Carnography

Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return (1999)

What does it say for a film franchise when I find myself excited for the 6th (and not 666th; archivists of the future hopefully don't get too confused with that) entry of the series because it promises the return of one of the few good characters (and actors) from the very first movie? That's the position I find myself in today, with the return of John Franklin in Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return.

Teenager Hannah Martin has travelled from California to the town of Gatlin, Nebraska in search of her birth mother. 19 years on from the events that first put Gatlin, on the map, so to speak, the town is mostly a ghost town, inhabited by a few adults, including the town's doctor and Cora, the town's sheriff, and a group of teens and children who seemingly run wild throughout the town. In Gatlin's barely-functioning hospital there is also Jake who seems to be able to only speak in Bible verses, and Issac, the child preacher and leader of the cult of children that sacrificed all the adults in Gatlin all those years ago. Issac miraculously wakes from his coma once Hannah is in town, and is up and about quickly, preparing things for a prophecy that has been 19 years in the making, where the first-born daughter and son of the children of Gatlin will come together and become parents to a new "master race" of children blessed by He Who Walks Behind The Rows. Can Hannah find her birth mother and escape what Issac has planned for her, or is destiny too strong to fight against?

So yes, obviously the big draw behind this instalment of the oh-so-drawn-out Children of the Corn series is the return of Isaac Chroner, played by the original actor from the 1984 film John Franklin. Now don't get me wrong, John Franklin reprising his role as Isaac is probably one of the best things about this film, but there are two caveats to that statement: one is that it's not that difficult and two is that, while in 1984 Franklin was an adult playing a very creepy-looking child, in 1999 he's an adult playing an only moderately-creepy-looking adult. A lot of Isaac's gravitas and punch are lost now that he's got clear crows' feet and the like, even when the film dresses him in the same dark clothes and hat and has him enthusiastically preaching about He Who Walks Behind The Rows' latest plan. Elsewhere, Nancy Allen plays Rachel Colby, a woman so clearly telegraphed to be Hannah's birth mother that the only way it could be less of a spoiler would be if she walked around with a giant neon sign flashing "Hannah's Birth Mother", and Stacy Keach turns up as the town's chain-smoking, hard-drinking doctor.

The plot surrounding the "prophecy" that Hannah will make the beast with two backs with the first-born son of the Children and bring a new pure race into being is also telegraphed as hell. Early on in the film we meet Gabriel, and conditioned as we are about mysterious handsome strangers who turn up in these sort of films, we're instantly suspicious of his motives. Then we hear about the prophecy, and that Isaac has a son with Cora, and we're obviously meant to think that it's Gabriel. It's of very little surprise when it turns out not to be, but Gabriel's still got such a prominent role in the film that we can't help but guess that there's something more going on with him. Personally I was betting on a switched-at-birth scenario involving Stacy Keach, but in the end, it wasn't even that, just some good old fashioned attempted nepotism.

Horror-wise, Isaac's Return isn't so much a "slow burn" as it is doused with cold water. For the first 40 minutes, all we get is Hannah seeing or hallucinating dead crows a few times, and I don't think that's even explained in the rest of the film. Just "It's the prophecy, move along." By the film's climax, several people have been sliced, diced, stabbed and/or impaled by scythes (and a broken metal pole), but that's about all there is that could really make this film a "horror" movie. Even the threat of Hannah being impregnated by He Who Walks Behind The Rows doesn't really feel like much of a threat when you consider that we have such things as the morning-after pill now (and even the staunchest Catholic would probably consider "impregnated by evil corn god" an exceptional circumstance).

Overall, Children of the Corn 666: Isaac's Return gets some points for bringing back pretty much the most iconic villain of the whole series (He Who Walks Behind The Rows doesn't count because they change his appearance each movie) and having John Franklin return to play him... but then it loses most of those points by not utilising him nearly enough and proceeding with an obvious and tension-free plot that a small child could probably see through. He Wh Walks Behind The Rows is growing less threatening with every chapter now.

1.5 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

 

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.

