Romer. Oh.

I put on Land of the Dead last night. I think I can be honest now and say that the film more or less blows. Not hugely, but it's not very good. I loved it at the cinema, but then cinema does that to me. The dark room, the huge screen, the excitement and totally engrossing... er, ness of it. That and I so dearly wanted to love Romero's "comeback" film. Eh. The best thing about it is the band at the start. It kind of slides slowly downhill from then on. Although the arm being ripped in two in silhouette remains pretty damn cool.

I'm not sure Romero is too bothered about it anyway. I seem to remember reading he wasn't comfortable with the big budget and the expectation that brings (never mind the fact he's the zombie Godfather!). He doesn't sound too impressed on the commentary track, it has to be said. And after having been obsessively listening to the Creepshow one lately, the difference is huge. He and Tom Savini giggle and ham it up and share some genuinely fascinating facts during the latter; in the former there are long gaps between very dry and matter-of-fact tales from the shoot. Perhaps it's because he was smoking during Creepshow?! We know how much he loves those cancer sticks. Anyway I fell asleep to it, so that tells you a lot.

The Beyond / L'Aldilà (1981).

We all understand that eyes are the most vulnerable of our sensory organs, the most vulnerable of our facial accessories, and they are (ick!) soft. Maybe that's the worst...
- Stephen King in Danse Macabre.

Fulci loves him some eyeballs!

...There so should've then been a shot of the German Shepherd's eyes too.

Oh yeah, that's the sweet stuff...

...oh, keep going, don't stop...!

Oh god... YYEEEESSS!!!

Ahem.

My favourite non gore close-up.

That's not even all of them. When I realised a written review wasn't going to be forthcoming, my angle was instead going to be that I cap every single eyeball close-up in the film. This I very nearly did, until I realised that it was way too many for anyone to find entertaining or interesting. Plus I got a bit bored.

Okay okay, this isn't much of a review at all, I grant you. I left my Final Girl Film Club homework until the last minute, and so I found myself viewing this movie on a bright and sunny Sunday afternoon. Not exactly perfect horror film conditions, so I blame this and how busy I am lately on why I couldn't dredge a decent review out of the flooded basement that is my brain.

In short: As a fan of Zombie Flesh Eaters I anticipated liking this, and I did. As with ZFE the make-up for the older corpses resembled great lumps of rotting meat covered in dirt - ie: perfect! They do literally look as though they are going to cave in under your touch (should you dare). The scene with the housekeeper and what she finds in the bath is one of the best, even before the climactic eye-impalement.

From the hour mark onwards The Beyond was decidedly great; from possessed guide dogs to a pigtailed child getting her head mercilessly blown apart by a doctor. The zombies in the hospital were also some of the best shufflers I have ever seen.

See the book Men, Women and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film for a whole chapter on eyes in horror.

Dead and Buried (1981).

Was Dead and Buried adapted from a short story? It certainly plays out like it. Despite being a slow burner it is incredibly well paced, with nothing extraneous added at all.

The plot is one we are used to: a lone person in a community feels something is amiss and sets about trying to investigate it, only for everyone to doubt and dismiss him and his "crazy ideas". Is he insane? Is everyone else insane? Could his schoolteacher wife (the gorgeous Melody Anderson) possibly have anything to do with all of this?

The character who is doing a lot of running around and confused face rubbing is Sheriff Dan Gillis (James Farentino).

We follow him from one gruesome murder scene to another in the previously sleepy town of Potters Bluff (one minor complaint is why the Sheriff has only just noticed all the weirdness, considering it seems to have been going on for some time with him living there). In any case, we watch as he learns more and more startling things about certain townsfolk.

It's a tightly plotted tale, and it builds nicely until the final act when Sheriff Gillis finally learns the whole macabre truth. The film ends on his screaming.

Though not a "shocker" by any means this film grew on me the more I thought about it. Given that it is 28 years old (it was released the year I was born, aww) it doesn't show its age as much as many films of that era. This is mostly due to the fact that Potters Bluff seems stuck in a bit of a time warp itself; the local waitress has a 1940s hairstyle and the town mortician listens to big band music while he works. This all sounds very twee, but it gives the film an air of the unreal and makes it even spookier. We aren't distracted by bad 80s hair and stone washed jeans here - we're just creeped out by how strangely placid everyone is and, if I'm honest, by the sight of a young Robert Englund.

The two best things about this film are a) the growing sense of dread as the Sheriff is given reasons to suspect that his town is seriously fucked up, and b) Stan Winston's special effects.

In fact, Stan Winston blew me away. Again. But in a totally different way to how his work on Pumpkinhead did. Listen, I know I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but it took the trivia section on IMDb to tell me that someone I assumed to be an actor in one scene, was in actual fact a life size animatronic creation of Winston's. Amazing. I mean, the guy is a burns victim in a full body cast, so you expect him to be moving a little awkwardly... but this thing is just so intensely creepy. Winston you genius-like bastard.

Ouch!

