Evil Dead (2013)

This artwork by Laz Marquez is EV-ER-YTHING.

I remember when I first saw a trailer for this, and it looked INTENSE. So much so that I didn't go and see it on its theatrical release. Tongue slitting?! Wow... that's a bit much.

Well, times have changed! And just recently I was in the mood to pop this on and finally see how I felt about Fede Alvarez's take on the Evil Dead thing. And, honestly, I felt pretty entertained!

After a gorgeous title card/opening shot one-two punch, we're introduced to a group of college kids. In a spin on the original set-up, Mia (Jane Levy, doing most of the work but doing it brilliantly) is being isolated in this cabin in the middle of nowhere in order to go through drug addiction withdrawals. Her brother David (Shiloh Fernandez) accompanies her to supervise, along with his girlfriend and Mia's friends (including Spring's Lou Taylor Pucci).

David is warned that his sister has paid lip service to quitting before, with all the heartfelt declarations and ceremony they just witnessed as she threw her drugs away moments before. So, he's told, they have to be harder on her this time if it's really going to work. This is obviously almost instantly the cue for demonic shit to go down and no one initially believing Mia, assuming she's either attempting to manipulate them or hallucinating through her withdrawal.

But as we know: she's not. This is demon dinnertime.

Fans of the originals will recognise some iconic plot points like the tree assault (feeling WAY less exploitative than the 1981 version but still horrible [I watched that to remind myself and YIKES x100]), the Book of the Dead (bound in trash bags and barbed wire; nice touch) the tool shed and an Oldsmobile sitting out to rust near the cabin.

This was neither as sick as I had assumed it would be, nor as redundant. And what I really enjoyed about it was the dirt under its nails. 99% of this film feels deeply unclean; slick with sweat/rain/vomit/blood and caked in mud (and blood!). When horror successfully feels so tainted, I'm so completely on board. I love it when world-within-the-movie feels this soiled.

Sure, the drug comedown madness/evil infiltration thing is a horror trope, but it works like a charm here, and once the demons have an "in" with this group, it's almost non-stop evisceration, self-amputation and screaming.

Taking into account the serious, practical gore + solid story + exceptionally bold visuals (the cinematography was by Aaron Morton, who's since worked on Black Mirror) I feel I must recommend Evil Dead. There's not much about this I can fault. Perhaps the ending? Just slightly? But that may only be because it's where we veer off from the known path more than at any other time and I wasn't quite ready for that. On subsequent viewings, I suspect I'll appreciate it more. For its pure insanity if nothing else.

Now that I've come to accept reboots, reimaginings and their ilk, it's easier to get excited about them. At the end of the day, it's more horror, and that's a good problem to have. None of these films will ever undo the classics, so why not enjoy them? Especially when they are as competently made as this is.

Perhaps the most disturbing shot in the movie, for me.

Raimi and Campbell were in fact producers on this movie. Apparently, the original plan was to make a sequel connecting both this and the originals, as this iteration was said to be set in the same continuity. Such info kind of boggles my mind as tonally they are so different; there are very few moments of levity here. I'm sad a connecting sequel didn't happen, as I can't imagine the middle ground. Would have been interested to see Raimi/Campbell and Alvarez mashup?!

I rented this on Google Play so I imagine it's easy to get hold of if you've yet to see it!

Black Christmas (2006)

I'll never underplay how much I love the original Black Christmas, so when this remake was announced, I was not interested in the slightest. To the point of being offended that they were even bothering to try. I turned my nose up at the mere thought of it for years.

I am now older and wiser (well, older at least, etc etc) and realise that boycotting for these reasons - especially 11 years later! - is pointless , because y'know what? Sometimes remakes are all right.

That's a good word to describe this movie: alright. It's an interesting watch for fans of the original, and it's certainly got gore aplenty (which is a complicated aspect, as I'll explain later) but it never becomes anything more than an explicit and un-scary rehash of a classic.

Let's break it down...

The Good:

• An actress who played one of the 1974 sorority girls plays the 2006 house mother.

