In It For The Kills: Horror Perspectives

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At Long Last, It's Fear No Evil!

Thank you to fellow pop culture junkie and blogger Jeff Sparkman at Jeff Sparkman's Siftin' for providing the movie Fear No Evil for today's post. What we've got here is a sweet coming of age story about a girl who's really an angel, a boy who's really a devil, and a school bully who has some strange ideas about his bullying tactics.

On the day of Andrew's christening, he turns the baptismal water to blood. The next eighteen years go by in one of the most unusual montages of the 1980s: we hear his parents arguing while we see a shot of their house exterior getting more and more and more run down. His mother apparently has been focusing too much on him and not enough on his father, but we don't get to see what about Andrew makes his father so upset. We look in on the family at Andrew's eighteenth birthday party, where his dad is so afraid of him he drops the cake, mom slaps dad, and dad flings mom into a table where she falls on the floor and pulls a strategically placed iron down onto her head.

Then we see Andrew at school. He is so evil that he is the only one to get a passing grade on the paper the teacher is handing out! The school bully tries to get him stoned, and then kisses Andrew in the shower surrounded by lots of nekkid guys after gym. Andrew grabs the guy and keeps on kissing him in what is I guess supposed to be his first devilish act at school. Whatever is going on, the bully and everyone else run off and leave Andrew cowering naked in the corner. At my school, there would have been some beatdowns handed out after an incident like that I'm sure, so it serves to show us how frightening the rather fey Andrew is.

Ok, I'm just gonna come out (no pun) and say it: angel girl classmate or no, Andrew acts gayer than hell to me. And I have impeccable gaydar. This movie is either a metaphor for having to come out to oneself and how scary that can be, which is fine, or it's about how gay people are evil, which is not fine. Whatever the subtext, it is worth watching for probably the only recorded instance of death by dodgeball. Yes, you read that right. There is also a kick ass punk soundtrack highlighted by a scene in which Andrew stands all alone looking down at the school parking lot while "Anarchy in the UK" starts up and we hear "I am an an Anti-Christ!" before the camera pans away from him. This film is a fine little nugget of what the fuck-ness from a decade full of what the fuck. Starring Stefan Arngrim, Elizabeth Hoffman, Kathleen Rowe McAllen, Frank Birney, Daniel Eden, John Holland, Barry Cooper, Alice Sachs and Paul Haber. Written and directed by Frank LaLoggia.

Solstice (2008)

Solstice tells a ghost story in which a dead person is trying to contact a living person and nobody believes the person being contacted. In the end the ghost gets through to everyone (or back at them, as the case may be.) It's an old story, but I never get tired of it.

Megan (Elisabeth Harnois) lost her twin sister Sofie (also Harnois) to suicide last winter solstice. No one knows why, but flashbacks make it obvious something was troubling Sofie greatly when she died. When the story picks up again, it is coming up on the summer solstice. Megan has not been able to go on with her life in the depression of not knowing what happened to her twin. She even failed her senior year, but she goes on a senior trip with her friends to her family's lake house to celebrate the solstice. Soon after arriving at the house Megan thinks Sofie begins trying to contact her. Sofie's ex boyfriend Christian (Shawn Ashmore) also feels it but acts increasingly sketchy as the solstice weekend goes on and Megan gets closer to finding out what really happened.

When she finally learns Sofie's secret, it is June 21, also known as the cusp between astrological signs Gemini (the twins) and Cancer. To me the date is obviously a reference to Megan's transition in life from grieving twin to a young woman standing alone and walking on into adulthood. Little details like this are what sets a film apart from all the other "vengeful female ghost" movies.

This film has been criticized for being mediocre, but as someone on the Imdb boards pointed out, if the film had been Japanese people would be creaming themselves over it. Its got the atmosphere of the Louisiana swamp complete with a hot local voodoo practitioner and a story that you won't figure out completely til the very end. It's also got a chick vomiting mud, some weird psychic shit that reminded me of The Gift and a ghost that does not look like every ghost since Ringu.

