Carnography

Castle Freak (1995)

We've had several of sci-fi, horror and Lovecraft director Stuart Gordon's films on this blog before - From Beyond, Dagon and (non-Cthulhu related) Dolls - and so I think we can safely say that he's one of the few directors who really "gets" Lovecraft's work and filming the so-called "unfilmable". So when he tackles another of Lovecraft's short stories, The Outsider, in the Full Moon film Castle Freak, you know you're in for something special.

Recovering alcoholic John Reilly, his wife and teenage daughter arrive in Italy to move into an old castle that John has inherited after Duchess D'Orsino, the previous resident and John's relation, dies. Things are very strained between John and his wife Susan, since when John was still drinking he caused a crash which blinded daughter Rebecca and killed their young son JJ. Also in the castle but unbeknownst to anyone else, there is a freakishly deformed man who was kept chained up in the castle's dungeons and tortured by the Duchess until she died. Now free from his chains, the "castle freak" searches for food and, after watching John having an encounter with the local prostitute, he starts kidnapping and killing people in an attempt to mimic what he saw. John is blamed for these disappearances and deaths, but can he clear his name and uncover the truth?

Castle Freak came about because of a poster. Director Stuart Gordon was in the office of Charles Band - the owner of Full Moon Pictures and of the castle that the movie was shot in - when he saw a poster titled "Castle Freak" that featured a deformed man chained up and being whipped by a woman. Gordon asked about it and was told, "Well, that's a castle and there's a freak." Gordon was then free to make whatever kind of film he could come up with from that poster, just as long as there were a castle and a freak in it. So there's an origin story for you. In the end, The Outsider ended up being more of a starting inspiration than a full-on adaptation, as the only thing that connects the short story and the movie is a scene where deformed Georgio sees himself in a mirror and realises how disfigured and horrifying he looks - after which he starts wearing a bedsheet to look like someone combined Mahatma Gandhi and Zorro.

Georgio, the titular Castle Freak, is actually quite a sympathetic monster. We see from the very start that he's been kept chained up, mutilated and tortured for nearly all of his life, and all of his human contact has been violent and hateful (and from someone who should have protected him at that). He has no idea how to be human, really, and the acts he commits are borne out of hunger, desperation and confusion - at first, at least. That being said, he does still kill and eat a cat (who was only trying to help him!) and his attack and murder of the prostitute are particularly graphic and unpleasant to watch (as they should be). Georgio also develops an obsession with blind daughter Rebecca, which results in her being menaced in just her bra - another rightfully uncomfortable scene to watch. Among the people who created the special makeup effects for Georgio was the late John Vulich, who also worked on TV shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Babylon 5 and the X-Files.

John, meanwhile, goes through several arcs during the course of the film. The biggest and most important one is his quest for redemption, of course, as he desperately seeks his wife's forgiveness for the drunken crash which killed their son and blinded Rebecca. As the film progresses and that arc becomes entwined with his quest to prove his innocence over the murders Georgio committed and save his family, you become aware that his story will probably not have the happiest ending, but things do get resolved by the end of the film. It's perhaps unfortunate that, since most of the film is from his perspective, that Susan, played by Barbara Crampton, is relegated somewhat to secondary character status - and something of a shrewish one at that. It should be perfectly understandable that she is still angry at her husband for what he did, and yet the audience is encouraged to feel sympathy for him when she pushes him away (another question would be why she came with him to Italy if their marriage is so bad, when surely it would have been easier for everyone concerned for her and Rebecca to stay in the States, but I guess we wouldn't have had our movie if they hadn't come).

Castle Freak has something for most horror tastes. It's got gore, it's got a monster, it's got a gothic atmosphere, it's got some Lovecraftian origins, it's got some vague giallo hints (an American arrives in Italy, gets involved in murder, has to uncover the truth himself), it's got some women in underwear - uncomfortable as those scenes may be - it's got some great genre stars in Jeffrey Combs and Barbara Crampton and it's got a climactic fight on the roof of a castle in the middle of a thunderstorm. What more could you ask for? It's well worth a watch.

3.5 out of 5.

 

 

Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest (1995)

Confession time: Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest was actually the first film of all the Children of the Corn films that I saw, thanks to that local video store well-stocked with b-movies from my teenage years, and so for a long time it held a special place in my heart as I thought it was actually quite good in a cheesy b-movie kind of way. My tastes have, of course, matured and evolved since then (honest), but after Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice, it would take a pretty herculean effort to be a worse movie than that, cheesy 90s themes and effects included.

In Gatlin, Nebraska, two brothers, Joshua and Eli, are escaping from their drunken and abusive father. Eli, however, is a devotee of He Who Walks Behind The Rows and kills their father by turning him into a scarecrow and taking a suitcase full of corn. The brothers end up in Chicago, adopted by William and Amanda Porter. William is a commodities trader who specialises in trading corn, and Eli soon wins him over by showing him the "miraculous" corn he has grown in less than a month in an abandoned warehouse next to their home with the special corn he brought with him from Gatlin. Joshua makes friends at their new school and starts fitting in easily, playing basketball and even getting a girlfriend; Eli, however, continues to stand out in his dark, simple clothes and Amish-like behaviour. Eli starts to build a new cult to He Who Walks Behind The Rows in the school, killing anyone who gets in his way or threatens to expose his secret origin. It eventually falls to Joshua to not only uncover Eli's weakness but also stop him and He Who Walks Behind The Rows before they start a new adult massacre in Chicago...

