Carnography

The Seventh Curse (1986)

I will be the first to admit that, as much as I might try to broaden my horror horizons, quite often I’ll fall back into old/bad habits – and genres – if given half a chance or if I’m having a bad day. Or it’s Thursday. Certain things – like zombies and found footage – are just like comfort food for me. So if it had been 100% up to me I probably would never have chosen to watch The Seventh Curse myself – which is why I’m very glad that a friend streamed it for a bunch of us a while back, because this film is completely and utterly bananas.

Dr. Yuen has a problem. A year previously while in Thailand, he rescued a young woman from being sacrificed, and as a result was cursed by the leader of the Worm Tribe. Now the curse has been activated and will kill him in a matter of days unless he returns to Thailand to defeat the evil Worm Tribe once and for all. With the help of his pipe-smoking friend Wisely, an ambitious young reporter called Rainbow, and Bachu, the woman he saved originally, Yuen will battle evil sorcerers, kung-fu Buddhist monks, and demons as he seeks the cure for his deadly curse.

The Seventh Curse is based on the Dr. Yuen novel series by Hong Kong-American writer Ni Kuang (I can’t tell you if it was based on any one specific novel out of the 300 novels Ni Kuang has written because I can’t find any English translations of the titles, but it’s probably a safe bet). Yuen’s friend Wisely, who he goes to for advice when the titular curse kicks in – by making his leg swell up and spray blood everywhere – also has his own series of novels, and is played in this movie by none other than Chow Yun-fat. I actually went looking to see if any of these books were available to read, but sadly the answer appears to either be, “No,” or, “Only if you read Chinese,” which is a shame because I’d totally be up for reading Wuxia James Bond fighting cults and demons.

“Wuxia James Bond fights cults and demons” is probably the most succinct description of the film as well – although it still somehow manages to downplay just how seriously barking mad the film is. Dr. Yuen is a doctor… but he’s apparently also some kind of supercop, because at the start of the film he’s called in to help deal with a hostage situation in an office building. After that, he gets home and finds a mysterious stranger is his apartment who, after a quick kung-fu fight, reminds Yuen about his curse and tells him not to have sex as that will speed the curse up (No prizes for guessing what Yuen promptly goes and does, and what happens as a result of it). After that, it’s a quick trip to Wisely’s house, who smokes a pipe while Yuen recounts/flashes back to the circumstances that led to his curse (which he had apparently forgotten about until now), and then it’s off to Thailand to sort this all out. We are barely one-third of the way through the film at this point.

And things don’t slow down or get any less insane for the rest of the film either. Some of the other features of The Seventh Curse include: a bunch of children kidnapped and fed into a giant stone “juicer” for a ritual; a demon-worm-fetus thing made from the blood of the aforementioned juiced children; a genderfluid evil cult leader; another demon, this one apparently called “Old Ancestor” who starts off as “just” an animated skeleton but inflates or ‘roids up for battle after snacking on fresh spinal fluid; and a kung-fu wire fight where Dr. Yuen and one of his companions fight a bevy of armed Buddhist monks while climbing a giant Buddha statue. I’d say that you couldn’t make this stuff up, but someone clearly did and the world is clearly the better for it.

As I said earlier, because all the Dr. Yuen and Wisely novels are written in Chinese and I can’t find any translations, I can’t say for certain whether all of this craziness comes solely from the novels or if any of it came from the mind of the film’s director, Ngai Choi Lam, who also directed such films as Erotic Ghost Story and the infamous Story of Ricky aka Riki-Oh. Looking at his filmography (hell, just at Riki-Oh) the guy definitely has a thing for ridiculously over-the-top stuff.

Alas, the film isn’t quite perfect in its absurdity. The character of “Rainbow” (seriously, that’s her name in the dubbing at least) is apparently only in the film for three reasons: to be annoying; to get captured/get into trouble as an added incentive for the protagonist(s) to sort things out (as if the deadly curse on Yuen wasn’t incentive enough); and to be a red herring love interest. Chow Yun-fat as Wisely also feels a little underused as well – some of that probably comes down to our being used to seeing him in bigger (later) roles in films like Hard Boiled and The Replacement Killers, but his role here also feels more than a little deus ex machina – especially at the film’s climax, where he quite literally turns up with a rocket launcher to solve any unresolved problems. It just doesn’t feel like there’s any real danger with Wisely around, like an eight-year-old with an Everything-Proof shield. Perhaps that’s part of the film’s charm though – it’s so gloriously and unashamedly crazy that it can get away with things like this.

