The Friday Night Horror Movie: Guilty of Romance (2011)

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When you watch as many movies as I do you are sometimes going to venture into the strange. You’re gonna watch a few films that make you say “What the Hell did I just watch?” I’m not entirely sure I liked Guilty of Romance. I’m definitely sure I didn’t quite understand it. But I’ll never say I was bored watching it.

It begins with a grizzly murder. A young woman has been dismembered inside a rundown flat in the Love Hotel district of Tokyo. Parts of her body are wearing a pretty red dress with the missing parts being replaced by mannequin pieces. Other sections of the corpse are fitted out in the same manner but in a schoolgirl uniform. The head and sex parts are missing.

Police detective Kazuko Yoshida (Miki Mizuno) is on the case. The story intercuts the investigation with that of bored housewife Izumi Kikuchi (Megumi Kagurazaka). She’s married to a famous novelist. He’s an exacting husband. He leaves at the same time every morning and returns promptly in the evening. When he arrives he expects his slippers to be waiting for him in the entryway and to be placed in a precise manner. He complements her tea-making skills in a way that lets us know he’s chastised her about it before. When she places some Japanese soap (not the French stuff he likes) in the bath, he berates her.

Their marriage seems to be without romance, love, or satisfying sexual encounters. She’s approached by a woman in a shop who claims to be a talent agent. Izumi is pretty enough to be a model she says. The photos turn out to be softcore in nature. Later she meets Mitsuko Ozama (Makoto Togashi) a sex worker who convinces Izumi to join her in that work.

In some ways, the film is about this repressed woman, living a very traditional lifestyle, diving deeper and deeper into sexual liberation.

Kazuko is more modern and liberated. She’s a police detective, a working woman in a field dominated by men. She’s also married, to a man who seems perfectly nice. But she’s had affairs as well. Currently, she’s involved with a man who likes to play domination games.

There is a lot more to the story but to delve any deeper would be to spoil it. The murder mystery takes second shelf to all of the sexual shenanigans. Director Sion Sono is interested in the ways women must navigate their own sexuality, and society’s demands upon it.

It is a deeply weird, subversive film. At times I was quite uncomfortable watching it. Especially early on when Izumi is being pushed into sexual acts she’s clearly not ready for. But the film wants us to be uncomfortable. This isn’t sex for titillation, there is always a reason behind it. I’m not always sure I understand those reasons or can get behind them fully, but I’m glad I watched it.

Recommended, but not for the faint of heart.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Malignant (2021)

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It is time for both the Friday Night Horror Movie and Murder Mysteries in May. One would think it would not be difficult to find a film that fits both of those descriptions. Murder is horrific after all. But for tonight, I found it nearly impossible. The trouble, I’m realizing is that since mysteries and crime stories are some of my favorite genres, I’ve seen a lot of them. I wanted to watch something I’d never seen before and that proved difficult. I was probably using the wrong search terms.

I eventually landed on Malignant. It was directed by James Wan who has helmed several horror films I’ve enjoyed (namely The Conjuring and Insidious). Even when I’m more ambivalent about his films (namely the Saw franchise) I’m always impressed with his craft as a filmmaker. He definitely knows how to move a camera and create some true cinematic scares.

The basic synopsis of the film – woman begins having visions of terrible murders only to realize they are coming true – has been done many times before, but that type of thing can be effective and with Wan at the helm, I figured it would at least be interesting.

I was wrong. So very, very wrong.

In general, I’d say picking on a film’s plot holes (both real and imagined) is one of the lazier forms of criticism. A film is more than a plot and a great movie can overcome bits in the story that don’t make logical sense. But I also realize that when a film isn’t working for me I tend to get angry at those holes in the plot.

Malignant is a very stupid movie. So much of what happens either doesn’t make sense or is just completely bonkers. But the thing is Malignant is also a film that completely understands how utterly ridiculous it is. Few films from major studios are allowed to have such a ludicrous premise and are given the chance to just completely go for it.

