Horror Archives - Page 13 of 40 - FILM FREAK CENTRAL

Madhouse (1981) – Blu-ray Disc

July 27, 20171980s, 2017, Arrow Video, Authors: Sydney Wegner, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Italy, Mystery, Thriller

There Was a Little Girl
**½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B-
starring Trish Everly, Michael Macrae, Dennis Robertson, Morgan Hart
screenplay by Stephen Blakley, Ovidio G. Assonitis, Peter Shepherd and Robert Gandus
directed by Ovidio G. Assonitis

by Sydney Wegner The final frames of Madhouse are a title card with a George Bernard Shaw quote: “…life differs from the play only in this…it has no plot, all is vague, desultory, unconnected till the curtain drops with the mystery unsolved.” In that instant, in one of the most beautifully-executed “middle-finger to my haters” moves in cinema, criticism of Ovidio G. Assonitis’s 1981 clusterfuck is rendered irrelevant. Sneaking that in at the end rather than putting it at the beginning is doubly hilarious, as you’ve just spent an hour-and-a-half trying to grasp onto this ungraspable thing, only to have all your hard work flushed away in a second. If your movie doesn’t make sense, it’s because living doesn’t make sense; case closed. Our own plots are never resolved, people flit in and out of our lives without us ever truly knowing them, our familial relationships are tangled and it’s sometimes impossible to figure out where any animosity began. We think we understand people, but it’s rare that we truly do.

Life (2017) – Blu-ray + Digital

June 25, 20172017, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Sci-Fi, Thriller

**½/**** Image A- Sound A Extras C+
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Rebecca Ferguson, Ryan Reynolds, Hiroyuki Sanada
written by Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick
directed by Daniel Espinosa

by Bryant Frazer If you’re going to steal, they say, steal from the best. It almost works out for Life, which borrows the fundamentals of its premise from Alien–hostile, shape-changing lifeform let loose in the confines of a spacecraft grows larger and more powerful as it eats its way through the crew–and rides that pony for a good forty-five nerve-jangling minutes before running out of oxygen. Alien‘s setting was an interstellar mining vessel that doubled as a haunted mansion, with long hallways, high vaulted ceilings, and other shadowy spaces where the boogeyman could wait for his prey. Screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick lose some of those gothic atmospherics by setting their story on board the International Space Station, since it imparts a more sterile, sci-fi feel. Moreover, in what’s arguably a more brazen case of cinematic larceny, director Daniel Espinosa, best-known for the 2012 thriller Safe House, swipes his anti-gravity stylistics from Alfonso Cuarón, opening the film with a single, very long, VFX-heavy take that sends the camera around in gentle swoops from character to floating character as the space station itself tumbles slowly around its axis.

A Cure for Wellness (2017) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

June 12, 20172017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, DVD, Esoterica, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

***/**** Image A Sound A Extras D+
starring Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth
screenplay by Justin Haythe
directed by Gore Verbinski

by Walter Chaw Gore Verbinski’s A Cure for Wellness is lurid unto beautiful, exquisite pulp, just barmy enough to attract a cult and just smart enough to deserve it. The central conceit is that humans are only really good as biological filters for pollutants; in place of the batteries of The Matrix, the film sees people as distilleries for some sort of immortality potion. The process kills them. I learned when I was young that rabies is a kind of fear of water: its sufferers die of thirst even surrounded by water. The old, rich, white/white-collar victims of A Cure for Wellness entomb themselves in an alpine sanatorium invested in hydrotherapy in hopes of feeling, you know, better. Their sickness is of the soul, alas. The irony of the water cure offered by their ostensible saviours is that the patients become desiccated, mortally. There seems to be a message in there about how the illness of soulless acquisition is self-inflicted, and the amount expended in solution only exacerbates it. Money is bad. The making of it is incestuous, perverse, and insatiable. It’s a strange thing to say in a movie that cost a lot of money, but the point is well taken. Especially now.