3.5 out of 5.

 

 

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.

 

 

Death House (2017)

Death House is one of those movies that I find difficult to pin down to a specific year of release. IMDB and Wikipedia list it as 2017, sure, but most other places list it as 2018 and it certainly didn't get a general release until this year. But since I'm currently at that time of year where I'm desperately trying to catch up on as many films released this year as possible to widen the pool for my best and worst movies of the year, I'm counting it as a 2018 release.

The Death House is a prison specially built to hold the very worst of humanity's killers. A government facility where serial killers are kept captive in virtual reality cells and studied for a greater understanding of evil, or subjected to psychological experiments to reprogramme them out of their homicidal urges and mould them into productive members of society. And then there are the "Five Evils" - five individuals so evil and depraved that they are kept in the facility's lowest level, the ninth, where it is hoped they will never escape. Agents Toria Boon and Jae Novak are being given a tour of the facilities by one of the doctors running the experiments there, Dr Eileen Fletcher, when an escape plan is put into action by newly-arrived prisoner Seig, a Neo-Nazi with the ability to regenerate from any wound. Trapped in the Death House, the two agents find that their only hope is to descend deeper into the facility and reach the Five Evils, who apparently hold the key to stopping the escaped prisoners - as well as hidden truths about Boon and Novak's pasts, such as why both have tattoos on their bodies that they have no memory of getting...

Have you ever had a good friend or someone you really admire come to you and ask you to look at something they've done, and give your honest opinion on it? And you really, really want to like what they've done, but the more you look at it or watch it, the more painful it gets? That's kind of the spot I'm in right now. Death House was described as "The Expendables of horror", bringing together as many horror icons as possible in one film. At least, that was the original plan of Gunnar Hansen when he envisioned it and started to write the story, before his untimely death in 2015. After that, I suspect that having to get a new writer (eventual director Harrison Smith) is where it all started to go wrong because the finished film is a tangled mess of plot threads that go nowhere and wasted cameos. Why bother getting names like Michael Berryman and Sid Haig, for example, if they get either one single scene that goes nowhere or about two lines in the whole film? Not to mention Camille Keaton, who gets brought in for a brief scene as a rape and murder victim (with Danny Trejo as her killer). Yeesh.

There was clearly supposed to be much more done with the Five Evils, for example. An apparently immortal Nazi (not Kane Hodder's character of Seig, who was an entirely different unkillable Nazi); a woman clearly meant to be Elizabeth Bathory; a super-smart mutant with a giant claw for a hand, a necromancer and a man whose preferred methods of killing are "crucifixion and turning people inside out". Excuse me, movie? I'd like to learn more about these characters, please... Oh, we're just going to gloss over the mention of necromancy and the guy with a giant claw for a hand? Actually, there is apparently going to be a prequel made that delves into the story of the Five Evils, but right now that's too little, too late for me because the way the film used them they were equal parts MacGuffin and Deus Ex Machina.

Then there's Toria Boon and Jae Novak, two agents with dark pasts and tattoos on their bodies (that we get to see in the world's most plot convenient co-ed shower) that they don't remember getting. Now if you've been paying attention, you'll remember that they work for a government facility that specialises in wiping the minds of killers and reprogramming them to become useful members of society, and so you can see exactly where this subplot is going. If you didn't... well, you do now, but it's okay, it's not like this revelation had much bearing on the plot anyway. There's also the bit with The Russian Sleep Experiment, which isn't explicitly named as such, but anyone who knows their creepypastas will recognise it the moment they hear, "We no longer wish to be free." That comes out of nowhere as well - three of them just stumble on the room they're in and Dee Wallace's character says something about, "We don't know what happened here,"; they hang out there for a bit so we can get a good look at the practical effects, and then we move on. It feels like subplots were just being flung at a wall to see what stuck, regardless of how much sense any of it made.

