Tag Archives: Random Number Generator Horror Podcast #9

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.

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!