 

 

Unfriended: Dark Web (2018)

It's time for an experiment. After hearing me complain about the upcoming (at the time) film Unfriended: Dark Web for about the umpteenth time, my brother suggested that I watch the trailer and then write the review (or at least the plot synopsis) based solely on that, and then see how much I got right or wrong when I saw the actual film. Well, several months later (because, perhaps in an act of mercy, my local cinemas decided not to carry the film - but then again, they've decided to do the same for the Suspiria remake, so it's a double-edged sword...) I can finally reveal the notes I made when watching the trailer.

A bunch of 20somethings with more disposable income than they really should have get together online via Skype for a gaming night. One of them has a new laptop that he lifted from his work's Lost and Found; it connects to a mysterious network called "The River" and has lots of videos of captive and abused women. It's a Dark Web snuff network! Other members of the network 'hack' the Skype call and start stalking and attacking the group. "I want to play a game," one of them types. Get out of here, John Kramer; this isn't your franchise. The snuff network kills or kidnaps everyone because they're just that powerful, efficient and well-connected. Honestly, the laptop was probably a honey trap.

Now that I've seen the whole film, I can say that the trailer tells a rather different story than the actual film. My John Kramer joke, for example, would have made no sense in the context of the actual film as that moment only happens in the trailer, and a lot of the events and pacing are switched around considerably in the film itself. Whether or not I was right about the film's "twist" I'll leave up to you to discover, however - although I will say that Unfriended: Dark Web doesn't really do too much that's original or groundbreaking plotwise. Frankly, I'm just glad they don't go with their original plan, which was the vengeful cyber ghost of Laura Barns going after another group of teens who had a hand in her humiliation and eventual suicide.

So Unfriended: Dark Web is a Sequel In Name Only (SINO), which can only improve things because the premise of the last film was really, really silly and had a terrible ending. Having the antagonists be (allegedly - I'll get to that) regular humans who just like a bit of the old ultra-violence and snuff film trading is a more grounded hook to hang the film on, and is therefore much easier to watch. And this film even seemed to have fixed some of the biggest problems that the first film had, like everyone stopping talking whenever our protagonist alt-tabbed and cutting down on the digital graphics glitches that just gave me a headache. I was actually starting to think I was going to have to take back much of the things I'd predicted and said about this film.

Unfortunately, at about the halfway mark the digital graphics glitches make their return with a vengeance, and in perhaps the silliest method possible - the original owner of the laptop, who's stalking the group to get it back (and later the rest of the snuff film cabal), apparently generates something that interferes with live camera feeds whenever he's near them to distort his image and so whenever he's on or even near the screen it becomes a glitch-a-palooza. And there's no explanation given for this ability either. Is he wearing an EMP suit? Is he related to Slenderman? The entire conceit behind this gimmick appears to be to just hide his appearance from the audience - but hey, he's already wearing a hoodie and could just as easily wear a mask as well and that would be just as, if not more, effective in terms of tension and creep factor. I suspect that at some point during the film's planning, someone remembered that digital tearing had been a big part of the first film and so it had to be a big part of this film as well, and who cares if it makes no sense.

At least most of the characters in this film were more sympathetic than the ones in the previous film. Our protagonist is Matias, and when we meet him we discover that he's been building a program to help him communicate with his deaf girlfriend via ASL easier, and that's a really humanising touch as well as an original one (as well as leading to Chekov's ASL Skills towards the end of the film). There's also a lesbian couple that I found to be incredibly sweet (and one of them was played by Betty Gabriel, who was also in The Purge: Election Year and Get Out). On the other hand, there's also AJ, played by a millennial Judd Nelson and who unironically uses the term "sheeple" at one point, and I could not count down the minutes until his inevitable demise fast enough.

Once again, Unfriended: Dark Web attempts to get with the zeitgeist by jumping on some of the most relevant internet topics of the day - most obvious is the use of the Dark Web as the ultimate internet boogeyman, as well as the myth of the highly organised and connected snuff movie community (previously seen in The Den) able to trace, track, hack,manipulate and kill people all over the globe on a moment's notice without leaving a single trace or contradictory piece of forensic evidence, but there's also a case of Swatting, just to broaden the internet culture sweep. I'm just surprised that AJ didn't have a Pepe poster in his room/basement, to be honest.