Death House wants to wow us with philosophical discussions on the nature of good and evil, and debates about transhumanism and morality, and shock us with its gore, and keep us interested with characters like the Five Evils and Seig, but it never really delivers on any of that except maybe the gore. How did Seig end up with his healing factor? What was the deal with that Nazi kid at one point? What was the point of the Icicle Killer? What was the deal with the Three Satans? Why don't we learn more about the damn necromancer and the guy with a giant claw for a hand in the basement? Not to mention, if I really wanted to see Barbara Crampton talk transhumanism, I'd watch From Beyond, because she's at least in fetish gear there.

 

 

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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The Beast Within (1982)

I've been trying to review this movie for a couple of years now. It's not been hard to track down or anything - it's available on Netflix and I even own a copy on DVD - but whenever I've sat down to actually write the review for The Beast Within, I've not been able to put things into words somehow. But I've not given up, and so finally here's my review of thin 1982 creature-feature eco-horror... thing.

A newlywed couple on the way to their honeymoon get their car stuck in a ditch near the small town of Nioba in Mississippi. While the husband goes to fetch help, his wife is attacked and raped by a strange being in the woods. 17 years later, the couple's son, Michael, is seriously ill in hospital and the doctors have no idea what is causing it. they suggest it could be a genetic or inherited condition, which prompts his parents to return to Nioba in the hopes of finding out anything they can about the rape and the perpetrator. While they're investigating, however, Michael is suffering from strange visions of an old farmhouse and escapes the hospital to travel to it... which turns out to also be in Nioba, Mississippi. While the locals are clearly hiding something from the family about a murdered resident and other events which happened around the time of the attack 17 years previously, Michael finds himself going through some radical changes, both physically and psychologically. What is the town's terrible secret that is linked to Michael's condition, and is there any way to save him?

See, I think the main reason I've found it difficult to review this film is that it's rather difficult to categorise. As well as "creature-feature" and "eco-horror" as mentioned above, it also contains elements of possession, slasher and splatter films, some cannibalism and a dash of backwoods hillbillies for good measure. When I first read the blurb for The Beast Within, I thought it was going to involve Bigfoot, but no, he's one of the few things not included in this film.

(What is the monster in the film? The best way I can describe it is reincarnated were-cicada. Yeah.)

It's also bookended by rape, and the way that the camera likes to hover over the victims as their clothes are ripped off and show us their breasts bouncing as they are violated leaves a rather unpleasant feeling, like these scenes are being shot more for their exploitation value rather than as plot points in the film. Interestingly, The Beast Within is directed by Phillipe Mora, who also directed Howlings II and III, so his claims of disliking all the flesh on display in Howling II is ringing less and less true to me.

The main selling point of The Beast Within is the transformation sequence, which doesn't happen until there are about 20 minutes left in the film, but it's worth the wait. They're entirely practical and, while the film doesn't show the transformation in one long cut like in An American Werewolf in London, it certainly feels like these effects are of a similar quality to the iconic scene in that film. It's wet and disgusting and looks incredibly painful, which is exactly what it needs to be. Similarly, the killings are also wet and bloody, although they're spaced out rather evenly through the film so it's not as splattery as other 80s splatter films.

Unfortunately, the film doesn't do a very good job of explaining why we've got a reincarnated were-cicada running around. An explanation was given in the script originally that involved Native American curses and insect life cycles, but practically all of this was cut from the final print of the film. this has the effect of making the film one-third monster movie, one-third supernatural whodunnit (complete with the town sheriff allowing a stranger to run around with them investigating murders) and one-third confusing mess. While it's true that not every film needs a complex explanation of what is happening, when a film is as convoluted as this there needs to be some clarification as to just what is going on.

Oh yeah, and that's Dick Jones as Eli McCleary, Michael's father. He also wrote and sang the country songs that make up some of the soundtrack for the film. Actually, Eli is actually one of the more interesting and better-realised characters in the film. Rather than go the more cliched route of having Michael's father resent him on some level because of the circumstances of his birth, Eli instead completely accepts Michael as his son, almost to the point of denial that anything else could be the case. It's an interesting little point in the film and one I like.