Andrea Martin was Phyllis in Black Christmas (1974).

• There's a moment where the sound of Billy slurping down prison food is overlapped with the slurping of a couple making out in a car.
• Visually, it looks great, drenched mostly in a colour palette lifted straight from Christmas lights.
• There's a really awesome shot that pushes through the branches of a Christmas tree, to reveal Billy lurking behind it. Really well done.

• Someone dies by having a giant icicle fall on their head.
• In amongst some pretty pedestrian eye violence, there's a moment that made me say "oh, jesus" 👀
• This shot:

The Bad:

• The drunk/lush character is truly awful. Even without comparing her to Margot Kidder's Barb, she's the worst.

• I have never enjoyed Lacey Chabert in anything.
• This is an incredibly early 2000's version of this story...
• ...Meaning almost all of the cast are sarcastic ad-campaign-pretty sorority girls (did anyone else have trouble telling them apart?).
• ...And cell phones are EVERYWHERE. I want to watch this again and do a shot every time someone is shown with a flip phone. #motorolarazrlife
• It's light on suspense, heavy on jump scares and splatter (the studio demanded extreme gore: the director didn't want that. Always a winning recipe - see below).
• Billy's backstory is told - often through clumsy exposition - in full. It's really messed up, which is pretty cool, but it also eradicates any sense of a terrifying unknown threat.

Oh, and he's yellow.

• Being a sorority house, they hammer away at the sisterhood thing like mad, but it never really sticks. There's no sense of love or bond between this group of women, despite their insistence otherwise.
• Billy is obsessed with ripping eyes out?! The one thing they don't explain about him.

You see, this movie doesn't make it easy to sit back and attempt to judge it on its own merits. Even though there's a lot added to the story, there are just too many things either lifted straight from, or heavily nodding towards Black Christmas (1974). I honestly tried to take it at face value, but it ultimately suffered from my knowing the original so well.

It's not worth actively avoiding, but considering its roots, it's an unremarkable, predictable stalk and slash.

The making of Black Christmas (2006) and what happened afterward, seems complicated and rather sad. Apparently director Glen Morgan was good friends with Bob Clark (director of the original) and had him come aboard as an executive producer, remaining on set for shooting. Clark saw the finished product before his death, and even though IMDb doesn't state what he thought of it, this interview suggests he was at least very happy with the backstory elements that were introduced here.

However, as mentioned above, the extreme gore was a matter of some dispute between Morgan and producer Bob Weinstein. Bizarrely, the film was marketed using multiple shots that weren't - and were never going to be - included in the final film. Morgan reportedly stated he stayed attached to protect as much as he could about the original idea, but Weinstein "urinated" all over the movie, trying to cash in on the torture porn craze. The end result is what we see today. Morgan never made another film after this one :(

A damn shame, all of it. I wonder what the intended film would have been like?

The Blob (1988)

This was a pretty nice one to help ease into my October, as it was just the right balance of 80s cheese; "where have I seen this actor before?" moments, and lovely lovely gooey practical effects.

For the record, the actors I recognised were:

• Shawnee Smith (from the Saw franchise) as female lead Meg
• Kevin Dillon (Entourage) as bad boy Brian with the incredible mullet
• Jack Nance (Twin Peaks' Pete Martell) in a small role as a doctor
• Erika Eleniak (old school Baywatch) as a sleepy drunken date, Vicki

In this remake of the 1958 sci-fi horror classic - real talk: I've never seen that one - a meteorite crashes in a forest near the town of Arborville, California. It makes first contact with a local, and when some teens find him and take him to the hospital, they unwittingly start a series of events that are going to leave one of them, and a lot of the townspeople, dead.

The blob itself (reminding me very much of the psychomagnotheric slime from Ghostbusters 2, which was released a year later) is a lot more dangerous than it appears, and if you let it touch you, you're basically done for. Not great news for the locals, but awesome news for us...!