In the end... Yes. Unfriended: Dark Web is a much better film than the first one. There are moments of genuine tension in this film, even if its attempts to have a more "grounded" story are still pretty far-fetched. Its protagonists are also far more sympathetic and likeable as well, which goes a long way in making a film more watchable. It still has some pretty ridiculous moments, however, which run the risk of obliterating all the kudos and tension the film has managed to claw back for itself. If there's going to be a third instalment of this series, can I suggest that the whole digital tearing thing just be dropped altogether? Either that or just bite the bullet and cross it over with Marble Hornets.

 

 

WNUF Halloween Special (2013)

While Ghostwatch will always hold a place in my heart as the BBC drama that inadvertently terrified me and a generation and was at least partly responsible for kindling the fascination with found footage and mockumentary horrors and the way in which certain publicity methods and media, in general, can create a special type of buzz around films almost greater than the film itself, it's not the only film out there to utilise this format. Today we're taking a look at the WNUF Halloween Special, a "film" I'd been wanting to see since it first came out but which I only got around to seeing it last night.

It's October 31, 1987, and television channel WNUF is broadcasting their special Halloween programming. Among the safety tips for trick-or-treaters, a local dentist's "Cash for Candy" scheme and a segment on a Christian group who believe that the holiday is evil and that all those who participate in it will come to an unpleasant end, the highlight of the night is a live broadcast from the Webber House, a local property that has stood empty since the brutal murders of Mr and Mrs Webber by their son 20 years previously. The son claimed that he had been driven to commit the murders by demonic spirits after using an Ouija board, and many people have claimed that the house is still haunted by those spirits. Reporter Frank Stewart plans to broadcast a live investigation into the house, with a Catholic priest and a psychic investigator couple and their "psychic" cat Shadow, and even hold a phone-in seance in the house on live TV. Almost from the moment they enter the house, however, the psychics begin to feel that there is a threatening presence in the house and that they are in danger. Frank is flippant about the whole situation though and demands the investigation and broadcast continue, even after the investigators' equipment is smashed and Shadow goes missing. Clearly, someone or something is in the Webber House with Frank and the others; will this live broadcast prove the existence of ghosts, or will this all end badly for the crew?

As I said at the start, I've wanted to see the WNUF Halloween Special since it came out in 2013; I couldn't bring myself to watch it until last night, however, because the moment I learned there was a cat going into the house I had a terrible feeling about what that would mean for poor Shadow. To say whether I was right or wrong would constitute a spoiler though, and since the WNUF Halloween Special is best experienced knowing as little as possible going in, all I'll say is that I succeeded in watching it, and I'm glad I did - even if my heart was pounding with the horrible anticipation of potential cat death for parts of it.

The whole gimmick of the WNUF Halloween Special is that it's an old VHS recording of the live broadcast from 1987, complete with static, the occasional tracking error and even ad breaks and local TV ads (which reminds me, must go down to Phil's Carpet Warehouse). This serves to both give the film a massive dose of cinema verite authenticity, and also give a massive dose of nostalgia for anyone watching who grew up in the 1980s. Granted, some of this was lost on me because UK 80s TV was pretty different from US 80s TV, but I can still appreciate the effect the film was going for. I will say that the frequency of the ads did start to grate on me after a while, and the pacing did start to suffer as a result of them as the film progressed, especially with the way the film would "fast-forward" through the ads on several occasions. It did keep with the concept that this is an old VHS tape that we're watching and that we're just skipping through some of the "boring bits", but it was really a very fine line between immersion and boring that they trod with this idea.

The WNUF Halloween Special does succeed in creating the right kind of atmosphere though. You really could believe that this was broadcast in the 1980s, on a small local channel, and that people just stumbled on it that Halloween night in 1987, not realising what they were tuning into and remaining transfixed as the events unfolded. You can see that it learned its craft from some of the greats (although your mileage may vary) of the past - The Last Broadcast, The Poughkeepsie Tapes, The Blair Witch Project and possibly even Ghostwatch itself, from framing to the potentially unreliable narrator (because hey, this could still be just one big hoax, right?)

The atmosphere in which you watch the WNUF Halloween Special is also key to how much you enjoy it, I think. I was lucky enough to watch it as part of a group, where we kept up the conceit that the events we were watching really happened, at least in part for the people (like me) who hadn't seen it before. Of course, we knew it was all fiction, but it was fun for those 82 minutes to really suspend disbelief and get properly into it. I certainly think I wouldn't have had the same enjoyable experience if I'd watched it on my own in a drier, more analytical setting, so take that as you will. But if you're like me and enjoy things like Ghostwatch and Local58, then you should definitely give the WNUF Halloween Special a watch.

