Tag Archives: horror

Il racconto dei racconti – Tale of Tales

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They are still making fairy tales, you know. There’s The Princess Bride, of course. And Moana. And my personal favorite at the time, Stardust[1]. But thanks to my horror podcast, I have learned about another one: Tale of Tales[2].

Man is this hard to talk about without spoilers, though, so I will stick to brevity. See, there are these three neighboring kingdoms. In the first one, Salma Hayek wants a kid, and goes to rather extreme lengths to get one. But then she is not perfectly happy with either the cost nor (especially) the secondary results. This story features an enormous sort-of axolotl, which is how the podcast settled on this movie as a gothic story with an aquatic monster. Other than by volume, this was a fair assessment of meeting the stated requirements.

In the second kingdom, a horny king and a youth-obsessed woman run afoul of each other, with results that are extremely predictable, right up until they aren’t, and then boy howdy do they keep not being. And in the third kingdom, a princess in want of a husband becomes the prize of a pretty implausible marriage contest, albeit with, again, predictable results. Until they, also again, aren’t.

This movie, if all goes well, will win my personal 2024 awards for worst father, worst mother, and worst sister. Also, it’s at least a middle of the pack contender for both best brother and best husband. But did it need to be three stories, if they barely at all intersect with one another? I guess the answer is this: while two hours and fifteen minutes is a little long for a movie so focused on being slow and dreamlike and cinematic, three movies of forty-five minutes each would have been just ridiculous. So.

[1] No idea if it holds up. I just know I was the only one who thought it might be its generation’s Princess Bride.
[2] Apparently these are pulled from a 17th century Italian fairy tale collection, and thus do not I suppose count as “still making”, in the strictest sense. Goes a long way toward explaining why the “skin of a flea” story seemed familiar, though.

The Dark and the Wicked

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So imagine your mom and dad live on a secluded farm, and also your dad is wasting away of some kind of unspecified illness that has him bedbound, on oxygen, and never particularly awake, while also not apparently being in a coma or whatever. So you and your sibling show up, over your mother’s objections, to help.

The Dark and the Wicked is that movie, and it is split up as follows: 10% day to day logistics, 50% long lingering shots of people in the midst of misery, and 40% absolute mindfuckery where it is never possible to tell what is real or unreal. I do not believe I ever knew why anything was happening, but boy howdy did things keep happening. From vegetable chopping mishaps to livestock mishaps to constant prank phone calls to uncomfortable parental sexuality, and honestly that’s barely scratching the surface.

In conclusion, the movie never made a lick of sense, but boy does it know how to set a mood.

Alien: Romulus

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Did you know there’s a new Alien movie out? And that it’s not about anyone exploring the lore or mythology of the xenomorphs nor whoever the giant people in the crashed ship that the Nostromo found some 45 years ago in the movie-goer’s timeline were?

Ah, I have your attention now, I think. No, Romulus is a research station in a decaying orbit around one of Weyland-Yutani’s colony planets[1], and a handful of teens intend to get up there and take advantage of the opportunity before anyone else does. Too bad, of course, about what Romulus-the-station is researching…

I’m not going to get into the plot of the movie. If you’ve seen an Alien movie, you know what the plot is and you know what the story beats are going to be, to at least a first approximation. This is one of those, for better or for worse[2]. I do want to call out one thing especially, though. As you know, a key aspect of these movies is body horror. From the moment John Hurt got that funny look on his face in the middle of lunch (or, honestly, from the moment they tried to pull the thing off his face and it… refused), that sense of impending dread, that your fleshbag is not entirely yours to control, is easily a third of what these movies are about. Anyway, the body horror in this movie is amped up pretty high even by my jaded standards.

Bravo.

[1] Yes, I am going to just sit here and assume you know what that means. And if you don’t, then this movie is for you the first episode in a reboot of the franchise rather than the latest episode in the franchise itself, and watching the movie would be a good way to find out. The accumulated lore surrounding that particular company is such that they didn’t have to waste any time hinting at things that have been slowly revealed over five decades and six or eight prior movies. Subtext has become text, and in 40 point font a that.
[2] And mostly for better, I would argue; both the formula and this implementation of it, to be clear.

Sorority Babes in the Dance-A-Thon of Death

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A very long time ago, in the summer of 1994 I expect, I watched Sorority Babes in the Slimeball Bowl-O-Rama. I rented it from Hastings, and I watched it with my roommates, and my girlfriend, and my girlfriend’s father, the latter of which you’ll realize was awkward if you’ve ever seen the movie yourself.

I believe that I knew about Sorority Babes in the Dance-A-Thon of Death before the internet was functionally searchable (and way before it lost that capability). But how did I know? Word of mouth: from whom? Usenet: I guess maybe, but I have never been a horror community guy, I suppose because I found my people somewhere else first. Hastings again: well that would make sense, except that I never saw the movie, which I definitely would have if it had been available. Because, like, how do I turn down a sequel to that aforementioned august masterpiece of film?

