Work Vs. Play: In Search Of My Own AMERICAN SCREAM

"They may not remember me, but they'll remember what I've done."

The American Scream from director Michael Stephenson (he of Troll 2 and Best Worst Movie fame) is a documentary that follows three "home haunters" who happen to live about an hour away from me in Fairhaven, Massachusetts.  Each year, Victor, Manny and Matthew (with the help of his father Richard) turn their respective homes into elaborate haunted houses, complete with authentic props, set dressings, animatronics, and a collection of volunteers dressed up as all sorts of terrifying creatures.  The three Halloween enthusiasts reside within a few blocks of each other and while all three display an intense dedication, each approaches the yearly tradition with a completely different mindset.  Matthew and Richard are adorably low budget, forgoing any sense of realistic terror in favor of simple entertainment.  I could spend hours watching them try to attach two bloodied baby dolls to a motorized see-saw or build an alien creature out of vacuum tubes and paper towels.  Manny is a tinker at heart and revels more in the creative process than the final product; he has so much fun dumpster diving and actually constructing his creations that he doesn't really care if everything little thing is perfect come Halloween, so long as everyone has a good time.  For Victor, it's all about the big show.  The son of strict religious parents who never allowed him to celebrate Halloween, Victor now spends all year working up to that one night of the year and he's not afraid to drive his family crazy, spend thousands of dollars or enlist the help of seemingly half the neighborhood in order to ensure that once he opens those doors, every minute detail has been precisely designed and executed to terrify each of his visitors.

All three haunters are entertaining in their own peculiar way and their respective houses each looked like an absolute blast on the big night, but Victor was the guy with whom I could most easily identify.  You see, as much fun as Victor has turning his own home into a yearly frightfest, it's just not enough.  Nothing makes him feel as happy, as excited, as alive as when he's haunting.  It's his most favorite thing in the world, and Victor doesn't want to limit himself to just one night a year; he wants to do this ALL THE TIME.

I get that.  It's a debate I've had with myself a lot over the past few years: do I need to have a job that I absolutely love doing, something that makes me excited to go to work every day?  Or can I be satisfied with a mediocre job if I spend my free time engaged in a more fulfilling activity?  I've talked about this before, how my current occupation is neither torturous nor rewarding, it's just sort of there.  I have very little to honestly complain about; I'm well paid, I love my boss, I get the chance to work with interesting new technology and when I leave the office (rarely later than five o'clock) I don't have to think about work until I return the next morning.  I know plenty of people who would kill for a job like this and I'll admit there were some lean times in L.A. when I truly missed the freedom and security of working here.  But after two and a half years, the daily grind of life in a cubicle has started to wear on me and it's become clear that while this job may be logistically more convenient, it still leaves me with an emotional and creative deficit in my life.  I therefore have two alternatives: either I quit in favor of a more personally enriching yet almost certainly less financially solvent career, or I keep my job and throw myself wholeheartedly into some other pastime in my off hours, Victor Bariteau style.

Obviously Option B is the easier choice, as it ensures my ability to keep paying my rent.  And yet, is that enough?  Will the pleasures derived from an engrossing hobby match or outweigh the tedium of a hum drum employment?  Or will I eventually just find myself wishing that my hobby was my employment and getting frustrated when that's not possible?  Am I Team Manny or Team Victor?  In a lot of ways, that's been a big part the experiment that is this website and I'd say the results have been partially successful.  I do really enjoy the writing and I plan to continue steadily in some alternative capacity after my year is over, but the fact that I'm perpetually behind schedule makes the task feel ever more daunting.  (At this point I'm on pace to finish my screenings by March and my writings by May.)  I'm also a little disheartened that, aside from a handful of articles, I haven't been able to significantly increase my readership over the past eight months.  Friends and family tell me that they enjoy reading my posts, and that's truly gratifying to hear, but I don't see people sharing articles on Facebook or Twitter and I just can't seem to get my work to travel outside of my immediate social circle.  Considering the amount of effort I've poured into this project, it's incredibly frustrating to feel like I'm just shouting into the wind.

I'd love to parlay this experience into a steady writing gig for one of the film websites I regularly follow, but I also realize that such a gig isn't going to be the kind of thing that will let me walk away from my day job.  But I expect that to be the case with most anything I'm really passionate about.  I've also been contemplating getting back into acting again, although I've been out of the game so long that it would probably take me a while to work my way back up to level of production I grew accustomed to in college.  Either way, that's not really any more viable of a full time career option than writing at this point.  I guess I'm cursed with a love of occupations that generally operate on low and/or inconsistent paychecks.

So perhaps this decision has been made for me, at least in the short term.  I'll keep going with my perfectly decent job and look elsewhere for personal fulfillment.  I'll continue pouring my energy into the projects and activities that make me truly happy, and maybe if I'm lucky, someday I'll get the opportunity to turn my passions into a career that means as much to me as haunting does to Victor Bariteau.

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Title: The American Scream
Director: Michael Stephenson
Starring: Victor Bariteau, Manny Souza, Matthew Brodeur, Richard Brodeur
Year Of Release: 2012
Viewing Method: Netflix Instant - Laptop

It's A Very Zombie Halloween With George A. Romero's Original DEAD Trilogy

"When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth."

After spending a month watching almost nothing but horror films, I had big plans to cap it all off for Halloween.  The Brattle was showing Night Of The Living Dead with a live band providing an alternative score to the film on October 30th and, as luck would have it, the Coolidge was showing Dawn Of The Dead on Halloween night.  That was just too good an opportunity to pass up, so I made sure to grab Day Of The Dead from Netflix well in advance and planned to go through the entire trilogy in order.

Then the World Series went to six games.