Overall, The Beast Within is an interesting film, but one that cut too much backstory from its final cut, which makes it difficult for the audience to really get engaged in it unless they've actually looked into the missing stuff. Also, the rape scenes are uncomfortable viewing for the wrong reason.

 

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Amityville: No Escape (2016)

I can't help but think that the title of today's movie, Amityville: No Escape, might have been better suited for the last movie in this series. After all, with the whole town being in on the evil plot in The Amityville Terror, there was very little chance of escape there. Instead, we've got... well, you'll see.

The movie claims to be a collection of footage filmed in both 2016 and 1997 in Amityville. The 2016 footage is from a graduate student and his friends who were spending time in the woods there as part of his thesis on fear. The 1997 footage is from an army wife filming their new house (which is of course meant to be the Amityville house) and her experiences there. The movie flips between these two sets of footage throughout - the army wife experiences growing levels of paranormal activity in her new home; the group in the woods experience strange noises and meet strange men with shotguns and creepy little (ghost) girls wandering the woods at night. Will any of these people survive, or will they be nothing more than more victims of the Amityville spirits?

You know how, with some films, you watch them and say to yourself, "This film really wants to be [better and more successful film]"? Well, Amityville: No Escape really wants to be two films - Paranormal Activity and The Blair Witch Project. The army wife (and I'm pretty sure we're never even told her name, so little characterisation is given to her) is the Paranormal Activity part, and the group in the woods is, obviously, the Blair Witch Project part. And until the very end of the film, it's a case of never the twain shall meet - and even then, the last shot of the film explains nothing. We might as well have been watching two separate short film for all the continuity they shared with each other (and together, the two storylines only come to 75 minutes).

At the very start of the film, some introductory text informs us that this footage has been put together to document the "inauspicious events" that took place in 1997 and 2016. It goes on to say that, for "marketing purposes" this footage, this evidence of crimes committed, has been titled Amityville: No Escape. If police departments are now having to sell evidence as feature films, then clearly budget cuts for the emergency services are far worse than we thought.

Another thing that's a little odd about Amityville: No Escape is that it's apparently set in our universe - ie. a universe where the whole Amityville story and all the movies are just that - fictional movies, which makes this movie rather meta in nature. Not that it matters all that much, because it's mentioned only once in passing in the whole movie and has no bearing on the plot. The film also makes the claim that Amityville is "the most haunted city in the USA", which is news to the dozens of websites that list haunted places in the US, where Amityville doesn't even make it into the Top 25.

It's another zero-budget entry in the series as well, shown this time by the fact that practically nothing happens on camera. There's a couple of bangs, some howling wolves and a couple of moving objects at one point, and a couple of shots of the creepy little girl (ghost) dressed in white and standing out there in the middle of the night, but that's about it. Whenever someone dies, our Blair Witch-like cast just comes across them lying dead on the ground with some fake blood sprinkled on them and/or oozing out of their mouths. They then emote rather weakly and move on. Seriously, they come across one dead guy in the woods in the middle of the night, and just wander back to their tents while making vague talk about "getting help". Army wife gets an even more ridiculous climax, as the evil spirits actually turn the camera away from her before attacking, so we just hear some screaming and then some thuds. It's the height of lazy filmmaking.

Amityville: No Escape is unimpressive and unmemorable, even in terms of this series in general. Just about the only other thing of note about it is that it shows boobs several times in the start and one shot of full-frontal female nudity, because cheap exploitation is the one thing this series had been missing up until now.

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Saw III (2006)

Back we skip again to the Saw franchise once more, and I hope you all have your notebooks and infographs ready because Saw III is where the important but complicated plot points start to be introduced or revealed - not to mention characters who might seem incidental right now but will turn out to be major players as the series continues.

We start off with a direct continuation from Saw II, where Detective Eric Matthews is still trapped in the Bathroom of Doom. He succeeds in breaking his foot and ankle to escape... and then we hop to six months later, where Detective Kerry is on the scene of another Jigsaw murder - but something is strange here, as they notice that the trap was inescapable no matter what the victim did, meaning that it was against Jigsaw's own rules. Before she has a chance to do anything about that clue, however, she is also kidnapped and placed in a rigged trap that rips her ribcage right off her body. Meanwhile, John Kramer's brain tumour has reacted critical mass, so he has his apprentice Amanda kidnap Doctor Lynn Denion to perform some emergency surgery on him and keep him alive while he tests yet another person. Jeff has been lost in obsession and depression for years since the death of his young son who was hit by a car, and now Jigsaw is giving him the chance to confront those he feels responsible in a test centred around punishment and forgiveness. But just who is really being tested, and will this end well for anyone?