Had I been in a better mood, had I been less tired, or had I been with some friends who enjoyed dumb, stupid, ridiculous horror films I might have allowed myself to just go with it and have a good time. As it is, I could barely make it through.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: X-Ray (1981)

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It wouldn’t be the Awesome ’80s in April without at least one dumb slasher. You may not believe this when I tell you, but I’ve actually grown rather particular when it comes to watching dumb slashers. I no longer have the patience for low-budget, dumb slashers if they are poorly made or have no sense of style.

I have this thing on my streaming service device that lets me browse through every movie ever made. I can sort by genre, or the year it was made. I can browse by actor or popularity, etc. It gives me a brief synopsis, and details on who stars in the film and even connects to YouTube to let me view the film’s trailer.

Tonight I sorted by year, clicked on 1981, and then went looking for horror films. I skipped past the big ones, the popular films, the ones I’ve seen already – films like The Evil Dead, Halloween II, and Scanners. I found a couple of films that looked interesting but when I watched the trailer I could see they were cheaply made and looked bad.

Finally, I landed on X-Ray (also known as the superior title of Hospital Massacre). It looked like a dumb slasher flick, but the trailer indicated it was well-lit and had a sense of style so I found a copy and hit Play.

The plot is simple. Susan Jeremy (Barbi Benton) stops by the hospital to get some test results. She can’t find her doctor and is detained by another one. Everyone who looks at her test results and x-rays makes disturbing faces as if she’s ready to die right then and there, but they won’t tell her anything. She’s forced to take more tests and stay overnight. It is Kafka-esque in its absurdity. Also, a crazed killer is on the loose.

When she arrives at the hospital no one seems to know where her doctor is. She’s told to look for her on the eighth floor. The elevator takes her to the ninth floor where she’s met by some creepy dudes in masks who say that the construction on that floor is making the air toxic. On her way back down the elevator gets stuck.

Her doctor isn’t in her office. A friendly medical student directs her to another doctor who looks over her test results and frowns. She’ll have to stay and take more tests he says. He makes her strip down and does a full examination of her body. He takes some blood.

The blood sample comes back and the doctor makes more frowny faces. He talks to the nurses in hushed tones. Over and over Susan asks what’s going on, is there something wrong? But the hospital staff won’t tell her anything. Just that she needs to stay overnight for observation. She’s put in a room with half a dozen other women, all of whom leer at her and openly discuss how she must be dying.

Meanwhile, the psycho killer is brutally stabbing anyone who gets in his way. It was he who switched her lab results and x-rays to indicate she was terribly sick. It was he who killed her original doctor.

In the opening scene, which amounts to a flashback we see young Susan making fun of a young boy who gave her a Valentine’s Day card (naturally this film takes place on a Holiday as Halloween and Friday the 13th had proven to be very popular and profitable). So we know who the killer is and what his motivation is, though we aren’t supposed to be able to figure out which adult in the hospital he is (it isn’t actually that difficult to guess.)

When Susan realizes a killer is on the loose she tries to tell the doctors and the nurses but they don’t believe her. They give her a sedative and tie her down. There is a feminist reading of this film where Susan is being treated like every woman everywhere – always being controlled by the men around her, never, ever listened to. I’m not sure the film is smart enough to have pulled that off on purpose but that reading mostly works.

It is well-lit. The Cinematography isn’t deserving of any awards but it looks good. A part of me always scoffs when films like this have hospitals lit by lamps and pin lights instead of the huge fluorescent real hospitals use, but it’s stylish and looks nice on the screen. Director Boaz Davidson has a sense of style, and there are several striking images. My favorite is when the killer holds a sheet up in front of him and is brightly lit from behind. It makes no sense plot wise but it sure looks cool.

The story is nonsense. The killer’s motivations are dumb even for this type of movie. His method of gaslighting her makes no logical sense since his ultimate plan is to just kill her. Etc., and so forth. It is a dumb slasher. But like I say it has some style and it looks good (and it does have some depth if you want to read it that way) and sometimes that’s what you want on a Friday night.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Child’s Play (1988)

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Out of all the classic 1980s horror icons – Jason, Freddy Kreuger, Michael Myers, Pinhead, etc – the only one I had never paid any attention to was Chucky. I don’t really know why. I was too young in 1988 to have seen the original in theaters, and it may have come too late in the cycle of ’80s horror films to have had the same cultural cache, or at least the same influence on me. Most of those other franchises had just about petered out by the time Child’s Play hit the screen. The exception would be the Hellraiser franchise which got its start in 1987, but I didn’t watch it until 2012.