A whopping $9 million of this film's $19m budget was spent on FX, and it shows! Some bad green screen aside (which must have been inescapable in 1988), the practical effects for gore and blob shenanigans are really impressive and still stand up. The blob genuinely seems terrifying!

Who's going to look after his dog now? :(

In amongst the poor innocent victims of this gooey menace, is one who definitely deserved what he got... and even if his death scene wasn't one of the best, it warranted the biggest cheer. Back then I suppose this type of character was considered funny, if a bit of a slimeball, but watching it now, he just comes off as rapey. 

Parked in his car, complete with a fully stocked bar in the trunk, he's too busy getting gorgeous Vicki drunk to notice the approaching ooze (in a blob POV shot! Genius!). When she passes out, he doesn't think twice about "continuing" the date.

What a creep. Thankfully the blob has quietly made its way into the car, and unfortunately, into poor Vicki too, and it isn't long before this guy is kicking, screaming and dying. Byeeee!

The carnage continues, bravely killing off some characters I wasn't expecting, until a big showdown in the centre of town and a very obvious set-up for a sequel (that never happened due to this being a box office fail at the time).

In a cast of entertaining but still rather clichéd, one-dimensional characters (bad boy, weirdo priest, town sheriff, diner waitress, little brother...) Shawnee Smith's Meg is the most well-rounded, avoiding the trap of shrill female lead and instead emerging as a strong, likeable survivor.

The first time we see her she's a cheerleader, but refreshingly there's no big deal made of her also being a badass wielding a gun by the end. She's just able to do that too, because she's a multi-faceted, "get shit done" kind of person.

She's not technically a final girl, but she's the closest thing to it here, and she's cool.

Side note: I just came across a mention that Joss Whedon had this character in mind as inspiration for Buffy, which makes perfect sense if true.


So The Blob has plenty to recommend it for a pretty chilled out, but fun and pleasingly gross watch:

1. Goo. So much goo. And there's something eminently satisfying about watching the blob pump itself into a tiny enclosed space like a hazmat helmet.
2. A cheeky reference to another film within the horror genre, with the blatant Friday the 13th rip-off the kids are watching. Fact: The real Friday the 13th franchise was on its 7th film by the time this came out!
3. A character getting fatally sucked into a sink,
4. Lighting! Cool 80s lighting throughout, plus X-Files-y shots of huge shards of light cutting through a forest, and hazmat suits with the little light inside. 

Speaking of 80s, we've got a sweet closing credits power ballad, too. Enjoy!

🎈

So it's here. I think it looks pretty good!

Children of the Corn (2009).

Final Girl Film Club time! Haven't done one of these in a while.

Only upon reading about this version did I learn that the 1984 Children of the Corn (reviewed here) doesn't entirely follow the plot of Stephen King's short story. It was pretty much given a "good triumphs evil" ending, whereas the original tale and this made-for-television film both finish on a downer. Closer to the source material + more depressing = a good thing, I thought.

Well, sometimes King's short stories work as feature length adaptations (Shawshank! Stand By Me!) sometimes they don't (this!). The sins of the 80s original are sadly repeated here: with pacing which makes minutes feel like hours and boredom taking the place of really any of the emotions you want from a horror movie. It's a shame, because who doesn't love brainwashed cult children killing adults in small-town rural America? That sounds just delicious and a whole lot of fun.

This film is neither of those things. Womp womp.

This may also be the least scary horror film opener I've ever seen. A group of children look gormless in a tent while some heavy handed scene setting goes down. It's NINETEEN SIXTY-THREE people, and we're in GATLIN, NEBRASKA. The death cult theme is introduced and we learn that adults are sinners, and the town's being punished by a cornfield-lurking Old Testament God because of this. So the kids are to kill all the grown ups - no one is to live above the age of nineteen.

The ranting child prophet is dressed as a cowboy, by the way.

Twelve years on brings more shitty dialogue badly acted, and not one but two more mentions that we're in GATLIN, NEBRASKA. Bickering married couple Burt and Vicky are road tripping and end up here after accidentally running over a child, as he hotfooted it out of a cornfield. 