Saw III is, in my opinion at least, when the series stopped being about the mystery of Jigsaw and his motives and the puzzles he set up, and started being more about the gruesomeness and, I guess, "torture porn" aspects of the traps. I mean, what else can you call a trap where a naked woman is strung up in a freezer and has jets of ice water sprayed on her till she freezes solid? (They were going to have her wear a t-shirt and panties, but decided that it would be "too sexual" when the t-shirt got wet.) The traps themselves are, as always, impressive and imaginative, but there's that shift now to focus more of the immediate pain and suffering of the victims. In the first two movies, the traps were slower and more cerebral in nature; now they're much more "instant gratification", especially when you now take into account that some of them are being rigged to be fatal regardless.

Then there's also the issue of the "collateral damage" of the traps. The three traps that Jeff faces don't threaten him, but instead a second person in each is actually the one in, and not only do they have no agency whatsoever in saving their own lives, it could be argued that at least two of them have done nothing to deserve their fates. It's a very different philosophy to what we've previously seen of Jigsaw's motives in previous films. (There's also a degree of hypocrisy here when you learn more of John Kramer's backstory in later films, but that's not here yet, so...) Whether these changes in MO are the result of Jigsaw's growing brain tumour, the actions of his apprentice Amanda, a combination of both or something else entirely is left for the audience to figure out.

The characterisation of our two protagonists is still excellent, and even manages to make us feel somewhat sympathetic towards them to some degree. Amanda in particular is shown to be especially tormented - she's clearly crazier than a bag full of mutant cats with smaller, angrier cats inside their mouths, but she's also obviously just swapped one addiction for another and has an unhealthy devotion to Kramer and keeping him alive. It's easy to tell that things are not going to end well for her. It's also always good to see a female antagonist in horror that's not either a ghost, undead, a sexpot or all of the above.

Saw III is directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, who directed Saw II and also Saw IV, which we'll get to soon enough, and it was written by Leigh Whannell, who of course has been involved in the series since the very beginning. Whannell has done a good job in keeping the plot of all the movies so far well-connected, adding just enough development each time to keep things fresh and interesting. Meanwhile Bousman's direction is competent enough, but there are some scenes where it is almost too dark to see what's actually going on, and at a few points the film falls back on lots and lots of quick frame cuts to denote tension. Overall, however, Saw III is a good enough film; still trying to keep people guessing even if it is starting to slide into the trap of making the gory traps more important than the puzzle.

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Howling II: Stirba - Werewolf Bitch (1985)

The first sequel to The Howling took three-to-four years to come out, which I think is something of a record for all the franchises we've covered so far. Joe Dante was not brought back to direct, not least because Gary Brandner, who wrote the books upon which the first film was based and also worked on the screenplay for this film, did not like Dante and what he had done with the first film. Quite what he thought of Howling II: Stirba - Werewolf Bitch (also known as Howling II: ...Your Sister is a Werewolf) isn't recorded but I can't imagine this improved things any.

Picking up where the first movie ends, Howling II starts at the funeral of Karen White, the heroine of the first film who we saw transforming into a werewolf on live television before being shot dead with silver bullets at the end of the film. That death has been retconned considerably, however, and now that broadcast never went out and so the werewolf revelation remains secret. What's more, the silver bullets were removed from Karen's body during the post-mortem, allowing her to rise again as a werewolf. There to stop this from happening is the mysterious Stefan Crosscoe, who has been hunting werewolves for a long time. He tries to convince Karen's brother Ben* and her former work colleague Jenny about the existence of werewolves, but they are varying degrees of sceptical until they see Karen's transformation themselves, as well as the attempts of several werewolves to rescue her. Stefan then tells them of the existence of Stirba, the 10,000-year-old werewolf queen and how he plans to track her down and kill her. Ben and Jenny then join him on his quest, travelling to Transylvania where Stirba resides and is preparing for a ritual to mark her 10,000th birthday that will give power to werewolves all over the world...

