall enjoyable film.

For more scares and your otherwise generally creepy reading pleasure, check out my new short story collection Devil’s Dozen.  And if that’s not enough for you, try my earlier collection, Bad Timing.

Click below for more fright-filled stuff.  And come back tomorrow for even more of my favorite time of year as The 13 Days of Halloween continues…

The 13 Days of Halloween

Day 1: Scary Movies to Spend a Cold, Dark Night With

Day 2: The Ghosts of St. Mary’s County

Day 3: Vincent Price–The Last of the Great Horror Icons

Day 4: Some Fiction For The Season–One Step Ahead

Day 5: Horror Literature–A Truly Unappreciated Art Form

Day 6: Hauntings of the High Seas

Day 7: A Few of My Favorite Horror Books

Day 8: More Fiction For the Season–The Trail

Day 9: Edgar Allan Poe–The Greatest American Writer

Day 10: Horror Anthologies on Film and Television

Day 11: Halloween Rituals and How They Originated

Day 12: Alfred Hitchcock Presents Horror

Day 13: Psycho Killers

Day 13: My Favorite Works of Edgar Allan Poe

Happy Halloween: Even More Fiction for the Season–This Old House

The 13 Days of Halloween: Vincent Price–The Last of the Great Horror Icons

Where have all our heroes gone?  Horror fans have always had their iconic anti-heroes of the silver screen. From Lon Chaney to Bela Lugosi to Boris Karloff, the golden age of American cinema produced some of the most recognizable, and frightening, on-screen personas ever. 

Following in their footsteps was Vincent Price, who crafted a 50 year career out of the terrifying and the atmospherically creepy, with his long, lanky body and his general ability to set a viewer at unease without saying a word.  Price had more acting talent in his eyebrows than most of today’s movie stars possess in total. And then, when he spoke!  Price has a voice that, much like Karloff before him, defined horror for generations of fans.  Whenever you heard that unmistakable sound of his speech, you just knew something altogether horrible was about to happen.

But since his death in 1993, and to be honest, his on-screen death in 1990′s Edward Scissorhands, his last significant role, no one has stepped in to fill his ample shoes.  Where are the great horror icons of today?  Who are the great actors who personify the very genre just by speaking a few words?  Sadly, there are none.

Sure, we have actors like Robert Englund of Freddy Kreuger fame who seems to be making the rounds of low-budget horror circuit with cameos in many films.  But Englund doesn’t transcend the genre into mainstream consciousness the way Price had.  And his claim to fame, Kreuger, now has a new actor under the makeup.

So who else do we have?  Tony Todd of Candyman and Final Destination fame?  He certainly has the voice for it, at least following that bit of Price’s legacy.  But his principle films haven’t had the impact that Price’s body of work held and, like Englund, has been reduced to almost a caricature of himself through a series of bit parts in mediocre movies.

Anybody else?  I can’t think of any.  No, our horror icons today aren’t the actors who play the roles, they’re the characters themselves, often hidden behind grungy masks and layers of prosthetics.  Freddy Kreuger is far more famous than Englund.  Jason Vorhees is infinitely more well-known than anyone who’s ever played him.  Same for Michael Myers.  Hell, more people know that Myers’ mask was of William Shatner than could tell you the name of anyone who’s worn it on screen.

The great icons among horror actors are dead.  Vincent Price was truly the last of his kind.  Maybe someone will rise up to claim that mantle in the future, but in the 18 years since he shuffled off this mortal coil, I’ve seen no evidence that one is forth coming.  The ghost-face mask in Scream is more identifiable than anyone who’s been in those movies.  And so is the creepy puppet thing on the tricycle from the Saw franchise.

The other day, I watched the 1972 made-for-tv special An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe.  For an hour, Price, alone on stage, performed a series of the most famous and madness-inducing Poe tales in almost Shakespeareian fashion.  This wasn’t watered down, simplified for the masses material, but all the eloquence, complexity and sheer terror of Poe’s words transformed into life through Price’s unique acting talents.  It’s difficult to imagine any iconic horror actor of today pulling off that feat.  Horror may be more prolific than ever, but watching Price channel Poe’s tales of insanity and darkness, I couldn’t help but realize what we’ve lost.

