Month: October 2024

Terrifier (2016)

There’s an awful lot of hype around this franchise at the moment, with the recently released third installment attracting attention for stories of people walking out on it, vomiting, etc cos the violence is just too much for them. Stories like this, of course, go back to the early days of horror cinema in the 30s, they were bullshit then and I suspect they’re a bit bullshit now (even though I’ve seen a bunch of folks on Threads claiming they saw it happen at the screening they attended). That said, having finally seen the first in the series, and having gathered that it’s apparently mild compared to the sequels, I could kind of believe that yeah, people really do find it excessive. Terrifier seems to have attracted attention mostly because of one notorious gore scene; director Damien Leone apparently made the film (which only cost around $50,000 or something) mostly as a showcase for his own makeup and FX skills, and goddamn if he doesn’t have those to spare indeed. He generally makes good use of his limited resources, particularly the grotty main location, although his story pacing is wildly off; the aforementioned hacksaw business is the film’s peak but it comes about halfway through it, after which it does kind of drag significantly. It weighs in around 84 minutes but could’ve been tightened to just over an hour. What makes it all work is David Howard Thornton as Art the Clown, the killer who’s clearly been calculated as a modern successor to the 80s franchise monsters, but who’s made more interesting by Thornton’s performance. Art not only has no dialogue but also no voice (ironic, since many of Thornton’s other credits are voice work), so he does everything in mime, including the surprisingly numerous times he gets something stuck by something and makes no sound… yikes. Thornton’s physicality makes Art a lot more effective than I’d initially expected. Despite its problems I think I enjoyed Terrifier more than I’d thought I might, not a great film but I can understand why the franchise is popular. I might even watch the sequels at some point. Stranger things have happened.

Black Christmas (1974)

This is the only film I’ve actually planned to watch for this whole “festival”, cos today (i.e. the 11th of October 2024) actually marks 50 years since Black Christmas was originally released in its native Canada. No one can agree on exactly what the “first” slasher was—the Wiki article on the genre notes filmic antecedents at least as far back as the 1920s and theatrical roots in the Grand Guignol—but this one seems to often get credit as a major progenitor and the instance where the tropes really first fell into place. So I thought I should watch it if only for historical reasons, and, well, “historical reasons” felt like the main reason to do so…

Directed by Bob Clark, who had one of rhe most unfathomable directorial careers of anyone I can think of (this is the same man who made the Baby Geniuses movies decades later), Black Christmas struck me as essentially pretty drab, produced fairly cheaply and making not much effort to look otherwise; it’s fairly plain to look at and, for that matter, hard to actually see much in cos it looked kind of underexposed or underlit or something on top of that… acting’s pretty drab as well. One notable thing is that the killer remains pretty much unexplored; we only know he’s called “Billy” cos he calls himself that, otherwise things like motive, backstory, even his appearance are pretty blank. The most shocking thing here, though, is the presumably main male character, played by Keir Dullea, who loses his shit when Olivia Hussey’s final girl announces she wants an abortion and he’s all “but what about meeeeeeeeee, the man, what about my feelings?”… ugh. I imagine that when he gets his in the end, a lot of modern viewers will be pleased just because he’s such a shit. No, on the whole I can’t say I was a fan of this. Happy 50th anniversary anyway, I suppose.

Happy hundredth, Ed

Alas that Edward D. Wood Jr. couldn’t be with us to see it, but one of filmmaking’s most singular figures would’ve been 100 today. Along with Andy Milligan, Wood is the ultimate problematic test case for the auteur theory, insofar as the latter posits that being an auteur also serves as a kind of guarantee of high quality. You’re more than just a mere metteur en scène, you’re a great artist; you can, of course, be a perfectly commercial artist (and auteurism was nothing if not a way for the French critics who pioneered it in the 1950s to justify liking their favourite Hollywood filmmakers), but the force of your personality is what really drives your work rather than the dictates of studios, etc. Wood absolutely complicates this by frankly not being a great artist in this sense. But his films are, undeniably, his films, they’re an expression of his personality. Again, this is also fairly true of Andy Milligan, although I don’t think you can talk about his films being charming in the way you can with Wood; cos there is a charm to Plan 9 From Outer Space and a sort of passion to it that means I can’t really condemn it as a bad film, and FUCK the Medved brothers for the whole “worst film of all time” thing. Anyone who genuinely believes that about Plan 9 needs to see more actually bad films (such as the oeuvre of the aforementioned Andy Milligan, perhaps). Ed embodies what I said in my last post about bad cinema; there’s different levels of it and one is where a film is mostly let down by a lack of resources and/or skills. He was on that level, I think, but passion and enthusiasm got him through… and I always liked Tim Burton’s biopic of him for communicating that. So happy 100, Glenda.

Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966)