If I had tried to squeeze in the Brattle screening I would have missed the first half of the potentially clinching game and then had serious trouble trying to get into a bar for the last few innings.  So I made an executive decision and skipped out on that evening's showing, but since I'd already purchased my ticket for Dawn Of The Dead the following night I had no choice but to pray there wouldn't be a Game 7 and settle for watching the three films out of order.  Certainly not ideal, but still better than nothing.

I love that all three Dead movies exist in a shared universe and that you can see the zombie infestation growing exponentially worse and worse over the course of the trilogy.  Not only that, but each story increases in scope as well.  Night introduces the very first zombie attacks and keeps the action isolated to a handful of strangers who've barricaded themselves into a remote farmhouse.  Their only objective is survival, staying alive long enough to find some kind of help.  They don't know exactly what's happening or why, but such concerns are academic when there's a horde of ghouls (the word "zombie is never spoken) banging down the front door.  We do hear some radio and television news reporters struggling to get a handle on exactly what's happening out there and in fact the initial reports are classified simply as mass murders with an element of cannibalism.  It's not until the president starts convening with NASA scientists that it becomes clear that something far stranger is afoot.

PS: Night clearly attributes the zombies to radiation carried by a satellite returning from Venus.  That's about one step shy of an alien infestation or biological attack.  Why didn't anyone ever tell me this?  How did I not know that Romero's zombies actually come from space??

These early zombies also exhibit behavior would be considered pretty a-typical these days; a few of them use rocks and clubs to smash in windows or beat down doors and one even stabs a woman to death with a gardening trowel.  You don't often see zombies using tools in that way and indeed such unique behavior would go on to become a major plot point for Romero down the line.  From a visual standpoint, Romero's first batch of zombies are almost charmingly simple compared to the kind of stuff now seen every week on The Walking Dead.  The makeup isn't overly complex and the majority of the zombies simply appear gaunt and pale with a detached look in their eyes.  There are a few standouts, but most of the extras don't feature severed limbs, rotting flesh or festering wounds.  That's fine though, because the black and white aesthetic gives Romero a lot more bang for his few bucks and gives the nighttime setting a stronger sense of menace.

Dawn Of The Dead immediately throws us right into the deep end of the apocalypse, with a local news station struggling to stay on the air and broadcast accurate and useful information to the masses while riot police storm through housing projects in an effort to mop up both criminals and reanimated corpses alike.  The national infrastructure is still somewhat in place and we hear reporters talk about the President sending legislation to Congress, however it's clear that this is no longer just a series of isolated incidents but in fact a full blown national emergency.  Trying to stay ahead of the disaster, news producer (I think?) Francine and her pilot boyfriend Stephen fly off with SWAT officers Roger and Peter and eventually settle down in an abandoned shopping mall.  They clear out whatever zombies are inside and then lock the place down to prevent any outsiders, living or undead, from breaching their little corner of security.  After that the group finds themselves stocked with an embarrassment of riches.  The world may be sliding into chaos outside, but inside they've got piles of food, guns, ammunition, TVs, fur coats and fancy champagne.  Along with having their run of the entire mall, they actually turn an isolated old storage room into a secluded little bungalow, complete with a living room, love nest and fondue set!  It looks like good times and smooth sailing, despite the growing number of corpses walking around outside the gates.  Eventually they even fall victim to the ennui of the wealthy, idly skating around the empty ice rink and trading hundreds of meaningless dollars in a game of cards.  Stephen actually proposes to Francine but she turns him down because "it wouldn't be real," implying that their emotional bond isn't enough reason for them to stay together and that without a ceremony full of adoring onlookers their marriage would somehow be considered a sham.  Yet they're not willing to go out in the world and search for other survivors despite having their own helicopter.  They're won't risk their own ivory tower in order to help those most in need.

But as is customary when the 1% hordes necessary resources, eventually the 99% gets pissed and comes looking for a piece of the good life.  In this case, the common folk are embodied by a biker gang led by Tom Savini, who was also the film's head makeup artist.  (I'll forgive Savini the terrible blue-faced zombies only because the rest of his work is so outstanding.)  Once the bikers come upon the mall and realize that there are people living in there, they storm the gates and ransack the place, letting in a swarm of zombies in their wake.  But it's telling that the looters don't go after food, guns or essential supplies and instead snatch up jewelry, TVs and cold hard cash from the mall's bank branch.  It seems that everyone, from street thug to socialite, is preoccupied with a sense of crass materialism and ensuring their own comfort to the detriment of all.  They're willing to forego stark practicalities or deny the new status quo in order to cling to a reality that no longer exists, to say nothing of eschewing the simple morality of helping other people because there's safety in numbers.

Day Of The Dead escalates the scale of the zombie destruction even further.  The struggle between man and corpse has long since ended, with whole cities overrun by the undead and not a living soul in sight.  We meet a handful of survivors who've locked themselves away in an underground military bunker in Florida, the only remnants of a last ditch effort by the government to determine exactly why the dead are coming back to life and how to stop them.  These people, a hodgepodge of military personnel and research scientists, have all but given up searching for other people in the wreckage of civilization; the isolation, sleep deprivation and dwindling supplies have brought the group to the very brink of sanity.  The soldiers (one of which is played by effects artist Greg Nicotero) have devolved into screaming, violent lunatics who want nothing more than to abandon their post and satisfy their own bloodlust, while the scientists, led by Dr. Frankenstein, have come up frustratingly empty despite countless hours spent dissecting and studying the zombies they've trapped in an old mine shaft.  In fact, it's gotten so bad that Frankenstein has abandoned all attempts to stop the zombie outbreak and has instead turned to finding a way to domesticate the creatures.

