In short: Critters (1986)

A shipful of furry, hungry and very rude aliens break out of prison and land near one of those archetypal US small towns the horror genre loves so dearly (to destroy) to get some lunch. Humans, cows - the Crites, as they are called, eat whatever you got, though the movie’s cat is a true survivor.

Particularly threatened is the Brown family – mother Helen (Dee Wallace), father Jay (Billy Green Bush), teenage daughter April (Nadine Van der Velde) and youngest Brad (Scott Grimes) – but since this is an 80s PG-13 movie, of their circle, only April’s new boyfriend (as portrayed by a young Billy Zane who wasn’t quite as disturbingly toothy an actor at this point in his life) gets eaten.

While the Earth authorities are rather slow in reacting, the space prison has sent two bounty hunters with shape-changing abilities to take care of the situation. One of them quickly takes on the appearance of a pop singer (Terrence Mann), while the other one has problems not having a new face pop up every two scenes. Not that they’re terrible great at killing the critters; they do have the whole wrecking a town thing down pat, though.

I’ve never loved Stephen Herek’s SF horror comedy quite as much as some people do. It is, admittedly, one of the better examples of the 80’s obsession with small furry monsters, but then, apart from Joe Dante’s Gremlins, that’s not exactly a corner of the genre full of great, or even decent, movies. Decent, at least, Critters certainly is. It mostly suffers from problems with follow-through and a curious unwillingness to actually milk its own ideas for comical effect. For example – and this is really only one of many - why create a fake music video and let one of the bounty hunters take on the singer’s appearance, but then not really use that as a running gag during the course of the movie?

The film also introduces way too many characters for its own good, jumping around between them in a way that does help neither the comedy nor suspense parts of the film, dragging things out much more than they should be dragged out, burying the better ideas and moments under stuff that’s just…there for no good reason.


Really great, however, are the special effects by the Chiodo Brothers and company, providing the little nasties with proper personalities, expressions, and finding design-wise exactly the right spot between funny and threatening. If that saves the film for a viewer is simply a matter of taste; it doesn’t for me, but then, I find most of the film simply neither terribly funny nor terribly exciting and have perhaps lost the patience for the whole US small town under threat thing.

In short: Ouija House (2018)

Warning: I need to spoil some of the best bits!

Graduate student – we dare not ask of what – Laurie (Carly Schroeder) decides to bring a handful of friends to a supposedly haunted house in the woods her family has somewhat mysterious connections to. It’s all in the hopes of furthering her research so she can graduate, sell her thesis to a publisher who is interested in it, and make enough money to help her mother (Dee Wallace) buy back the family home she just lost. Yeah, I don’t know either, and the film’s explanation for the whole publisher business later on actually makes less sense than what I have just written. But I digress.

Laurie’s aunt Samantha (Mischa Barton) is coming too, for she is fluent in the house’s and her family’s backstory concerning a good and an evil witch cult, baby sacrifice and a bit of nudity. The plan is to hold a traditional séance in the house, but when Laurie finds a ouija board, they just use that. Surprising nobody but the characters, this turns out to be a very bad idea.

For its first half hour or so, Ben Demaree’s Ouija House has all the  hallmarks of mediocre low budget horror made in the 2010s. There are the small and tiny appearances by more or less “name” actors – besides Wallace and Barton, there are also Chris Mulkey, Tiffany Shepis and Tara Reid putting a half day of work or less in –, the boringly generic set-up, and seemingly no interest in trying to lure an audience in with atmosphere and intrigue. However, once the plot gets going, Ouija House becomes a prime example of how a film that’s really not good in a way most people would use the word becomes really rather awesome (in all senses of that word) by throwing all kinds of crazy shit at the audience while keeping a completely straight face. The film gets outright 70s/80s Italian in this regard, therefore charming me to a considerable degree.


Ouija House’s title, you see, is to be taken literally, it turns out, with the letter of a ouija board hidden away behind the titular house’s wallpaper until a possessed member of the crew (very enthusiastically played by Grace Demarco) rips the wallpaper covers off. As you may or may not imagine, there are scenes of a possessed young woman in a state of undress groping and hissing towards the letters painted on the walls, and one of the film’s dramatic highpoints sees the characters desperately trying to duct tape paper over the letters. It’s glorious. Also appearing are a young woman’s upper body (she’s wearing a bra to prove this isn’t actually an Italian film from the 80s) being used as a ouija board, an idea to which the other characters react with shrugs of “why not?”, a moebius strip road, Dee Wallace’s possessed face, and…the black guy surviving(!). It’s absurd, it’s certainly not thought through with even a bit of real world logic in mind, but damn, is Ouija House’s second half entertaining, if you like your ideas strange, and their presentation straight-faced.