Culling the trivia page again, I just have to mention my relief at learning that the one really lame effect in this movie was nothing to do with Winston.

It involves a doctor being killed by acid being pumped into his head (heh, cool) and the resulting mess is... well, a mess.

Horrible in that it's a big screaming rubber face - but not at all realistic, I think you'll agree.

As IMDb states:

...but they could not get Winston back to off the doctor, so another FX team was used on that one sub-par effect.

The effects team who created the "dissolving head" for Doc's murder mentioned in an interview that the director had originally told them that he wanted to do the scene in one unbroken shot, meaning they had to build a head that was both convincing and also would "melt" the way they wanted it to. They lamented the fact that, while they did the best they could with what they had, the director ended up using a cutaway shot anyway, which would have given them the opportunity to make the scene much more realistic.

I don't know who I feel more sorry for; Winston for not getting to play with a liquefying head, or the poor saps who had to stand in for such a talent for one literally lousy effect.

But no matter, what Winston does do, he does spectacularly. There is one scene where Dobbs, the mortician, is shown to slowly rebuild a murdered hitchhiker's smashed in head. I have to wonder if the hands featured in it are actually Winston's.

It is a beautifully creepy montage, actually very representative of the film as a whole in its stillness and uncomfortable, under-your-skin type of horror.

This isn't a film to put the fear of god into you - but in a way it is much worse. It stays with you and the next time you enter a dimly lit room, or see someone approaching in the street at dusk, your mind flits back to Potters Bluff and its terrible secrets. That type of horror is far scarier than cheap jump-scares. This little gem will have you thinking about it as you wait for sleep to come. Good stuff.

Children of the Corn (1984).

This film didn't scare me. It wasn't the worst thing I have ever seen, but it was laughably poor in places. Look, I know it was a Stephen King adaptation and the yardstick is rarely very high for those - but it is possible to do something successful with his material. I saw The Mist over the xmas holidays so I know this to be the case.

Well maybe not in 1984 - unless Firestarter is any good, I haven't seen it.

For this post I am going to walk you through some screencaps I have taken from Children of the Corn, and discuss what is scary, not scary, scary in completely the wrong way and... whatever damn else I feel like mentioning. I was actually given the boxset of all three Corn films, so perhaps I'll do this with all of them, who knows? It really depends on how bad they get to be honest.

Okay, let's start with the image-heaviness.

Scary: Creepy looking children staring menacingly through windows.

Not scary: Bad "poisoned" acting by old ladies.

Scary: Meat cleavers being waved around in a coffee shop.

Not scary: Children's drawings. I know a children-slant on horror can have great results (child's voices, nursery rhymes etc), but the drawings in this film didn't work. In fact they just pissed me off because she kept getting her S's the wrong way around.

Scary in the wrong way: Linda Hamilton singing and dancing. For a long time. In fact it even cuts away from her doing so, and then back again. Twice.

An aside: I'm not sure it is fair of me to mock this obvious dummy-work, as I only noticed this shot when I had the film paused, progressing frame by frame. Still, funny.

Scary in the wrong way: How pointy those trainers are.

An aside: I like this shot. Although it has to be said there are a lot of "hand holding weapon looming into frame" shots in this movie, which dampens their impact a bit.

Scary: Zombie children! Well, it was a good jump moment anyway.

Scary in the wrong way: Bad "laugh" acting by young children.

Not scary: Corn on the cob crucifixes.

Scary: I love the composition of this. One of the rare moments this film gets something very right.

Scary: Advancing armed child gangs.

Not scary: Corn-based vehicle vandalism.

Not scary: Histrionic child-acting.

Scary: Rotten crucified cops. Maybe more cool than scary, but it works for me anyway.

Not scary: Corn-haired and pink lipsticked Jesus.

Not scary: Obviously fake knives. Where is that blood coming from exactly?!

Not scary: More histrionic child-acting.

Not scary: More histrionic child-acting.

Scary: Deserted towns.

Scary: Sinister religious rituals at dusk.

Scary: Surprisingly genuine acting. He looked utterly petrified.

Not scary: Climatic reveal of much talked about monster results in some truly shitty CGI...

Not scary: ...and the corn crucifix taking off like a rocket? Against a sky which is lighter than in the previous shot.

Not scary: Corn "attacking" (and overpowering) a grown man.

Not scary: More shitty CGI. Looks like marshmallows.

Not scary: The grimacing face that seems to appear in this explosion.

Scary: Backseat assailants.


So the tally is closer than I suspected at:
Scary: 10
Not Scary: 14
Scary in the wrong way: 3

The problem is mainly in the pacing. After an introduction showing the children turning against the adults of the town, the focus switches to Linda Hamilton and Peter Horton driving through it three years later. For almost an hour, nothing of any consequence happens. By the time the decently scary moments started happening, it was a little too late for me to care. On top of this the bad computer effects and startling lack of continuity with regards to what time of day it is! Harsh but fair, I assure you.

Wish me luck with the sequel...