Frankenstein asserts that since we can't get rid of the zombies we must learn to live in harmony by training them to perform menial tasks and not to think of living people as food.  (This same concept was amusingly realized at the end of Shaun Of The Dead.)  His star pupil is Bub, a.k.a. the single greatest character in the entire trilogy.  He's seems to exist in a state of childlike wonder, which makes sense considering that Frankenstein acts as a sort of father figure.  Watching Bub use a shaving razor, try to read Salem's Lot, or learn how to make music come out of a cassette deck is downright adorable and you almost forget about the creature's savage nature.  Of course the dark secret to Bub's success is that Frankenstein has been rewarding the zombie's progress by feeding him the remains of dead soldiers, the discovery of which sends Rhodes, Steel and the other soldiers completely over the edge and forces a final bloody showdown featuring unparalleled zombie carnage.  Most of the film is simply people arguing in a bunker (a setting that always feels like a cost-saving measure), so it's not until the film's final 15 minutes or so that we get any really good zombie kills.  But rest assured that your patience will pay off, as film's finale is an absolutely gleeful splatterfest of gore at the hands of a number of amusingly costumed zombies.  If you enjoyed the Hare Krishna zombie in Dawn, wait till you see some of the outfits in the finale of Day.

The progression of the zombie apocalypse and the human response to it over the course of all three films is pretty fascinating: the zombies begin to slowly evolve into actual people while humanity slips backwards and embraces its most base instincts.  Or at least all the white people do.  We've all grown accustomed to the horror trope of the black guy dying first, so you've got to give credit to Romero for giving each film a strong, intelligent black lead who always acts with dignity and never sheds his own morality just to stay alive.  Ben, Peter and John are all unflappable in the face of disaster and they're exactly the kind of guys you want by your side when you're fighting off legions of the undead.  It certainly stands in sharp contrast to The Walking Dead, a show that operates on the unspoken rule that the audience is only allowed to care about one black character at a time.  The fact that Michael and D'Angelo from The Wire are both still alive after four episodes feels like a minor miracle, but since they're both out on the same supply run right now I fully expect one of them to go down before they make it back to the prison.

I do feel like there's an element missing from Romero's original trilogy that The Walking Dead actually handles pretty well, and that's depicting an attempt to actually forge a life and perhaps even a community in the midst of the zombie wasteland.  Dawn spends a lot of time with the zombies as an almost abstract threat that only exists outside the safety of the mall.  Our heroes are insulated and able to live a life of idle contentment within the walls of their hideaway.  And while I don't necessarily think we're supposed to believe that the soldiers and scientists of Day are the last people left on Earth, they might as well be since we never meet anyone else.  Either way, those guys have already gone fully round the bend before the movie even starts.  But between Dawn and Day lies a middle ground, where zombies remain a threat and people struggle to survive but they're able to work together and maintain some semblance of hope for the future.  Zack Snyder's Dawn Of The Dead remake moves a little closer in that direction, but if my vague recollection of Land Of The Dead is correct then I think that's the droid I'm looking for here.  I'll have to give it another watch this week to be sure.

I'm reminded of my reaction to Contagion, in that it's fairly impossible to watch a zombie movie and not start coming up with your own zombie contingency plan.  I actually love the shopping mall idea if only because it would provide you with a wealth of resources, but such a place would also surely attract Savini-esque looters.  The trick is to find a secure, defensible location that lies outside of a major population zone.  Hopefully that would ensure fewer zombies to deal with but also perhaps fewer marauders.  As much as I criticize the callous and insular behavior of Dawn's heroes, I have to admit that in the same situation I would probably act in a similar fashion, wary of broadcasting my position to outsiders.  Sure I have an intellectual problem with that now, but when it's a matter of personal survival with no promise of rescue or safe haven, it's hard to imagine what I wouldn't do to protect myself and those closest to me.  You want to believe you can take in strays and help others, but as I just admitted we all have the capacity for ruthless action when our back is up against the wall.  In the zombie apocalypse, all bets are off.

I will say this.  My disdain for "fast zombies" has now grown exponentially.



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Title: Night Of The Living Dead
Director: George A. Romero
Starring:  Duane Jones, Judith O'Dea, Karl Hardman, Marilyn Eastman, Keith Wayne, Judith Riley
Year Of Release: 1968
Viewing Method: Netflix DVD

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Title: Dawn Of The Dead
Director: George A. Romero
Starring: Ken Foree, David Emge, Scott H. Reiniger, Gaylen Ross, David Early, Tom Savini
Year Of Release: 1978
Viewing Method: Theatrical - Coolidge Corner

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Title: Day Of The Dead
Director: George A. Romero
Starring: Lori Cardille, Terry Alexander, Jospeh Pilato, Richard Liberty, Jarlath Conroy, Anthony Dileo Jr., Sherman Howard, G. Howard Klar, Greg Nicotero
Year Of Release: 1985
Viewing Method: Netflix DVD

24 Hours Of Halloween Horror Part II: Revenge Of The Coolidge!

I’m a bit of a crazy person.

My friends Jason and Lucy loooooove Halloween and, more specifically, Halloween movies.  Every year they host a movie marathon full of all sorts of crazy shit and I’ve been looking forward to it ever since they first put the bug in my ear a few months ago.  They set the date for the Saturday before Halloween, scheduling 12 hours of non-stop horror from noon to midnight.  The only hitch was that I had already planned on attending the Coolidge's 13^th Annual Halloween Marathon, taking place immediately thereafter from midnight to noon.  For most people this would present an insurmountable problem, forcing them to choose one marathon over the other.

I just said fuck it and went to both.

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Like a lot of independent movie theaters, the Coolidge really goes all out for Halloween.  This year they kicked off their annual Halloween movie marathon with a quick but energetic set from local punk band The Mangled Dead, whose skeleton faced lead singer skateboarded down the aisle and onto the stage.  The performance was quickly followed up with a costume contest.  I was wearing my newly acquired Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man costume, but I was hopelessly outmatched by the other competitors, which included a giant flag waving Sgt. Slaughter, Tippi Hedron from The Birds, the personification of Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles (yum) and the best Gozer the Gozerian I've ever seen.  But the eventual victors were two guys who sat on the shoulders of two other guys and then wore long coats, bowler hats and fake mustaches, explaining that they were "two perfectly ordinary gentlemen who are certainly old enough to see this movie."  The clever gag quickly became an endurance test to see how long the guys on the bottom could hold out before collapsing or dropping their friends, but that only endeared them to the crowd even more.  After that it was movie time.