 

Amazon US

Halloween (2018)

My carpets have been fitted, and so I can finally move everything back into place and get back to some semblance of a schedule. And just in time too, as today is the release of the long-awaited Halloween movie - released exactly 40 years after the very first one came out and invented a whole new horror subgenre. This new Halloween is a sequel only to the very first movie, throwing out such things as Michael and Laurie's familial relationship, the existence of his niece Jamie and, to the relief of many, Halloween: Resurrection. But is this movie worth all the anticipation?

40 years after his last escape and murder rampage through Haddonfield, Michael Myers is still being held at Smith's Grove Sanitarium, and he's spent those four decades not making a sound or reacting to very much at all. Shortly after a couple of podcasters visit him and show him his old mask, however, Myers is put on a bus to be transported to a new secure mental facility, whereupon he promptly escapes, gets his mask back and heads back to Haddonfield to deal with some unfinished business. That "unfinished business" is, of course, Laurie Strode, who has spent the last 40 years preparing for the possibility that Michael might one day escape again and come back to try to finish the job he started on Halloween 1978, including having enough guns for an NRA convention, a panic room in her basement and a wrecked relationship with her daughter and granddaughter as a result of her obsessive Michael-prepping. With Michael stalking the streets of Haddonfield once more, will Laurie be able to protect her family and stop Michael once and for all, or will Michael receive some help from unexpected places?

The opening credits of this new Halloween movie are deliberately designed to call back to the 1978 movie, complete with the same font and a jack-o-lantern on the left side of the screen. Only this time the jack-o-lantern starts off squashed and obliterated, and slowly reinflates during the course of the opening credits. I like to imagine that this is some sort of reference to the franchise being somehow reinvigorated by this new entry after previous entries (*cough*Halloween: Resurrection*cough) reduced it to little more than squashed... squash. It's far from the only callback to previous films in the series though - even Silver Shamrock gets a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo while the children of Haddonfield are out trick-or-treating. The movie still makes it clear, though, that the only canon it's following is the events of the first film, so no Strode family revelations, no Mark of Thorn, and no druids. We're back to Michael Myers just being a pure psychopath, killing pretty much for the sake of killing, with no explanation as to what drives him whatsoever.

And boy, does Michael kill a lot of people in this film! No-one is safe either, as Michael goes just about anyone who crosses his path or looks at him funny, be they man, woman or child. The deaths are a lot more varied than the traditional kitchen knife stabbing he's become almost synonymous with after all this time, as he uses his bare hands, a hammer he randomly picks up and even his feet during the course of the film. Clearly, he's been spending his time thinking about what he'll do during those 40 years at Smith's Grove - which must also have a first-class exercise facility when you consider that Michael is now around 61 and still keeping up with his victims, getting up from being shot and even at one point being run down by a car. Some things, at least, never change.

The evolution of Laurie Strode as a character is also an interesting thing. She's gone from being almost the archetypal Final Girl in the 1978 Halloween to taking on the role of the Woodsman, of Dr Loomis (side note: I'm not sure I liked the voice of the person they brought in to "voice" Loomis since Donald Pleasance is sadly long-departed), who is there to warn everyone of the threat and come in to save the day at the end, and it's good that there was no question of her filling that role. Laurie could easily join a support group for survivors of nightmareish stalkers out to kill you and everyone you love (founding members: Sarah Connor and Nancy Thompson). She's there to shoot Michael first and repair her relationship with her daughter later, and that's all there is to it.

There are flaws, though. The first act or so of the film felt less like it was setting events up and more like it was giving the audience the Cliff Notes of what happened in the first film - stating events a little too pointedly in case there were people out there who'd never seen, read or heard anything about the first Halloween (although to be fair, there probably are people out there now who might never have seen it). The two British podcasters/"investigative journalists" got on my nerves about as much as the loud idiot in the cinema with me who kept a running commentary on the film's events, and I really couldn't wait for their usefulness (a way to get Michael his mask back) to come to an end so they could die as the trailer promised us. And yes, the trailer does manage to give several key moments away, although they do manage to restrain themselves enough to not give everything away for once.