The most likely answer, I suppose, is that I’m wrong about how long I knew this second movie existed. Because, honestly, any of those other reasons would not have found me almost exactly 30 years later and only now learning that the two movies are entirely unrelated, except by naked opportunism[1]. Which is ironic, since this one had no nudity. (Nor did it have actors, or a script, except in the most literal of senses. It didn’t even have the charm of Bloody Muscle Body Builder in Hell to make up for having been shot on low quality video with a sufficiently washed out color palette that black and white would have looked a lot better.)

So, you know, I freely admit that it’s unreasonable of me to believe I have a better technical eye, to know when a scene has overstayed its welcome by multiple seconds, and a better ear for dialogue, to know that I would need a much better story reason to send my characters to “the abandoned college on the hill” than the payoff I received, in order to ever even consider using that line seriously, and a better eye for talent, when I’m not constraining myself to only actresses who’ll film nude scenes[2], to end up with at least one or two people who could have sold that wretched line in the first place. …although come to think of it, that particular actress may have been the best of the bunch, ie she may have actually sold it. I was saying, though, it’s unfair of me to believe all those things of myself when the last movie I made was a ten minute short adapting Fahrenheit 451, in junior high. But that said, I’m pretty sure it was better than this. (I wonder if the video cassette still exists for me to check against.)

Still, though, they mentioned Joe Bob Briggs in their “Thanks” section of the credits, and that has endeared them to me somewhat.

[1] That is to say, the box mentions a “from the creators of” line, and I flat out do not believe this is true. (Just like I don’t believe anything else it says besides the title.)
[2] That sounds like I’m denigrating the ability of actors who shoot nude scenes, but I’m not. I’m just saying when you have fewer options to choose from, especially if your talent pool is already restricted by “can commute to Kansas City”, you get what you pay for. And I’m especially saying that these people did not constrain themselves thusly, and have no excuse whatsoever.

A Nightmare Wakes

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This was a weird one, and I’m not sure how I feel about it. See, Mary not quite Shelley and Percy Shelley and Mary’s sister (I think) and Lord Byron are all hanging out at Byron’s place, just like we saw in a recentish episode of Doctor Who. And they made a bet to write a scary story, which as we all know was the genesis of a certain Modern Prometheus. Fine so far.

Only Mary also had a miscarriage, and started getting obsessed with this idea she had for a book, and Percy is getting more and more grossed out by her whole vibe, and meanwhile she’s got Victor Frankenstein (who is just Percy except dressed in black and nobody else can see him) stalking and/or courting her, and basically the whole movie is this obsession she has with her book, or maybe the book is haunting her? I was at first really unhappy because it seemed like they were saying she was being externally haunted and the book was being given to her, which is kind of a bullshit take. But I’m pretty sure it’s the obsession or maybe haunted by the book as she goes[1] but at least she’s really the one writing it angle instead, and that’s alright.

I did a shallow dive into the history of a handful of characters afterward, and while they are certainly taking some liberties here, the movie was in the end at least a reasonable fiction of how it might have happened. (But it definitely did not happen this way, all the same. Also, not for nothing, Percy Shelley, good poet though he might be, was kind of crap at being a man.)

[1] A Nightmare Wakes kind of implies the latter haunted version, but only kind of.

Pánico en el Transiberiano

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I have learned about a new streaming service funded by libraries. My local does not offer Kanopy, but apparently they offer Hoopla. Which is nice, because the last two movies [that I haven’t seen] presented by my horror movie podcast were both available on said network. Thanks, Carrollton Public Library!

Anyway, the randomness this time was Hammer Studios[1] crossed with aliens, which is a hard sell since Hammer makes mostly movies with draculas. In fact, I’m being informed that this is not a Hammer Studios production, and my podcast people done screwed up. But in their defense, the movie stars both Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, so the only thing missing (aside from a dracula and/or some of its brides) was a couple of gallons of just enormously bright red paint. I can understand, when you’re desperate for a match, overlooking a little thing like not technically made by Hammer, if almost everything else lines up, y’know? They were in a real fix.

So, Christopher Lee is a paleontologist I guess, and he’s just dug up a maybe missing link in China, and now he’s on a train back to civilization with his find. But Peter Cushing wants to see inside Lee’s comically overprotected trunk in the storage compartment, which sets off an unlikely chain of events when the thing in the trunk is not as dead as previously believed, and is furthermore[2] a visitor from the depths of space and not the missing link at all! …sort of.

Soon undead alien apes and countesses and Rasputins and Hammer Studios talents and Tellys Savalas are running up and down the train, trying to solve the mystery without getting their eyes boiled out of their heads and/or without being caught and exposed as the alien. If Horror Express were wildly popular, one could easily imagine a hidden roles boardgame being developed from the IP. But my point is, hijinx ensue as they necessarily must have, until there is eventually a final showdown for the fate of humanity. (I mean, probably? It was after all just the one alien.)

