Re: *** Official 9th Annual HTF October Scary Movie Challenge
10/28/08: DAY WATCH (Timur Bekmambetov, 2006)
I recall being let down and confused by NIGHT WATCH (2004); while no less muddled, this sequel is possibly more entertaining – but, at nearly 2½ hours, it’s hellishly overlong! When I watched it, I couldn’t say I recalled much of the previous film’s events – though some faces looked familiar enough: anyway, here once again the stage is set for the eternal struggle between Good and Evil. The catch is that the hope of the latter, a young boy, is the son of the other side’s most prominent member – while they have their own ‘ace’ in a female student of his (with whom he naturally falls in love). The Dark Side, then, has a tenacious and stunning-looking femme fatale (decked-out with devilish hairdo); however, she’s brought down by her own (unconvincing) relationship with a teenage vampire!
An amusing subplot has the hero exchange bodies with a female colleague to escape detection; similarly, blood is seen to be drained – by the villains – just as one would a typical carton of fruit juice(!) and, besides, the much-feared titular overseers emerge to be no more than ageing twin brothers. As with the first film, the production values (including plentiful and intricate special effects) are impressive for a non-Hollywood release – the prologue, denoting the history of the all-important Chalk Of Fate, is quite splendid – though the director’s technical ‘prowess’ soon grows tiresome! Though the ending smacks of the Apocalypse, there’s supposed to be a third entry yet in the series – currently being filmed under the title of TWILIGHT WATCH…
10/29/08: THE HILLS HAVE EYES (Wes Craven, 1977)
Despite owning Anchor Bay’s 2-Disc Set for close to two years, it’s only now that I managed to catch up with this horror ‘classic’ – which had been the missing link for me from among all those seminal releases that the genre spawned throughout the 1970s; consequently, I also hadn’t watched the 2006 remake – even if I mildly liked its director Alexander Aja’s SWITCHBLADE ROMANCE (2003).
Anyway, while I concede that the original is perhaps genre exponent Craven’s best work, I can’t deny being slightly let down by the film: the desert setting is notable and the action of its latter stages effectively handled…but, despite a plethora of mutant cannibals for villains (in itself, a neat concept), what we see is never really scary or even very disturbing! This is all the more baffling when considering that Craven’s preceding film had been the notorious THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT (1972); that said, some of the death scenes here are remarkably vicious (such as that of the old man at the derelict service-station) – while others are just plain bizarre (the one devised for the head of the city-folk, a retired cop crippled by a heart condition, and Mars’ own at the very end).
The premise of having a group of stranded travelers at the mercy of a family of maniacs is obviously reminiscent of Tobe Hooper’s THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974), another influential (with numerous sequels, prequels and remakes to its name) genre outing from this same creative era which, ironically, also didn’t quite impress me as much as I had anticipated – though, cumulatively, it’s an altogether more intense experience than Craven’s film. While the cannibal family (many of whom are named after planets!) – and especially Michael Berryman’s lanky and odd-looking Pluto – have acquired iconic status, their characterization is rather sketchy; John Steadman as the old man and Janus Blythe’s Ruby, then, appear as the human members of the clan – who are resented and eventually attacked by their own kin for being ‘soft-hearted’.
Still, the victims don’t fare much better (the impossibly naïve mother being a liability above all) – and their final dehumanization, not to mention resourcefulness in the face of crisis, isn’t exactly believable if inevitable so as to generate the requisite crowd-pleasing heroics. One of the latter folk is played by Dee Wallace, soon to tackle the lead role in Joe Dante’s THE HOWLING (1981) – curiously enough, yet another popular horror title which doesn’t do much for me! Incidentally, Craven states that his intention with the film was to blur the line between Civilization and the wilderness: symbolizing this is the fact that the travelers’ Alsatian dogs – which play a major role in the proceedings – are called Beauty and Beast and, while the former quickly (and gruesomely) expires at the villains’ hands, the latter repeatedly triumphs over them! By the way, I followed the film with its much inferior (and partly recycled) sequel – made by Craven himself and featuring three cast members (four, if you include Beast) from the original; see my comments about it elsewhere.
10/30/08: SCANNERS (David Cronenberg, 1981)
My father owned a magazine which had reviewed this one back in the day (when I was myself barely aware of who David Cronenberg was) and I still recall its electrifying poster. Having caught up with the film after all this time, I can safely say that it’s one of the director’s better and more intriguing vintage/genre efforts.
Movies about psychic powers were fairly popular around this time: Cronenberg himself would also make THE DEAD ZONE (1983) – while, say, Brian De Palma had already dabbled twice in the subject with CARRIE (1976) and THE FURY (1978). SCANNERS is noted for some truly gory make-up effects (which are something of a Cronenberg trademark anyway) courtesy of THE EXORCIST (1973)’s Dick Smith – for instance, I’ve always known of the scene with the exploding head…and actually seeing it, I have to admit that it still packs a wallop! Though the body-twitching brought on by the intense concentration when a person is being “scanned” can appear silly, the concept of thought-control as a political weapon is fascinating and, in fact, has been a favorite on the screen for some time already. The chilling twist here is that a colony of these superior yet destructive beings is in the offing a` la the “Damned” films of the 1960s, with pregnant women being unwittingly ‘infected’ – their demented leader (Michael Ironside) obviously intent on world domination.