The only titles that the Coolidge announced in advance were the first two movies, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, both of which were influenced by real life killer Ed Gein.  I've each both film a few times and totally love them, but I made an executive decision that if I was going to make it through some of the later films that I surely would not have seen, I was gonna need some nap time.  So I stayed awake through all the Marion Crane stuff in Psycho and the great scene where Arbogast interrogates Norman Bates and then gets pushed down a flight of stairs for his trouble, but otherwise I closed my eyes and let myself drift off throughout the movie.  And I caught the beginning of Texas Chainsaw including the great scene with the hitchhiker in the van, but then I dozed off until Sally hailed down the truck driver at the very end.    Next up was A Nightmare On Elm Street, which I had just watched the previous night, so I actually took that time to be productive.  I slipped out into the hallway, pulled out my laptop and knocked out my Krueger write up, popping back in just to see Johnny Depp get liquefied.

13 Ghosts (1960)

Oh that William Castle.  What an innovator.  Castle is considered the king of B-movie horror, but here's a guy who absolutely reveled in fucking with his audience while generating active engagement and interaction with the images on screen.  And he always came up with the most adorable names for his theatrical gimmicks.  The House On Haunted Hill included "Emergo," consisting of an actual skeleton on a wire that would fly out over the audience to mimic the onscreen action of the film's finale.  The Tingler was about a creature that would attach itself to the human spine and could only be killed by the sound of screaming.  In the end the creature is said to have gotten loose in the theater, so Castle bought up surplus airplane de-icers from the military and attached the vibrating motors to the bottom of some theater seats, calling it "Percepto."  (The urban legend is that Castle actually gave audience members electric shocks.)  But 13 Ghosts utilized what Castle called "Illusion-o": the audience members were given "ghost viewers," similar to the traditional red and blue 3D glasses but with the lenses laid out as parallel horizontal panes.  The film is shown in black and white, but any scene that includes a ghost is colored blue while the ghost itself is shown in red.  If you wanted to see the ghost you'd look through the red pane, but if you were "too scared" you could look through the blue pane and it would remain invisible.

While the Coolidge didn't have the original ghost viewers handy (and they would have been too expensive to actually make again) they did have a supply of 3D glasses that they handed out.  Whenever a ghost scene came up, you'd drop the glasses down over your eyes and then just close one eye or the other depending on what view you wanted to see.  If you kept both eyes open you could see both images at the same time and there was a faint 3D-ish effect while your brain tried to resolve the two colors.  It was really entertaining and  I can't help but think that Hollywood is in dire need of a new William Castle, a filmmaker who's willing to really go out on a limb in order to build unique theatrical experiences that will make people really want to go to the theater again.  Then again, Emergo screenings eventually devolved into a bunch of kids throwing empty soda cups and candy boxes to try and knock down the skeleton, which is pretty much the 1950's version of kids texting during the movie.

I don't have much to say about the movie itself, about a down on their luck family who inherit a haunted mansion, because I'll admit that I inadvertently drifted off a few times through this one as well, but I always managed to wake up whenever there was ghost effect happening.  Even still, I'm now morbidly curious to check out the remake with Matthew Lillard.

The House By The Cemetery (1981)

More Fulci!  This one is not nearly as coherent as Zombie Flesh Eaters, but it certainly is sillier. Again we've got a family that moves into a creepy old house (by a cemetery!) but instead of ghosts this one has an immortal mutant of sorts living in the basement.  After a researcher goes mad and seemingly kills himself and his mistress while investigating the experiments of a crazy scientist named Dr. Freudstein, Norman Boyle moves his wife Lucy and young son Bob into the man's house to continue the research.  Bob soon meets a little girl that no one else can see, there's a weird babysitter who doesn't talk and a whole lot of characters behaving in ways that make little to no sense.  At one point the family grows so disturbed that they tell the estate agent they want to move out of the house immediately.  The agent soon arrives at the empty house and is brutally murdered by the evil basement dweller, leaving a huge trail of blood across the floor.  The next scene shows mute babysitter Ann scrubbing away the blood only to have Lucy walk in with a bag of groceries, acting like there's absolutely nothing strange about that.  There are no more discussions of leaving the house.  The traditional Italian post-dubbing of all the dialogue certainly doesn't mitigate the inadvertent humor of it all and only makes the whole enterprise feel even more absurd.  And every time young Bob opened his mouth, especially whenever he was talking to his possibly imaginary friend, all I could think of was the kid from Pod People, my favorite episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

There is some great gore and a couple of really awesome death scenes, including a sweet decapitation and a whopper of a kill in the first few minutes.  But there are long stretches of the film that are unbearably slow.  It's an oddity to be sure, a few moments of delightful insanity surrounded by a borderline incomprehensible mess.

Near Dark (1987)

At this point it was about 8:00 AM and the crowd had definitely thinned out a bit.  The staff had stopped introducing every film after 13 Ghosts, which meant we got no preface, description or explanation for what we were about to watch and had to discover it all as it unfolded.  I'd never heard of Near Dark before, but as every credit flashed across the screen I knew I was in for a treat.  Lance Henriksen.  Bill Paxton.  Adrian Pasdar.  Written and directed by a pre-Point Break Kathryn Bigelow.  I'm already in.