Or maybe the Child’s Play films didn’t get the same late-night cable TV airplay as the others. Like I say, I don’t really know why I never got around to watching Child’s Play.

I rectified that tonight and while I’m glad I did, I can’t say that I’m all that upset it took me this long to get to it.

Chucky, the knife-wielding, homicidal doll (voiced by the always wonderful Brad Dourif) is an iconic character. I’m definitely familiar with him but that familiarity comes from seeing clips from all the movies and various commercials or specials or whatever.

The thing about the first film in a long-running franchise is that it is often more subdued than the subsequent films. Sequels have a tendency of ramping things up. So it is with Child’s Play. I was surprised at how long it takes for Chucky to really show himself.

First, there is a scene demonstrating how the crazed killer’s soul got into the doll. Then we have to introduce the family he’s going to terrorize. There’s the mom Karen (Catherine Hicks) and the little boy Andy (Alex Vincent). The boy precocious and smart. He’s introduced by fixing his mother breakfast in bed which consists of an overflowing (and over-sweetened) bowl of cereal and a huge blob of butter on burnt toast. He wants a Good Guy doll for his birthday but she can’t afford one. Later some homeless dude has one for sale for cheap.

At first the doll talks in its normal voice. Everything is normal about it. Then the babysitter gets pushed out the window of their high-rise apartment. Andy says Chucky scared her and she fell. Andy says Chucky speaks to him (and his language is pretty filthy).

No one believes Andy, including police detective Mike Norris (Chris Sarandon). We get a few POV shots from Chucky’s perspective and a glimpse of him moving around, but for a good chunk of the film we don’t really see him in action.

This isn’t to say the film would be improved if Chucky were to be seen early on wreaking murderous havoc. I suspect we’ll get more of that in the sequels. Rather I’m simply stating how surprising it was to me to find the story weaving a mystery for the characters about whether or not Andy was making Chucky up or not, even though as an audience we know the doll lives.

It makes sense from the perspective of the filmmakers. They didn’t know this was going to turn into an iconic franchise. They were just trying to make a scary movie about a killer doll. They needed an actual story, with plausible characters. Later it can have films with more murdering mayhem, but the first film in a franchise needs grounding.

Or something. That concept makes sense in my mind, but honestly, watching it was a little bit of a drag. I wanted more Chucky, not more story, more grounding. Once the doll does come out it is pretty cool. The animatronics are great, and while he’s not in full-on shite talking mode yet, he gets in a few good lines. And the ending is pretty great.

I’ll definitely be checking out those sequels.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Entity (1982)

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The Entity is a supernatural horror film that got lousy reviews upon its release and bombed at the box office. It was almost immediately overshadowed by Poltergeist which came out that same year and has now mostly been forgotten. But if you are a fan of things that go bump in the night and gnarly ghost stories then it is well worth checking out.

Carla Moran (Barbara Hershey) is a single mother of three kids who works all day and is taking classes at a secretarial school all night. She’s had a hard life, but she’s doing the best that she can. One night as she lies in bed she’s assaulted. She cannot see her attacker and when she is finally able to scream her teenage son Billy (David Labiosa) rushes in to find nobody in the room, nobody in the house, and all the doors and windows are locked. Perhaps it was just a terrible nightmare.

The next day she’s violently attacked again. This time her eyes are wide open and still she can see no one. The assailant is invisible. When the attack is over she loads the kids up and takes them to her friend’s apartment. She talks her into seeing a psychiatrist.

