13 Needles of Halloween #13

And thus we come to the close of our "13 Needles of Halloween" series, with the greatest on-screen "needle" of all-time -- Marilyn Chamber's armpit stinger in David Cronenberg's Rabid, which manages to be all of the genitals and none of them all at once, in the best Cronenberg fashion. Long live the new flesh, babies! And a Happy Halloween to you all! (PS Get vaccinated.)

13 Needles of Halloween #12

I haven't seen The Fly II (1989) in years but there are two bits of violence from it that I don't think I will ever forget -- there's the elevator coming down on the man's head and exploding it like an overripe melon, which -- grody! And then there is this little moment from early in the film where this asshole nurse breaks a needle off in Eric Stoltz's arm while she's taking blood and that spray of blood shoots out of the broken piece. I'm generally not scared of needles -- which has made this year's "13 Needles of Halloween" series one of my least personally frightening (get back to me if I ever do spiders) -- but this scene made me reconsider that stance. The Fly II, even though as I said I haven't seen it in years, struck me at the time as being better than any un-Cronenberg Cronenberg sequel should've been. Any fans? Oh and in case you were wondering that awful nurse gets what's coming to her!

13 Needles of Halloween #11

After seeing that George Romero's 1978 vampire-ish flick Martin will be getting a 4K remaster this next year from the swell distributor Second Sight in the UK (I imagine it will get some play here too from somebody but if not invest in a region-free player y'all, it's blown the doors off my life) I realized what better needle scene for my "13 Needles of Halloween" series than the opening scene of that movie? If you're unfamiliar the film opens with our titular uhhh "hero" Martin clambering into a strange woman's sleeping compartment on a train, sedating her, sexually assualting her, and then slicing her wrists open with a razor and drinking the blood. I mean -- what better???

It's freakin' creepy stuff and Martin is one of Romero's best, so the fact that the movie streams nowhere and even the crappy DVD of it is out of print and going for sixty to ninety bucks on Amazon is downright shameful -- news of this upgrade is extremely overdue. I don't think I've ever seen a good quality copy of this movie to be honest, and I have a feeling that watching it remastered is going to be one of those times when a movie steps up and wallops you in a wholly fresh way. Great flick -- any fans?

Thursday's Ways Not To Die

Dead and Buried (1981)

Dead and Buried was a pandemic discovery for me. I do believe that I saw it and Messiah of Evil and Daughters of Darkness all within a couple of weeks of each other, and those I can tell you were a happy couple of weeks -- you know, besides the pandemic -- for this lover of movies about ghostly seaside "towns with a secret" (TM the Gaylords of Darkness). It's got one of those pieces of poster art that I definitely recognize from my childhood days staring at VHS covers in the horror section with terror and awe, but I never got around to seeing it until last year. Speaking of the cover-art though...

... this film just got released onto 4K blu-ray this past summer and that was the cover, clearly inferring that this scene here with the nurse and her diabolical needle is one of the scenes that stuck (heh) with people all these years. (Yes this is an entry in our ongoing "13 Needles of Halloween" series.) Is it an iconic horror image at this point (heh)? I think Tarantino was probably referencing it with Daryl Hannah in Kill Bill, and I think it's getting there, it just needs more eyes (heh) on it, and the fact that this movie currently streams on both Shudder and Prime Video makes me think there might be an entire generation discovering its pleasures now. I am glad I did -- it's a humdinger. Any fans? 

Hit the jump for links to the Previous Ways Not To Die...

13 Needles of Halloween #9

Similarly to how earlier in this series I described the scene where Rosemary gets sedated in Rosemary's Baby as the most disturbing moment in the film, I think a lot of people find the seemingly endless scenes in The Exorcist where Regan (Linda Blair) gets guinea-pigged for all of those medical tests to be among that films most upsetting moments -- I guess I won't come right out and call it "the most disturbing moment in the film" like I did for Rosemary because The Exorcist, dunno if you've heard, but The Exorcist has some moments. 

But it says something that Friedkin was not just talented enough to make these moments sting (and god do they with that ratcheting hammering soundtrack and Regan's cries) but that he was even smart enough to take so much time and care doing so, as they become integral to what makes the film such a masterpiece. The film shows science degrading and exhausting these people, beating them down to a place of absolute desperation -- it's the "modern" that alienates, proves pointless, and drives them into the arms of superstition and madness.  

13 Needles of Halloween #8

So yesterday's entry in my "13 Needles of Halloween" series -- Reminder: Get Vaccinated! -- dealt with the final shot of Halloween 6 having a needle in it, for some inexplicable reason. And so today it only felt right to move on to the opposite tactic -- to a film that actually begins with the sight of a needle! In this case a needle being self-jabbed directly into a person's own scalp, which is how we are greeted in the very first moment of Brandon Cronenberg's masterful 2020 flick Possessor. Leave it to a Cronenberg, am I right? And of course leave it to a Cronenberg...

... to then immediately zoom in for a closer look. I actually think Brandon, even more than his father, prefers abstracting close-ups of the sort seen above, where materials we don't entirely understand are explored in minute grotesque detail -- he loves to zoom right in on wounds, rivulets of gore, et cetera. It seems like the further step in the Cronenberg project of abstracting humanity past the point of human -- we are not people under their lenses, but foreign objects where the pressure of the camera itself seems to split our skin right open. (Possessor is streaming on Hulu right now! Here is my review.)