And, P.S., it was a foreign film first, but from Denmark (Midsommer, 2003.) We don't get a lot of horror out of that part of the world but it seems to be an up and coming spot for it in recent years. If I can find the original, I'll review it here as well.

From the Mind that Brought You Porky's, it's Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things!!!!

This one tops my list of the "hey, let's go to an island and be eaten by zombies" subgenre. The title comes flying out of a zombie's mouth and lands in green letters on the screen right at the beginning, so you know the movie to follow is going to be disgusting fun. Located in the tropics off the Florida coast near Miami, a yucky little swamp oasis serves as a pauper's cemetery. Alan is a snotty play director who for some reason has enough money to pay a bunch of actors to essentially do his bidding. All the other characters in the movie are so scared of being fired by Alan that they are willing to go to the island. While he shouts at them, they dig up a corpse for him and help him do a Satanic ritual by which he tries to raise the dead, who are supposedly also going to work for Alan. Then everyone has to go along with Alan's plan to bring the corpse to the one house on the island, sit it on the couch and talk to it as if at a cocktail party. The only time in the movie besides while he's being eaten that Alan doesn't get his way is when he tells the ingenue of the group he should get to sleep with her before her boyfriend the leading man.

Obviously, you know where this is going, but tension effectively builds up during an hour of false scares before the 30 minute zombie fight. Then we get to watch the group come to several temporary solutions before succumbing to the inevitable. People complain that the movie doesn't have enough gore, but I was more than satisfied in that respect by watching the zombie chow literally play with the corpse they stole. It's nauseating! Alan even gets into bed with the thing and talks to it when no one else is around. The friends are a little more interesting than the standard group. There isn't a slutty girl, but instead a girl who argues with Alan and insults him. Two of Alan's manual laborers are flaming homosexuals.

Best of all though, this movie raised a couple of questions for me. Alan does a ritual involving Satan, not voodoo. Could the zombies be animated corpses because demons come into them and control them? Why don't the group members who die throughout the course of the film turn into zombies?

Is it just a coincidence that the background noise is filled with the sounds of frogs? Or is there a symbolic connection between zombies and frogs? People associated the frog with evil in the middle ages because witches used frogs as familiars. It also stands for transfiguration, as in a frog being kissed and turning into a prince. Or a dead body turning into a cannibalistic killing machine.

Out of all the rituals done in the movie, which one worked? Was it the last one they tried, or does it maybe take awhile? I can hear frogs in my backyard. How long would it take to walk here from the cemetery?

Finally! I got to see Paranormal Activity

Keep in mind I live in a town with one movie theater and about 10 stoplights, and most of the time I'm lucky when movies I actually want to see come to the minor city 45 minutes away. Meaning, in the end, that although we actually by some miracle got this movie right here at our own little theater, nobody is going there to see it so it will be the first and last time we get something that doesn't star Owen Wilson. Even the ghetto fab girl behind me wasn't screaming or even talking to the characters as if they could hear her, because this is the kind of film that is succeeding on the midnight movie audience camaraderie experience. And that experience was missing. Don't believe me? Think about how many times you have actually watched Rocky Horror at home alone. (Not you, sir. Only the sexy people.) See? So if you want to enjoy Paranormal Activity, see it on the big screen, preferably in a crowded theater.

Now I'm not gonna sit here and say the film sucked, or that it wasn't scary. And I applaud the William Castle marketing techniques as well as the return of the midnight movie. Its just that the movie tried to break from the mold but only halfway. To go along with the mockumentary feel, the two stars seemed like average (i.e. annoying and self absorbed) people you might know. Katie was so crushingly average she seemed like one of those awful women who love to hang out in front of the school waaaaay before my son's elementary school lets out in the afternoon just so they can talk about scrapbooking and pregnancy and how hard life is when you don't have to do anything but take care of your litter of kids and collect your husband's check. (I am a stay at home mom. Its the easiest job ever, and my kid is special needs, bitches.) Katie likes making jewelry, knitting and having her ugly friend come over so they both can be cunty to Katie's boyfriend. She is a prude who is always snappish and would never, ever ever let herself be photographed having sex or even do a little striptease down to bra and panties. And although I couldn't wait to see the demon get ahold of her yuppie ass whose shit don't stink, it was surprisingly refreshing to see such an average person on film. It was not in keeping with Hollywood conventions. So why was the rest of the story horror-by-the-numbers?