Dr. Sneiderman (Ron Silver) is incredibly kind. He never sneers at her claims of being raped by a poltergeist. He asks questions and responds. He doesn’t believe these supernatural occurrences really happened, but he never calls her crazy. He understands she believes they did. When she comes to his office covered in bruises, he asks a female nurse to come in while he takes a look at them. When he comes to her house to see the places in which she was attacked he repeatedly asks if it’s okay for him to come in (to the bathroom, her bedroom places of intimacy and privacy).

He believes her issues are deeply rooted in her psyche. Perhaps some childhood trauma. He wants to help. But the more they talk, the more he probes, the more violent the attacks seem to come.

She wants his help, but more than anything she wants him to believe her. When an attack happens at her friend Cindy’s (Margaret Blye) house Cindy’s belief in what is happening greatly moves Carla. At this, she begins pushing away from therapy and seeks the help of some parapsychologists. They take over her house with scientific equipment and eventually try to capture the Entity with specialty equipment.

The Entity is an odd mix of tone and a jumble of themes. Hershey and Silver are terrific as Carla and Dr. Sneiderman. I especially love those character details about Sneiderman. And Hershey portrays Carla with a great deal of empathy. Both go a little off the rails towards the end of the film, but that’s a script problem, not the actors. The best parts of the film are just them talking.

As you can probably see from this review some of the underlying themes of the film are about how women who make claims of assault are treated. The men in the film tend to not believe her, they make negative claims about her sanity. They objectify her or use her for their own purposes.

The worst part of the film is when she’s being attacked. There are a couple of really harsh assaults and even though we can’t see The Entity, his presence is felt. The scenes are meant to be uncomfortable and they are especially so as I was expecting something more along the lines of Poltergeist, not something so heavy.

From an audience perspective, we see that she is being attacked by some invisible force so all of the mystery of whether or not she’s just imagining it is sucked out of the room. The attacks are a blunt force. Almost immediately in the film, we witness her being attacked. Before we even get a picture of who she is, she’s being slung across the room. The film is relentless in that way. It isn’t a ghost story. There is no mystery. Perhaps that’s the point, it ties in better with how men tend to not believe women.

But it also wants to be a thriller, a scary horror film. And those two ideas – women are assaulted all the time and it is horrifying and they are rarely believed – and gee isn’t this an exciting horror film about ghosts and monsters attacking a woman seem to be at odds.

But there is enough here to like. Think of it as the opposite side of the Poltergeist coin and maybe you’ll enjoy what you see.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Maximum Overdrive (1986)

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Stephen King stories have been adapted into countless films and television series. Some of them are good, a lot of them are bad, a few of them are great, and some aren’t even worth talking about. Opinions vary on which films fit which category with King himself disagreeing with most.

In 1986 for the first (and last) time Stephen King actually adapted one of his own stories for a film. Based on his short story Trucks, King wrote the screenplay and directed Maximum Overdrive. It bombed at the box office and is generally considered to be lousy in pretty much every way.

I’ve become a pretty big Stephen King fan over the last few years, and have tried to watch a lot of the adaptations of his work. I knew I needed to watch this at some point, but I tended to believe the critics on this one and kept putting it off.

But since it is the Awesome ’80s in April, I decided to give it a go.

I knew it wasn’t going to be good, but I had no idea how insanely incompetent it was going to be.

One can forgive a first-time director like Stephen King (and especially one who has no training in filmmaking) for not banging it out of the park, but you’d think a guy who has written a lot of wonderful stories, would know a thing or two about writing. But the script is just as bad as the direction. Maybe he just didn’t know the difference between writing for the screen and writing for the page.

The bare bones of the story are actually interesting (and most of it seems to have come from that short story – which I haven’t read). Extra-terrestrial forces pass by Earth causing all electronics to become sentient, and murderous. Several people get trapped at a truck stop by a bunch of semi-trucks bent on their destruction.

Technology becoming sentient and trying to destroy mankind is not a new idea, but it can be a good one in the right hands. I especially like the idea of big trucks attacking people. And I love a good people trapped in an enclosed space story. With a better script and a good director this film could have been cool.

King has admitted to having a cocaine addiction at the time, and he was still deep in his alcoholic phase, so no doubt that affected the production.