Pasdar jumps out of his pickup truck in a dusty denim jacket and a beat up cowboy hat, and it suddenly hits me like a ton of bricks.  There's always been something oddly familiar about him but I could never place my finger on it.  But seeing him as a Caleb The Cowboy I had a flash of Necessary Roughness and finally realized that Pasdar is an off-brand, humorless version of Scott Bakula.  Henceforth he shall be referred to solely as Not Bakula.  So Caleb The Cowboy meets a hot, ethereal young blonde named Mae and they drive around and look at the stars for a while until Mae really wants to go home and Caleb The Cowboy refuses to give her a ride until she makes out with him a bunch.  She obliges and then takes a big old bite out of his neck and HOLY SHIT Kathryn Bigelow made a vampire movie and nobody told me!

The sun comes up as Caleb The Cowboy is stumbling home and he's starting to look a bit extra crispy when suddenly a Winnebago with blacked out windows pulls up and grabs him right in front of Caleb's father and sister.  Inside we find Lance Henriksen as lead vamp Jesse, Jenette Goldstein as his wife Diamondback, an adolescent vampire named Homer (not making this up) and a full-on manic Bill Paxton as Severen, the loose cannon vampire.  This thing just gets better and better!

Then it doesn't.

Look, if this was a movie about an awesome cadre vampires (played almost entirely by the space marines from Aliens) who steal cars and attack dumb hillbillies as they wander across the southwest, well you couldn't pry me away from that movie.  Especially with Henriksen and Paxton at the wheel.  There aren't a lot of pointy fangs or transformations or really any of the traditional vampire tropes.  In fact, nobody ever says the word vampire, which lends the whole thing a somewhat classier vibe.  But whenever the Weyland-Yutani crew are on screen, everything pops.  There's a scene where the posse wanders into a dive bar and each vampire gets to take down the patron of their choice.  But instead of a fast and brutal attack, it's all done with cheeky and lackadaisical sense of fun - these guys really like to play with their food.  That's not to say it isn't violent; the waitress gets her throat ripped open, but instead of sucking her dry Henriksen shoves a beer mug under the wound and and fills it up, using her throat as a beer tap.  And I simply cannot overstate how wonderfully psychotic Paxton is here.  Look, I like Apollo 13 as much as the next guy, but I really miss young, vibrant Bill Paxton.  There's also a daytime shoot out with the cops at a motel that's brilliantly staged; the cops don't know they're dealing with vampires, but they're outside shooting holes in the walls and each hole lets in a shaft of sunlight that acts like a laser beam to the solar-averse banditos inside.  It's both energetic and beautiful, all the more impressive considering that it was Bigelow's first solo directing gig.  It's little wonder she's got an Oscar.

Unfortunately, Not Bakula kind of sucks.  He's squeamish about killing people so he spends most of the film moping around being lame while Paxton gives him shit for being such a wimp.  He doesn't belong in this crew of badasses and everyone knows it.  But there's also no dire conflict between Caleb The Cowboy and his new undead family.  He doesn't seem to mind the fact that they're totally fucking evil so long as he gets to keep making out with Mae and doesn't have to get his own hands bloody.  It's only when they accidentally bump into Caleb's family and Homer wants to turn his sister into a new immortal playmate that Caleb The Cowboy decides to abandon the group and return home.  It's hard to watch Near Dark without thinking of the The Lost Boys, especially since they were released in the same year.  Unfortunately for Bigelow and Not Bakula, the former utterly pales in comparison to the latter, lacking the sense of fun that comes part and parcel with the presence of The Coreys.  Also, the romance between Caleb The Cowboy and Mae is the dullest, least sexy vampire romance I've ever seen.  Oh yeah, and they cure Caleb's vampirism with a simple blood transfusion.  Lame sauce.

Near Dark is nearly a good movie.  The story is pretty slight, but I honestly wouldn't mind that if only the incredible supporting cast wasn't being dragged down by the lead weight of Not Bakula.

Brain Damage (1988)

Part low budget schlock horror, part after school special, Brain Damage is the tale one man whose life gets flushed into the shitter due to his own unfortunate addiction.  The rub is that his addiction comes in the form of Elmer (or Aylmer), a blue, wormlike parasite with adorable eyes and the voice of a friendly neighbor who releases a chemical that allows the host to totally trip balls while experiencing psychedelic euphoria.  But while you're busy tasting colors, Elmer off in the corner eating some poor fool's brain.

The story is your basic morality tale detailing the nightmares of drug addiction.  Our protagonist Brian gets seduced by the smooth talking and just this side of cute Elmer, who promises incredible highs if Brian will just put the creature on the back of his neck.  Elmer unhinges his jaw, revealing the horrifying array of jagged teeth, and extends a long needle from inside his mouth that reaches all the way into Brian's brain and drips a blue liquid onto his grey matter.  It makes Brian downright giddy and the experience is so intense that soon his normal life just doesn't measure up.  He locks himself away in his room, stops going to work and won't talk to his brother or his girlfriend Barbara.  And when he does go out on a date, he ends up running out on her and getting high in the alley, only to wander into a punk club and get a blowjob from a random woman in leather who ends up getting a mouthful of Elmer.  Not a euphemism, although I think I just made it one.

Once Brian realizes that people are dying and the old man that Elmer escaped from delivers a long monologue explaining the creature's intricate history, Brian locks himself away in a seedy motel room and tries to quit cold turkey.  He ends up going through a painful withdrawal, twitching and foaming at the mouth while Elmer splashes around in the sink and taunts Brian, even singing a fucking song about his own awesomeness.  Eventually Brian gives in and the two basically go on a killing spree that includes his now ex-girlfriend who's found comfort in the arms of Brian's brother.  Needless to say, it doesn't end well for Brian.  Like any good drug addict, eventually he overdoses and gets so much juice to the brain that his head literally explodes in light.