As I rewatched Children of the Corn III: Urban Harvest for this review, a couple of things jumped out at me. The first was that He Who Walks Behind The Rows really has a type - dark-haired male children (matching dark eyes optional) who have a thing for preaching (although that might be a talent He gives to them). In this film, Eli is given a lot more screen time than Micah had in The Final Sacrifice, and that coupled with a genuinely unsettling presence (when he smiles, he seems quite innocent, which only adds to his overall sinister nature) lifts this sequel above the level of the last one alone. The second thing that caught my attention was the name of the director - James D. R. Hickox. Hickox... I'd seen that name before because his brother is Anthony Hickox, who directed (among other things) Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (things keep coming back to this movie, and it's starting to get a little disturbing). That at least explains why Urban Harvest's climactic scene in the abandoned warehouse felt remarkably similar to the nightclub scene in Hell on Earth, I guess, and why there's a scene in a chapel involving a crucified priest getting his faith battered as well as the rest of him.

And while we're on the subject of the film's climax... None other than Screaming Mad George was behind the creature makeup effects, because Urban Harvest is the film where we finally get to see He Who Walks Behind The Rows as something other than a Graboid or a bad graphics effect, and the best description I can come up with for it is "Audrey II as imagined by HP Lovecraft". That and a couple of other practical special effects stand out as being pretty decent, if stereotypically 90s, but... I've got to assume that at some point the money ran out, or time, or everyone aged 19 and over working on the film was sacrificed in a team-building exercise because a good portion of the climactic scenes involving He Who Walks Behind The Rows are very clearly models, and we're talking diorama and clay levels here. It's almost like that bit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the cartoonist dies in the middle of animating a scene, only it's not in the least bit funny. It's bewildering to me how anyone involved in the production or distribution of the film was able to look at that and go, "Yeah, looks like two seven-year-olds playing with their toys, that's as good as we're gonna get it. Ship it, boys!"

Director James Hickox hadn't seen either of the previous two Children of the Corn movies before he agreed to direct this one, and it shows. Not exactly in a bad way, mind, but he does take the series and mythology in a different direction than the first two films, with the new focus on spreading He Who Walks Behind The Rows' corn as far and wide as possible, and giving Eli a backstory that neither Issac or Micah had in their films (plus it's actually not a bad wrinkle in the overarching mythology). And while it might be peak 90s horror with plot holes you could drive a combine harvester through (they live in a clearly upper-class Chicago neighbourhood... right next door to a derelict warehouse?) and a matching hole in the special effects budget, it's not without its charms, plus it's an improvement on The Final Sacrifice.

2 out of 5 stars.

 

 

Children of the Corn (1984)

Happy New Year and Happy 2019! The time has come once again for a franchise review marathon, and this time the hypothetical wheel has spun and landed on the Children of the Corn franchise, which started back in 1984 and was originally based on a short story of the same name by Stephen King, because that was around the time that just about anything King wrote was being adapted into a movie. And so we begin with, obviously, Children of the Corn.

In the small corn-farming town of Gatlin, Nebraska, most of the children of the town have started to follow a child preacher named Issac, who commands them to kill all the adults in the town one Sunday morning. Three years later, couple Burt and Vicky are driving to Seattle, where Burt will be starting work as a doctor, via Nebraska when they hit a child on the road. The boy they hit was already dead, however - his throat having been slit by Malachi, Issac's second-in-command, for trying to escape. Wanting to report the incident, Burt and Vicky find their way to Gatlin, which now appears to be a ghost town - although the corn all around the town appears to be growing well. Issac and Malachi now lead the children of the town in the worship of He Who Walks Behind the Rows, an entity that demanded the blood sacrifice of all the adults in the town in return for the continued good growth of the corn. Trapped in a town where all the children and teenagers want to kill them as well as the supernatural threat of He Who Walks Behind The Rows, how will Burt and Vicky survive?

"An adult nightmare," read the tagline for Children of the Corn, in that the idea that one's children could rise up against you and kill you (whether on the orders of a potentially Lovecraftian god or not) has long been a fear exploited in fiction, from as far back as 1954's The Bad Seed and probably earlier. King just took the idea and made it his own (although as several of his stories involve children potentially turning evil and/or fighting supernatural forces, one would be forgiven for wondering if he knows something we don't). Of course, the movie version has a considerably more upbeat ending than the short story and also gives us two towheaded moppets, Job and Sarah, as the two "good" children who never joined Issac's grown-up killing cult (and for bonus points, one of them can see the future and the other one narrates the early part of the movie).

There are two sets of antagonists in Children of the Corn - there's the threat of Issac and Malachi, who command the other kids in the town to kill the "outlanders" and anyone else they/He Who Walks Behind The Rows wants dead, and He Who Walks Behind The Rows him/itself. The latter's origins are left very vague indeed, although I tend to favour a Cthulhu-esque origin for it, as one of the few times we see it manifest it seems to be a formless shape of black static/early 80s video effects, which just strikes me as Lovecraftian in nature. There's also a suggestion that He Who Walks Behind The Rows is in fact just another form of recurring King antagonist Randall Flagg (" a sobriquet that includes all of the letters, in order, of the name Walter: "he Who wALks behind ThE Rows") - although it should also be noted that "Randall Flagg" is an alias of the Outer God Nyarlathotep, so we could all be right. With the way it sometimes moves under the earth, it may also be part-Graboid. In the end, though, it is still defeated by that good old Promethean standby, fire.