The revelation regarding the latter, hero Stephen Lack (a benign “Scanner”), and the foremost authority on the subject – a scientist played by a typically riveting Patrick MacGoohan – isn’t exactly surprising since all three are always at the core of the proceedings. With this in mind, though Jennifer O’Neill receives top-billing, her role (as one of a small group of “Scanners” who oppose Ironside’s evil ways) is essentially secondary. Anyway, while MacGoohan is dispatched by a ‘mole’ in his organization (again, the latter’s contact is shrouded in mystery but his identity is pretty obvious!), Ironside and Lack fittingly engage in an effects-laden battle-of-wills (capped by an incredible if clever twist) at the climax.
For the record, the film was followed by a couple of sequels (both made the same year, 1991!) and even as many spin-offs later on in that decade – all of which are most probably no more than pale imitations of Cronenberg’s original (which, apparently, is itself on the point of being remade)…
10/30/08: THE FUNHOUSE (Tobe Hooper, 1981)
Director Hooper fared better here than in EATEN ALIVE (1977), which I watched the day before, because it’s much closer to the slasher formula and perhaps also because the goings-on in a carnival are intrinsically creepy to begin with.
That said, the teen protagonists are, as ever, depicted as either bland or obnoxious – the heroine (Elizabeth Berridge) even has a kid brother who likes to dress up in scary masks (his room is filled with horror-movie paraphernalia) to scare the girl (who looks barely post-puberty herself) out of her wits while she’s taking a shower! The latter amounts to an all-too-obvious homage to both HALLOWEEN (1978) and PSYCHO (1960), and the scene is followed by one more – though it seems highly unlikely to me that the average American family of 1981 would gather in the living-room to watch something like BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1935) playing on TV…
Anyway, the carnival section delivers the goods in both the atmosphere and chills stakes – from animal freak shows to fortune-telling and culminating in a ‘House Of Horror’-type ride; the youngsters then commit the typical foolishness associated with slashers by opting to stay behind for the night to make out in “The Funhouse” – even though this particular carnival troupe (including an underused but effective William Finley as a ‘gruesome’ magician) had been connected with a murder a couple of years back! Sure enough, they soon witness the slaying of the ageing fortune-teller (Sylvia Miles) they had themselves made fun of by a kid in a Frankenstein costume (the usher to The Funhouse itself) – the result of his feeling slighted when his sexual encounter with the undiscriminating Miles was prematurely terminated!
When the teens’ presence is detected, the alcoholic Funhouse barker (Kevin Conway) puts the monster boy (who’s his own disfigured and uncontrollable offspring and not unlike the Leatherface of Hooper’s earlier classic THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE [1974]) on the teenagers’ trail; while he naturally wants to protect his son as well as the image of the carnival, Conway’s also intent on retrieving the money that was stolen from his coffers by one of our imprudent and, subsequently, ill-fated heroes. For my money, the make-up job done by expert-in-the-field Rick Baker for the monster/killer is one of the most effectively hideous ever devised; the scenes of violence, then, combine Hooper’s trademark intensity with a fair smattering of the gore demanded by the subgenre – unsurprisingly, the heroine is the only one to make it out alive…though she’s anything but unscathed by the experience.
10/30/08: THE HILLS HAVE EYES PART II (Wes Craven, 1985)
I recently acquired this via the full-frame Image DVD in anticipation of the HTF Halloween challenge; I knew the film was nowhere near as well regarded as the 1977 original – but I wasn’t aware that Craven only made it because he was hard-up for cash, that he later disowned the result and that the picture was even shelved for two years (by which time he had re-acquired his stature with A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET [1984] which itself developed into a franchise and, ironically, the director would also return to much later after another lean period in his career)!
Anyway, this sequel is really quite lame as these things go (especially given that the original director is involved): apparently, there was so little plot to work with that the makers felt the need to pad out the running-time with gratuitous recollections of some of the highlights from the first entry – including an outrageous (hence, justly infamous) dream sequence by Beast, the heroic Alsatian! Similarly, the mutant cannibals this time around are relegated to just two – Michael Berryman’s Pluto, who’s shown to have somehow survived two separate vicious attacks by the dog(!), and yet another relative (brother to Jupiter from the first film and, thus, Pluto’s uncle), dubbed “The Reaper”, and who appears out of nowhere.
The motocross-enthusiast protagonists are among the most obnoxious heroes to feature in this type of film – the kind that you don’t care whether they live or die. In fact, just about the only characters to engage our interest are a blind girl and Janus Blythe’s Ruby herself – who has been domesticated in the interim (at the end of the original, she had saved a baby from a fate worse than death and, as seen in an alternate ending on Anchor Bay’s SE of the first film, had even joined the surviving members of the cannibals’ victims). Though Robert Houston (Bobby) is also on hand, his character is conveniently put out of the way at the very beginning: he freaks out when a motor race is set to take place in the desert near where his family was attacked all those years ago and opts to stay behind – Ruby (who’s even changed her name) and Beast, however, go along and, though the former’s confession about her past isn’t taken very seriously by her companions, both of course prove instrumental in the new victims’ safe-keeping.
Incidentally, Craven knew when he had a good thing going and, so, reproduced here two death methods from the original – Berryman himself, in fact, expires yet again at the hands of Beast (though he’s met with the fate that had previously befallen his brother Mercury), while The Reaper’s come-uppance is an even more elaborate and protracted stunt than Jupiter’s demise in the 1977 film and which would have been more appropriate for a Road Runner cartoon! By the way, Ruby herself inexplicably vanishes from the proceedings during the last third or so!
Plus, for some reason November has always been a big "horror" month for me. I'm just getting warmed up!