All the drug stuff is about as subtle as a mouthful of Elmer and you're certainly not going to dazzled by the dramatic prowess of star Rick Hearst, but that little blue worm is such an oddly entertaining creation that you simply cannot take your eyes off of him.  His voice is almost hypnotically soothing, like the host of an easy listening radio station, and the combination of puppetry and stop-motion feels like the unholy demon spawn of Jim Henson and Henry Selick.  It's unreal, in that I can't believe this is a real movie.  Fans of director Frank Henenlotter, a.k.a. the man behind Frankenhooker, will recognize a familiar man and his basket riding on a subway car near the end.

This is how I'm going to teach my children about the dangers of drug addiction, and I don't even need to buy it because you can watch the whole thing on YouTube.

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The lights came up and the once packed theater was now only about a quarter full.  I gathered up my belongings, stumbled out into the sunshine and drove home just in time for the start of the Patriots game.  You'd think that I would have passed out for the rest of the day, but I was surprisingly alert.  It's at this point my wife would point out that I almost never consume caffeine, not out of any kind of pretension or moral superiority, but simply because I don't like the taste of coffee and soda.  Unless there's booze involved, of course.

The Pats put the beatdown on Miami and a few hours later the Sox got retribution for Game 3: up by two runs in the bottom of the ninth with two outs, a man on first and Carlos Beltran, one of St. Louis's best hitters at the plate, Red Sox closer Koji Uehara snapped the ball to first baseman Mike Napoli who tagged out the runner.  It was the first time a World Series game has ended on a pickoff play.

We were still in this thing.

24 Hours Of Halloween Horror Part I: Zombies And Slashers and Universal Classics

I’m a bit of a crazy person.

My friends Jason and Lucy loooooove Halloween and, more specifically, Halloween movies.  Every year they host a movie marathon full of all sorts of crazy shit and I’ve been looking forward to it ever since they first put the bug in my ear a few months ago.  They set the date for the Saturday before Halloween, scheduling 12 hours of non-stop horror from noon to midnight.  The only hitch was that I had already planned on attending the Coolidge's 13^th Annual Halloween Marathon, taking place immediately thereafter from midnight to noon.  For most people this would present an insurmountable problem, forcing them to choose one marathon over the other.

I just said fuck it and went to both.

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I arrived at Jason and Lucy's apartment in Somerville just before noon.  I was the first one there, but they had clearly been prepping the place for quite some time.  The living room was packed with enough comfy chairs, pillows and blankets to seat about 15 people with nary a bad seat in the house.  I snagged myself a prime spot on the couch and settled in while loads of bizarre horror trailers looped on the TV and Halloween music drifted out of the speakers.  Jason hung sheets to black out the windows while Lucy literally cranked up their Whirley Pop and filled two big bowls with perfectly seasoned popcorn.  Throw in the two jack-o-lantern buckets stuffed with candy (one chocolate, one fruity), the refrigerator full of beers and the impending pizza delivery, it quickly became clear that I'd be taking a break from conscientious eating.*  It was also clear that this was gonna be a good day.

Let the madness begin!

Zombie Flesh Eaters, a.k.a. Zombie, a.k.a. Zombi 2 (1979)

Yes, that's right.  That's a zombie fighting a shark.

We started the day with Lucio Fucli's undead masterpiece Zombie Flesh Eaters, originally sold in Italy as an unofficial sequel to Romero's Dawn Of The Dead.  The story centers on a reporter and a woman who travel to a tropical island in search of her father after the old man's boat arrives in New York Harbor with only a single zombie on board.  They track down a British doctor who's been doing experiments and studying the locals, many of whom seem to be rising from the grave to attack the living.  Soon it's a race to evade the zombie hordes and get off the island alive.

A perfect way to kick things off.  After the initial zombie attack the story is a bit slow to get started, but really Fulci's just lulling you into a false sense of security.  The second half of the film is full of some really fantastic zombie attacks, including the infamous one above in which an underwater zombie fights off an actual shark.  (The zombie is actually the shark trainer in heavy makeup.)  There's also a really fantastic scene in which the doctor's wife gets a pretty serious splinter to the face.  It's incredibly cool that Fulci is able to use Romero's modern zombie sensibility while also bringing it all back to island voodoo, the proper birthplace of zombies.  The last thirty minutes is chock full of that really awesome Italian gore, with latex skin and gurgling red paint galore.  And, like so many Italian films of that era, the cast is made up of both English and Italian speaking actors, all of whom speak their own native language with no sound recorded on set.  That means every line of dialogue is done in post, so sometimes it feels like you're watching a dubbed foreign film and sometimes it just feels like you're watching an American film made up entirely of shitty ADR.  There's an inherently comical element to the disconnect between what you're seeing and what you're hearing; combine that with some really well staged zombie attacks (I'm particularly fond of the conquistador graveyard) and the first rate make-up and practical effects, and you've got an absolute classic with a seriously killer ending.

The Mummy (1932)

I was feeling guilty about going through an entire month of horror films without ever getting around to any of the Universal Classic Monsters, something I planned on doing way back in week two.  I felt so bad that I even forced myself to purchase the Blu-ray boxed set of beautiful new restorations when Amazon had it listed at over 50% off last week.  Thankfully, Jason makes it a point to watch at least one Universal Monster movie every October and this year he settled on The Mummy starring Boris Karloff in the title role.  He brings a remarkable sense of quiet menace to Imhotep, who only appears as the traditional cloth-wrapped corpse in the film's opening scene.  He's quickly revived and escapes into the desert, at which point the film jumps forward ten years and Karloff spends the rest of the film posing as a wrinkled contemporary Egyptian.  My understanding is that the incongruity between the general public's perception of these characters and their actual early execution is a running theme throughout these films.

Technically this is considered the source material for the Stephen Sommers franchise starring Brendan Fraser, but there aren't a whole lot of similarities.  Arnold Vosloo's character is also named Imhotep and the plot still centers around his attempt to reincarnate an ancient Egyptian princess in the body of a modern day beauty, but everything else is radically different.  Sommers' film is a rollicking adventure tale, with Fraser as the wannabe Indiana Jones, but Karl Freund's original is an exotic supernatural mystery that's far darker in tone.  Each have their own time and place I suppose.  The restoration here is so good that I'm really excited to delve into my shiny new boxed set even further.  Maybe I can knock out one movie a week or something.