The Mummy (2017)

June 10, 20172017, Action, Adventure, Authors: Walter Chaw, Fantasy, Horror, Theatrical, Tom Cruise, Zombie

*/****
starring Tom Cruise, Sofia Boutella, Annabelle Wallis, Russell Crowe
screenplay by David Koepp and Christopher McQuarrie and Dylan Kussman
directed by Alex Kurtzman

by Walter Chaw It took me a while but it finally clicked about an hour into Alex Kurtzman’s hilarible The Mummy that the whole thing wasn’t a really bad movie, but a really bad videogame in bad-movie form. It has the same alternating cadence of leaden exposition drop, interminable and hideously- animated/performed cut-scene, and standard FPS-strictured gameplay culminating in a boss fight. Envisioned as the launch for Universal’s “Dark Universe” franchise (in which the pantheon of classic Universal Monsters are given gritty action reboots, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen-style), it finally functions as a first-generation “Resident Evil” port in which the dialogue, for what it’s worth, was written in Japanese, translated into English, and performed by 64 pixels stacked on top of each other. Awkward doesn’t begin to describe the desperation with which all involved try to seductively reveal/hide their Dark Universe™ Easter eggs while hobbling from one big, button-geeking, CGI-hobbled moment to the next. Look, behind those dust zombies: it’s Dr. Frankenstein’s lab!

C.H.U.D. (1984) – Blu-ray Disc

June 7, 20171980s, 2017, Arrow Video, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Sci-Fi

**/**** Image B+ Sound B Extras B
starring John Heard, Daniel Stern, Christopher Curry, Kim Greist
screenplay by Parnell Hall
directed by Douglas Cheek

by Bryant Frazer Fondly remembered in cult circles as a surprisingly well-acted low-budget horror diversion, this Reagan-era creature feature boasts a roster of game performances, a plethora of vintage locations from the days when New York City was scary enough by itself, and, of course, that title–one of the most vivid and ludicrous acronyms in film history. A CHUD, as any red-blooded FANGORIA subscriber could have told you many months before the movie itself made its way to their hometown, is a cannibalistic humanoid underground dweller. OK, it’s not the most elegant acronym. For one thing, if the underground dwellers are cannibalistic, does that mean they eat humans, or just other humanoids? And if they do eat humans, doesn’t the fact that they are merely humanoid mean they’re not technically cannibals after all? But forget all that. Cannibalistic. Humanoid. Underground. Dwellers. What else do you need to know?

Howling II (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

May 23, 20171980s, 2017, Authors: Sydney Wegner, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, UK, Werewolf

Howling II: …Your Sister is a Werewolf
Howling II: Stirba – Werewolf Bitch
***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A
starring Christopher Lee, Annie McEnroe, Reb Brown, Sybil Danning
screenplay by Robert Sarno and Gary Brandner, based on the novel Howling II by Brandner
directed by Philippe Mora

by Sydney Wegner Let’s get this out of the way first: Howling II–a.k.a. Howling II: …Your Sister is a Werewolf, a.k.a. Howling II: Stirba – Werewolf Bitch–is a mess, an entity that refuses to be judged on any conventional, objective scale. Though originally intended as a comedy, the studio sliced it up to come across as more of a horror movie, and the bizarre result is a tone that changes with each scene. Half new-wave werewolf erotica, half Hammer horror, Howling II‘s themes of grief and rebirth and female sexual empowerment swirl together in a campy, indecipherable whirlwind. Just as things begin to approach being scary, they’re kicked right back down with a novelty wipe effect or a cartoonish facial expression. Christopher Lee, playing werewolf hunter Stefan Crosscoe, was allegedly so appalled by the acting of his co-stars that he spent much of his time offscreen trying to flee the planet using only the power of his mind. You can feel the ennui behind his eyes with every line delivery, yet the attention he commands is undeniable. In a way, his performance is a microcosm of the entire film. The opening shot finds Lee suspended in a sea of stars, reciting werewolf legend from a book, and that is probably the most normal thing that happens in Howling II. It’s ridiculous, it’s stupid; it’s occasionally embarrassing and endlessly fascinating.

