Peacemaker (1990)

An alien spacecraft crashes down close by the coast of LA, as UFOs are wont to do. Out of it swims a guy we will later learn to be called by the typical alien name of Townshend (Lance Edwards). His attempt at stealing a shotgun out of a cop car right in front of what must be donut central or something ends in him getting shot so often, the cops must have confused him with an unarmed black man.

But don’t you worry, he gets better in the morgue, right in front of coroner Dori Caisson (Hilary Shepard). He kinda-sorta proceeds to kidnap her. On the way to her home – because that’s where aliens bring their kidnapping victims when it’s not an abduction with all the probes and whistles – they are attacked by a charming man (Robert Forster!) with a handgun so large I don’t even need to make any jokes about his manhood. We’ll later learn that he goes by that other popular alien name, Yates. Townshend and Dori escape, and shack up together, or rather, Townshend ties her up and studies TV for a night, from which he learns to speak English. Well, more or less, for Edwards (or whoever) had the brilliant idea to play his new-won language abilities as if he were a mentally handicapped man played by a horrible actor.

Anyway, Townshend exposits that he is an alien cop, a so-called peacemaker, who got sucked into a black hole together with serial killer Yates and somehow landed on Earth. He’s now keen on finding Yates as well as some McGuffin they are both after. The problem is that this is going to be exactly the same story Yates is going to tell Dori when he’s alone with her, only with Yates in the police role, and consequently, she’s going to bounce around between the two like a human yo-yo.

Also involved is an Earth cop (Robert Davi!), who has taken a shine to Dori, as have the two aliens. The problem: Dori has been burned by policemen before and is unwilling to commit to anything beyond bad jokes and a bit of sex under the shower.

There’s a good handful of films with the same basic plot made around the same time as Kevin (S.) Tenney’s Peacemaker (I think somebody in Hollywood must have enjoyed Hal Clement’s “Needle” quite a bit), and while the film at hand is most certainly not the best of the bunch, it may very well be the goofiest. The whole set-up is a bit silly from the outset, but Tenney (who also wrote the script) seems to be hell-bent to always make the silliest choice in any given scene, so we get Dori’s incessant wisecracking even when she’s kidnapped, threatened or shot at, the horrible performance by Edwards that makes one wrong but entertaining acting decision after the next, never shying away from the worst line delivery possible in any given situation, and a plot that never comes up with much more for the characters to do but drag Dori around.

Because Edwards is so goofy (and mildly embarrassing), and Shepard’s Dori is reacting to whatever happens in any given scene in the most insane and illogical manner possible, Forster’s very serious performance of an alien with a very, very, very big gun makes for a particularly hilarious contrast. Now, if you’re me, you’re probably a bit sad the film uses non-actor (sorry, but seriously) Edwards as the other alien when it has a perfectly good Robert Davi around, who’d make such a great counterpart to Forster. Sure, you might have wanted to cut the romance angle from the film in that case, but those parts of the film are so cringeworthy because Dori’s written as such a ditz in them, that would not have been too much of a loss.


Anyway, when the film doesn’t do goofy nonsense, or babbles about black holes and time travel (don’t ask), it does sometimes find the time for a decent if silly action sequence or three, probably delivering what was the actual selling point for this loveable and highly entertaining piece of crap.

In short: Brain Dead (2007)

Not to be confused with all those other brain dead movies, I mean movies called “Brain Dead”.

A bunch of cliché characters converge at the usual woods/cabin/lake nexus where some cost effective alien parasite zombie thingies do their thingy. Breasts are bared, heads are exploded, and oh so very many horrible jokes are made, until the film truly does to you what the title promised. Your Latin teachers were right!

Remember Kevin S. Tenney? Once a purveyor of silly horror films of mediocre to surprisingly good quality, the 00s find the director still/again dealing in the genre, but if Brain Dead is anything to go by, he’s not even reaching the heights of “mediocre” anymore, for this thing is as dreadful as they come. Sure, it’s kinda-sorta better than some of your usual shot-on-video movies in that the shots stay in focus and the sound is fine which, alas, means you can really appreciate how bad the acting is, and hear the dialogue. However, it’s a bit like saying being hit on the head with a mallet is better than being hit with a morning star – your brain’s gonna be mush either way. So, otherwise, the film offers one would-be clever bon-mot after the next (until you begin to see Tenney’s Night of the Demons as an exercise in restraint), only broken up by a bit of gore from time to time. Alas, about one (two, or three if you’re absurdly nice) joke here is actually funny, and the incessant barrage of “humour” does of course make it impossible to enjoy the horror parts as horror, particularly since anyone with even the slightest footing in the genre will have seen everything here a dozen times before, sometimes even in movies with characters, a plot, a theme, or jokes that are actually funny instead of obnoxious.