Around the time of his death, the American Movie Classics cable channel ran a Vincent Price movie marathon.  I, in my excitement, filled two VHS tapes with some of the best of his film work.  This was still in the days before DVDs became the norm.  For years after, I pulled out those tapes every October and held my own little Price movie festival.  I watched The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Tomb of Ligeia, Tales of Terror, The Raven, House of Wax and The Conqueror Worm over and over.  It became an annual tradition in my household.

Since then, I’ve built quite the collection of Vincent Price movies, and I still make it a point to spend each October ensnared in his work.  While we may not have icons like Price anymore, we do have his many great films and best performances preserved for eternity.  So I don’t weep for the loss of the great horror icons.  Price, and others like him, will live on well beyond the grave, perhaps as it should be.

Here is a list of some of my favorite film works of Vincent Price.  Maybe you can spend a day this Halloween season emersed in the terror and madness he brought to each role.  I know I will.

For more scares and your otherwise generally creepy reading pleasure, check out my new short story collection Devil’s Dozen.  And if that’s not enough for you, try my earlier collection, Bad Timing.

Click below for more fright-filled stuff.  And come back tomorrow for even more of my favorite time of year as The 13 Days of Halloween continues…

The 13 Days of Halloween

Day 1: Scary Movies to Spend a Cold, Dark Night With

Day 2: The Ghosts of St. Mary’s County

Day 3: A Few of My Favorite Vincent Price Films

Day 4: Some Fiction For The Season–One Step Ahead

Day 5: Horror Literature–A Truly Unappreciated Art Form

Day 6: Hauntings of the High Seas

Day 7: A Few of My Favorite Horror Books

Day 8: More Fiction For the Season–The Trail

Day 9: Edgar Allan Poe–The Greatest American Writer

Day 10: Horror Anthologies on Film and Television

Day 11: Halloween Rituals and How They Originated

Day 12: Alfred Hitchcock Presents Horror

Day 13: Psycho Killers

Day 13: My Favorite Works of Edgar Allan Poe

Happy Halloween: Even More Fiction for the Season–This Old House

The 13 Days of Halloween: A few scary movies to spend a cold, dark night with

Halloween is my all-time favorite holiday.  And it’s mostly because of the horror movies.  Ever since I was a kid, spending my Saturdays watching an array of cheesy slasher pics on Commander USA’s Groovie Movies, I’ve been hooked.  I figured it was only fitting to kick off the first day of my 13 Days of Halloween with a look at some of the films that will be giving me the shivers this year.

Every Halloween season, there is nothing I like more than to settle into a cold, dark room and spend some quality time with a series of horror films.  This list is what’s on tap for this year’s special Halloween-a-thon.  These aren’t all the best, creepiest, scariest, or goriest movies ever made, just what I’ll be watching this year, in no discernible order.

The Haunting

The original 1963 version of this film, based on the fantasticly creepy Shirley Jackson novel, “The Haunting of Hill House”, is a classic.  The black and white film, made with a minimal to non-existent soundtrack at times, is still one of the most frightening things I’ve ever watched.  The scene with Theo and Nell in the bedroom and the banging sounds out in the hallway coming closer and closer always gets me.  If only film directors today could take notes on how to build tension, we’d have a lot less splatter-fests and more genuinely scary stuff out there.  And for the love of God, please avoid the 1999 remake with Liam Neeson, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Owen Wilson.  It’s an affront to Shirley Jackson’s memory.  And a really, really lousy movie.

Friday the 13th

Again, I’m talking the original here.  No absurd sequels or unnecessary remakes for me.  Back in 1980, near the dawn of the slasher pic, this low-budget flick set a new bar for these kinds of films.  The franchise was later built on Jason, the supernatural, unkillable mass-murderer, but he wasn’t even in this one (other than a brief dream sequence).  This movie is great because you don’t really know who the killer is until the end, so it’s kind of a mystery wrapped inside a horror movie.  And it has a very young Kevin Bacon getting skewered through the throat with an arrow.  For years after I first saw this, I had trouble sleeping on my back for fear of someone under my bed waiting to do the same to me.  And that nice old lady saying “Kill her, mommy,” in her best high-pitched little boy voice still creeps me out.