Issac and Malachi, on the other hand, are more threatening because they're clearly real and take a far more active role in the murdering throughout the course of the film - Malachi (played by Courtney Gains, who you might recognise from an incredible number of things but for me it's always going to be The 'Burbs) in particular would probably have been a school shooting waiting to happen if Issac hadn't come along and given him a different direction to channel his murderous energy into. But it's Issac who stands out the most - a creepy child who somehow seems far older than his physical years. This is at least partly because John Franklin, who played Issac, was actually 24 when he starred in Children of the Corn - which probably puts him up there with Peter Bark for the title of Creepiest Child In a Movie Being Played By An Adult. Incidentally, the other role you've probably all seen John Franklin in? Cousin It from the Addams Family movies.

In the end, Children of the Corn combines bad religion with the idea of children turning on their parents, and mixes it with the genuinely creepy and intense performances from its two child antagonists to make quite an arresting movie. Yes, the addition of the two "good" children and the not-exactly strong characters of Burt and Vicky make parts of it rather twee and cliche, but the story is strong enough to cover those cracks. The graphical effects are pretty hokey, what with it being 1984, but they're used sparingly enough that they don't actively detract from the rest of the film (unless you really hate time-lapse clouds). It's a good enough little film that ended neatly and probably should have remained a one-off...

Horror Kid, Horror Kid. 
Ritual Murder Horror Kid.
Finds adults, kills all those
told by The Man Behind The Rows
Look out! Here comes the Horror Kid!

(Yes, that's the alternate French title. Horror Kid.)

Score: 3 out of 5

 

Dagon (2001)

!Yeah, let's just go and throw that schedule right out the window, shall we? I'm completely off my plans now and pretty much making things (or at least what movies get reviewed next) up as I go along. So let's take a look at a movie I managed to catch last night with a bunch of other horror movie fans, Stuart Gordon's Dagon.

Paul Marsh, his girlfriend Barbara, his friend and business partner Howard and his wife Vicki are holidaying on a boat off the Spanish coast, celebrating the success of their company being floated on the stock market, although Paul is troubled by recurring dreams of a beautiful yet strange woman with a mouth full of sharp teeth. When a sudden storm crashes the boat against rocks and traps Vicki's leg, Paul and Barbara set off to try to get help from a nearby fishing village they sighted from the boat. The village, Imboca, seems to be at first deserted - when the two finally do find some of the village's inhabitants, they seem strange in both behaviour and physical appearance. Paul and Barbara are separated and Paul is sent to Imboca's dilapidated and damp hotel, where he dreams of the strange woman again before having to flee from the townspeople, who have apparently formed a posse to hunt him down and kill him. Coming across the town drunk, Ezequiel, who is also the only other "normal" person in the town, Paul learns the horrifying truth  - that decades ago, the town of Imboca turned to worshipping the ancient deity Dagon, who offered them gold and fish in return for human sacrifice and the town's women to interbreed with. Will Paul and his friends be able to escape Imboca and its distinctly slimy inhabitants, and what do Paul's strange dreams have to do with all of this?

In case you hadn't already guessed from the Stuart Gordan director credit (and Brian Yunza as one of the producers), Dagon is an HP Lovecraft movie. It's based on the Lovecraft novella The Shadow Over Innsmouth - "Imboca" being a Spanish adaption of "Innsmouth". In it, a man travels to Innsmouth to research the town's history and discovers the town's horrific secret as well as terrible revelations about his own family, and the movie Dagon follows that plot relatively closely (so, you know, spoilers if you've only seen or read one so far). Interestingly, there's also a certain resemblance to the video game Resident Evil 4 - the isolated "European" village full of hostile and deformed locals, and a distinct similarity between the merchant in the game and some of the Imboca residents, looks-wise (RE4 came out four years after Dagon, so it's pretty clear who probably influenced who).

Because it's Lovecraft, there's of course a lot of hinting rather than outright showing, at least for the first half of the movie when it's still not clear what's actually going on in Imboca and the town's inhabitants could just be "regular" deformed, inbred murderous locals. People who know their Mythos will easily be able to spot the early clues, however - the slimy pallor, unblinking eyes and awkward gait that indicate that someone is a Deep One - and as more is revealed, little by little, we see webbed hands, gills and that what we had thought were just crippled or missing limbs are in fact tentacles growing in the place of arms and legs. By the end of the film, the townspeople have abandoned all pretence of pretending to be "normal" and at that point, all bets are off and people are growing tentacles from just about everywhere.  For the most part, the effects are all practical as well - there are two moments in the film where CGI is used, and they look exactly as dodgy as you'd expect the CGI in a 2001 low-budget horror film to look - and they're all suitably slimy and unnerving. Special mention, I think, has to go to the character of Uxia, whose top half is really quite beautiful (if a little too much with the stare-y eyes), but whose bottom half is... well, I'm sure you can all guess.

Unlike other films in Gordon and Yunza's repertoire (*cough*Re-Animator*cough*), Dagon isn't filled with wall-to-wall gore, although there are a few moments that are quite jarring - Ezequiel's fate being chief among them. There's also a fair amount of rape threats to helpless women, including a protracted scene where one is tortured before being chained and hung naked over a pit as a rape sacrifice to Dagon that's almost certainly meant to be as uncomfortable to watch as it actually is. For the most part, though, the horror in Dagon is of the bodily variety - the horror of transforming into something inhuman, whether willingly or unwillingly, and of discovering certain unpleasant truths about oneself (the game is perhaps given away a little early in the film when Paul mentions offhandedly that his mother refused to even let him learn Spanish growing up) - as well as the traditional Lovecraftian trope of ancient gods and entities manipulating humans and sending everyone who sees and/or interacts with them stark raving mad.