Karloff has a weird line about how he doesn't like to be touched because of his "Eastern prejudice."  That phrase would become a running joke throughout the day.

Bud Abbot And Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

Another great introduction to the Universal Classics.  About fifteen minutes into this movie I realized that not only was it the first time I was seeing Bella Lugosi's Dracula or Lon Chaney Jr's Wolfman, but it was also the first time I was seeing Abbott and Costello doing something other than arguing about baseball.  We do miss out on Karloff as Frankenstein's Monster, but it doesn't feel like a huge loss because the character is barely present in the movie.  There's a pretty remarkable blending of tones here: Abbot and Costello are as funny as ever, but Lugosi and Chaney are playing their famous characters pretty straight, resisting the urge to really ham it up or mock themselves to keep up with the comedians.  Everyone's just sort of doing their own thing and having a ball doing it and somehow it all just falls into place.  There's a whole lot of Costello encountering the monsters while Abbott is out of the room and while that might sound tiring on paper, watching the two of them argue is so entertaining that I not only didn't mind the contrivance, I actually wanted it to last the whole movie, for Abbott to NEVER see the monsters and remain convinced that Costello was just imagining things the whole time.

There's a whole running gag about two beautiful women named Sandra and Joan who are seemingly infatuated with Costello while Abbott keeps trying to convince his friend to "let him have one," talking about the women like they were cheeseburgers.  It's easy to write this behavior off as just an unfortunate relic of a bygone era, but I actually think the film is smarter than that.  Neither of the women is actually interested in Costello and they're both playing him to serve a greater agenda - Sandra wants to steal his brain to put in Frankenstein's Monster and Joan is an undercover insurance investigator who suspects the duo of theft.  The men's misogyny is thus undermined by two women who are both smart and capable and they make Abbott and Costello look like even bigger fools for trying to trade them like a pack of gum.  In reality both Sandra and Joan have the ability to completely destroy these men in very different ways, and Abbott and Costello have absolutely no idea what's really going on.  It's actually a fairly clever subplot that feels sharply ahead of its time.

Also, the hand drawn animations whenever Dracula turns into a bat totally rule.

Re-Animator (1985)

This is another flick I've been meaning to watch for years, despite knowing almost nothing about it other than that it stars Jeffrey Combs (familiar to me from his numerous roles on the various Star Treks) as a scientist who can bring back the dead thanks to a syringe full of some glowing green stuff.  That's actually the only thing you really need to know, as the movie isn't really concerned with exploring the characters with any kind of depth or even explaining exactly what's in the mystery reagent and how Dr. Herbert West managed to get his hands on it.  All that really matters is that West has got a duffel bag full of the stuff and he's willing to use it.  Director Stuart Gordon knows exactly what kind of movie he's making and he powers through all the perfunctory plot stuff in order to linger on violent reanimated corpses and insanely great visuals that will make you laugh and scream simultaneously.

West is a perfect mad scientist, singularly focused and unconcerned with trivialities like politeness or, you know, morality of any kind.  All that matters to him is results and if that means being a tremendous dickhead  or killing your cat ("Details later.") then so be it.  Generally you'd expect an upright, idealistic hero to counterbalance a character like West, but his nice guy roommate Dan is such a boring pushover that he practically blends into the background.  Bruce Abbott can't hold his own with anyone in a scene, including Mace the security guard and his copy of Boudoir magazine.  (That's not a gramatical error.  The guy gets upstaged by a magazine.)  Barbara Crampton, who was lovely in the recent You're Next, acquits herself well as Dan's girlfriend Meg, even if her character is often left with little to do other than scream at the madness all around her.  But neither of these characters ever properly take charge of the situation and assert themselves.  Instead they just get sort of sucked into West's insanity and hold on for the ride.  The only other character that really steps up is Dr. Hill, the supremely creepy teacher who wants to bang Meg and steal West's potion for his own fame and fortune.  Hill's an outright villain - if he had a mustache, he'd spend half the movie twirling it - so by the time we get to the film's conclusion, in which Hill creates an army of reanimated and lobotomized corpses to do his bidding, (it's awesome) Herbert West practically becomes the fucking hero by default!  It's a hell of a turnaround and a great subversion of the classic and anticipated plot structure for this kind of movie.  Instead of Dan and/or Meg growing a spine and standing up to West, the movie simply introduces an even BIGGER asshole scientist so that West looks practically altruistic by comparison.

I'm tiptoeing around the finale a bit because there's some stuff in there that's absurd, great and just absurdly great and I was grateful to not know it was coming in advance.  Re-Animator is currently streaming on Netflix.  Watch it with friends and beers.

Black Christmas (1974)

Black Christmas was released the same year as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and the two films pretty much gave birth to the modern slasher genre.  But whereas Leatherface begat killers like Jason, Freddy and Michael Myers, Black Christmas is the direct forebearer of the more grounded, domestic killing sprees of films like Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, When A Stranger Calls or Prom Night, where it's less about the actual killer and more about executing the concept.  Here we've got a sorority house full of attractive young girls who are preparing to leave school for Christmas break.  An unseen killer, presented entirely through first person POV (You're welcome Friday The 13th!) sneaks into the house and starts to slowly pick the girls off one by one while simultaneously calling the house and screaming almost indecipherable obscenities over the phone.  Nobody is the wiser until the first victim's father arrives to bring her home and she's nowhere to be found.  The largely inept local police, led by John Saxon (who would later play Nancy's father in A Nightmare On Elm Street) finally start to take notice when a little girl is found murdered in the park nearby.  They put a tap on the sorority's phone and we get some great scenes of the phone company guy literally running up and down corridors trying to find what physical switch the call is coming from, leading to the infamous and destined to be co-opted line, "The calls are coming from inside the house!"