An example of how this film works. At the start of the film, the controls to a draw bridge come alive, raising the bridge when cars are on it. I swear the number of cars on the bridge at any given time changes, depending on the shot. The height to which the bridge is raised changes as well. Sometimes we’ll have a shot in which the bridge has just been raised to a slight angle, but then we’ll get shots of cars spinning their wheels trying to keep from sliding backward, while other cars slide into the trucks behind them. A wide shot will then show the bridge all the way up. Then it will switch to barely having been raised. There is no tension, it isn’t at all scary.

I can see King writing that scene. As a novelist, he’d take pages and pages to tell that part of the story. We’d get lots of details. We’d know several of the characters. We’d get a sense of the terror. There would be gory details of someone getting smashed up. But as a director, it feels like he didn’t know how to get those details cinematically. He didn’t know the types of shots he’d need or how to put them together.

The entire movie is like that. It feels cheap. Like some bad B-movie, you’d see late at night on cable TV. In part, I suspect this is intentional. I can see King trying to make a B-movie. The kind he might have watched when he was growing up. But those movies have an energy to them that is fun to watch. Maximum Overdrive is a dud from start to finish.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Forbidden World (1982)

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We are edging ever so close to Totally Awesome ’80s in April, so I thought I’d let my Friday Night Horror be an ’80s flick. I will have at least one more Western In March review up before the end of the month to make it not a total loss, but as I’ve mentioned before there aren’t a lot of Western horror flicks.

Roger Corman remade Alien and it’s pretty good, actually.

Corman was a prolific producer (who also directed some pretty great Edgar Alan Poe adaptations). He famously gave Martin Scorsese and Jonathan Demme their starts and mandated the films he produced have at least one scene of violence and/or sex every fifteen minutes.

Forbidden World has ample amounts of both. But it also has a bit of style, a pretty good story (even if it is mostly ripped off from other, better science fiction films), and it is rather entertaining.

Military fixer Mike Colby (Jesse Vint) is called to an isolated planet to investigate some troubling messages from an experimental research station there.

Upon landing, he learns that the scientists have been experimenting with a synthetic strain of DNA that when combined with another creature has turned into something strange and dangerous. Something alien you might say.

There are a couple of sexy scientists (Dawn Dunlap & June Chadwick), a disheveled, chain-smoking genius (Linden Chiles), and other miscellaneous (and thus disposable) crew members. The monster thing continues to change and grow and kill all the while the survivors try and…well…survive.

It is very much a low-rent Alien knock-off with bits of The Blob, Star Wars, and other science fiction/horror flicks from the time period thrown in for good measure. Oh, and at least a couple of naked shower scenes, because why not?

But it is well made for what it is, the effects are surprisingly good all things considered, and I found it to be quite a bit of fun.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Spasmo (1974)

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I’ve come to realize the line between the horror genre and the crime genre is often a thin one. Sometimes horror films involve monsters or space aliens or the supernatural, but sometimes the villains are more pedestrian. Many horror films involve human killers – often of the psychopathic and serial variety – but human all the same. Many of these films follow a police detective private detective or some other normal citizen as they investigate the murders. This is, of course, what countless crime dramas do.

In these cases, it isn’t entirely clear as to what differentiates a horror movie from a crime one. Sometimes it might be a matter of the violence and gore, but I’ve seen plenty of detective movies/series that revel in the gruesome details. Maybe horror movies have more jump scares. Or maybe sometimes the genres rather blend together and you get to decide which one you are watching.

The Italian Giallo was pretty much always crime stories with a (usually leather-gloved, knife-wielding) killer on the loose and someone out to discover who he (or she) is. But they did so with a particular brand of style and a pension for graphic, sexualized violence.

Spasmo is a Giallo that works more like a standard crime mystery with a bit of (not very graphic at all) sexual psychology thrown in for good measure.

Christian (Robert Hoffman) and his girl go frolicking on some beach. They come across a woman face down in the sand. At first, they think she’s dead, but upon further inspection, they find she has just passed out. When she awakens she says her name is Barbara (Suzy Kendall) but she gets pretty cagey when asked any other questions. As soon as Christian’s back is turned she runs for her car and jets away.