Alien: Covenant (2017)

May 19, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Directors: Ridley Scott, Horror, Sci-Fi, Theatrical, Thriller

*/****
starring Michael Fassbender, Katherine Waterston, Billy Crudup, Danny McBride
screenplay by John Logan and Dante Harper
directed by Ridley Scott

by Walter Chaw When you call your film “Prometheus,” you’re borrowing centuries of critical thought, grafting yourself to the idea of the ascension of Christianity on the backs of vanquished pantheons and suggesting the mischief in stealing the light of Heaven (the better with which to build your own unholy automatons). Mary Shelley knew this when she subtitled Frankenstein “Or, the Modern Prometheus,” and Ridley Scott knew this, too, when he partnered with everyone’s favourite half-assed theologian/philosopher/one-eyed king Damon Lindelof to make a prequel to one of his two or three movies that are worth a damn, Alien. Not content to leave well enough alone, Scott is back with Alien: Covenant (hereafter Covenant), whose title invokes either a promise made by God as represented by Jesus’s crucifixion in the Christian New Testament, or the promises God makes in the Old Testament to Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David–each of which, Christians may tell you, predicts the New Covenant. The old ones were written in stone, you see, but the new one is written on your heart. Another Shelley, Percy, makes a cameo in this one as his “Ozymandias” is recited at some length, reminding mainly that it was used better, and more subtly, in “Breaking Bad”. There, it was assumed the viewer knew the piece in question. The film narrates it. It’s the difference between being respectful of your audience, and being a pretentious dick.

The Bye Bye Man (2017) – Blu-ray + DVD + Digital HD

April 13, 20172017, Authors: Bill Chambers, Blu-ray Disc, Disability, DVD, Horror, Thriller

*/**** Image A- Sound A
starring Douglas Smith, Lucien Laviscount, Cressida Bonas, Faye Dunaway
screenplay by Jonathan Penner, based on “The Bridge to Body Island” by Robert Damon Schneck
directed by Stacy Title

by Bill Chambers The Bye Bye Man begins as Terminator: Nebbish, with a Poindexter in a sweater vest named Larry (Leigh Whannell, of Saw fame) pulling up to a suburban home and asking the lady of the house, Jane (Lara Knox), if she told anybody “about the name.” Affirmative. Larry then returns to his vehicle, retrieves a shotgun, and blasts a hole through Jane’s front door. We see a man jump out of his wheelchair in the living-room window in a tiny, easy-to-miss background detail I suspect would’ve been airbrushed out of a more respectable film, because the prologue ends there in the theatrical cut. In the unrated version on Blu-ray, it continues on to show Larry entering the house, finishing Jane off, executing the wheelchair dude, Rick (Andrew Gorell), as he futilely drags himself across the carpet, and grimly, dutifully marching down the street to kill some neighbours Rick just threw under the bus. Smoothly staged in one take, the sequence reminds not unfavourably of A Serious Man, getting most of its period authenticity–the year is 1969–and middle-class dread from an aesthetic ape of that film. (The chyron-ascribed Madison, WI setting is pretty close to Coen Brothers territory, too.) It’s suitably horrific. Until, that is, you start thinking about Rick: Why does his escape plan involve slumping to the floor like a sack of potatoes? The whole point of wheelchairs, see, is that they have wheels–an innovation that gave disabled people an efficient, dignified way to get a bag of chips from the kitchen or flee an axe murderer. As we will soon discover, the titular Bye Bye Man makes his marks do absurd, irrational things; the problem is, The Bye Bye Man doesn’t quite know how to portray this without being hilarible itself.