Oh, Sir Christopher Lee, why? Well, actually, he gave his reason for taking the lead role in Howling II as simply having never been in a werewolf movie before. I suspect another factor in this was that Howling II was directed by Phillipe Mora, with whom Lee had worked with in 1983 on The Return of Captain Invincible (where Lee played the supervillain Mr Midnight and which, incidentally, everyone should see because it's a funny film, a good satire and Christopher Lee sings in it). As it was, Lee seems to have regretted his decision to star in Howling II quite quickly - apparently having quite the low opinion of his co-stars' acting ability and, when cast in Dante's Gremlins 2: The New Batch, one of the first things he did was apologise to Dante for having appeared in Howling II. Certainly there's a couple of points in the film where I think I spotted him looking at his co-stars and silently counting the number of ways he could kill them.

So, Howling II is a mess. Its key points of notability are the afore-mentioned Sir Christopher Lee and the fact that the credits repeats the shot where Stirba, played by Sybil Danning, bares her breasts no less than 17 times. Other than that, it's got made-up werewolf lore coming out of its ears - werewolves can only be killed by silver bullets or blades, except for some who are immune to silver and so can only be killed by titanium. But holy water, holy medals and garlic can also be used to protect oneself from them, and at one point holy oil is thrown on a werewolf who goes up like it was napalm. It's bewildering, to say the least. Stirba is also a witch as well as a werewolf, which gives the film a couple of opportunities to perform some strange spells which either result in some gory special effects or some very dodgy cell-drawn ones. Originally, the film was meant to be a horror-comedy, which makes the movies title and alternate titles make more sense, but while director Mora was in Australia shooting another movie, the studio recut the film to make it more of a straight horror with some comedy elements. The fact that Brandner, who had been brought in to write the script originally, eventually quit because of executive meddling and so was replaced by another writer who re-wrote most of it couldn't have helped matters much either.

One thing that this sequel does carry over from the original is the female sexuality and empowerment themes, although even then they're given a beating with the silly stick. Apparently, if you're a female werewolf you're duty bound to wear leather underwear - the kinkier, the better. Stirba is described by many reviews as "bi-curious" but I'd say there's very little of the "curious" about her, and there is one infamous scene where she takes part in a threeway with her lover Vlad and another female werewolf, Mariana, where the three of them writhe erotically on a bed in mid-transformation, yet unable to touch each other in case the glued-on wolf hair fell off. Mora said that the film was inspired by New Wave Eroticism and that's certainly clear throughout the film, complete with a New Wave Punk band providing the movie's signature (and repeated throughout the film, so you know they got their money's worth from it) track, "Howling".

In the end, Howling II could just as easily have been a stand-alone movie instead of a sequel; it bearing so little resemblance to the first film other than the opening scenes (they don't even bother to use the same footage of Karen's on-air transformation, instead managing to make her werewolf makeup look even sillier than her look in the previous film). Sir Christopher Lee gives a fine performance despite everything, but the best that can be said for the rest of the film is that it would probably be a good film to watch with friends while getting drunk and making fun of it. Oh, and the 17 shots of Sybil Danning's breasts in the credits.

 (* - For some reason I kept calling Ben "Mike" throughout this review. I don't know where the name "Mike" came from, but I think it says something about just how uninteresting the character was that I can't even keep his name right in my head...)

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The Howling (1981)

July has arrived and with it comes another franchise marathon. This time around I've decided to tackle the Howling series, both because I've tended to avoid the werewolf genre somewhat as I've never been all that taken by it (I've only ever seen four werewolf films before this that I've really enjoyed - An American Werewolf in London, Dog Soldiers, Ginger Snaps and Brotherhood of the Wolf - and one of those doesn't even have any actual werewolves in it), and because I didn't really feel ready to tackle the convoluted mess that is the Amityville series just yet. So let's start at the beginning, of course, with the 1981 film The Howling.