But she leaves behind a bottle with the name “Tucania” written on it. Somehow they figure out the name is also the name of a boat and they jump aboard and attend a party going on there. As it happens Barbara is also aboard and before you know it Christian has dumped his girlfriend and run off with Barbara.

Strangely, Barbara is all about a little hanky panky but she forces Christian to shave his beard first. While he’s in the bathroom getting a face trim some dude busts in the window brandishing a gun and threatening to kill him. A Tussel ensues and Christian accidentally shoots the man dead (or is he?).

Barbara is weirdly chill about this fact, doesn’t even bother to look at the guy but does suggest that the two of them (her and this man she’s just met) go on the run together. But before they can leave Barbara’s boyfriend shows up and forces her to go with him. Christian takes off separately, then realizes he left a necklace at the house and returns to the scene. There he finds the dead man has vanished.

He regroups with Barbara at a chateau on the sea where they meet a couple of oddballs who tell them a story about a weird crime they just came across. Turns out someone is planting very lifelike dummies, dressed in lingerie and with knives sticking out of them all around the countryside. The film is littered with people discovering these strange creations.

Someone else attacks Christian and nearly kills him. His brother is somehow involved. Barbara seems to come and go. Christian begins to think he’s going crazy. At its heart this is a murder mystery, but also a psychological horror. We’re never quite sure what is real and what is being imagined by Christian.

The ending ties it all together with a twist that I won’t spoil, but it’s one of those things where once you see the conclusion the rest of the film makes more sense. I found myself thinking about the beginning and what was confusing got tied together. But that didn’t really make watching it the first time all that satisfying, and I’m not sure this film really merits a second viewing.

ScreeningNotes over at Letterboxd has a really interesting essay on the film. He ties it into the larger Italian cinema from the time frame. I’m not sure I buy into everything he’s spouting, but it is an interesting read anyway.

For my money, if you are a fan of the genre then this is worth watching, but you’ve really got to be a fan.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Bone Tomahawk (2015)

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There aren’t a lot of Western/Horror hybrids for some reason. I don’t know why as it would seem like the barren landscapes of the West and the isolated communities filled with all sorts of outlaws would lend itself to horror, but I guess not. Maybe the audiences for those two genres are considered too far apart to make bringing them together worth it.

Controversial director S. Craig Zahler gave it a pretty good shot with his debut film Bone Tomahawk. Storywise it is primarily a Western but its graphic use of violence and impending sense of doom give it a good dose of horror.

In discussing the Western Genre I’ve not spoken much about its depictions of Native Americans (though we did have a good discussion in the comments section a while back). Generally speaking, the Western’s depiction of Native Americans has not been good. They were usually depicted as nameless, faceless savages attacking, raping, and murdering the pure and righteous white people who had come to the new land to save them from their savage ways.

Zahler (who also wrote the script) tries to work his way around this problem within the genre by having an Indian character (Zahn McClarnon) state that the film’s villains aren’t real Indians, but Troglodytes, cannibalistic savages that belong to no tribe. And thus hand waiving the whole problem away. But this is a Western set in the American West and the villains sure do look a lot like Indians, and they sure are savage. If you can get past that (and the really, truly, gruesome violence) then you are in for a bit of a treat.

A stranger (David Arquette) stumbles into the small town of Bright Hope. He buries his ill-gotten treasure before wandering into a bar. The town’s Back-Up Deputy Chickory (Richard Jenkins) spies the bag burial and tells Sheriff Hunt (Kurt Russell) about the suspicious nature of it all. They question the man who pushes Chickory down and tries to escape, getting shot in the leg by Hunt for his trouble.

They call in the doctor’s daughter Samantha (Lili Simmons) to take the bullet out of the stranger’s leg. Somewhere in the night our villains sneak into town and kidnap the stranger, a deputy, and Samantha.

In the light of day Sheriff Hunt, Chickory, Samantha’s husband Arthur (Patrick Wilson) who has a broken leg, and a dandyish gunslinger named John Brooder (Matthew Fox) all head for the valley where the enemy camps.