Popcorn (1991)

A group of film students want to put on a horror all-nighter in an old-style movie palace a few weeks before it will be wrecked. The films are all classic gimmick horror in the spirit of William Castle, so the students plan to go all-out with the gimmicks, leaving no seat un-electrified, and no nose not bleeding when watching THE STENCH.

Alas, doom announces itself when our heroes discover a reel of a film of film cult(!) leader Lanyard Gates, who ended his career of taking drugs and making creepy films with an attempt to murder his family live in the movie theatre. Strangely, Maggie (Jill Schoelen), one of the students and our obvious heroine, recognizes Gates in the movie, for she has been dreaming of him for months.

Maggie won't realize that there's a rather natural explanation for this recognition much later than is good for her or her friends, but the audience learns much sooner that Maggie's mother (Dee Wallace) must have been a member of the cult, and that someone or something - perhaps Lanyard Gates himself - is out for revenge. So it's not exactly a surprise when the horror all-nighter becomes the noisy and enthusiastic background to a series of murders committed by a guy in the habit of stealing other people's faces. It's too bad too, for the show would have been a great success without him.

Mark Herrier's Popcorn is a rather great horror comedy whose mood permanently fluctuates between silliness, the sort of hysteria that comedy and horror share, and an enthusiastic "best of" of all kinds of horror. Alan Ormsby's (who also started as director of the film before "being replaced") script shows a clear and obvious love of the genre it is working in, as well as a sure hand when playing with genre conventions without feeling the need to tell its audience what it's doing right now. There's clearly no need for the film to pat itself on the back for its cleverness, nor does it assume its audience doesn't get what it's doing without being told. I do like an assumption of basic intelligence in my movies, I have to say.

Watching Popcorn I found myself particularly happy about the ease with which it unifies its disparate elements, showing no trouble at all going from teen comedy through dream-like killings through the excellent ravings of the murderer and to the particularly lovingly made movies in the movie, which are often very effectively and funnily intercut with the murders.

These mini movies are a pleasure in themselves, really getting the tone needed for lovingly making fun of the kind of film that sold itself through smell-o-vision right, and clearly based on films many of my readers will have no trouble recognizing, I hope. If you've seen and written about as many films of the style as I have in the last three decades (well, the writing hasn't been going on for quite that long), you can't help but see someone involved in the production as a kindred spirit. Particularly when you add all these other shout-outs to various horror traditions: the casting of Dee Wallace, the excellent parodies of 50s and 80s horror movie romances, the echoes of Phantom of the Opera, various slasher movies, José Mojica Marins, and many a thing more obvious (like the film posters), and much less obvious (everybody should find these on their own, I believe). Even better, with all these elements around, Popcorn still feels much less than a patchwork movie than the description would lead one to suspect: the way Herrier and/or Ormsby use them, they all belong in the same movie with naturalness (as far as you can speak of naturalness in a movie that is so lovingly a movie instead of a depiction of "reality") and style.

Which of course makes it quite impossible to say how someone who doesn't share my personal predilections will see or approach Popcorn. To me, this is a delicious, comedic piece of over-the-top clever low budget horror wrapped in peanut butter of movie nerd-dom - a film impossible not to love.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,mark herrier,alan ormsby,jill schoelen,tom villard,dee wallace,horror

SyFy vs. The Mynd: Robocroc (2013)

The set-up of Arthur Sinclair's (whoever he might be) "increasingly robotic crocodile on a highly localized rampage" movie is so bog-standard for a SyFy film I can just skip details like character names, keeping completely in the spirit of a movie that might just as well have done the same.

So, a military satellite crashes over a zoo, and mild-mannered but large crocodile Stella is infected with one of those "behind the enemy lines" weapons without a sensible way to get rid of them once they have slaughtered the enemy - civilians, military, and people who surrender alike. In this particular case, said weapon are nano robots that turn their victim into an indestructible killer machine. The military can't quite cut it fighting the menace, of course (one suspects they are spread rather thin with murdering brown people in various countries across the globe), and the mad scientist who invented the things (played gleefully by Dee Wallace as the only person who was actually awake during the shoot of the film) is secretly helping the robocroc. So the fight against the metallic menace falls to zoo keeper Corin Nemec and "the new biologist" Lisa McAllister. The latter, alas, is a girl, and therefore not allowed to do anything of interest. There's also some stuff about Nemec's scrawny teenage son being menaced by the croc, so Nemec has a bit of motivation for his heroism, and the film an opportunity to show us another one of those mysterious American "spring break" rituals.