I have no idea what I – or anyone else for that matter - did to deserve the cruel and unusual punishment of this thing.

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Three Films Make A Post: She's out to score for more of what you love her for!

Witchtrap (1989): Kevin Tenney clearly was a horror director with many faces. With Witchtrap, the face he wears is that of the purveyor of awkward crap that is highly entertaining in all the wrong ways. Visually, this reminds me of the less interesting local productions of about a decade earlier, with a smidgen more gore and Linnea Quigley's breasts added, and a slightly more moveable camera. The film's real comical high points are the dialogue and the acting though. What comes out of people's mouths is a mix of "how dumb people think educated people talk"-speak, some of the worst "sarcasm" ever to flow out of a character's mouth (James W. Quinn, I'm looking at you), hare-brained discussions of faith and disbelief, and slightly Ed-Woodian non-sequiturs pretending to be dialogue. All this the actors deliver with all the style and verve of someone reading a newspaper aloud at the coffee table, with emphasises that suggest nobody involved even understood what the sentences they were saying were supposed to mean. To make matters even more interesting, most of the dialogue seems to have been post-dubbed. It's really quite the thing to listen to for ninety minutes.

Gonger (2008): Thanks to various cultural factors too annoying to get into here, not many horror movies beyond semi-professional gore movies have been produced in Germany after the Second World War. Consequently, even a minor, totally derivative (of "J-horror" in particular) TV movie like Christian Theede's Gonger is something to cherish. It helps that the film, quite in the tradition of TV horror, may have no original idea in its body, but is decently acted, competently made and doesn't overstay its welcome. The film's biggest negative point is really that you could imagine seeing its plot, set-up and locality used in much more interesting and complex manner. But that's not how TV, and certainly not German TV, works.

Catacombs (1988): This David Schmoeller film was made during Charles Band's Italian phase, which provides the film with some fine locations, an excellent Pino Donaggio score, and an Italian co-writer who gives the film some of that thought-after Italian movie weirdness. Of course, the last element also leads to a film whose plot developments are not always logical, and whose characters are erratic to say the least. What it curiously does not lead to is an abundance of weird gore. In fact, the film's body count is relatively low, and while some of the deaths are rather strange (there are not many horror films having the theological chutzpah to have someone killed by a Jesus statue come to life), they mostly seem to be beside the point of Catacombs.

Said point seems to be an attempt to reconcile possession type horror with non-crazy Christianity, something the film mostly achieves while also being one of the few horror films that shows monks as actual human beings. It's more an interesting effort than a completely successful film, but it's certainly worth a viewing or two.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,german movies,italian movies,in short,horror,kevin tenney,david schmoeller,christian theede

Three Films Make A Post: The Meating Place for DISMEMBERS ONLY!

Kick Ass 2 (2013): Despite my general loathing for the works of Mark Millar (with some exceptions) I actually thought the first Kick Ass was a pretty successful mixture of sledgehammer satire, American toilet humour, and more actual human warmth than you'd expect given the source material's boring cynicism. Alas, someone must have drugged director Matthew Vaughn before he made the sequel or something, because this one's just a pale imitation of the first one, with at best two or three good moments. The rest of the film feels worn out, as if nobody involved had actually understood what worked in the first film, and now proceeded to copy the most obvious parts of it in the most obvious ways while suffering from a horrible hangover.

On the plus side, Millar-typical self-congratulatory cynicism still doesn't make an appearance; very much in the minus side, it's replaced with a treacly sentimentality that isn't made more interesting by jokes about vomiting.