Wishmaster Collection: 4-Film Set [Vestron Video Collector’s Series] – Blu-ray Disc

March 31, 20171990s, 2000s, 2017, Authors: Sydney Wegner, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror

WISHMASTER (1997)
***/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras A
starring Tammy Lauren, Andrew Divoff, Chris Lemmon, Robert Englund
written by Peter Atkins
directed by Robert Kurtzman

WISHMASTER 2: EVIL NEVER DIES (1999)
*/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C
starring Andrew Divoff, Paul Johannson, Holly Fields, Tommy ‘Tiny’ Lister, Jr.
written and directed by Jack Sholder

WISHMASTER 3: BEYOND THE GATES OF HELL (2001)
**/**** Image A Sound A Extras B-
starring Jason Connery, A.J. Cook, Tobias Mehler, John Novak
screenplay by Alexander Wright
directed by Chris Angel

WISHMASTER: THE PROPHECY FULFILLED (2002)
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B+
starring Michael Trucco, Tara Spencer-Nairn, Jason Thompson, John Novak
screenplay by John Benjamin Martin
directed by Chris Angel

by Sydney Wegner The Wishmaster saga begins with a quick infodump about angels and demons from narrator Angus Scrimm, the folklore giving way to a lush array of reds and purples and sandy earth tones as a sorcerer forges a magic red gemstone over the opening credits. In 1127 Persia, something is wreaking havoc on a crowded square; a skeleton rips its way out of a man’s skin and walks around to join several other horrifying atrocities. The sorcerer (Ari Barak) pushes his way through the screaming crowd to the King (Richard Assad), who’s being advised by a Djinn (a.k.a. the Wishmaster, played by a ferociously campy Andrew Divoff) that he must make a third wish to stop the violence. But the sorcerer manages to trap him in the gemstone, stopping the King before his third wish can grant the Djinn the power to rip through dimensions and unleash his Djinn brethren onto the earth. This prologue sets up a world of magic and fantasy and folklore the series never quite re-establishes. While the ancient imagery is vaguely referenced hereafter, the world of Wishmaster won’t feel this sensual or mystical again.

At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964) + This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse (1967) – DVDs

March 26, 20171960s, 2017, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Brazil, DVD, Esoterica, Horror

À Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma
***½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring José Mojica Marins, Magda Mei, Nivaldo Lima, Valeria Vasquez
written and directed by José Mojica Marins

Esta Noite Encarnarei no Teu Cadáver
***/**** Image A Sound A Extras B
starring José Mojica Marins, Roque Rodrigues, Nadia Freitas, William Morgan
written and directed by José Mojica Marins

by Alice Stoehr Zé do Caixão, known to English-speaking audiences as Coffin Joe, is like Mr. Hyde without a Dr. Jekyll. Although nominally a small-town undertaker, he has the mien and rap sheet of a supervillain. Attired in top hat and cape, he stalks the countryside, bent on perpetuating his bloodline. He luxuriates in his own depravity. He’s a horror-movie monster, and he loves it. Joe is the brainchild of Brazilian filmmaker José Mojica Marins, who’s been playing the role for decades. He introduced the character back in the 1960s with a pair of colourfully-titled films: At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul and, three years later, This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse. Both of those phrases are threats spoken onscreen by Joe’s victims; both hint at ghostly mischief and a lurid tone. Unhindered by understatement, these films dispense atrocities at the rate of about one per reel. Joe’s first evil act, mere minutes into Soul, is blasphemy: he spends Good Friday noshing on a leg of lamb–an unthinkable sin to his pious Catholic neighbours–then, like a schoolyard bully, forces an unwilling bystander to take a bite. Further iniquities pile up quickly in the form of bullwhipping, blinding, and immolation. When an elder dares to challenge him, Joe lacerates the man’s face with a Christ figurine’s crown of thorns.