The Exorcist

What list of Halloween movies would be complete without a film about demonic possession?  It was a close call between this and the original The Omen, but even Gregory Peck couldn’t dissuade me from picking the end-all film for exorcisms.  Originally released in 1973, the year before I was born, I finally got to see it in the theater when some new scenes were added and it was re-released a few years back.  I lived in a fourth floor apartment at the time, with access by a rickety staircase around the back of the building.  I saw a late-night showing, and when I got back home, I found that it had gotten foggy and the staircase was shrouded in white mist.  Needless to say, I ran up those stairs like a bat out of hell.  Linda Blair set the standard for pea-soup spewing, foul-mouthed little girls in this one.

Behind The Mask:  The Rise of Leslie Vernon

Many people think Scream set the standard for poking at the culture of horror movies.  Well, this one does it way better.  Behind the Mask chronicles a young documentary maker’s film about an aspiring slasher preparing for his first slumber party massacre.  Some of the scenes are just priceless, when Leslie describes the inside tricks to being a slasher killer, like planting false newspaper clippings to set up his back story, rigging the location beforehand to steer his quarry where he wants them to go, and sabotaging all the available weapons that anyone could fight back with.  People think these guys just go nuts and kill anyone at hand, but Leslie makes sure to explain the ins and outs of the weeks of preparation that go into a proper slaughter.

Cabin Fever

If there’s anything I like more than a good scare, it’s a good laugh.  As cheesy as this movie is (and it’s pretty damned cheesy) I find myself laughing every time I watch it.  The scene where Paul washes himself off with mouthwash after having sex with one of his fellow flesh-eating virus afflicted cabin-mates is a classic.  And watch out for the old man in the country store.   This is an all-out gore fest, with bodily fluids oozing from nearly everyone, nearly everywhere.  After some serious scary stuff, a little bit lighter brand of horror is always nice for a mood shifter.

28 Days Later

Just like demonic possession, what’s Halloween without a good zombie flick?  There are other zombie movies that are better (the original Night of the Living Dead, for instance) but this one is very enjoyable.  Cillian Murphy wakes up alone in a hospital after being in a coma only to find everyone gone and the world in ruins.  (This scene, by the way, was ripped off wholesale by the zombie tv series The Walking Dead).  As he looks for any signs of life, he gets accosted by a vicious zombie priest, only to be saved by a pair of survivalists.  But when one of them gets infected, he watches as his other savior brutally hacks her partner apart with a machete.  Things get progressively darker from there, with what’s left of the British military harvesting women for sex and so forth.  There’s been a rash of infected zombie pics of late, most of them pretty lousy, but this one is well worth a watch.

So, there you have it, the six films I’ll be watching this Halloween season.  Don’t get too scared.

For more scares and your otherwise generally creepy reading pleasure, check out my new short story collection Devil’s Dozen.  And if that’s not enough for you, try my previous collection, Bad Timing.

Click below for more fright-filled stuff.  And come back tomorrow for even more of my favorite time of year as The 13 Days of Halloween continues…