If you're gonna make me suffer through two hours with an unlikeable, boring, the-best-part-of-her-is-in-her-bra-and-wont-come-out-and-say-hi lead actress, why not make the extraordinary experiences she is having give you the license to write a screenplay in which the characters have SOME sense? If the demonologist is out of town, go sleep in a church. Call another demonologist; hell, every demonologist in the country. Try praying or reading your bible. Have your family come over and camp out. Cut your wrist and take a vacation to the mental hospital. Katie was more concerned with pussy whipping Micah than she was for her own life and Micah did everything he could think of to worsen the situation with the demon. I mean, for God's sake, when Micah finds Katie holding a cross he actually burns it. Way to go. I'd like to see more horror movies populated by characters who have seen a horror movie before in their lives. The best movies are the ones where they decapitate the masked killer, slay those zombies or find out what that ghost wants, and then even if they die those fuckers go out fighting.

So go and see the movie in a charged up emotional group setting if you want to see it. Encourage Hollywood to embrace budget films and give them major releases in podunk towns. If you want a big boobied unsmiling girlfriend to degrade you so you can build your ego in the neverending pursuit of being her tampon, ask her if any demons are chasing her before you move in together. If you come down with demons, don't bring home a Ouija board. And for those of you who say it wouldn't be a movie if the characters' actions had been logical, please consider whether watching movies with really stupid people in them is making you feel better about yourself, and then go take some continuing ed classes.

Oh, and check out the original ending of the film on YouTube after you see the movie. If it had not been changed the movie would have been much better.

Strait-Jacket (1964)

Its a fact of life that you either prefer Coke or Pepsi, and Bette Davis or Joan Crawford. Strait-Jacket puts another vote for Ms Crawford on my scorecard. I have not seen a lot of movies made before 1968 or so and had no interest in doing so until I saw The Innocents this summer. Of course the only thing these two movies have in common is that they both surprised me by being so much better than I thought they would be because they have no boobs, blood or cursing. Sorry, but I'm a child of the 80s and was raised on gratuitousness. But since the songs of my teenage years began appearing on the classic stations, maybe coincidentally I've come to appreciate acting without special effects and the subtlety afforded thereof. Maybe its because I'm getting progressively slower and I can wait for the plot to fan out. Besides, the decap scene in this flick is awesome even without the gore.

Anyway, I do know enough about old movies to know that at the beginning of Joanie Dearest's career the lines were delivered in a more projected fashion because a lot of people had come from the stage and also because you had to project the lines for the mikes of the time. And I've seen enough 60s-80's horror starring actors from the studio golden age to know some people were still hamming it the hell up. But Crawford changed her acting style with the time and here, even though she spends a lot of time shredding up the screen, her emotion is believable and not melodramatic. This is especially notable because Strait-Jacket is a neat little schlock sandwich. But I love it because it's the classic slasher melted together with "someone is trying to make someone else think they're insane," only the boogeymen are women.

The Imdb says this movie distills to "after a 20 year stay at an asylum for a double murder, a mother returns to her estranged daughter where suspicions arise about her behavior." The dude who talks a lot at the beginning of movies on TCM said it was an example of a woman over a certain age not being allowed to play a romantic role. I think Crawford's character turns on her sexuality/passion. She grabs an axe and cuts off her husband's head because he is quite literally sleeping in her bed (post coitus, its is implied) with an old girlfriend. Joan's character had an old man husband first to get his money and then got herself a handsome younger cowboy who ends up a headless horseman. But she turns out to be sane in the end because her crime was only a crime of passion. Personally, when I found my recent ex fooling around with someone else I fixed myself another drink and went back to the party. But some people get stabby about cheating. In this case the straitjacket fits someone quite different who murders out of true long simmering insanity rather than temporary. It is the notion of Crawford as a romantic heroine, however tragic, that makes this movie a little better than the usual William Castle flick. The only gimmick here is the star.