Awkward.

Wait, where are we again? I forget...

"Come take a look! So you can tell all your NRA buddies what you bagged in NEBRASKA!".

Oh, yeah.

Upon closer inspection they discover the kid was bleeding out from a slit throat anyway. What a spot of luck! That doesn't stop the incessant bloody arguing between the two though. Vicky wonders aloud how she ever ended up married to Vietnam veteran Burt, whilst we ponder likewise. But this isn't a depiction of a vulnerable marriage like in, I dunno, The Shining; it's merely aggravating having to listen to a couple going on and on and ON at one another. If I wanted to listen to couples pointlessly arguing, I'd turn off the TV and eavesdrop on my neighbours.

They load the kid in the trunk and head off to find Gatlin police, to report the accident.

Unfortunately for them, this is the Gatlin police dept.

Then this happens.

This is my favourite part of the film, this shot.

Preston Bailey plays prophet and leader, Isaac. You may recognise him as Dexter's son, from the popular TV show! Here he spouts scripture and delivers lines with exceedingly repetitive parrot-fashion intonations, to the extent that I couldn't concentrate on what he was saying, half the time. Exposition in this movie is a choice between adults yelling, or children talking nonsense.

Big hats: not generally scary. But at the least the corn's in shot.

I much preferred the weird young-old looking Isaac from the first one (John Franklin). He may have been an adult playing a child, but at least he was creepy.

It is an age old trick, using kids and kiddie-related stuff to ratchet up the creepiness in a narrative; yet somehow the casting of actual children in this does nothing for the sinister feel of the movie. They went to all that trouble of employing mostly under-agers (whereas the '84 version did not) but it only really pays off in the more explicit scenes, which I'll talk about in a little while.

The pace picks up finally, when Burt goes to investigate a church, leaving Vicky in the car. She is ambushed by the children and despite what must have been a hell of a lot of noise in an otherwise dead silent town, it takes Burt ages to go back outside and try to help his wife.

Um, spoiler... he fails.

This confrontation with the little religious zealots appears to kick off some 'Nam flashbacks in Burt, who spends his remaining screen time killing or maiming children and slowly losing his mind - illustrated by some sweet visual effects which look like they belong in a music video. Because horror needs more of those.

Ultimately the corn god gets bored waiting for the kids to kill Burt, so he does it himself. Then we're given a looong post credit sequence of ginger sergeant-at-arms Malachi saying goodbye to his knocked up lady love Ruth, because he's reached the age he must offer himself up as a sacrifice. 

This film... it kind of baffled me. On the one hand, it's not very good and the acting stinks (best performance by far? Alexa Nikolas as Ruth, her faith shaken). Nothing much happens for stretches of it, the dialogue during the dialogue heavy sequences... just awful. Yes, it was made for TV and I'm not too sure what the caliber of work is on the SyFy Channel - wasn't Sharknado from there? - but this is dire and yet strangely explicit, at the same time? It depicts graphic (compared to mainstream films) child death and young adult T&A. 

The scene goes on for some time on the uncut DVD version, too.

Clearly some of the more intense stuff was not aired on TV, but that just makes the uncut version play disjointedly like exactly what it is: a weak TV movie with some graphic stuff thrown in to shift the DVD release. Personally I'd rather it picked a side and stayed there.

Visually speaking it's interesting to note that like the 1984 version, I found there to be some lovely shot compositions in amongst everything. The image of the dead boy in the foreground and car behind, for one. Here it is again, if you can't be bothered to scroll up.

Big juicy high-res version here.

Another is this one.

I'd be fine with someone taking a sickle to everything but these two visuals, and build it up anew from there. 

Maniac remake.

Have you seen this? (skip to around 40sec in to avoid the billion boner-killing studio logos).

I am having so many feelings about it. All of them good. The MUSIC, the END to that clip. Elijah Wood doing yet another good job at creepy and fucked up. Hubba hubba, I want to see!!!

(Out March 2013 in the UK).