A tale filmed by an idiot, full of badly post-synchronised sound and flagrant disregard for continuity cutting, signifying… fuck. “Shocking” barely begins to describe it. Reportedly director and star Hal Warren made this after a conversation with legendary Hollywood screenwriter Stirling Silliphant; Warren claimed it was easy to make a cheap horror film, Silliphant told him to go and make one then, and, well, Warren did just that. Fortunately for him he never specified the film had to actually be good as such, cos he failed brilliantly there. Manos is legendarily bad, its rediscovery on Mystery Science Theatre 3000 ensuring its posthumous fame; there’s a particularly good review of it on Letterboxd calling it “not only an inscrutable piece of anti-cinema but also a glorious piece of accidental outsider art”, which is as accurate a description as any. In some respects, the unspeakable (if you’ll pardon the expression) dubbing is the real horror in this film—all the dialogue is post-synced and terribly; the young child actor apparently cried at the premiere when she heard the adult woman’s voice replacing hers—but honestly, apart from the fact that it’s mostly in focus, Manos is a wild catastrophe on almost every level, clearly made by people with only a minimal idea of what they were doing, and it would notably be the only film most of the participants ever made. The only thing it gets right, I think, is the Master’s costume, that black robe with the giant red hands on it, that looks kind of awesome. The thing is, this could actually have been decent; I have a sort of taxonomy of bad cinema where the worst sort of bad films are deeply flawed on some conceptual level that can’t be overcome, but there’s another level on which a bad film has an adequate idea behind it but lack of resources and other technical skill lets it down. Manos is one of those films; the whole demonic cult thing isn’t bad as a plot for a B horror, and in the right hands (ho ho) you could actually make something good from it… but that’s not what happened here, obviously; what we actually got was an amazing classic of crap (Warren was a fertiliser salesman by trade; this was a different kind of shit he was selling). This would’ve been amazing back in the good old days of Mu-Meson Archives with an alcohol-fuelled audience; I’m only sorry it’s taken me this long to see it, but it was exactly what I needed after In a Violent Nature to cleanse the palate…

In a Violent Nature (2024)

I’ll be honest: I did something I almost never do (especially not with a film I haven’t seen before) and sped through a bit of this. Only during one kill sequence that was taking fucking forever, but still… Anyway, it’s nice to be able to say I’ve actually seen a film in the same year that it was released, which is not something I’ve been able to say much in the last decade or so; wish I could’ve said that about a better film. Director Chris Nash takes what could be called an “arthouse” approach to the slasher, with IaVN drawing comparisons with “slow cinema” and taking Gus Van Sant’s Gerry as an avowed inspiration; with what I know of those things, I suppose I can see that point, especially with all the goddamn walking in this one… though what it put me in mind of was actually Jim Jarmusch and something he said about his 1999 film Ghost Dog, about leaving in stuff that other directors would cut for timing, story, etc. IaVN definitely does something similar.

Basically, Nash takes the slasher cliches—seemingly immortal killer, negligible characters, graphic murder scenes, final girl, all of that—and then proceeds to do nothing much of interest with them. Supposedly it’s shot mostly from the killer’s perspective, which is bullshit in that it’s actually shot mostly from behind him as he plods through the delightful bit of Ontario forest in which it’s filmed (it can’t be his POV if he’s actually in the shot now, can it?). To give Nash due credit, the choice of location is stunning and the visual sense on display is an interesting one, a couple of the kills are particularly imaginative and they’re filmed in a really interesting way, the lack of incidental and highlighting of the natural sounds of the area is a bold and successful choice. But dear GODS it’s so fucking boring. The backstory is as trite as they come, the Expendable Meat is even less interesting than they usually seem to be in these things, and just… urgh. I will give it points for what it does well, but I otherwise have not a lot of use for this. Still interested in seeing what else Nash does in future, I think he could be interesting, but I just hope it’s not more of this…

The Shadow of the Cat (1961)

Can’t do a horror film festival (insofar as this is such a thing) without some Hammer… albeit if you want to be picky about genre, I suppose this is probably more thriller than horror, and apparently there’s been debate over the years as to whether or not it’s even a Hammer film. Technically it’s actually by an outside company called by BHP, a small concern who needed co-producers to actually make anything, so they teamed up with Hammer who wrangled funding from Universal and provided some of their regular cast and crew… Hammer in turn needed something to fill a double bill slot after another production fell through, so they just redressed some sets from Curse of the Werewolf (the other half of said double bill) and everyone was happy. It’s not overtly based on Poe’s “Black Cat” but it has certain similarities; a slightly cranky old woman is murdered by her servant in conspiracy with her husband and their other servant, but unbeknownst to them Tabitha the cat witnesses everything and she is not happy, and as the film goes on she becomes an increasingly vexing presence. The film was made in black and white, which is a bit of a shame cos Bernard Robinson’s set design looks like it would’ve been delightful in colour, though it still looks fine in monochrome; it’s a small film and a B-movie in most respects, but John Gilling has a good cast to play some frankly unsavoury characters, and obviously the cat is adorable as hell while it’s monstering them. Good stuff, whether “strictly” “Hammer” or “horror” or not…

Nekrotronic (2018)

I’m quite an admirer of Kiah Roache-Turner’s Wyrmwood series, so I felt like I’d probably be onto a good thing with this one that the brothers produced in between those two… and I was right, too, this was quite delightful. It sets out its background premise with considerable and almost admirable bluntness before the credits even roll; basically we live in a world full of demons and have done ever since the first human sacrificed the first animal and brought demons into the world. However, there have also been demon hunters ever since, and our hero discovers he himself is one of them…  more to the point, he’s the son of one of the worst of these demon figures (played, amazingly, by Monica Bellucci), and they’ve caught up with modern technology to take people’s souls. Not a little Matrix-y, with a bit of Ghostbusters thrown in, but I think it works well enough. I don’t know what this thing cost but goddamn it looks expensive; I suspect it wasn’t mega-budgeted but it’s all there on the screen. What puts the film over, really, is the characters; Roache-Turner has a quite delightful cast to embody them and they’re all fun, the two more experienced demon-hunting sisters having to school their new recruit who never realised he was such a powerful figure, and the latter’s Maori co-worker who comes to an untimely end early on and spends the rest of the film as a wraith (Epine Bob Savea as the latter is the film’s MVP for me; surprised by how small his screen career seems to have been). Pacing occasionally feels a little bit off at times but that’s a relatively small complaint; Nekrotronic was a lot of fun to watch. Unfortunately R-T’s latest production, Sting, is a giant spider movie of some sort, and, well, you know me, arachnophobe. I do look forward to what he does next (three for three so far), but I don’t know if I’ll be watching that one any time soon…