The 13 Days of Halloween

Day 2: The Ghosts of St. Mary’s County

Day 3: Vincent Price–The Last of the Great Horror Icons

Day 3: A Few of My Favorite Vincent Price Films

Day 4: Some Fiction For The Season–One Step Ahead

Day 5: Horror Literature–A Truly Unappreciated Art Form

Day 6: Hauntings of the High Seas

Day 7: A Few of My Favorite Horror Books

Day 8: More Fiction For the Season–The Trail

Day 9: Edgar Allan Poe–The Greatest American Writer

Day 10: Horror Anthologies on Film and Television

Day 11: Halloween Rituals and How They Originated

Day 12: Alfred Hitchcock Presents Horror

Day 13: Psycho Killers

Day 13: My Favorite Works of Edgar Allan Poe

Happy Halloween: Even More Fiction for the Season–This Old House

Coming Soon to a DVD Player Near You: A Review of 2011′s Movies

So in my internet perusing this morning, I ran across a preview of the big movies coming out this year.  First off, let me say that very few of these look like they could be really great films, they are almost all throw-away entertainment.  But you know what, there is definitely a place for those, especially with the now-prevalent $1 rental kiosks from Redbox, Blockbuster and others, as well as the online versions and Netflix.  It’s cheaper than ever to rent a movie these days and, honestly, a movie has to be really, really bad to not be worth a buck.  The end of 2010 saw two movies, coincidentally both starring Jeff Bridges, that I’d like to see, the long-awaited sequel to Tron, and the Coen Brothers remake of the John Wayne classic True Grit.  Both have gotten some pretty solid reviews, but they belong to 2010.  These are the movies I’d like to see in 2011.  And no, there will be no mention of boy wizards or shimmery vampires, so please look elsewhere if that’s what you’re in to.

Next year will be a big one for comic book superheroes.  Admittedly, probably not as big as 2012 when Spiderman, Batman, Superman and the Avengers, among others, return to the silver screen, but there is no shortage of men in tights flying around and smashing stuff up set for this year.  Probably one of the more interesting ones being Thor.  Kenneth Branagh of Shakespearean fame, directs this flick about the Norse God of Thunder and even has Anthony Hopkins as Odin.  If anyone can treat this material right, it’s Branagh, and he could make this into the epic it should be rather than a lame lead-in to The Avengers movie coming out next year.

Speaking of which, Captain America: The First Avenger does kind of look like the aforementioned lame lead-in.  Admittedly, I’ve never been a big fan of Cap, and his story of genetic engineering to fight the Nazis just seems really, really dated at this point.  Hopefully, they can make this more relevant and not just a simple origin story for yet another character in The Avengers (to go along with Iron Man, Thor, The Hulk, etc.)  But I’ll check it out anyway, just to see if they pull it off.  Plus, his nemesis, the Red Skull, was always creepy in the comics.

Over on the DC Comics side, we have the most inexplicable star in Hollywood, Ryan Reynolds, taking the power ring of Green Lantern.  Honestly, at what point has Reynolds ever done something good?  Two of my favorite comics as a kid were Daredevil and Green Lantern.  Well, Ben Affleck totally destroyed any possibility of the dark, complex character Daredevil ever being anything more than a bad joke to anyone not familiar with the comics.  Get ready for the same treatment for Green Lantern from Reynolds.  Certainly, Reynolds is eye candy for the female audience, but this is a superhero movie not a cheesy Rom-Com.  Two thirds of the audience are going to be pudgy guys in glasses with anime-themed tee-shirts, not exactly Reynolds’ core fanbase.  Plus, his suit is entirely CGI.  This one is going to suck mightily, but it could be so bad that it is at least vaguely entertaining.  Or it could be another Daredevil.

In other superhero news Seth Rogan is set to star in a farce kind of update of the ’60s television show The Green Hornet.  Unfortunately, Bruce Lee was unavailable (due to being dead) to play the role of Kato.  This movie could be funny.  Did I mention rentals are only a buck these days?  In yet another relaunching franchise, a new version of Conan the Barbarian is also set to come out this year.  No Arnold in this version, though.  And we won’t get the pleasure of watching James Earl Jones morph into a giant snake.  This time around, Conan is being played by Jason Momoa, who played Ronon on Stargate Atlantis.  I actually think he could be pretty good.  And as cheesy as the original was, I still kinda liked it.  That and The Beastmaster, but don’t tell anybody.