Still, good times. I especially liked the sci-fi backstory,

[1] out of London, although the movie was made in Spain, and furthermore my brief research indicates this was not in fact a Hammer Studios production at all, and great, now I have to talk about this outside the footnote.
[2] I would consider this a spoiler, but as an alien was necessary to this being the movie I watched, the cat was kind of already out of the bag.

Let’s Scare Jessica to Death

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So this is one of those movie titles that I’ve seen over and over again, and I think I always just assumed it was the same as April Fool’s Day[1] where Jessica, having died in the opening scenes or else via flashback, would be taking her revenge on her teenage bullies for the rest of the flick. Let me start by saying that Let’s Scare Jessica to Death is decidedly not that movie.

So Jessica is a schizophrenic who has just been released from psychiatric hospital, and now she and her husband have moved out to a farmhouse in the sticks near a small town, I suppose to get away from it all. Only, their house has a squatter as well as a history, and Jessica keeps seeing a girl in white, and the townspeople are creepy, and who is that under the lake? Plus, she keeps hearing voices that do not have her best interests at heart (which is how I know she was a schizophrenic).

The mystery isn’t whether or not we should be worried if Jessica is imagining things. It’s nearly a first person movie, and that is her fear the whole time. As such, it is the central tension in one of the tensest psychological horror movies I’ve ever seen.

Recommended.

[1] Why, you ask, did I for years think April Fool’s Day was about a girl named April? I cannot help you out with that.

Abigail (2024)

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I decided to do a movie outside of Shudder, as I do every so often. And this time I thought, hmm, there are two recent horror movies with little girls on Peacock, but which? And I decided to go with the newer one, since the older one I’m already way too far behind to accomplish anything useful for my hungry public.

And so, I watched Abigail, which is a crime turned horror movie about a kidnapping. See, there’s this ballerina kid, and a whole bunch of people in masks who don’t know each other (a la Reservoir Dogs) come together to kidnap her. Then they go to an isolated estate to lay low and wait for the ransom, which might have gone according to plan except that they decide to not trust each other. And once things start going wrong, boy howdy do they escalate, in all kinds of ways that you would never have considered possible.

I mean, unless you watched the trailer. Don’t watch the trailer, for the love of all that is holy.

But that aside: you know what, obviously the Tarantino movie does a better job of being a crime movie, and I could name a few horror movies along these lines that do a better job of doing what they do (spoilers below the cut), but as mashups go? I’m pretty happy with this one!

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Dagon

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The random qualifiers for this podcast-inspired movie were: a foreign film (I think?) with monsters from under the sea. I have a hard time, though, considering Dagon a foreign film when it is a) directed by Stuart Gordon (of Re-Animator fame, as outlined in the poster) and b) mostly in English, and without subtitles when it is in Spanish. As in, it’s pretty clear that the audience is assumed to speak English and to not understand along with the main character when anyone else isn’t speaking English. All the same, its originating country is Spain, so what do I know?

What’s weird about this movie, though, is I have played it as a game, both video and board. …but I’m probably getting ahead of myself. See, the first act is a bit silly. Dream sequences, mermaids, early ’90s quality CGI (ie, budget quality as of 2001 when the movie came out), and eventually a storm and a shipwreck near an isolated fishing village, and quickly our cast of four is whittled down to one. Which is where the game reference comes in, because there’s your character in a hotel room surrounded by subtly aquatic people with torches and pitchforks or whatever, trying to get away from room to room and then from alley to alley, completely outnumbered and outmatched but maybe able to survive if the shadows can be kind.

I’ve never read The Shadow over Innsmouth, but the scenes people have created in homage to it are so evocative that it must have been pretty chillingly written. Then, eventually there’s an act three where things come together nicely and also horrifically. But then again, Stuart Gordon is known to be able to deliver in this genre, so, hooray!

Virgin Witch

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My horror movie podcasts’s next movie [that I had not already seen] was meant to be a grind house movie about a witch. My instant internal response was, does that even exist?? Turns out, there’s at least one! (And I’m betting not many more than that.)

Here’s how I knew this was a grind house movie: during the opening credits, every image was a still of a topless actress in some situation we would eventually see during the film. It was perhaps as brazen a series of movie credits as I’ve ever seen, but it definitely said “Buckle up, we’re not fucking around.”

Virgin Witch is a movie about two country mice sheltered sisters who have decided to run away from home and go be models in London. And look, I just cannot talk about this movie interestingly without spoilers, as there’s just too much. So if you want to watch it, (and it’s… it’s not precisely worth watching as a movie, but it might be worth watching as a spectacle. Train wrecks, after all, spectacular.) If you want to watch it, I was saying, stop here.

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