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.
Tag: The Matraville Horror Film Festival
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.
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…
Censor (2021)
I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that certain films, especially of a horrific nature, should be banned because they might inspire people to, you know, imitate the terrible things shown therein, but somehow the censors who decide on banning or cutting these films never suffer any such ill effects from them. That was partly what drew me to Censor, which is about a young woman working for the BBFC in the mid-eighties in the midst of video nasty hysteria, who proves to be… not entirely cut out for the job, shall we say; Enid has a reputation for being one of the hardest scissor-wielders, but she starts facing harrassment when a film she did pass inspires a hideous copycat crime… and the personal baggage she carries, in the form of a sister who disappeared when the two girls were young, gradually becomes heavier and heavier.
So I liked the idea of this a lot, but not so much the execution, unfortunately… director Prano Bailey-Bond opts for the non-exploitative approach this could’ve taken; this still allows for one rather amazing jump-scare and a number of kills as Enid’s sanity starts to evaporate, one of which is kind of hilarious, but on the whole it’s possibly played with a bit too much restraint, and the film is left with an overall rather dry and slightly ponderous flavour. Plus it never makes much of its particular period setting and does require a certain amount of prior knowledge. Mind you, it pulls off its climax fairly well; the lighting of the night-time filming sequence (and the variable film frame size in this scene) makes the whole thing look so good that I can almost ignore the question of why the filmmaker had a real axe on set that could actually kill someone (and does) rather than just a prop one. It’s OK. I’d still be interested in seeing what Bailey-Bond does next.
Maximum Overdrive (1986)
So I watched a George Romero film the other night, but did I just watch another one? Cos apparently a rumour persists that Maximum Overdrive is at least partly his work, given the substance abuse its nominal maker, one Stephen King, was apparently engaging/rampaging in while making it*… and King has apparently never confirmed or denied beyond saying Romero was always on set to offer him directorial advice on his first (and still only) feature film. Whatever. It’s odd, I admit, that I consider myself at least a bit of a horror fan, but despite that I have so little acquaintance with Mr King and his oeuvre… only ever read a handful of his books and seen a handful of the films made therefrom. I have at least partly rectified that tonight, I suppose…
Anyway, the Earth passes through the tail of a “rogue comet”, and all the machines on the planet start going mad. From electronic bank signs insulting people to vending machines dispensing drinks lethally, the world is in trouble; ultimately the story kind of settles down to Night of the Living Dead with trucks. Apparently the film was heavily cut to avoid an X-rating from the MPAA (even George Romero allegedly found the uncut film excessive, which is… interesting coming from him) and the end result was a critical and box office flop, earning a Razzie nomination for King and its nominal star Emilio Estevez (whose role King wanted to be played by Bruce Springsteen; that would’ve been something to see). The latter is not unfair, since Estevez is one of the film’s weakest links apart from certain logical problems (why doesn’t the newlyweds’ car go berserk like the trucks, why did the truck stop owner have so many explosive devices around his petrol station and how did nothing go off, what the fuck WAS the point of the Bible salesman “returning from the dead”), and the thing runs out of puff at the end, leading to a text epilogue describing an ending there obviously wasn’t time/money to actually shoot (for which matter, why didn’t those satellites fuck up too?)… but for all its undeniable faults, I had a reasonably good time with Maximum Overdrive; King may not have known what he was doing, but he made a fairly entertaining film despite himself.
*Regarding which: King himself says he was blasted on cocaine, but the on-set translator for producer Dino De Laurentiis’ Italian crew apparently said he never saw King doing the white lines but he did see him getting hammered on booze from early morning onwards. Was King so wasted he couldn’t even remember what he was wasted on?
Phantasm (1979)
Well, that was something, albeit I’m not 100% sure what. I’m trying to use this month of horror viewing to catch up on some of the bigger and older hits of the genre that I’ve hitherto never seen rather than rewatches, hence tonight’s screening… Phantasm has a certain reputation for not making a lot of sense, and I can’t say it doesn’t live up to that; I’d have struggled with it had I not read the Wikipedia summary of it. I think I liked it but I am genuinely unsure. I suppose you can view it as an interesting example of low-budget independent filmmaking somewhat like Halloween, the sort of things you can do with minimal resources and a particular vision… and I will say director Don Coscarelli certainly had one of those; I just don’t know how well he explained it. I knew Phantasm had originally been nearly twice as long as the end result, supposedly mostly character development stuff that Coscarelli decided was ultimately redundant, but I feel like there was a certain amount of expository stuff that got chucked out too. Alas that, apart from the minimal sense-making, Phantasm‘s other chief weakness is Bill Thornbury in one of the main roles; there is an unfortunately good reason why his acting career has been so limited, namely that so is his acting ability… I must give it points for the things it does well, of course, especially the mood it conjures (great night-time filming too), and of course Angus Scrimm as the Tall Man. He doesn’t really do an awful lot but he also doesn’t really need to; he just needs to kind of stand there and be tall. Which, measuring at 6’4″ as he apparently did, he was very good at, and the climactic chase scene where he’s pursuing the teenage lead is particularly effective because of the size difference between them. On the whole, possibly interesting more than actually successful, but I’ll take that over dull…
The Amusement Park (1975)
Or, what happens when the Lutheran Church hires horror director George Romero to make a film in which the horror is… old age. The Lutherans basically asked him to make a sort of educational film or PSA about the way in which we don’t look after our elderly as well as we should, giving him a bunch of volunteer performers and a freely donated location. What Romero gave them in return was, probably, regrets, and I’ll bet they REALLY appreciated the scene in which our sorely beset protagonist finds “sanctuary” at a church bandstand, only for it to close for the day before he can get to it… apparently they actually did make some use of it, but after a film festival screening in 1975 that seemed to be the end of it until it was rescued from oblivion just before George’s death. He seems to have viewed it himself as being as ephemeral as the industrial films and commercials he was making in the 60s… but if he did, he was nonetheless clearly determined to make something more of this production than a “normal” commissioned work. The amusement park gave him room to hammer home the thesis of “old people are treated like shit” (the film has no real subtlety on that point), which he does in a manner that becomes borderline surrealist, and generates a real sense of deep unease, particularly with the use of sound. I found it interesting that, for all the thematics about old age being awful, the other elderly folks surrounding the old man in the thick of things are about as unhelpful to him as the younger people surrounding them all. And yet 54 minutes of it, short as that is, felt like a bit much; Romero could probably have brought this in more tightly and effectively in about 30 minutes. So I can’t call it a full success, and yet there’s something about the strangeness of the whole thing that’s fascinating. I think further viewings will benefit it.
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