All of this is fairly standard Western stuff. Zahler gives it a lazy energy in the first half which is punctuated by some wonderful dialog and terrific performances by all involved. As they finally come to the enemy camp things turn horrific as the bad guys are truly abhorrent. I won’t go into details but let’s just say cannibalism isn’t their worst trait.

I’ve seen a lot of horror films in my day so I’m fairly immune to graphic violence, but this gets pretty intense. I do appreciate a film that doesn’t shy away from the realities of violence. Westerns have a tendency to have bloodless gunfights where the worst that happens to a man when he gets shot is that he falls off a building. Real violence is full of blood and gore and is horrible in every way. There is something to be said for a film to show that.

If you can stomach the violence and the hand-waiving away of the genre’s casual racism, Bone Tomahawk is a rather terrific bit of genre filmmaking.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Faculty (1998)

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The Faculty is so of its time, so late 1990s that I spontaneously turned into a 22-year-old college senior again while watching it. It was produced by Miramax, the hippest studio at the time. It was directed by Robert Rodrigues at the very apex of his coolness factor. It was written by Kevin Williamson hot off his hit-making turns with Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. It stars a veritable who’s who of late ’90s hip young actors including Josh Hartnett, Elijah Wood, Clea Duvall, and Jordana Brewster. The soundtrack features Stabbing Westward, The Offspring, Soul Asylum, Creed, Garbage and Layne Staley with Tom Morello covering Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall.” If it was any more late 1990s I think it would create a black hole time warp.

It was part of the late-90s horror boom that began with Scream in 1996 and catered to a more younger, cooler, and mainstream crowd that horror was used to. I was very much into that whole scene. I freaking loved Scream and was so excited that horror had become popular.

I hated The Faculty when I saw it in theaters. Hate is probably too strong of a word, but I was very disappointed with it. I dug Rodrigues and Williamson, I loved this new wave of horror, but something about The Faculty just didn’t sit right with me. Looking back on it now, I think it was that it is more of a throwback to older films. It clearly has influences in all those schlocky 1950s sci-fi/horror films, and it outright references Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Thing (both films I wouldn’t see for several more years). I wasn’t hip to that vibe just yet so it all felt off to my brain.

I didn’t watch it again until tonight. I now am quite familiar with the film’s reference points and I think twenty years of distance has given me perspective on that particular wave of horror (it was mostly not very good) and so I found myself rather enjoying it. Don’t get me wrong, it is still not a great film, but it’s an enjoyable one.

Plotwise it takes a lot from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but sets it mostly inside a high school where initially the teachers are the aliens and the kids are all that’s left to save humanity. And not just any kids, the outcasts, the freaks, and the nerds.

Wood is the book-smart nerd who everyone picks on. Hartnett is the drug-dealing tough kid. Duvall is the put-upon shy kid who wears all black and might be a lesbian (in 1998!) The teachers (including a goatee-wearing Jon Stewart, Piper Laurie, Famke Jannsen, Salma Hayek, Bebe Neuwirth, and Robert Patrick – geez this cast is stacked) get controlled by these little alien worm things and are out to invade the entire world.

Williamson’s script is smart (but not nearly as smart as he thinks it is, not Scream smart) and Rodriguez’s direction is steady. The cast is mostly great. Overall it is a pretty good little horror film with some nice comedic moments

When I started this review I noted that The Faculty was very much a movie of its time. Unfortunately, that time has not aged very well. The CGI effects look bad. There is a scene that directly references a scene from The Thing. Actually, there are a couple of them, but this particular scene apes some very effective practical effects from that John Carpenter film, but here they are all computer generated and they look terrible.

It is a Miramax film, which of course was run by Harvey Weinstein. Danny Masterson has a small role (his character is simply named F’%# Up #1 which is appropriate, I guess) and freaking Harry Knowles has a cameo so call this a sex pest trifecta.

If you can get past all of that, I think it is worth seeking out, especially if you are a fan of late 1990s horror and somehow missed this one.