Oh and PS, Joan requested Diane Baker to play her daughter having worked with her before. So there's evidence the famously bitchy star got along with at least one fellow actress!

Raw Nerve (1991)

 
 
Your neighbor who sells bootleg shrimp and rides a bike because he cant afford a shrimp boat and a car has a story idea. What the hell, he has to daydream to stay awake while he's going out to work in the morning before dawn. You're a screenwriter, ya know? He comes up with ideas, snap snap snap but he's just the idea man. That's the hard part. You might as well do the easy part, writing the script, since you don't have a job.

So here it is. Some asshole is going around shooting big haired pretty girls in the faces with a sawed-off shotgun. How can you finish the script with maximum exposure of Jan-Michael Vincent with a southern accent and a butt cut? Once you've cast a 1991 Traci Lords as a naive high school age orphan, you've entered a cinematic world of pure absurdity. Then add a male romantic and dramatic lead who drives racecars for a living in Mobile Alabama. Have him hanging out with the guy who played the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse in Raising Arizona. Then to add class, bring in Glenn Fucking Ford as the Angry Police Chief. Congratulations. You have a vintage straight to video chicks in peril movie with no boobs and no blood. Now with more incest.

But you do have a pickup truck driving off of a parking deck and breaking in half. You also have the two dumbest people on earth falling in love after one night of sex during which one of them is trying to exploit the other for a newspaper story. Because your neighbor with the boat still lives in that universe where people get all shouty about the local paper.

Encounter of the Spooky Kind (1980)

 
In only three movies I completed my lazy person's thesis on 80s Hong Kong horror: the movies are all absolutely ridiculous. But movies in general were a bit more WTF to me in the 80s. Sammo Hung plays a guy who, literally in the first scene of the movie, barely escapes two ghosts looking for a body as he walks home from work. We find out that his wife is a bitch, he drives a horse drawn cab (year is 18something) and helps his client cheat on his wife...with Sammo's wife!

Sammo sees someone running away when he sneaks off to check on his wife. Then the plot, and be patient because there isn't much left, leaps to...the client has to kill Sammo, who doesn't even know who was at his house while he was at work. And they don't just wanna kill him, they wanna convince him to go to an abandoned house at night so a magician can telepathically animate a corpse to do what I'm not sure to him. Sammo's kung fu is too strong for the dead guy and we never get to see how the dead guy would have taken out his victim. And by the way Sammo's character, we find out 30 mins into the movie, is locally famous for being afraid of nothing.

The rest of the movie is absurd humor and some of the best kung fu scenes this side of Drunken Master and its ilk. From what I read it was the first movie besides Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires to have the hopping corpses who can't find you if you hold your breath. I think this is probably the kind of movie you could watch several times and still notice new things going on in the fight choreography. There is not a lot of killing, blood or nudity (in fact we get mooned by a male actor and that's it) but I didn't miss them. An excellent intro to the sub genre and owed a debt by Mr. Vampire.

The Mythology of the Universe as seen in The Haunted Cop Shop (1987)

 
1. If your police station used to be a night club for suicidal Japanese men, don't be surprised if you break out in vampires.

2. Acting like a headless ghost will scare a confession out of a crook.

3.If you're in jail, and you wander out of your spontaneously opened cell into a game of mah-jong, don't bet your life on the game just because you have no money.

4. If you meet three guys who ask you to play mah-jong while you're wandering around jail, they might be ghosts.

5. When internal affairs sends a skeptic to investigate your claims of goblins in the workplace, you can make a believer out of her by tricking her into eating dog meat. This will make her unlucky which will in turn make her see ghosts too.