Aliens also make several appearances in theaters this year.  I Am Number Four is a big-screen adaptation of the first book of the Lorien Legacies series (Can’t anyone just write a novel anymore?  Why does everything have to be a series?) written by none other than Pittacus Lore, the ruling elder of the planet the alien babies in the book and movie come from.  Actually, Pittacus is a pseudonym for James Frey.  If you don’t know who James Frey is, he’s the guy who wrote the drug-addled memoir A Million Little Pieces that garnered such rave reviews for its shocking honesty from Oprah Winfrey and others before they found out the book was actually all bullshit.  Hey, if the guy can scam Oprah, he’d gotta have some talent for fiction, right?  Oh, and the movie’s about somebody hunting and killing these alien children on Earth.

In Battle: Los Angeles, aliens surprisingly come to Earth to wipe us humans out and it’s left to a small band of marines to fight off the evil invaders who outclass them in every way imaginable and save the day for humanity.  Sound familiar?  It’s only been the basic plot for every alien invasion movie since film was invented.  But still, spaceships are cool, and I’m sure they’re gonna blow lots of stuff up.  I never said these were going to be classic films.

In Cowboys & Aliens, visitors surprisingly come to Earth to wipe us humans out and it’s left to a small posse of cowboys to fight off…oh, you get the point.  This one might actually be interesting, though.  One, it’s based in the Wild West of Arizona in the 1870s.  And two, it stars Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig.  If you could get behind Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith destroying an alien fleet with their laptop, I’m certain watching Indiana Jones and James Bond kick some alien ass from horseback with a Winchester rifle and a Colt revolver will not pose any problem at all.  Hey, I like westerns and I like aliens.  Why not bring them together?  Once I watch this movie, I’ll likely find out.

In the category of reminiscing from my days as a little kid, there are two movies coming out this year that I will definitely watch.  One is a retooling of The Muppets.  In this version, Kermit and the gang have to put on a show to save their old theater from being demolished.  So it’s like a big screen episode of The Muppet Show?  Awesome!  I wonder if they’ll do a Pigs in Space segment?  Or if the grouchy old dudes are still going to be bitching about everything from the balcony?  Hey, as long as The Electric Mayhem make an appearance, I am there!

The other movie in this class (please don’t laugh) is The Smurfs.  That’s right, they are making a live action Smurfs movie (the Smurfs themselves are actually CGI, probably because shirtless little people painted blue would have been offensive, Umpa Lumpa’s notwithstanding.  And they were orange, anyway.)  The best part?  Jonathan Winters, apparently back from the grave (you hear that Bruce Lee?  That’s commitment to the craft) does the voice of Papa Smurf.  I am all over this, unless, of course, the movie includes the late-cartoon-era Grandpa Smurf and his urine stained yellow pants.  Then I’ll skip it.

As ever, there are an array of sequels hitting theaters in 2011, most of which would likely have been better off not being made, but the chance to suck every last dollar out of a concept is just too overwhelming for Hollywood to pass up, I suppose.  We have The Hangover Part II where the boys get back together for another bachelor party, this time in Thailand instead of Vegas.  The first was pretty good, I suppose, but Thailand?  Really?  And after all they went through in the first one, what kind of universe would any of these guys ever go on another group trip again?  I’m getting nauseous just thinking about it.

Checking in this year, we also have Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides or, as I like to call it, Johnny Depp’s Personal ATM.  I guess after struggling along for years doing excellent work in really good films, I can’t begrudge Depp the right to cash in as much as he can.  And this one has Ian McShane, who played one of my all-time favorite TV characters Al Swearengen on Deadwood, as Blackbeard.  Yeah, I’ll be watching this one.  There’s Sherlock Holmes 2, where Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law try to solve the mystery of how the hell this ever got made after the trainwreck that was the first one.  But I do like Robert Downey Jr., and I have read all of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories.

And then there’s Scream 4. Scream 4 Mercy?  Scream 4 Relief?  Scream 4 someone to please stop Wes Craven before he beats this premise any more to death than it already has been?  However, it is a cheesy slasher movie and I’ve watched a lot worse, so I’ll be plopping my buck down at some point out of boredom if nothing else.  Another interesting one is Mission Impossible: The Ghost of Tom Cruise’s Career…er, The Ghost Protocol.  This is the fourth in a series of films that probably shouldn’t have made it past one.  But it is a spy flick with fancy gadgets and wild action sequences.

Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon is the third installment in this series about giant alien robots.  Interestingly, everyone involved in part two pretty freely admits that it sucked and promise to do better this time.  No word on when they’ll be offering refunds on the $400 million box office take they made on it, though.  The really cool thing with this movie is, if you sync it up to The Wizard of Oz, the plot will actually make sense.

The last sequel I plan to check out is Fast Five, the fifth in the Fast and the Furious franchise.  Oddly, there are characters in this movie who died in previous Fast films.  The producers explain it by saying that this movie actually takes place before part three.  That means this is the sequel of a prequel of a sequel.  Confused?  Somewhere in Einstein’s Theory of Relativity is an explanation for how the continuity of this franchise actually works.  I’ll be watching to see really cool cars go really fast, and to see Vin Diesel get all up The Rock’s grill.  It’s The Pacifier vs. The Tooth Fairy in a no hold’s barred battle royal.  Who can beat that?

And that leaves me with just four films that might actually be pretty good, and not in a cheesy way.  The first is Red Riding Hood, a dark, gothic retelling of the fairy tale (which, honestly, was pretty damn dark and gothic in its own right) starring Gary Oldman.  I just love Gary Oldman.  He’s had me hooked ever since I saw the drug-sniffing, psycho dirty cop he played in The Professional.  He was pretty good in Dracula, too, which leads me to believe that another dark, horror-type tale is just the vehicle for him.  Another one is Unknown with Liam Neeson, who I think is one of the most underrated actors alive.  He’s always excellent, no matter how lousy the movie.  In this one, he wakes up from a coma to find someone else has taken his life and identity and even his wife doesn’t know who he is.  I just love a good mystery.

Then there’s the American version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.  If you haven’t seen the Swedish version (warning: it has subtitles) go rent it now.  It was an excellent film, start to finish.  I’ll be very interested to see whether it gets neutered in translation.  The original has some rather disturbing things happen that help explain the main character, Lisbeth Salander, that I’m just not certain will make the cut without being toned down for us prudish American audiences.  If they do hold to the story, this could be a Best Picture kind of flick.  If they don’t, it could totally suck.  I just want to see which way it goes.

And lastly, here’s a movie called Sucker Punch. Just read this description:  “A young girl, confined to a mental institution by her stepfather who plans to have her lobotomized in five days time, creates an imaginary world to plan her escape.” That just sounds all kinds of screwed up.  And something tells me that it’s not going to have a happy ending, a la Pan’s Labyrinth where the little girl escaped the Nazi’s in her mind but actually died in the end.  I’m ready for the Jack Nicholson Cuckoo’s Nest moment when he’s drooling on himself after being lobotomized.  I could be expecting too much, as the trailer seems like a big action movie, but considering she’s imagining it all, it could be pretty decent.  After watching the rest of the stuff on this list, let’s hope so.

Movie Review: Let Me In (or as I would put it, Let Me Out…of the Theater)

So what is it about horror movies these days?  The past few I’ve actually went to the theater to see have been nothing short of dull.  Yesterday, I dropped $10.50 on a ticket to see one of the latest horror flicks out there, Let Me In.  At the concession stand before the movie, I ordered up some Italian coffee.  I’ve never bought coffee at a movie theater before, and I made an offhand joke to the girl I was with that at least I wouldn’t fall asleep during the film.  Little did I know that the caffeine in that cup would likely be the only thing to keep me awake.  Lord knows the movie didn’t.

Let Me In, at its core, is the love story between an awkward, lonely 12 year old boy and a vampire in the person of a 12 year old girl.  The boy, Owen, is caught in the middle of a crumbling marriage between a distant father and a religious, alcoholic mother.  One of the things I did like was the presentation (or lack of) of Owen’s parents.  The father never appears in person, only as a disembodied voice during occasional phone calls.  His mother, despite being physically present, is not really there, either.  We never see her face, and in virtually every scene, she’s seen pouring yet another glass of wine before passing out on their couch.  Owen is dangerously close to being an orphan.  At school, he’s tormented and tortured by a group of three classmates led by one particularly sadistic boy who’s tranferring the poor treatment he receives from his brother onto Owen.