It all becomes rather mad and overwrought by the film's climax, and the character of Paul might be seen as a low budget and nerdier (if that's even possible) version of Herbert West/Jeffrey Combs who's not the easiest protagonist to root for, but there's still clearly a lot of love for the subject matter in Dagon, and that enthusiasm and energy can make up for a lot of shortfalls elsewhere in the film. Iä! Iä! Cthulhu Fhtagn!

 

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Slender Man (2018)

This movie and I got off on the wrong foot - literally. Partially it was the fact that the only time my local cinema was showing it was at 9 pm at night, and partially it was because I was recovering from breaking two toes and (probably) one of the small bones in my ankle and yet still had to walk to the cinema and back to see it. Does this mean that I might have perhaps been in an unfairly negative mindset when it came to watching and reviewing Slender Man? Perhaps. But honestly? I could have been the happiest I've ever been in my life and Slender Man still wouldn't have been a good film.

Blown it again with keeping my overall opinion of the film till the seconds half of the review again, haven't I?

In a small American town, four teenage girls - Hallie, Wren, Chloe and Katie - are living their average teenage girl lives when, one night, they learn about the urban legend of the Slender Man and decide to do a ritual to summon him. They don't really believe in the entity, but it seems like a fun thing to do (and they'd heard that a group of boys were planning on doing the ritual as well and don't want to be left out). However, after performing the ritual some of the girls seem to be suffering from nightmares related to the ritual and Slender Man - and then one of their number, Katie, disappears without a trace on a school trip to an old graveyard. The three remaining girls search desperately for their friend but to no avail, and gradually they begin to believe that the Slender Man might not be a myth after all and somehow has something to do with Katie's disappearance. They attempt to appease Slender Man in an attempt to get Katie back; this only seems to make things worse though and the three girls start to fall into madness, suffering supernatural visions and seemingly being stalked by the Slender Man himself. Can they survive the horror they have apparently unleashed and get their friend back?

Ah, Slender Man. Slenderman. The Operator. Originally created by Victor Surge as part of a thread on the Something Awful forums to create creepy Photoshopped images in 2009, the Slenderman and his mythos are now practically a household name. This was at least partly because of the web series Marble Hornets, which was the first of several to use Slenderman (or as they called him, The Operator) as a Lovecraftian-esque antagonist, who could distort reality with his presence and who liked to stalk people, especially in the woods. Other web series soon followed - Tribe Twelve, EverymanHYBRID - and even some lower-budget movies as his infamy grew - Windigo and Always Watching: A Marble Hornets Story. Slenderman very quickly became part of the internet's consciousness and one of the icons of creepypasta. Unfortunately, with all this cultural awareness came the tragic case of two mentally unbalanced teenage girls who attempted to kill a classmate "for Slenderman". Despite that, though, it was inevitable that one of the big movie studios would pick up the Slenderman rights to try to cash in on the phenomenon.

The problem with that was that they somehow took everything that made the Slenderman so creepy and unsettling... and threw it all out in favour of generic teen horror movie "scares". You know how I sometimes complain that bad horror movies make things worse for themselves by reminding me of other, better horror films they've tried to "crib" things from? Well, Slender Man did something like that, only it was mediocre (at best) films like Sinister, Rings and Friend Request that it reminded me of instead.

The movie was dark, and I don't mean thematically. Many scenes were shot in shadow or darkness, and while that might have worked to set the scene, the movie also had the most annoying habit of shining torches straight at the audience or flashing bright images on the screen from the darkness, which did nothing but hurt the eyes of the audience. Really, making your audience squint at the screen is not going to endear them to your film. Conversely, when it came to old Slendy himself, rather than keeping him something to be glimpsed in the background or far away, the film decided to have some close-ups of the man himself. Now, they had Javier Botet to play him, and I guess if you've got someone good at playing unnaturally tall and thin creatures then you at least want to make sure you get your money's worth from him, but close up... The blank features of Slenderman ended up looking more like a half-finished Jack Skellington to me, at least.

Another major problem with the film is the backstory it invents for Slenderman. In most of the other entries of the Slenderman mythos I mentioned earlier, there is actually very little history or backstory given for the man himself, and it's not really needed. Slenderman exists and does bad things to people or causes bad things to happen to people when he's around - it doesn't really matter where he came from or what he's been doing in previous centuries. In Slender Man, however, he's revealed to apparently be the cause of hundreds, even thousands of missing children over the years, which isn't too bad... but then they start connecting him with the legend of the Pied Piper and other things and it just starts getting overly complicated. Once again, I remind filmmakers: not everything needs to have a fully fleshed-out backstory, and in fact sometimes the lack of one actually makes things scarier.

I freely admit that I've been a fan of the Slenderman mythos pretty much since its inception and followed Marble Hornets through all three of its seasons. I also admit that I didn't really have high hopes for this big-budget entry into the mythos - but I was also hoping that it would prove me wrong; that it would exceed my low expectations. Alas, it was not to be. Maybe it's the creepypasta nature that lends itself better to smaller and more episodic storytelling rather than a glossy full-length movie, or maybe it's that Sony just sanitised things into a pallid grey mess in trying to make another bloodless and scare-free teen horror movie. Either way, this version of the Slenderman needs to fade quickly back into the background.