News Anchor Karen White is investigating the case of a Los Angeles serial killer known as "Eddie the Mangler". She's been communicating with him for some time and has agreed to meet him while also being part of an undercover police sting to capture him. Things go wrong, however, and she is nearly killed by Eddie in a porn theatre before he is shot dead by cops. After this, Karen and her husband Bill are invited to stay at a coastal community called the Colony so that Karen can recover from her trauma. Things and people are a little odd at the Colony, however; not the least of which is Marsha, another resident there who is said by the others to be a nymphomaniac and who wastes no time in coming on strong to Bill. Meanwhile Karen is hearing strange animal howls in the night, Bill starts to act stranger and stranger as he becomes more involved with the others at the Colony, and as two of Karen's fellow journalists investigate deeper into Eddie the Mangler, they uncover a disturbing supernatural background for him that could mean he is far from dead...

The Howling was released in the same year as that other classic werewolf (and 80s horror!) movie An American Werewolf in London, and it's interesting to compare the two. Aside from the obvious point of both featuring werewolves, both deal with the idea of an outsider coming to terms with the idea of werewolves and possibly being cursed with lycanthropy themselves and both have some spectacular special effects for the transformation from human to werewolf. It's also interesting to note that while An American Werewolf in London ends in a porn theatre, The Howling begins in one - a coincidence, I'm sure, but an interesting one; werewolves being linked to unbound and even deviant sexuality, both in cultural folklore over the centuries and more explicitly in The Howling (Marsha's "nymphomania" and Eddie's obvious interest/fetish in rape). The sexuality on display in The Howling is also considerably darker than in An American Werewolf in London; perhaps it could be seen that the former film is picking up where the latter ended and kicking things up a notch or two - but that would have to have been a conscious decision on the part of director Joe Dante and as I said, I don't think that's the case here.

Joe Dante is a favourite director of mine, having directed two of my favourite horror-comedies - The 'Burbs and Gremlins 2: The New Batch, and while The Howling isn't a horror-comedy here, it does have one or two moments - the recurring motif of certain characters eating from cans of "Wolf" chili being one of them. Another is the character of Walter Paisley, played by long-time Dante collaborator and B-movie stalwart Dick Miller, who is the owner of the occult bookstore that we get a lot of the werewolf exposition from. For the most part, though, the movie is played as straight horror, which is good as I think adding humour, however black, to this film would have run the risk of diluting the horror of it and leaving it open to accusations of being an inferior An American Werewolf in London.

There's a lot of sexual politics in The Howling as well. Eddie the Mangler's deviant and obviously predatory sexuality throughout is clear, but there's also the idea of the wolves being more sexually open and free to do what they want in general. There's also an interesting comparison between Karen, the pretty blonde reporter whose job and trauma seem to have inadvertently emasculated her husband, and Marsha, the dark, mysterious and very sexually aggressive woman who sets about seducing Bill by being everything that Karen is not. Once she seduces him, Bill's whole personality changes; he becomes aggressive towards Karen and starts devouring meat when before he had been a vegetarian - a slightly ham-handed (hah!) metaphor for the freedom that lycanthropy brings, but an effective one nonetheless.

The special effects are a bit of a mixed bag. While some scenes are spectacular, particularly the scene in which we finally see Eddie's full transformation (that demonic lupine grin will haunt me for some time), other scenes are a bit too obviously claymation or badly drawn cell animation. And the final transformation at the end of the movie looks less like a werewolf and more like one of Chewbacca's family from the Star Wars Holiday Special. Robert Picardo, who played Eddie, had to spend up to six-and-a-half hours in the makeup chair for some of those scenes, and at one point complained that his first acting role in California was "[his]face get[ting] melted in a low-budget horror movie.". Personally, I'm more amused to see him in a role where he has hair, as today he's probably more known as the Doctor in Star Trek: Voyager. Interestingly, there's also surprisingly little blood throughout, especially if we go back to comparing it with An American Werewolf in London - the emphasis is more on the creeping, psychological horror of it all.

As a werewolf film and a product of the 80s horror movie boom, The Howling is an important, if sometimes overlooked, film. It takes things in a different direction to certain other werewolf films of the same time - a direction which it can't really be said it managed to maintain throughout its sequels...