Owen spends his time sitting alone in the courtyard of their apartment complex, and one evening, he meets the new girl, Abby, who just moved in next door.  Over the next few weeks, (and believe me, it felt like a few weeks) Owen and Abby grow close despite her warnings that they can’t be friends.  At the same time, we see why.  Abby’s father, or at least the man we’re supposed to think is her father, spends his nights stalking, killing and draining his victims of their blood to feed Abby’s hunger.

The story itself actually has some fascinating undertones, with the lonely little girl vampire just looking for someone to connect with, and the disenchanted little boy suffering in his domestic Hell just looking for the same.  The end is fairly predictable, especially after we discover the secret of her father, but its not inconsistent with the film.  Unfortunately, the plot takes too long to develop, and the constant courtship-type scenes between Owen and Abby are an odd, uneven  combination of cute and boring.  It felt like I spent half of the film’s two-hour run time watching the pair just stare unemotionally at one another.

After about an hour, sixty minutes that contained about five minutes worth of action, I began to yawn uncontrollably, and to feel really grateful for the coffee.  There was a very real chance that I would have fallen asleep, otherwise.  Even the movie’s conclusion was somewhat boring, despite it being quite literally like a bloodbath.

At the end of the day, Let Me In isn’t a terrible movie, it’s just dull, and it does win some points for trying a different, more realistic take on what a vampire would go through in this day and age.  The film is a remake of a Swedish film, Let the Right One In, and like too many other Americanized remakes of foreign films, you should probably stick to the original. 

This one is worth a look on dvd somewhere down the line, but save the ten bucks for something better, like a pillow.  It’ll make the nap this movie induces much more comfortable.

On Second Thought, One Visit To Pandora Was More Than Enough

Last week, I wrote about the attempts to capitalize on the success of James Cameron’s film Avatar.  At that time, I hadn’t seen the movie.  Well, now I have.  At least, the first two hours before I finally got up and walked away.  I watch a lot of bad movies, and very rarely do I ever turn one off, but this one didn’t make it.  I don’t know what I was expecting, blockbusters are usually pretty limited story-wise anyway, but I didn’t expect it to be this bad.  Well, not really bad, just juvenile.

If you haven’t seen it, you may not want to read on.  Of course, the story is so predictable and simplistic, there’s really nothing to give away that can’t be gleaned from the 30-second trailer.  There are much better things you can do with those three hours (yes, it is almost three hours long).  Sure, the effects are cool and all, but an even slightly coherent plot would be nice.  Basically, you have humans invading this alien world to steal an element called, believe it or not, unobtanium.  No joke.  I very nearly turned the movie off when they first said it.  Wasn’t unobtanium one of the three fundamental elements they needed to get the Cobra death ray to work in the old G.I. Joe cartoons?

Despite being armed to the teeth, and apparently having the will to blow this extra terrestrial paradise to pieces, the humans instead choose to grow mindless clone bodies of the native aliens, and then linking them by remote control to people.  My thought was they would do this for infiltration, you know, sneek into the enemy, gather intelligence, engage in a little sabotage, what have you.  But what do they do once they have these bodies?  They head down to the planet dressed up like the A-Team.  Nothing like subtlety.  They have an understanding of the alien language and culture.  Would a little native dress have killed them?

When the main character gets captured by an alien female, he discovers that they all speak reasonably good english.  And despite the fact that they know he came from the humans, and that the humans want to kill them, they inexplicably welcome him in, offering to teach him all of their secrets.  Sure, here’s all of our valuable information so you can go back and use it to better slaughter us.  Perfectly reasonable.