 

 

Prometheus (2012)

And so, we return to exclusively Alien part of this series with Prometheus, which also returned Ridley Scott to the franchise as well. And if you're trying to follow continuity here's where it gets really complicated: Prometheus is a prequel to the four standalone Alien movies, but has no connection to the AVP movies. Meanwhile, the AVP movies are at least acknowledged in Predators but are said to not be connected to the upcoming The Predator movie, which leaves us with at least three divergent timelines. Ugh. This is enough to make even me want to give up trying to track everything.

An archaeological team discover a 35,000-year-old cave painting that not only implies an Ancient Astronauts theory for early human civilisation but also provides a star map to a moon where the originators of human life might have come from. Four years later, in 2093, the spaceship Prometheus arrives at LV-223 to investigate and try to find any trace of the creatures that have been dubbed "Engineers". Among the crew are Elizabeth Shaw and Charlie Holloway, who discovered the cave painting and "star map", and David, a synthetic who has been monitoring the crew while they were all in hypersleep for the journey. The expedition has been funded by the Weyland Corporation, whose CEO Peter Weyland recorded a message for the crew before he died, hoping they would find proof of humanity's origins. Exploring the planet, they find a pyramid-like structure that contains, among other things, the mummified and decapitated body of an Engineer and rooms full of mysterious stone cylinders. While Shaw and the others test the Engineer's remains and find that his DNA matches human DNA, David secretly brings one of the cylinders back to the ship as well and discovers that it contains a strange black liquid. But not everything is dead on this moon, and hidden dangers and agendas start to come together, threatening the lives of not only the crew of the Prometheus, but also everyone on Earth as well...

You know that feeling I've mentioned I have about Dario Argento now, as I look at his recent output (*cough*Dracula 3D*cough*) compared to his much earlier work and can't help but feel he's no longer at the top of his game? I'm starting to feel that way about Ridley Scott as well. He's done some absolutely brilliant films - the original Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator - but lately he seems to have slipped a little. Prometheus was supposed to be a return to form; coming back to what made the first film so legendary and iconic, but instead it feels as though it's abandoned all that in favour of exploring some all-new ideas of a much more metaphysical bent. If not for the almost-token nods to series continuity with the Weyland Corporation, the Engineers/"Space Jockeys" and a scene at the very end of the film, Prometheus could easily have been its own film, completely unconnected to the Alien series altogether. And that's disappointing.

Let's list the things I did enjoy about the film. Michael Fassbender was superb as David, of course, although I'm not sure if they intended to imply he was a slightly deranged and creepy stalker-type person from his very first appearance in the film, or if it just accidentally came out that way. Regardless, the man puts his best performance forward regardless of what film he's in, and Prometheus is no exception. Idris Elba is another standout, although I was slightly distracted for a lot of the film trying to place the accent he was affecting. Charlize Theron, also excellent. As for horror and/or creepy elements, the shot of one of the crew, presumed dead, turning up at the doors of the spaceship with his body folded up so that he looks like a crab was an image I really liked, which was added to when he "unfolded" himself to stand up straight (although if he'd scuttled around menacingly like that I probably wouldn't have complained either).

But these things can't quite make up for the weakness, the wishy-washiness of the rest of the film. Even ignoring the ancient astronauts theory that I hate so much but keeps coming up, the film's underlying themes of religion and children seeking answers from their parents is, to be blunt, prosaic and obvious. Even after two hours we still don't learn anything from the Engineers (who, under their helmets, look like albino versions of Dr. Manhattan wearing nappies); what they were doing on Earth or LV-223. David's role as secondary antagonist goes completely unnoticed by everyone else in the crew, which considering some of his behaviour - particularly towards Elizabeth Shaw, who I'm pretty sure we're supposed to assume he has some sort of android crush on - is just ridiculous. And as I said above, the film barely feels connected to the Alien series at all, which had to disappoint a lot of people who came to the film expecting to learn the origins of the Xenomorphs. I'll even go so far as to say that I think the film might have been better if it had no connection to the Alien franchise at all, and been its own film about people seeking answers as to the origin of their species and why that turned out to be a bad idea.

Oh, and my suspension of disbelief went and threw itself out of the window as I watched Shaw running and throwing herself around the place straight after having abdominal surgery and getting the incision stapled shut.

Perhaps the one theme that runs through both Prometheus and Alien is that first contact protocols should always - ALWAYS - be adhered to. In both films, so much could have been easily avoided if they'd done so. Don't take your helmets off in alien atmospheres; don't poke at the strange new alien species you've found; don't bring containers full of strange alien liquids secretly on board your ship to do experiments with, and if in doubt, get the flamethrower out.

 

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AVP: Alien Vs Predator (2004)

You know, it's quite possible to draw comparisons between AVP: Alien Vs Predator and that other fan-fantasy crossover, Freddy Vs Jason. Both films were born from a brief shot originally meant as an in-joke; both took a decade or more to actually reach the screen, and both turned out to be disappointments for the fans who'd been waiting and playing out the smackdown in their heads for all those years. We should have stuck with all the comics and books that were released while AVP was languishing in development hell.