Personal Shopper (2016)

March 24, 2017****/****, 2016, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Drama, France, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical

****/****
starring Kristen Stewart, Lars Eisinger, Sigrid Bouaziz, Anders Danielsen Lie
written and directed by Olivier Assayas

by Walter Chaw There’s a brilliant song by Patty Griffin called “Every Little Bit” that, among other piquant turns of phrase, includes the lyric “I still don’t blame you for leaving, baby, it’s called living with ghosts.” At around the 30-minute mark of Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper, our survivor Maureen (Kristen Stewart) tells a confidante she had made a vow with her late twin brother to make contact from beyond the grave should one pre-decease the other. “And then?” he asks. “I guess I’ll live my life and let it go.” Then a long, gliding shot of Maureen riding her moped through the Parisian nighttime scored to simple, haunted strings that are augmented towards the end of the sequence by percussion, which reveals itself to be a pencil against parchment. Maureen works as a personal shopper for a German fashionista who never seems to be home. In her off moments, she helps her brother’s “widowed” girlfriend Lara (Sigrid Bouaziz) try to suss out if his ghost is unquiet and lurking in the house they shared. Maureen’s a medium, you see, or at least she and her brother played at being mediums–a morbid pastime informed by a heart ailment, unpredictably mortal, shared by the siblings. A doctor warns her against any strenuous activities or emotions. She’ll suffer both before the end.

The Initiation (1984) – Blu-ray Disc

March 14, 20171980s, 2017, Arrow Video, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Mystery, Thriller

*½/**** Image A- Sound A- Extras B
starring Vera Miles, Clu Gulager, James Read, Daphne Zuniga
written by Charles Pratt, Jr.
directed by Larry Stewart

by Bryant Frazer Turning up at the tail-end of the late-1970s/early-1980s slasher boom, The Initiation is another one made with little ambition by people with no special inclination towards horror, but at least it doesn’t look down on the genre: Despite the sorority-house trappings, it aspires to a perfectly middlebrow level of quality, like a network movie-of-the-week or mass-market paperback original. That’s some kind of achievement for a film that opens with a delightfully ridiculous dream sequence (or is it?) depicting an episode of coitus interruptus involving a little girl with a knife and an intruder who catches on fire and ends with a half-dozen college kids being tracked down by a serial killer with knives and a harpoon gun. Trouble is, The Initiation works a little too hard to lay a foundation for its killing spree in a drama of dark family secrets. The result is a messy amalgam that doesn’t work especially well as a soap opera or a teen sex comedy, let alone as a slasher movie.

The Girl with All the Gifts (2016) + Logan (2017)

March 3, 2017****/****, 2016, 2017, Action, Drama, Horror, Road Movie, Sci-Fi, Superhero, Theatrical, Thriller, Zombie

THE GIRL WITH ALL THE GIFTS
***/****
starring Gemma Arterton, Paddy Considine, Glenn Close, Sennia Nanua
screenplay by Mike Carey, based on his novel
directed by Colm McCarthy

LOGAN
****/****
starring Hugh Jackman, Patrick Stewart, Richard E. Grant, Dafne Keen
screenplay by Scott Frank & James Mangold and Michael Green
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw Movements start this way, with one or two events that could be thought of as coincidence in response to some greater trend in our culture, perhaps–or, more likely, in response to some greater corruption. I’ve long referred to movies, especially genre movies, as indicator species in our cultural swamp. They’re the first to show evidence of introduced toxins; at minimum, they’re the first major art form to disseminate warnings widely. Jordan Peele’s sleeper hit Get Out is just the latest in a recent spate of pictures that have caught the zeitgeist. Test the theory: would it have been as popular in another time? Movies are not unlike Percy Shelley’s “dead thoughts… Like wither’d leaves” carried on divine winds to quicken new births. It’s a florid reference to justify an unpopular concept. Not religious in any way, I find sublimity in the idea that human hands work in concert sometimes, and the close study of their products can provide insight into the world as it is, not simply as it was. Find in James Mangold’s Logan and Colm McCarthy’s more or less contemporaneous The Girl with All the Gifts (hereafter Girl) complementary, near identical concepts executed in largely the same way–proof for me of a body politic reacting in concert to poison. As grim as they are (with Logan actually verging on vile and mean-spirited), they are nonetheless, to me, evidence of at least some collective immune response. Artifacts of resistance left for the anthropologists. Despite their apparent nihilism, they are proof, as referenced explicitly in Girl, of hope.