Witchboard (1986): Just because I never liked his Night of the Demons all that much, i tend to underestimate Kevin (S.) Tenney quite unfairly. In truth, Tenney is probably one of the unsung heroes of 80s/90s horror, a guy who added a degree of subtlety to the expected excesses while also being rather good at the excesses themselves. Witchboard doesn't come down on the side of the excesses much anyway but gives Tenney opportunity to show off his skill on a more suspense than gore-based set-up. He also adds somewhat complex characterization (even of the kind that doesn't always feel the need to explain everything to the last detail) to a mix that wouldn't necessarily need it, earning actual audience interest in what happens to the characters.

There is also some choice silly dialogue, and a bit of 80s horror cheese to enjoy, so really, there's little here that doesn't provide a fun time. Plus, from today's perspective, I can't help but see the film as a main influence on Paranormal Activity, just made with verve.

Witchboard 2 (1993): Seven years later, Tenney's own sequel to the film is still a really fun and interesting effort, though the crazier parts of the original have been toned down a bit in favour of a kind of supernatural murder mystery. Tenney's still pretty good at that whole "suspense" stuff, and his script rather cleverly plays with some of the expectations built by the first film, as well as with the audience's knowledge of noirish mystery tropes. Even better, the characters are still more interesting than usual in this type of 90s horror, the film tends to show rather more complex relationships than typical in this context, and then there's the never stated but quite obviously implied fact that the ouija board's evil interest actually helps the film's heroine Ami Dolenz to become an independent person. Which, really, is all and more than one can expect from a 90s horror sequel.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,matthew vaughn,kevin tenney,ami dolenz,superheroes,horror

In short: Pinocchio's Revenge (1996)

Going into Pinocchio's Revenge, I was expecting a rather limp rip-off of the Chucky films, but Kevin Tenney's film turned out to be a rather positive surprise.

The film concerns divorced public defender Jennifer Garrick (Rosalind Allen) who is convinced her already condemned to be murdered by the state supposed serial killer client Vincent Gotto (Lewis van Bergen) is innocent in the murder of his son and two other children, even though he himself says he's guilty, and only wants do die. Jennifer can't save her client, and unwittingly inherits some of his troubles.

Jennifer's pre-teen daughter Zoe (Brittany Alyse Smith) is a bit of a problem child, having taken the divorce of her parents clearly pretty hard. She already has regular appointments with a - clearly horrible - psychiatrist to help her over anxieties and certain violent tendencies.

By ways that might be natural or quite the opposite, a large wooden puppet depicting Pinocchio Gotto made for his son and buried with his dead body makes its way into Jennifer's car and from there into Zoe's heart. As it goes with these things, Pinocchio seems to have quite a bad influence on Zoe. People who annoy the girl or get between her and her mother develop a tendency to suffer from accidents; Zoe doesn't just talk to the puppet but the puppet seems to answer her.

It takes some time before Jennifer realizes something really horrible is going on, and soon she can't be sure what is actually happening to her daughter - is Zoe "just" suffering from a mental illness that makes her dangerous to herself or others and has found the persona of Pinocchio as her catalyst, or is Pinocchio actually alive and murderous?

Exactly that is the point where Pinocchio's Revenge is more interesting than your average killer doll/evil seed movie, for the film keeps the actual explanation of what's going on ambiguous throughout. While the audience knows pretty soon that some screwy things are happening, it takes more than half of the movie until we actually see the puppet move by itself, and even longer until we hear it speak. Tenney frames even these later scenes in ways that always keep the possibility open and on the surface that we're only seeing what a mentally unstable character thinks she's seeing.

Earlier on, the film doesn't show Pinocchio moving in quite a creepy way. There might be wooden scraping when the camera's not looking, and the next shot sees the puppet staring with suggestive emptiness and a threatening pose at someone. For a long time, the film is more about what its audience suspects and expects than about what is actually going on in it.

Most surprising for a US movie made during the 90s, the film keeps to being ambiguous throughout, not even giving a clear answer about what happened when all is over and done with; there's a clear suggestion that something more than just a little girl cracking has happened - we did after all see Pinocchio attack Jennifer in the end, because the film may want to be ambiguous but it also wants to give its audience some sort of pay off - but Tenney (not a director I'd ever expected to be able of subtlety) manages to still keep a question mark hanging over everything. Even in US horror cinema of the 90s, it turns out, perceptions and mental health can be more complicated than they at first appear.

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