6. Don't leave your keys lying on the gurney next to the vampire you have strapped down.

7. Why use a wooden stake through the vampire's heart when a chopstick will work just as well?

8. If you light enough candles you can fight lesser vampires using kung fu. If their leader shows up though, he will rip off your arm.

9. Mixing comedy and jump scares randomly will make the jump scares more effective.

10. If you speak Mandarin to your partner he will kick your ass.

11. Folks who were fans of HK horror in the 80s are very nostalgic when it come to this movie.

12. Ricky Lau managed to have a great career in films despite being very funny looking.

He Lives By Night aka Ye jing hun (1982)

Although I began my serious horror junkie ways recently in 2007, my love affair with the Hong Kong horror flick began when a large group of friends and I got blindsided by the piss-your-pants-funny Mr Vampire on a baked potatoes movie night in 1996. As I was pretty much solely into kung fu movies at the time (OCD, anyone?), I didn't begin to explore the world of Hong Kong horror until I started this blog. I needed to know: are all Hong Kong horror films padded with slapstick?

After watching the goofy ass yet still creepy Bless This House, which is considered to be one of the first serious HK horror flicks, I did a little research and found out that yes, at least in the 80s, most HK audiences preferred comedy. Now while I hate horror spoofs (Student Bodies, Return to Horror High) I do love a lot of comedy mixed with truly terrifying stalk and kill scenes. Simply put, In my journey through the world of horror as documented in this blog, I've found that I don't like to get to the end of the movie and feel bad. Sue me, Eli Roth fans.

He Lives By Night is notable in the HK slasher genre because it borrows heavily from the giallo. However, where the giallo fills the running time with gratuitous sex or weird hallucinations a la Autopsy, He Lives By Night breaks up the scares with fat guys in glam makeup for no reason, three people eating $200 worth of tripe, chicken feet and dumplings for breakfast or a radio station security guard who keeps a box of weapons like spiky maces and brass knuckles behind the desk for employees to borrow. The film also does more than a little winking at Mr Hitchcock; when we first see the fat, pipe smoking police chief (Kent Cheng) we see a large silhouette of him alone in profile with his pipe.

Someone is murdering women by stabbing them and then strangling them with a white fishnet stocking, which is the killer's fetish of choice. Now, I lived through the 80s as a young pop culture junkie, and the only pair of white fishnets I ever saw was in the ZZ Top video for "Legs," but maybe they were a fashion staple in HK. Anyway, the film gives us a too-obvious choice of suspect in the obsessed fan of Sissy (Sylvia Chang) the late night radio host with the sexy voice and the face for radio. Because the fat police chief has the hots for Sissy, and his partner (Simon Yam) is an old classmate of hers, she helps the police with the investigation until of course the real killer is stalking her. It doesn't help that she taunts him over the radio and figures out uncannily why he is killing. Just like in the giallo or the Hitchcock thriller, there is a damn good reason the killer went nuts.

The movie does have its disturbing parts, chiefly the scene in which a  young woman is brutally murdered in her own home while her friend hides from the killer and watches. Whether by reason of good old misogyny or morality, most of the victims are not very nice people (the Carrie syndrome). I actually rooted for the killer after he murders the shoplifters who carjacked him.

I enjoyed the movie and would recommend it, but I wish if the writer wanted to go Western he had kept the Italian/British convention of hiding the killer's identity til the end. It's just not as much fun to watch the cops try to catch the killer when we the viewer already know who dun it.

Want more? These movies are sometimes hard to find, so I'm not only taking viewing suggestions but also guest reviews. Lets spend the weekend looking at HK horror to try to get a handle on it and put it in context. And yes, since I went to a public state college, the weekend starts at midnight tonight. So get out your glitter makeup and join me for a mini HK film fest, this weekend on In It ForThe Kills.