A satellite owned by the Weyland Corporation detects a "heat bloom" emanating from an uninhabited island in Antarctica, Bouvet Island. Charles Bishop Weyland (yeah, they went there) organises a team to go investigate the site, discovering that there is a strange pyramid buried 2,000 feet under the ice, and he wants to be the first to claim it. His team includes archaeologists, language experts and Alexa Woods, a survival expert and guide. The pyramid turns out to predate all other known pyramids and civilisations - unbeknownst to the humans though, it is also a "rite of passage" test for young Predators (let's start calling them Yautja), who come to the pyramid every 100 years to face off against and kill Xenomorphs. To this end, there is a Xenomorph Queen kept chained up at the base of the pyramid and thawed out whenever the hunt is on, and humans are lured to the pyramid to act as hosts for the Xenomorphs. In the past, it was all done via a ritual sacrifice aspect of early Aztec/Mayan religions; this time, of course, there's the team investigating the site. Three young Yautja are sent in to prove themselves against the Xenomorphs; things turn pear-shaped however when the humans discover the Yautja's plasma weapons and take them, leaving the warriors without their most important weapons against the Xenomorphs and trying to get them back. The humans find their numbers rapidly dwindling as they're caught between the two alien races, as both sides have no problem killing anything in their way. The human survivors realise that their only hope of survival is to somehow team up with the Yautja - but will that even be possible?

An early warning sign that AVP: Alien Vs Predator was not going to be up to the standards of the films that preceded it was the fact that it was released as a PG-13 film. Looking back at the previous six films from both franchises before this one, the one thing they all had in common was a refusal to shy away from showing gore. Even the much weaker Alien films, ³ and Resurrection, at least still had heads being crushed into a pulp, chestbursters messily emerging from hosts, and people being sliced to ribbons by Xenomorphs. AVP doesn't show any of that. It occasionally shows the aftermath of Xenomorph "birth", and there are one or two shots of humans being impaled on Yautja weapons, but for the most part the film decides to cut away whenever something messy is going to happen on-screen, so all we see is a trickle of blood, maybe, or someone's eyes widening and then closing as they die. And this wasn't even a case of executive meddling because someone thought that making a sci-fi horror film that combines two franchises known for their violent and rather splattery content would make more money if they made it teenager-friendly - director Paul W. S. Anderson (also responsible for Mortal Kombat, the Resident Evil movie franchise and, somehow, the ultra-gory and horrifying Event Horizon) set out to release the film as PG-13. It makes no sense, and I'm not saying that horror films just can't be good if they're not throwing buckets of blood everywhere like modern-day Grand Guignol. It's just that neutering a film like this is just going to alienate fans.

Another early warning sign was the fact that AVP was not screened in advance for critics. For films that aren't independent or underground but instead released by one of the big studios, this is generally seen as the studio and/or director not having any faith in the film getting positive reviews, so they just release it and hope they can make enough back on the box office before the negative reviews come rolling it. And oh, did they come rolling in - AVP currently holds a 20% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 29 out of 100 on Metacritic - although its worldwide gross did end up being $172 million, so the trick of not screening it for critics did work out for them.

In the end, though, AVP is just a weak film. It's virtually bloodless, has a weak plot (that was cribbed from an Aliens Vs Predator novel I read back in the 1990s), and there are plot holes and glaring errors in it that give the audience the distinct impression that the filmmakers didn't really care about the film they were making. The timeframe from being impregnated by a Facehugger to expiring via Chestburster in this film can't be more than an hour, tops, which flies in the face of every other Alien film we've seen, and has clearly just been fudged for expediency rather than actually having to think for a moment about the plot. In another scene, a Xenomorph is killed by one of the Yautja (the one known as "Scar", for reference) and it doesn't bleed. They didn't even bother to put in a digital acid blood effect. And if the filmmakers seem to care so little for their product, why should we? the working relationship that develops between Scar and Alexa is pretty much the only good thing about this film, and even then I can find flaws with it - there's not enough screen time devoted to it; it suffers from the same problem that the new Transformers movies did in that we're not here for the fleshlings, we're here for alien-on-alien action, and there's just not enough of that in the film.

And of course, the movie's final shot sets us up for a sequel, which people may have thought they wanted with the anticipation of seeing the "PredAlien" in action, but as we were to discover, things didn't go as we hoped they would...

 

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Aliens (1986)

The idea of a sequel to Alien was discussed as early as the year of its release, 1979. Management changes at 20th Century Fox, however, pushed it to the side for several years. Then David Giler met director James Cameron, who was receiving a lot of attention as he worked on a new film called The Terminator. Cameron was interested in making a sequel to Alien and came up with a 90-page script for it while waiting to start work on The Terminator, and was told he could make the film, Aliens, as long as The Terminator was a success. And we all know how that turned out...

57 years after the events of the previous film (Aliens apparently takes place in 2179, which means that Alien took place in 2122), Ripley and Jones the cat are finally found by a deep-space salvage team. Taken back to Earth orbit, Ripley discovers that her daughter has died and the Company - Weyland-Yutani - don't believe her account of what happened on the Nostromo and LV-426, not least because they colonised the moon 20 years previously and haven't (yet) come across the derelict alien ship or any aliens. Traumatised and disgraced, Ripley tries to go about putting her life back together... until the Company come to her again. Turns out that since her claims about LV-426, all contact has been lost with the colony, and they want Ripley to go back there, along with a platoon of Space Marines, to investigate. Ripley, very reluctantly, agrees, even though she's not confident of the Marines' ability to take down a Xenomorph. Not long after arriving at the colony, the group discover that it's not a single Xenomorph this time - they've had a lot more time and warm bodies to grow their numbers, and soon Ripley and a few survivors find themselves trapped and fighting to survive...