Theoretically, all this could make for a rather fun monster movie; in practice, though, Robocroc feels like a film made on auto-pilot. The script, as the whole film, is mostly boring, with no fun ideas except one scene where (the) robocroc picks a helicopter out of the air, which I have seen done better before (and first) in Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus, and even lacking the energy to get up to the usual SyFy "estranged family gets back together" shenanigans.

If you're hoping for any kind of imaginative flourishes, jokes funny or unfunny, or even the smallest sign of life behind the camera, Robocroc will disappoint you, or rather, will lifelessly look at you and perfunctorily mumble "boo", or at most try to distract you with the least interesting romance I have seen in a SyFy movie (which actually might be an achievement, now that I think about it).

If I sound bored and a bit disappointed by Robocroc's lack of visible effort, that's exactly what I am.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,horror,sf,in short,corin nemec,lisa mcallister,dee wallace,arthur sinclair,syfy vs the mynd

Exit Humanity (2011)

The end of the US Civil War marks the beginning of the zombie apocalypse, at least in Tennessee, where Exit Humanity takes place. Six years after the beginning of that particular end, veteran Edward Young (Mark Gibson) returns from a hunting excursion to his cabin in the woods to find his wife a zombie and his little son gone.

Edward begins to roam the area around his home until he finds the kid, also as one of the walking dead. After Edward kills has killed him, he at first tries to kill himself too, now that everyone he loved and everything he believed in is gone. But a not quite successful attempt at that, and the look at a picture of a waterfall many days of travel away that gave Edward hope all through the war changes his mind. Before he'll die, he wants to throw his son's ashes into the waters to give him at least some semblance of peace.

On his travel there, Edward meets a man named Isaac (Adam Seybold), whose sister Emma (Jordan Hayes) has been abducted by former General Williams (Bill Moseley) for his pet "doctor" Johnson (Stephen McHattie) to experiment on, the witch Eve (Dee Wallace), and just possibly reasons to regain his own humanity.

Whenever I think a certain sub-genre of horror movies has finally reached the point of oversaturation, that nothing of further interest can be done in it anymore, a movie like John Geddes's Exit Humanity appears and actually manages to be a fantastic zombie movie at a point when such a thing seemed increasingly improbable to me. Exit Humanity also manages to be yet another excellent entry among the growing number of horror westerns.

What makes this particular film so special are a handful of things. Most obviously, there's the film's unhurried pacing that isn't caused by the typical indie horror problem of a script that's burying its core themes and plot in boring minutiae, but really is what the film's mood and its characters call for. There are long and important scenes of Mark Gibson alone with nature that are quite a bit more exciting than anyone could have expected. Geddes knows when and how to end scenes (another of my indie horror pet peeves is that too many directors don't seem to know how to do that at all), which slow moments to show because they are important for an audience to understand the characters, and which dramatic moments not to show.

Exit Humanity is a handy reminder that the quality and rhythm of a movie are determined as much by the things one leaves out (we never get to see Edward killing his undead wife, for example, but only witness the aftermath) as by those one includes. I was also very impressed by Geddes's ability to provide the film with a sense of place and time, making impressive use of the landscape of Ontario that may not be strictly authentic as a portrayal of woods in Tennessee but feel real and alive to me; the rather lavish (and free as in beer) nature of the landscape also provides Exit Humanity with the best enhancement of its bleak yet hopeful mood a film could hope for.

Additionally, the director makes two decisions that sound horrible on paper, yet in practice work out very well. Showing some of the film's more dramatic sequences in pretty rough animation may be a budgetary decision (or it may not be), but it's a decision that just works, giving these moments a quality of the mythical or the nightmarish that is perhaps more effective than just another action scene would have been. Strangely effective directorial decision number two is to have large parts of the plot and philosophical musings of Edward being narrated by the off-screen voice of Brian Cox. I generally hate off-screen monologues, but - again - Exit Humanity's mostly just works. Cox has just the right voice for the monologues he's given, and the film seldom falls into the trap of only telling its audience the things it is already seeing. The primary reason for the voiceovers may be to fill in some gaps in the plot, yet his voiceovers don't feel like an inorganic stop-gap; in fact, it's hard to imagine the film working as well as it does without them.

The acting is Exit Humanity's final trump card. The well-known actors in smaller roles (a traditional element in independent horror movies) are doing a fine job here, with nobody just slumming for a cheque for a day's work (so no Michael Madsen). The true stars are the lesser known Gibson, Seybold and Hayes though. The trio go through the film's more difficult moments with grace and style, always keeping their characters from becoming the horror movie clichés they could have been in less capable hands.

Technorati-Markierungen: canadian movies,reviews,john geddes,mark gibson,jordan hayes,adam seybold,brian cox,dee wallace,bill moseley,stephen mchattie,horror,western,zombies