People are already talking about whether or not there will be another entry in the series after this one (not giving anything away, but if you know anything about slasher movies you know that masked slashers are like 1960s TV Batman in that if you don't literally watch them die they're going to pop back up at some point) but I really hope they don't. This was a good film, and it would be a good ending for the Halloween franchise... if they can just let it die.

 

 

Absurd (1981)

Here's some advice. Don't schedule a carpet fitting the same week as getting a Smart Meter fitted in your home, and only weeks after getting a complete house cleaning (which went so terribly, terribly wrong to boot). Don't do all this especially in the same month as you're trying to do 31 horror movie reviews, as you'll quickly realise that there are going to be some double review days in your future. It's all really quite absurd... which leads cunningly into today's review, Absurd (see what I did there?) - also known as Antropophagus 2, Monster Hunter, The Grim Reaper 2, Horrible and (for some reason) Zombie 6: Monster Hunter.

A priest chases a man through a wooded area until the man tries to climb a set of railings and ends up disembowelling himself, spilling his guts on the doorstep of a nearby house. The man is taken to hospital and operated on; he recovers remarkably quickly and escapes, killing a nurse with a medical drill along the way. The priest who was chasing him explains that the man, Mikos Stenopolis, was experimented on by the Vatican and has been given regenerative abilities; unfortunately, he was also driven insane and is now a homicidal maniac, and the priest is seeking to stop him and kill him via the only method that will work - "destroy[ing] the cerebral mass". Meanwhile, at the home that Mikos turned up at, the Bennetts are preparing to go to a nearby friend's house to watch the Super Bowl. Their daughter Katya is confined to bed and in traction due to a deviation in her spine, and her nurse Emily is due to stay the night to take care of her but gets delayed because of events at the hospital. The babysitter Peggy taunts the family's young son Willy by telling him that the man at the door was the Bogeyman and that he will eat Willy if he misbehaves, not knowing that Mikos is making his way back to the house with murderous intent...

From looking at some of the alternative titles of Absurd, you might think that it has some sort of connection with Anthropophagus, that 1980s film about a cannibal with a dreaded skin disease running amok on a Greek island, and you'd be half-right. Director of both, Joe D'Amato (here under the pseudonym Peter Newton) wanted to make a direct sequel to Anthropophagus and asked George Eastman to take part. Eastman, however, didn't want to do a sequel and agreed to only act; however, when he saw the script he felt it was so bad he decided to re-write it into "one of those American thrillers, Halloween style" (and did so under the name John Cart). And like Halloween it is, what with the stalking killer and references to "the Bogeyman" and even a stand-in for Dr Loomis chasing the killer throughout the film. Of course, it's not actually set at Halloween, lest they be accused of taking imitation a step too far - instead it's set on Super Bowl weekend, which also gives the opportunity for lots of filler scenes with a group of people dressed up far too well for watching a game on TV and snacking on pasta.

Absurd is also quite the who's who of Italian exploitation cinema. As well as George Eastman/Luigi Montefiori as Mikos, we have Annie Belle (The House on the Edge of the Park) as the quite saintly nurse Emily, Charles Borromel (one of the dubbing voices in Don't Torture a Duckling), an uncredited Michele Soavi (Stagefright) and Edward Purdom (Don't Open Till Christmas), just to mention a few. If I was playing Italian exploitation bingo, I think I'd have easily won with this film. Just about the only thing missing is Bob from The House by the Cemetary or Manhattan Baby in the role of Willy - instead, we get a dark curly-haired moppet for the cast to have to try and rescue, although he is still dubbed by an adult trying to do a child's voice.

For the most part, Absurd is pretty uninspired as far as early-era slashers go, not really bringing anything original to the table. The exception to this is the character and arc of daughter Katya, who spends the first two-thirds of the film confined to bed, and strapped down to boot. the scenes when she is desperately attempting to unstrap and unhook herself from the bed and traction machine as Mikos chases Willy and Emily around the house are really quite tense considering what they are (someone trying to undo leather belts without being able to see them), and when she inevitably becomes the Final Girl and has to face down Mikos she is really quite resourceful, using a drawing compass, loud music and eventually the axe from a convenient suit of armour to great effect.