The aliens, which look a lot like a blue version of Shrek, possess the ability to connect with plants and animals of their planet through a built in USB cable in their pony tails.  And apparently, there’s this one tree that contains all the knowledge of the planet and tells the aliens what to do through floating jelly-fish looking spores.  I didn’t even see the ending and I can tell you that the aliens win.  Despite the fact that they have flying lizard looking things, big land animals that look like an elephant had a hot date with a hammerhead shark, and some bows and arrows against the best military technology humans can conceive of, even as far into the future as the film is set. Again, perfectly reasonable.  Everybody knows that you can defeat tanks by throwing rocks at them.  Haven’t you seen Return of the Jedi?

But all of this is a moot point because I went into the movie expecting something more.  I’d read review after review touting the great story line, and the message Cameron was telling us about respecting nature and the dangers of colonialism and all.  I thought this might actually be a somewhat intelligent movie.  Hey, I liked Terminator.  I enjoyed The Abyss.  Aliens was even pretty good.  Didn’t care much for Titanic, but I’m no Cameron hater.  I was just misled.

For all its great effects, Avatar is little more than a high-tech cartoon with a plot designed for the sensibilities of a 12-year-old.  For a movie repeatedly described as groundbreaking, it’s shockingly unimaginative, amounting to little more than a mash up of various other sci-fi movies set to a fancy background.  Why are there floating mountains?  And why, exactly are there waterfalls cascading from them?  Where is that water coming from?  It’s a giant floating rock in the sky connected to nothing but air, how can there be a steady river of water up there?  See, I tried to bring an actual adult sense of reality to the film, because that’s what I thought it was, but it’s a Saturday morning cartoon.  And that’s okay, if you just want to watch some interesting visuals for three long hours with only a modest plot to drive you from background to background.  But if I’m going to spend three hours watching a cartoon, I’d still rather see Scooby Doo.

Return to Pandora again, and again, and again. And don’t forget your check book.

First off, let me say, I haven’t seen Avatar.  It may, indeed be a fantastic movie, and the effects look cool enough, I suppose, but I’ll wait until I can get it for a buck or watch it at a friend’s house (if that doesn’t constitute copyright infringement, and, given the course of things, someday soon, it might).  Interestingly, this movie has already topped every other movie in the history of recorded film in box office.  That means it’s made tons and tons of money, while also being one of the most, if not the most, pirated movie ever.  So, how exactly has that illegal copying hurt Avatar?  How much better than the best ever could the sales have possibly been?

Anyway, director James Cameron and the studio, 20th Century Fox (there’s an apt name, if I’ve ever heard one.  Do they even realize it’s the 21st century now?  Has been for a decade or so)  have started down a somewhat disturbing road.  First, they locked out movie rentals for 30 days after the DVD release to boost sales.  Well, apparently, the disc has some copy protection on it that requires blu-ray players to download some sort of upgrade for the disc to even play properly.  Quite a few folks are pissed, after assuming, rightly so, that paying the extra bucks for the blu-ray version would actually mean you could watch the film without hassle.  Guess not.

Anyway, from all reports, if you do get the movie to play, what you get is a stripped down version with no special features and any of the fancy stuff that blu-ray was supposedly designed for, you know, an enhanced viewing experience, other than a supposedly superior picture, of course.  Well, apparently, the plan is to re-release the film with added footage (the director’s cut, I suppose) in the fall, followed by a new round of DVDs and blu-ray discs, then later a 3D version with yet another release of DVDs and blu-rays.  Exactly how many times do they think people, even big fans, really want to buy the same product?  I understand that they have a commodity, and they are more than free to try to exploit that, but this seems a bit too far to me.

The film has already surpassed expectations for sales in a big way.  Do you really need to soak your audience three or four more times over?  Isn’t there a point where you just have to say, “Hey, maybe we should be a little more considerate to the people who put out their hard-earned money to see our movie than trying to sap more of it from them, one new blu-ray release at a time?”  At what point does an honest desire to find success and protect your work turn into unmitigated greed?

If I understand properly, the point of the film is decrying humans trying to exploit these poor, simple aliens by stealing their precious resources.  Apparently, the people selling this movie don’t see the irony of essentially doing the same thing to the movie-going public.  Do as I say, not as I do, I suppose.