13 Needles of Halloween #7

Today's entry in our season-appropriate ongoing "13 Needles of Halloween" series was not one I had planned on doing, but that's okay because I kinda wing these things and had the room. I hadn't planned on this one because I never would have remembered it, since I hadn't seen these films since high school. But over the weekend the so-called "Thorn Trilogy" of Halloween films (that would be parts 4-6) which dive into the ancient druid cult that cursed Michael Myers upon birth... 

... I know. I know. It's ridiculous. It doesn't even make a lick of sense in the films themselves as they explained it, and it certainly doesn't help that the sixth film, which is where they really get into this, they give most of the exposition to Paul Rudd who, while very cute (this is the same year as Clueless so Prime Paul Rudd), is bust giving one of the worst performances of his career, if not the worst. He plays things goofy when they should be serious and serious when they should be less -- it's really embarrassing and he's really lucky he booked Clueless this same year so nobody noticed. 

Anyway as you can see needles factor really heavily into the final action sequence in Part 6, up to and including the very last shot of the film seen up top of Michael's mask laying on the floor beside an emptied syringe. So clearly I had to post about this sequence even though watching it I had no fucking idea what was going on. To be honest I was so tuned out by the end -- this movie is bad, real bad! -- this is maybe partially my own fault, but I had no clue what they were signaling with Michael getting injected in this lab. They show...

... a bunch of fetuses and genetic sequencing charts that I guess are supposed to mean something? No idea. But this is what Google is for! So I looked it up. Basically this entire sequence got butchered when Donald Pleasance died in the middle of filming. The genetic stuff just has to do with the passing of the curse; the stuff in the needles, as far as I can tell, is just "corrosive liquid" and nothing to do with genetics at all. None of it means anything! That sounds about right. 

13 Needles of Halloween #6

The murderer in Lucio Fulci's 1984 film Murder Rock: Dancing Death -- which, if that title isn't clue enough, you need to see immediately if you have not yet had the pleasure -- murders women with a hairpin needle about ten inches long with an ornate golden and bejeweled head to it. You know, as one does. To be honest I actually think this killer is pretty kind, as far as psycho killers go -- they chloroform their victims first so they are unconscious, and then they gently prick the needle straight through the woman's breast -- exposed, natch -- directly into their hearts; I mean if ya gotta be murdered this doesn't seem like the worst way to be murdered. 

The gifs you see here are from a spectacularly-80s dream sequence early on in the film (don't you feel like the WIlsons might start singing at any moment?) where our heroine has a vision of the killer -- in the nonsense logic of every giallo of this sort the dream shows her the killer's face and it turns out he's a male model and she sees him on a billboard which leads her to actually going out and finding the man and having a romance and stop me if you think this woman makes very irresponsible choices with her life. Seems like at some point in the middle of this behavior one would ask one's elf, "Am I actually in a giallo movie right now? Maybe I should go home and nap this one out." Alas!

Click here for all the Needles of Halloween!

 

13 Needles of Halloween #5

There's really not much of anything in terms of physical violence in Rosemary's Baby -- we do see Terry Gionoffrio's bloodied dead body on the sidewalk after she's leapt out of the Bramford building, but that's after the fact -- it's all emotional and psychological. Maybe that's why the scene where the coven closes in on Rosemary, holds her down on the bed as she flails and shrieks, and inject her with a sedative, does continue to hit so viscerally until this day. It's the only scene where we see Rosemary physically attacked -- such things are hinted at during the demonic rape sequence of course, but the witches were decent enough to feed Rosemary that doped-up chocolate mouse there so that sequence remains hazy, unlike this. Add onto it Rosemary's obvious frailty, so stick-thin with that gigantic pregnant belly heaving to and fro as she convulses, add on Mia Farrow's enormously effective performance, and well this scene stands out to my eye as the scariest single moment in the entire film. 

13 Needles of Halloween #4

This scene in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors is definitely reminiscent of the scene in Saw II which I took to task earlier this week, in that their intentions are both to exploit the addiction trauma of a recovering female character; in Saw's case it's Amanda (franchise stalwart Shawnee Smith) while here in Elm Street...

... it's Taryn (Jennifer Rubin) who is both, in case you don't know it already, beautiful and bad. And while I think Dream Warriors is one of the better Elm Street films I don't know that I could make a flawlessly coherent case for why this scene plays better to me than the "Needle Pit" in Saw II does -- they're both gross and exploitative. I mean...

... honestly. (Elm Street's longstanding adoration of little screaming mouths is So Much, you guys.) But Dream Warriors at least genuinely makes us care about the kids that Freddy's tormenting at the Hospital, as well as real hope for their wellness -- the film spends time with them as people, unlike Saw which revels in people as piles of meat. When Freddy arrives and exploits Taryn's weakness...

... it is sad and disturbing because we have gotten to know Taryn at least a little, and seen her struggle. We have seen her be goofy and fight back! And this scene certainly doesn't beat around the bush...

... in that it even reads in its way as a coded rape scene; the way he corners her in an alley and forces himself inside of her. It's a true violation, and it is played as such. These characters are borderline paper-thin but there's just enough there there that makes this moment sting, and its horror still resonate all these years later. "What a rush..."

Click here for all of the "Needles of Halloween" so far!