Tag Archives: Kanopy

The Addiction (1995)

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It’s been a while since I have been faced with categories this easy to remember. I have never heard of The Addiction, but boy howdy did it meet the intersection of vampires as scare and 1990s as style. You know how Clerks screams indie comedy, from the dawn of independent cinema? This is like that, but for thesis horror, here defined as “horror for people who would never admit that horror has value, so I made an art house flick instead.”

So what’s actually happening is Lili Taylor is an NYU philosophy student, grappling with important topics like who, at a generation’s remove from the events, was the actual bad guy in Vietnam? But between walking around town to the soothing strains of gangster rap, she gets introduced to heroin.[1] And then she takes the heroin to each of her friends and classmates and professors who she is also dating, and gets them addicted to heroin as well. At one point, a dude tries to tell her about Jesus, and he does not get addicted to heroin, but neither does she quit her addiction and move to the suburbs.

That’s it. That’s the whole movie.

Wait. You said this was a thesis horror movie dressed up as art house drama. That’s just purely arthouse drama. What gives?

Oh. Crap. Um. Let me do some quick rewrites here. Um, let’s see. Okay, what if she’s bitten by a vampire, and then wanders around doing soliloquies in dark sunglasses about who the bad guy really is, but also turning all of her classmates and friends and professors who she is also dating into vampires? And the vampirism is a metaphor for heroin, you see.

Ah. Yes, that would fix it.

Well there you go then!

[1] Or maybe meth, but I think it’s too early to have been movie meth, even in movie New York.

Rökkur

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I’ve made it to December 2021. I think this means I’m still catching up? Who can say, really. The scare was (I’m pretty sure) psychological, and the style was queer, and thus I watched Rift, a movie out of Iceland about gay dudes breaking up but then talking about it for the rest of the movie while other things also happen.

The deal is Einar is posing as maybe suicidal and then a couple of days later… no, let me go back. They’re standing at a balcony, post-breakup, and Einar is wobbling his beer bottle on the railing, and says, “This bottle is me. If I fall, do you think you could save me?” And then the bottle falls to the pavement. And then a couple days later, Gunnar gets a 3am voicemail about how he’s out in the sticks and there’s maybe someone with him. So he leaves his new boyfriend and drives out into the sticks to check on Einar, and, well, things are immediately weird, and they stay that way.

It has a tiny cast. There’s Einar and Gunnar (who if it was not clear already initiated the breakup), there’s the new boyfriend but he’s only in the prologue, and then there’s a) the helpful neighbor keeping an eye on the place, b) the creepy old farmer down the road who is introduced as probably a sexual predator, c) the girl at the convenience store who says not to pick up hitchhikers, and d) the Icelandic countryside, full of wind and emptiness and dry December grass, and bends and folds from all the volcanoes off in the distance, and abandoned buildings in states of decay. Oh, and I forgot e) the creepy red car that keeps showing up everywhere.

So yeah. The movie is 100% atmosphere, which unfortunately leaves no percentage points for making a lick of sense. But still, it’s a creepy, immersive atmosphere, and that makes up for a lot of sins, you know?

The Howling (1981)

I’m supposed to remember what the randomizers are that lead into the movie my podcast bids me watch, but I really very don’t. Werewolves and something else. ’80s? Could be that, for sure, but it sounds wrong. Either way, I had somehow never seen The Howling, and so here we are.

I imagine, had I known it was a Joe Dante film, I might have put in more effort.

So there’s a serial killer[1] stalking the streets of Manhattan, and that isn’t the only reason by a long shot that I felt this movie had strong giallo elements, despite being a creature feature. Dee Wallace who you may remember as the mother from Poltergeist a year later[2] is a TV reporter engaged in an implausible sting operation where since he’s been calling her and breathing heavily, they have a connection and she agrees to meet him in an adult arcade[3] on Times Square (probably), where he is promptly shot by police. Well, not I suppose promptly enough, since she is emotionally scarred by the whole ordeal first.

Therefore, she (and her husband) are sent off by Patrick Macnee[4] to one of those peaceful outdoor psychiatric retreats, where she can be regressed through hypnotherapy to remember what happened and ease her burdens, except instead of that her husband is being constantly seduced by a hot brunette while she is being tormented by one or more creepy dudes and meanwhile for no obvious reason her friends back in town are researching werewolves, and before you know it, the moon is out of the bag, if you catch my drift.

The effects were pretty decent, one or two literally animated transformations aside. We really lost something, when CGI came to horror. It’s great for action and sci-fi and whatever genre superhero movies are, but for horror and probably fantasy? Practical effects are just where it’s at.

To be clear, this was not a good movie, and I’m not recommending it or anything. But at the same time: monster movies are cool, you know?

[1] played by the Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager, but I could never see him well enough / in sufficient lack of makeup to recognize, and definitely didn’t by voice
[2] or from not confusing her with Dee Snider because nobody besides me does that
[3] I went to an adult arcade in downtown San Jose in the late ’90s, and it was one of the greatest disappointments of my life to learn that they just meant you could watch movies there, when I was expecting to play porn-themed video games to a bitchin’ ’80s soundtrack.
[4] Best known (to me at least) as Count Iblis in the original Battlestar Galactica show, which meant I immediately distrusted him.