Let's get this out of the way first - yes, Aliens is not so much a sci-fi horror as it is a sci-fi action film. This certainly doesn't make it a bad film, as the seven Academy Award nominations (and two wins), eight Saturn Awards and more besides clearly shows. Ridley Scott took the first film in one direction; James Cameron took his sequel in another. Both played to their strengths, and both put out great, iconic movies. This does mean, however, that much of the stalking terror, haunted house in space aspects that were so prominent in Alien aren't here in Aliens. Instead, we've got perhaps one of the most iconic presentations of space marines in the modern age of film.

It was entirely logical that the stakes would have to be raised like this in Aliens. After all, in the first film we saw what one Xenomorph, isolated on a small ship, could do, as well as seeing the lengths Ripley had to go to defeat it. And (thanks to Scream 2) we know that sequels have to have a bigger threat and bigger body count, so by looking at those factors alone, it was inevitable that the film would deal with more than one Xenomorph. But James Cameron also chose to explore the Xenomorphs themselves, giving them the insect-like behaviours and Alien Queen providing the eggs that became so integral to the franchise.

It's also interesting to note that the Xenomorphs as an aggressive, insect hive mind is also a very effective way to (further) cement their... alien-ness in the audience's mind. The Xenomorphs are barely humanoid in appearance already, wherein so many other sci-fi horrors (and in real-life accounts of alien abductions) the aliens tend to share at least some of our human characteristics. By making sure that the Xenomorphs both look and behave nothing like us, their otherness is emphasised even further. And when the Alien Queen understands Ripley's wordless threat to her "children", the idea that something so... well, alien can do more than just go down Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs like a checklist is the final damning moment of horror.

The cast of Aliens is another area where the film shines, of course. Sigourney Weaver returns as Ripley - although there was a brief time when ideas for the film were being explored where she was to have been written out - and her performance in the movie earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress (doubly impressive when you see that most genre films don't get many Oscar nominations outside of effects and soundtracks). Maybe the movie beats us about the head a little too much with her maternal instincts to Newt, her daughter/cat substitute, and her action movie-montage transformation into a badass action heroine, but we don't mind that because it flows so well. Also in the cast are Lance Henrickson as Bishop, this movie's "artificial person" with a far better demeanour than Ash, Jeanette Goldstein as Vasquez, an even tougher female action heroine than Ripley, and Bill Paxton as the permanently jumpy Hudson. These three actors made such an impression that when Kathryn Bigalow was making Near Dark, James Cameron suggested she cast them... and we all know how well that turned out. Michael Biehn, who played the sleepy Corporal Hicks, is another stand-out (and frequent Cameron collaborator) also stands out as the "love interest" for Ripley, and the scene where he teaches her how to operate the Marines' pulse rifle could be seen as the closest the film gets to a sex scene.

Aliens might not be a "horror" film in the same way that Alien is, but that's far from a bad thing. It made its own mark on the cinematic world and progressed the Alien story in a new and compelling way, and even managed to achieve that Holy Grail of sequel-making, by being a sequel that was even better than the original, which considering how good Alien is, was no mean feat.

 

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Alien (1979)

July has rolled around once again and we all know what that means - ridiculous heatwaves that turn my cats to puddles and leave me sitting listlessly at the computer desk sweating out 10% of my body weight! And another series review marathon. this time around we're going for something a little more complicated, with not one but two series, for reasons that will soon become clear. So let's start things off at the beginning with Ridley Scott's classic sci-fi horror Alien.

In the future, the commercial starship Nostromo is heading back to Earth when the ship's computer detects a potential distress signal coming from a nearby moon and wakes the crew in order to investigate as per company policy. They land on the moon and some of the crew head out to investigate, finding a large alien ship on the planet's surface. The ship contains the mummified corpse of a large alien pilot, and a cave containing numerous "eggs". One of these eggs "hatches" while one of the crew, Kane, is nearby, and a strange creature emerges from it and, burning straight through the faceplate of his spacesuit, attaches itself to his face and knocks him out. The ship's third officer, Ripley, doesn't want to let Kane and the others back onto the ship because of quarantine procedures, but she is overruled. The strange creature's acid blood makes it impossible to remove it from Kane, but after a few hours it falls off Kane and dies, and Kane appears to have no ill effects apart from some memory loss. While the crew is eating a final meal before going back into cryosleep, however, Kane starts to choke and convulse before his chest bursts open from the inside and a new alien creature emerges. Now trapped on the ship with a clearly hostile and dangerous alien creature, the remaining crew try to capture and kill it, but others on board have other ideas...

If you didn't know the basic plot of Alien until now, hey, welcome to the 21st century. As well as being the same age as me, Alien is one of those films that can legitimately be described as genre-defining and iconic, having spawned a franchise, gained numerous imitators and even joined the very small club of horror films that have won Academy Awards (for Visual Effects). The "dinner scene" is one of the most infamous in film history overall, never mind horror film history, having been ranked the second scariest movie moment by Bravo in 2004 (Channel 4's 2003 list had it at #4). This one scene completely changed the tone and direction of the film, where before it had been more about the mystery of the alien ship - where it had come from, what had happened (although we figure that one out, unfortunately for Kane) - with absolutely no inkling of what was going to happen. There's an urban legend that the cast, aside from John Hurt who played Kane, had no idea what the actual scene was about, and so their shocked reactions are real. In reality, it was more that they didn't know just how splattery it was going to be, so while they're still shocked that they've been splattered with so much blood, they did actually have some idea of what was going to come out of Kane's chest.