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My Bloody Valentine (2009)

Happy (slightly late) Valentine's Day. A couple of years ago I reviewed the 1981 Canucksploitation horror My Bloody Valentine, and with it being that time of year again and a new 50 Shades movie out (I think this one is called 50 Shades of Restraining Orders, from what I saw of the trailer), I figured that it would be a good time to review the 2009 remake, My Bloody Valentine 3D. And, as you might have guessed from the little addition to the title there, this version of the film is in 3D, so get ready for weapons, body parts and anything else the filmmakers can think of to be thrown at the screen.

The mining town of Harmony is struck by a mining accident that leaves six miners trapped underground - a tragedy made even worse when it's discovered that the incident's sole survivor, Harry Warden, killed the other five miners to ensure his survival. One year later, on Valentine's Day, Warden wakes up from his coma and, feeling remarkably spry, goes on a rampage, killing 22 people before he is apparently killed by the town sheriff. Ten years after that, Tom Hanniger, the mine owner's son who caused the original accident that started everything off and who narrowly avoided becoming Warden's last victim, returns to town. At the same time, gruesome murders committed by a person in full mining gear and wielding a pickaxe start happening again, with the victims' hearts cut out and placed in chocolate boxes in time for Valentine's Day. Tom and the new town sheriff Axel (who is now married to Tom's old sweetheart Sarah) both start their own investigations into the murders, but is it a returned Harry Warden or a copycat killer?

There's not a very large suspect pool in this My Bloody Valentine remake. On the one hand we have Axel, the town sheriff who's cheating on his wife and is shown throughout the film to be a pretty big asshole. And on the other hand, we've got Dean Winchester. By the laws of narrative casting, one of these two will have to be the hero, and the other the killer, and if you were to ask me I'd say the film shows its hand there way too early in the film with a throwaway scene. But let's be honest here, the plot was never going to be the key selling point of this film - it was always going to be the 3D.

So, the 3D. This film has a lot of it, which in turn means that it has a lot of CGI. And it's not very good CGI at that. I know that I've shown myself to be rather biased against CGI and 3D in the past, what with not being able to actually watch films in 3D and all, but near the beginning there's a 3D effect that makes the eye-popping scene in Friday the 13th Part 3 look good. For the rest of the film the 3D effects are mainly pickaxes flying at or lodging in the screen, or CGI flesh and blood globules splattering their way towards the audience, the vast majority of which mainly serve to highlight how good the occasional practical effects are in comparison (mainly they're bodies with empty chest cavities and a callback to the launderette/washing machine scene from the original movie).

This version of My Bloody Valentine also has several connections with the Friday the 13th franchise as well; some coincidental and some not. Valentine's Day in the move falls on Saturday 14, and there's a 'joke' at the beginning of the film where a teen stumbles into a mine full of dead bodies and calls out, "Jason, is that you?" On the more coincidental side, writer Todd Farmer also wrote Jason X (and has cameos in both films as well; here we get to see his bare ass as he has sex with an incidental character/future victim who has a truly impressive full-frontal nude scene). There's also the fact that the 2009 Friday the 13th remake both came out in the same year as My Bloody Valentine (obviously) but also starred Jensen Ackles' Supernatural co-star Jared Padalecki as well (and if you squint at it and add a "Is it the ghost of Harry Warden?" subplot to it, you could almost see those two movies as episodes of Supernatural where the Winchesters have to go undercover...). It's an interesting little comparison that's certainly more interesting than some parts of the film.

And finally, we come to the direction. The My Bloody Valentine remake was directed (and also edited, and to be fair he seems like a pretty good editor) by Patrick Lussier, who was also the man responsible for Dracula 2000/1 (depending on what year it was released in your country, it seems). And in the end, many of the problems with that movie also apply to this one, which can really be summed up as "All style and no substance." (See also: any Zack Snyder movie.) It's all about the gore and the 3D money shots and the set dressing, so much so that things like plot, characterization and continuity are left by the wayside. Whenever a remake is made the question has to be asked, "Does this remake bring anything new to the table?" and in the case of My Bloody Valentine the answer is no, because 3D is hardly a new or rare effect. The original film was a low-budget classic that made a name for itself in the burgeoning slasher genre. This new version tries to draw an audience in with gimmicks because it can't improve on anything else (and in fact makes some things worse). A shame.

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