Absurd was one of the "video nasties" in the UK, as one of the DPP's 39 titles successfully prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. While the film is full of heads being drilled, heads being bisected by butcher saws and heads being impaled with pickaxes, the scene that most probably got it into trouble is the one where Emily is caught by the killer and has her head forced into a gas oven which is then turned on. We then get to watch as, over several minutes, her face is slowly cooked by the heat - with the camera "inside" the oven for that nice close-up view. It's hard to explain that away as anything other than an exercise in torturing a woman for the enjoyment of the audience and goes on for far longer than is necessary.

 

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The Love Witch (2016)

Two days into October and I'm already throwing my carefully-planned-out schedule (I practically colour-coded it and everything) right out the window because I decided to watch films out of order (because I was too lazy to get up off the sofa). But since nothing is date-sensitive, it doesn't actually matter so let's get on with today's review, The Love Witch.

Elaine is a beautiful young woman who moves to the town of Arcata in California after her husband's sudden and apparently suspicious death. Elaine is also a practising witch, and rents a room in the house of her mentor Barbara as well as joining the coven in the town. Elaine has some rather odd, and even traditional views on relationships and how women should cater to mens' fantasies and that the most important thing they can do is love them; she is also constantly hoping to meet her true love, who she imagines almost exactly as a knight in shining armour from a fairy tale. To that aim, she performs a ritual - a "love spell", if you will - to find her true love. Unfortunately, every man she meets and captivates becomes obsessed with her or cannot cope with the feelings she brings out in them, eventually causing them to commit suicide or pine away when she loses interest in them. When Griff, a police detective starts to investigate these mysterious deaths he meets Elaine, and the two quickly start a relationship. Elaine believes she has finally found the man of her dreams, but will that still be the case if Griff discovers her involvement in the deaths of her previous lovers?

My gods, but Elaine - or more specifically Samantha Robinson, who plays her - is beautiful. I mean, really, utterly, stunningly, elegantly beautiful. You look at Elaine and you find yourself wondering why she could ever have any problems finding a man to love her - but of course, that's (one of) the point(s) of The Love Witch, I think - Elaine wants to find a man who isn't just captivated by her looks, but who wants her for her entire being. Love versus desire. It's clear that many men desire her, but she does not reciprocate the attention for most of them - we see the uncomfortable looks on her face whenever the male leader of the coven attempts to get close to her or touch her, for example. Elaine also has created such an idealised portrait of her ideal man in her mind that, inevitably, no man will ever be good enough for her - even Griff, her "white knight" is doomed to eventually disappoint her as we hear his internal monologue stating that he does not truly believe in love.

As you might have suspected, The Love Witch is a feminist film, and so there's a fair bit of gender politics in the film. On the surface, Elaine might seem to be rather anti-feminist, considering her views on how women should fulfil the fantasies of their men, but at the same time, she is the one doing all the pursuing and enforcing her will and power (in the form of her love spells) onto the men she desires. At one point in the film, we watch as Elaine hears the male voices of her past berate and demean her for not being good enough for them, and it's clear that these past events have driven her to become what she is now - a woman who wants to be loved, but is also determined to never again be objectified or belittled for what she is. It's pretty obvious that she's a sociopathic serial killer, but even then she's not so much an antagonist as she is an anti-heroine - you can't help but feel for her even with everything she does.

Something else that's beautiful in The Love Witch is the cinematography. It has a very 60s and 70s aesthetic (so much so that, when the film started, I had to check that it wasn't set in that period rather than the present day), and the colours are all so very striking and lush. They might not be at quite the level of saturation as The Neon Demon or Dario Argento's Suspiria (two other films that also deal with women's power), but they still work together to create a sort of otherworldly atmosphere to the film that works so well with the magical themes within. Things like the Victoriana tea room also feed into the idea of female fantasies - or rather, the feeling that so much of this is just dressing up and playing out your fantasies for Elaine.