Get Out (2017)

February 25, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical

***/****
starring Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford
written and directed by Jordan Peele

by Walter Chaw It’s the easiest thing in the world to make a movie about bigots; it’s a lot harder to make a movie about liberals who mean well, but are feckless elites who not only don’t make things better, they actually, through their platitudes and paternalistic attitudes, make things worse. It’s about money. If anything has been confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt, it’s that everything’s about money. The villains of Jordan Peele’s directorial debut Get Out aren’t white people–they’re rich white people. (Its closest analogue is Brian Yuzna’s Society.) A movie about white privilege, it’s a comedian’s film in that, like the best comedians, it recognizes some awkward truisms and makes them manifest in a situation that builds on itself. This is a great set. It gets on a roll. Its central riff is a complicated one: rich white liberals are so detached and alien that through their best intentions, they’re actively responsible for the continued oppression of minorities in the United States. There was a string of films in 2016 that raised this as a possibility (I Am Not Your Negro and OJ: Made in America high among them), but in Get Out the idea has found its natural home in the horror genre. The bookend to Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, it even shares the same set-up for a radical “down” ending. The decision Get Out makes at that terminal crossroads says everything. It’s a challenge to the audience to check their own attitudes about how black men are demonized in our culture: abusers of white women, sexually threatening to white men, and murderers of both; angry and bestial.

A Cure for Wellness (2017)

February 19, 20172017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Esoterica, Germany, Horror, Mystery, Theatrical, Thriller

***/****
starring Dane DeHaan, Jason Isaacs, Mia Goth
screenplay by Justin Haythe
directed by Gore Verbinski

Deadly Virtues: Love.Honour.Obey. (2015) – VOD

February 16, 20172015, 2017, Authors: Alice Stoehr, Drama, Horror, Netherlands, Thriller, UK, VOD

*½/****
starring Megan Maczko, Edward Akrout, Matt Barber, Sadie Frost
screenplay by Mark Rogers
directed by Ate de Jong

by Alice Stoehr “You cannot fight,” explains the villain to his rope-bound prisoner. “Your only chance of survival comes from compliance.” This lecture is the starting point for Deadly Virtues: Love.Honour.Obey. [sic], an erotic cat-and-mouse thriller that takes place over a long weekend in a suburban English home. Said villain is Aaron, an intruder played by handsome French actor Edward Akrout. He has a sparse moustache and a head of unkempt hair, locks of which fall dashingly across his forehead. The camera adores him. Megan Maczko, playing Aaron’s prisoner Alison, receives far less flattering treatment. She spends much of her screentime tied up and in some degree of undress, her face contorted with faint disgust, eyes averting her captor’s gaze. Like Akrout, she has to look hot, but hers must be a hotness coloured by mixed emotions and performed under duress. As her co-star murmurs the lion’s share of the dialogue, Maczko needs to indicate reluctant arousal blossoming into full-on emotional liberation. She fails, but so would any actress, because the film’s greasy sexual politics set her up to fail. Meanwhile, the third member of the cast–Matt Barber, as Alison’s husband Tom–has to squirm in a bathtub and howl as Aaron mutilates Tom. He acquits himself adequately, especially given paltry lines like, “Did you touch my wife?” and, “I can’t have anyone else inside you.”

Dead Ringers (1988) [Collector’s Edition] – Blu-ray Disc

January 31, 2017****/****, 1980s, 2017, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Directors: David Cronenberg, Drama, Horror, Scream/Shout! Factory, Thriller

****/**** Image B- Sound D Extras B
starring Jeremy Irons, Genevieve Bujold, Heidi Von Palleske, Stephen Lack
written by David Cronenberg and Norman Snider, based on the book Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland
directed by David Cronenberg

by Bryant Frazer Dead Ringers begins and ends extraordinarily, with the soft swelling of Howard Shore’s title music. It starts with the slow emergence of strings, which are eventually layered with harp and woodwinds, mining uncommon veins of sadness in a major key. Set against on-screen illustrations of an anatomical and explicitly gynecological nature, the music serves the obvious function of undercutting the film’s pointedly unsettling subject matter with unalloyed lyricism. It’s like a statement of purpose. But Shore’s melody goes farther than that, somehow. It’s remarkably haunting, for one thing–the theme is one of the most potent sensory triggers I know, instantly evoking both beauty and despair. Just the first four bars are enough to set me weeping. And it’s penetrating. More than elegiac, it’s specifically regretful, and bittersweet. According to Royal S. Brown’s liner notes on the first CD release of the movie’s score, the director knew it right away. “That’s suicide music,” Cronenberg told Shore when he first heard the theme. “You’ve got it.”

Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990) [30th Anniversary] – Blu-ray Disc

January 26, 2017****/****, 1990s, 2017, Authors: Walter Chaw, Blu-ray Disc, Crime, Drama, FFC Must-Own, Horror, Thriller

****/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Michael Rooker, Tracy Arnold, Tom Towles
written by Richard Fire & John McNaughton
directed by John McNaughton

by Walter Chaw John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (hereafter Henry) is one of the great black comedies. At its heart is the basis of Judd Apatow’s gross-out flicks: body horror, deviant sexuality, deep ignorance-unto-actual stupidity, questionable decisions and their consequences, and brilliant bits of deadpan humour dependent upon timing and situation. Similarly, it derives its effectiveness from a keen observation of male heterosexual relationships and the peril implicit therein. The sole distinction, really, is that Apatow and his followers believe in conservative, family-values resolutions whereas Henry ends in essential, sucking nihilism. It’s a distinction that draws the line between something that’s considered to be a comedy and something that’s widely discussed as possibly the most unpleasant American film ever made. What most have identified as pessimistic, however, I would just call vérité, now more than ever. At least for me, Henry had about it an almost palpable air of taboo. Though shot in 1986, it was released in Denver in 1990, when I was 17. I read Roger Ebert’s cautionary, celebratory review of it, which made me afraid. When I saw it, I saw it alone. For its wisdom, it’s never quite left me.

Slugs (1988) – Blu-ray Disc

December 27, 20162016, Arrow Video, Authors: Bryant Frazer, Blu-ray Disc, Horror, Spain

**/**** Image A- Sound B Extras B+
starring Michael Garfield, Kim Terry, Philip MacHale, Concha Cuetos
screenplay by Ron Gantman, based on the novel by Shaun Hutson
directed by J.P. Simon

by Bryant Frazer “I recognize terror as the finest emotion,” Stephen King wrote in Danse Macabre, his 1981 book-length rumination on horror and storytelling, “and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I’ll go for the gross-out. I’m not proud.” That’s where the late Juan Piquer Simón (or J.P. Simon, as it became anglicized) must have found himself on the set of Slugs. The native Spaniard was only so-so as a director: He was technically competent, with a decent eye for composition, but he wasn’t so adept with English-speaking actors and had no real knack for generating suspense or escalating tension. Fortunately, Simón is pretty good with the gory stuff. And that’s why, decades later, his Slugs still crawls tall as a minor classic for creature-feature completists.

Vamp (1986) – Blu-ray Disc

November 23, 20161980s, 2016, Arrow Video, Blu-ray Disc, Comedy, Horror, Vampire

Vamp1

**/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Chris Makepeace, Sandy Baron, Robert Rusler, Grace Jones
screenplay by Richard Wenk
directed by Richard Wenk

by Bryant Frazer In concept a little bit After Hours and a little bit An American Werewolf in London, Vamp attempts to transplant some New York cool into a story set in the L.A. underground, where a downtown strip club is staffed by lithesome vampires who prey on losers and outsiders yearning for companionship in the lonesome city. Vamp isn’t scary, though it’s fairly stylish, thanks in large part to Grace Jones, who flew into Hollywood with an entourage (including artists Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, and Richard Bernstein) to play Katrina, an exotic dancer with an appetite for flesh. While the film is pleasantly weird whenever she’s on screen, that’s not much of the time. The bulk of it is a laid-back assemblage of moderately clever ideas–a bunch of clockwork gears that never mesh into anything much.