It's a great cast, including Olivia Hussey,  a wonderfully boozy Margot Kidder, a big-haired Andrea Martin (who would appear in the 2008 remake) and Marian Waldman as Mrs. Mac, the well-meaning house mother who's constantly sneaking shots of straight sherry from a collection of bottles hidden all over the house.  And while none of the kills are particularly gruesome, they are all pretty varied and fun.  We get suffocation by plastic bag, a pulley hook to the face and a stabbing with a crystal unicorn head among others.  But otherwise it's not a terribly flashy movie.  If you didn't know that Black Christmas was the film that influenced generations of horror filmmakers, you'd be tempted to write it off as just another movie about a psycho killing a herd of young hotties.  What sets it apart is that it got there first and set the bar for everyone that followed.  That and the film's ending, a really ballsy decision that not only have I never seen copied before, but one that provoked a perfect reaction from our assembled ranks.  Black Christmas is the one that started it all and it's just as great today as it ever was.

Sleepaway Camp (1983)

HOLY.  FUCK.

This movie was so insanely great that I simply cannot contain myself.  The fact that it does not exist on Blu-ray and the DVD looks to be out of print is downright criminal.

While I had heard the title before, I knew absolutely nothing about this movie going into it and trust me, that's the ideal situation.  In fact, I really hesitate to say anything at all about the movie and would rather just implore you to pull it straight to the top of your Netflix queue.  (Sadly it's not streaming on Netflix, although a few of the surely disappointing sequels are.  UPDATE: Jason rightly pointed out that the whole movie is available in HD on fucking YouTube of all places.  But seriously, plug your laptop into your TV.  It's worth it.)  The basic premise is obvious from the title: a series of brutal murders take place at a sleepaway camp and the killer's identity remains a mystery.  There is SOOO much more going on though and delving into really any detail would be a massive disservice.  Yeah, it feels silly to contort myself like this to avoid spoilers for a 30 year old movie, but Sleepaway Camp is very much a cult title and I'd rather use this as a platform to convince you to check this thing out for yourself, especially if you're a fan of seriously fucked up movies.  The film's final freeze frame is one of the most disturbing images I've ever seen in a movie and it's little wonder that it remains on screen throughout and even after the credits roll.  If any of that sounds appealing, stop reading now and just watch it.  You can thank me later.

Still here?  Okay, I will say this much: the more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that Sleepaway Camp is one of the most brilliantly executed stylistic fake outs I've ever seen.  Especially watching the film today, you get so wrapped up in all the hilarious 80's fashion (some of the shortest shorts I've ever seen) and some really over the top performances in the supporting roles that you're quickly convinced you're just watching a bad movie.  But a lot of those weird performances and confusing story choices are really just a smokescreen that serve to keep you off balance and set up a finale that will absolutely knock you sideways.  Sleepaway Camp is a dark shard of psychological horror masquerading as low budget cheese.  It's like if you started out watching Troll 2 and at the end it had suddenly turned into Seven.

You must watch this movie.

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After Sleepaway Camp it was a little after 11:00 PM, which gave me just enough time to make my way over to the Coolidge before the festivities kicked off there.  I was missing out on Game 3 of the World Series, so I listened to the local radio broadcast on my way across town.  When I pulled up in front of the theater the Sox had tied the game up for the second time, but by the start of the first movie St Louis had won on a controversial and now-infamous obstruction call at third base.  (I agree that the ump made the correct call, but I also think that the rule itself probably needs to be revisited to consider intent.  Major League Baseball agrees.)

But no matter.  The Sox had plenty more games of baseball to play, and I had twelve more hours of movies to watch.


UP NEXT: Midnight To Noon At The Coolige!


*I've put myself back on my pre-wedding diet, although I haven't been quite as strict about it this time.  Getting to the gym has proven difficult, so it was either eat better or buy all new clothes.  I chose the former.

Programming Note: Welcome To The Shocktober Halloweenie FrightFest Spooktacular!

A future picture of me 31 days from now.

I couldn't come up with a single clever bit of wordplay to title my month-long detour into horror, so I settled on the longest, most unwieldy thing possible.

Yes that's right, for the month of October I'll be reveling in the Halloween spirit by watching (almost) nothing but movies about ghosts, demons, monsters, psychopaths, and all the things that haunt our collective nightmares.  Jamie actively hates horror movies, so I expect I'll be spending a lot of time this month by my lonesome.  Perhaps I should just turn into the skid and make a point to watch most of these late at night in my darkened apartment.

To be fair I'm not actually going to watch 31 horror movies.  For example, yesterday I watched Best Worst Movie, which is a documentary about the cult favorite Troll 2.  I've also been saving The American Scream, another doc by Michael Stephenson about people who go way overboard turning their homes into giant haunted house attractions for All Hallow's Eve.  There are a few special, non-horror screenings I'm planning on as well, including a sneak preview of Captain Phillips tonight and The Maltese Falcon at the Brattle on Sunday.  I've also got the Brattle Watch-A-Thon in two weeks (please donate here!) and a handful of other off-genre new releases.  I love a good gimmick as much as the next guy, but if you think I'm not going to see Gravity in 3D IMAX this weekend, you're an insane person.

But I'm hoping to make this month a bit more interactive!  I've got more than enough scary shit to fill up the month of October, but please keep sending me your favorites!  You'd be surprised at some of the staples of the genre that I've just never gotten around to, including the majority of films starring Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers.  I plan on doing a lot of live-tweeting as well, so you can follow along at home if you like and snark along with me.  Or, if we're friends outside of the internet, feel free to come over and take in the madness.

After all, terror is always better when it's shared among friends.