If you're looking for a traditional and/or gory horror movie, then The Love Witch probably won't meet your expectations. There's very little gore, and Elaine is far from the "traditional" horror movie villain or slasher. Similarly, if you don't like mixing your horror with your gender politics, then you might find this film difficult to get through. But if you like thoughtful films, with beautiful cinematography and leading actresses, and can enjoy playful, subtle satire, then you should give it a look.

 

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The Boy (2016)

I missed out on seeing today's film, The Boy, in the cinema when it first came out - partly because I wasn't in a position to see it and partly because I took one look at the trailer and pretty much figured out what was going to happen in the movie immediately. This wasn't because The Boy has one of those trailers that gives everything away either (although it doesn't exactly leave much out), but because it just has one of those plots that's ridiculously easy to read.

Greta Evans has come to England to work as a nanny for a wealthy British family, the Heelshires, but also to escape her violent stalker ex, Cole, who once beat her so badly he caused her to have a miscarriage. Greta expects to be looking after the Heelshires' son, Brahms - she is shocked, however, when she discovers that "Brahms" is, in fact, a porcelain doll, the real boy having died in a fire 25 years previously. As a way to apparently cope with their grief, the Heelshires treat the doll as though he is still their eight-year-old son, and require Greta to care for him while they are away on holiday, leaving her a list of very specific rules to follow as well. At first, Greta pays no attention to the rules, thinking that the doll is just a doll and the Heelshires are just eccentric old people, but strange things soon start to happen around the house and she starts to wonder if something more is going on with the house and the doll than she first believed. At the same time, Greta also learns that her ex has found out where she is staying and there is the threat of him coming to the house in England to force her to go back to him. Is Brahms' spirit somehow in the porcelain doll that represents him, or is there a much more insidious explanation for the strange events that go on inside the house?

As an experiment, before I sat down to watch The Boy, I wrote down what I thought would happen in the film, including the inevitable revelation about Brahms Heelshire and the doll, just to see how accurate I could be. The fact that I got nearly everything right apart from the existence of Cole the abusive stalker ex (and one other incidental plot twist), does not speak well for the film. Also, so I can actually discuss these things without making huge chunks of this review in hidden text, consider everything past this paragraph a great big SPOILER (just in case you have some time to kill after a recent trepanation and decide you want to watch the film blind).

So yes, Brahms did not, in fact, die in the fire when he was eight and has been living in the walls of the family home ever since. His parents, needing to keep his continued existence a secret, created the doll and the rules to hide their behaviour to him and to deflect any attention onto their eccentric ways, but also to control him because Brahms was most probably a budding psychopath even before the fire and his subsequent life cosplaying as Roach from The People Under The Stairs. But after 25 years they've grown weary of the charade, and so hired Greta to not only care for him but also for Brahms to take as his "mate" or wife or whatever you want to call it. I know, it's shocking, isn't it? You'd never have guessed any of this from the trailer that doesn't lay all of this out with a trowel.

The Boy also manages to engineer a third act where the Brahms, the psychotic man-child who's been living inside the walls of his home for a quarter of a century squares off against Cole, the abusive stalker ex... and Brahms manages to come out as the more sympathetic of the two. Nature versus nurture, I suppose, although as I said, Brahms was clearly heading down the path to violent psychopath even before he became Brahms-in-the-Walls. Although the film even manages to blow even this one halfway-interesting part of the film, as when Brahms bursts through the wall to attack Cole, all I could think of was the Kool-Aid Man.

As for the rest of the film? It's dull - interminably so. One hour of The Boy felt more like two, as Maggie from The Walking Dead wanders round the Heelshires' home and alternates between creeped out by the Brahms doll and mothering it. Periodically John Myers from Hellboy (or if you really want to condemn him, Reeves from Tank 432) turns up to awkwardly flirt with Greta and be repeatedly shot down, and provide episodic exposition to fill in more of Brahms' backstory. It's made even worse when you know you've already figured out everything that's happening and are just waiting for the film and the characters to catch up with you so you can get to the inevitable climax where Greta has to face down Brahms-in-the-Walls, escape, and then the film can end on a shot that leaves the door open for a sequel that will, I pray to Eris, never happen.