Alien can be described in a lot of different ways. Obviously, there's the groundbreaking sci-fi horror reading; there's the "haunted house in space" reading; the "stalk-and-slash" reading, with the Xenomorph, as it's now become known, in the role of the slasher (and the slasher genre was still in its infancy at this point, with John Carpenter's Halloween having only been released the previous year); the "men's fear of penetration and rape" reading; and my own personal favourite, the one where Jones the ship's cat is on a mission to protect his humans from the Big Ugly Bug (it actually works if you think about it). The fact that the Xenomorph design came from HR Giger certainly helps take things in a rather Freudian, psychosexual direction - you can't look at the Xenomorph design, specifically its head, and not think, "Now there's a phallic symbol to end all phallic symbols." And that's not even going into the smaller set of jaws inside the Xenomorph's mouth that gets used to punch through people a lot. If you're paying attention, the sexual overtones can be found elsewhere in the film as well, with one character's attempt to choke another to death with a rolled-up porn magazine.

In the end though, the theme that we can't help but come back to is that of the slasher movie. Even though the Xenomorph doesn't appear until around 50 minutes into the film, once it's been born it acts very much like a Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees, albeit one that's been drenched in KY Jelly. It stays in the shadows and dark corners of the Nostromo, lying in wait or stalking the various crew members as they inevitably head off on their own, despite at least trying not to. It also has a Final Girl in the form of Ripley, although the film does go to great lengths to portray its cast as gender-neutrally as possible, primarily by only referring to them all by their last names. But Ripley is clearly meant to be the Final Girl - she's the one who wants to obey the rules, putting pragmatism above emotion. The film's sole caveats to her femininity are her long hair and her protectiveness of Jones, but other than that she's as interchangeable as the male characters.

As we all know, this Alien film spawned a massive and popular franchise. Movies, books, comics, crossovers (both Batman and Superman have fought Xenomorphs, for example)... The list goes on and on. And of course, we'll be covering the big movie crossovers as we go along the timeline. But certainly, this first Alien film is a classic, not just in horror but in film in general. And unlike a good many other films, it hasn't lost any of its impact even 38 years later. Atmosphere and some truly original and disturbing art and visuals have made sure that this film will be remembered and lauded for a long time to come.

 

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It (1990)

Since I so recently reviewed the new version, I should really be efficient and do the 1990 TV version now. So here we are with the "original" movie version of Stephen King's IT; the one that launched a generation's coultrophobia (although personally it was the bleeding photograph that did it for me).

Derry, Maine; 1990. Children in the town are disappearing, and what's worse only some of them are being found; or rather, only parts of them are being found. The town librarian, Mike Hanlon, knows what is going on but cannot get the police chief to believe him. Instead, he calls his six childhood friends - all now highly successful adults living across the USA and even in Britain - and reminds them of a promise they all made as children. Back in 1960 the seven of them faced down the shape-changing, child-killing monster that was preying on their town and defeated It, and then they all made a promise together that, if It ever returned to Derry, they would also return and finish the job that they started. But will they even have the strength as adults to repeat what they did as children - especially when they can barely remember what happened back in 1960?

This version of IT was of course the first to come out (not counting the book, of course) and so there has been a lot of talk and debate over whether this version or the 2017 version is the better/scarier option. Personally I think this is an unfair comparison as so many of us grew up with the terror of the 1990 version, but looking back on it now requires some nostalgia goggles. After all, what scared you as a child in film, TV or otherwise is unlikely to still scare you as an adult. Yes, IT scared me when I was a pre-teen, but so did Zelda from Terrahawks, the Kandy Man from Doctor Who and The Nothing from The NeverEnding Story (although to be fair, that last one might still scare me. Existential nilhilism...)

No, the biggest reason the 1990 version of IT is still held in such high regard by so many is because of one person: Tim Curry.

Tim Curry had the role of Pennywise the Dancing Clown, and to say his role was a memorable one would be something of an understatement - why all those clowns didn't step up to defend the good name of clowns in 1990 is a mystery, especially when Curry's version of Pennywise has (until now, perhaps) been the iconic "evil clown" for 27 years now. Remember, this is the same Tim Curry who lost out on voicing the Joker on Batman: The Animated Series because his laugh was just too creepy for a kids' cartoon.

Of course, Tim Curry wasn't carrying the whole two-part TV movie on his back solo. The late Jonathan Brandis as young Bill Denborough, Seth Green as young Richie Tozier, and the late John Ritter as the adult Ben Hanscom - among others - all gave stellar performances, but somehow whenever this version of IT gets talked about it's nearly always about Pennywise and/or Tim Curry's performance.

Much like in the book version, there's a hint of Cthulhu or otherwise otherworldly entities in this version of IT, with the revelation of IT's true form and the concept of the "deadlights" as something that, if you look directly into/at them, they drive you completely insane. Of course, the deadlights have also been brought up in the 2017 version, but as that only deals with the events as children we're yet to see how things pan out there, while the 1990 version has everything contained within the two parts of the TV mini-series.

This 1990 version of IT, as I said, was originally made for TV in two parts that were later put together to make one three-hour movie, and it's here that the movie does fall down when you look at it critically. Stephen King's IT is a long book, and so trying to fit it all into three hours (plus ad breaks) is just not going to work. And they didn't even try to fit the whole book in - yet it still feels awkwardly paced - rushed in some places and too slow in others. That's the risk of the TV movie, of course. Looking back at it now, it's also incredibly dated, but that's not really a fair judgement to make on it considering it's cultural impact at the time. It was more than good enough for us in the early 1990s.

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