Considering that The Boy came out only a couple of years after Annabelle and creepy-looking dolls in supernatural thrillers were very much in vogue at the time, I find myself quite suspicious that the film was made this way to cash in on the trend at the time. Which is another example of lazy filmmaking - when I was growing up, creepy murderous dolls actually got up and did all their killing themselves rather than just sat there hoping to creep people out and/or acting as psychological transference devices that lead to an ending that reminds you of Friday the 13th Part 2 and make you ponder watching that instead.

And is it just me, or does the portrait of child Brahms look like the mascot of MAD Magazine?

 

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The Windmill Massacre (2016)

This review got a little delayed, because while I watched The Windmill Massacre a week or so ago, all the detailed notes I made on the film for the review got "accidentally" thrown away during a rather botched house cleaning (along with the DVD case for the film and a large number of my DVDs and Blu-Rays, picked apparently at random). So it's taken me a bit of time to get my head together again and remember enough about the film to be able to write a proper review of it, albeit slightly later than originally planned.

Jennifer is a young Australian woman living and working as a nanny in Amsterdam, who is also on the run from a traumatic event in her past. When her employer discovers that she is in the country illegally she flees before he can call the police, and ends up hiding on a tour bus that is visiting various windmills in the country. Also on the bus are a Japanese tourist, Takashi; a French photographer and former model, Ruby; Nicholas, a doctor; businessman Douglas and his son Curt; soldier Jackson; and bus driver Abe. Partway through the tour, the bus breaks down after Jennifer sees a figure standing in the road, but when they check there is no sign of anyone. Jennifer and Jackson head out to try to find help from a nearby windmill they spotted, but Jackson starts to see images and mementoes of a prostitute we saw him accidentally kill the previous night in a PTSD-flashback before he is abruptly attacked and killed by a demonic figure wielding a scythe. Jennifer tries to tell the others back on the bus what happened, but they dismiss her as being mentally unstable and accuse her of killing Jackson instead. When a further accident knocks the bus into a river and injures Curt, the group have no choice but to head to the windmill for safety and to try to get help. As the group continue to experience strange visions of their past, it becomes clear that not only do they all share a common secret... but that the windmill has a horrific past that still lingers to this day...

I was honestly not expecting to enjoy The Windmill Massacre as much as I did. I picked it up on the basis of a trailer I'd seen on YouTube way back in 2013 (and which was very different from how the film eventually turned out), but I was still expecting it to be little more than typical low-budget, B-movie fare that relied mostly on the gore factor to get noticed. Don't get me wrong - it is most of those things, but as we all know by now that's not necessarily a bad thing, and it actually has a clever little plot hiding in there underneath all the splatter, and it really did impress me.

You can probably guess what the "dark secret" all the tourists share is - I'd pretty much figured it out before we'd got ten minutes into the film, and the brief journey into Jackson's life before he gets on the bus pretty much confirmed it - but the film still puts an interesting twist on it that managed to surprise me. Personally, if it had been me making the film I'd have had a "Seven Deadly Sins" theme rather than the way they went, although if you squint you can see hints of at least Lust, Pride, Avarice and Wrath at least in most of the tourists on this ill-fated trip. This is actually the film's biggest flaw - most of its plot developments are pretty easy to see coming, and while that doesn't necessarily ruin the film, it does take some of the wind out of its mill blades, so to speak.

On the other hand, the film's villain - a miller who sold his soul to Satan for the secret of making his mill blades turn without wind, is quite the original antagonist and considerably more original than all the backwoodsmen killing off campers or masked psychopaths stalking babysitters that make up a lot of the slasher genre, and his kills are, for the most part, sufficiently wet and gruesome enough to satisfy any gorehounds watching. There are digital blood effects, and they are noticeable as such, but they don't stand out so much that they break immersion or ruin the rest of the film. Another thing I particularly liked about the film was how, despite the story of the demonic miller being explicitly Christian in origin, he/it could also be held at bay by a non-Christian - in this case Shinto - prayer ritual. It's little details like this that show that real effort went into the making of the film, so that it would stand out from all the other splattery horrors churned out every year.

The Windmill Massacre might not ever be as good as some of the films it's been compared to (The Abominable Dr Phibes, films from Brian De Palma and the works of Agatha Christie, most obviously Ten Little Indians/And Then There Were None) but it still manages to have more splattery originality than many of its peers, and is therefore worthy of a watch for that alone. Just pretend to be surprised by the plot twists.

 

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