The Friday Night Movie(s): Totally Killer (2023) & The Final Girls (2015)

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I’ve talked many times about growing up in the 1980s and my undying love of slasher movies. Now, we are all reasonable people here so I can admit that slasher movies are also really, really dumb. The plots are derivative, the acting is lousy, the writing is bad, and the direction is usually bland, and uninventive. But there is still a bad-movie charm to most of them, and some of them at least have found ways to inventively kill their awful characters.

Anyone who has watched a few slashers (or has seen a film in the Scream franchise) knows that there are rules. The number one rule in all slashers is that the one person to survive, the hero who will kill the killer will be a good girl. This “final girl” will usually not do drugs or get drunk and she will always be a virgin. To have sex in a slasher movie is to die.

Slashers were made on the cheap and were designed to make a quick buck before disappearing and being forgotten. Like a lot of low-budget genre films, they were filled with gratuitous sex, nudity, and violence. That makes them more than a little problematic for today’s audiences.

For tonight’s Friday Night Horror film, I watched two recent movies that attempt to modernize the slasher while still trying to hold onto its roots. The results are decidedly mixed.

Totally Killer is a recent Amazon Prime release from Blumhouse Studios. Like a lot of Blumhouse pictures, it is well made, and quite a bit of fun, but also soulless and without a true directorial voice.

Kiernan Shipka stars as Jamie a teenager who has lived under the over-protective thumb of her mother (Julie Bowen) who survived the Sweet 16 killer when she was a teen. Three of her friends were not so lucky.

Through a series of events too silly to explain Jamie finds herself time-travelled to 1987 where she then tries to stop the killings from ever happening.

Jamie spends much of her time in the 1980s gasping at the racism, casual homophobia, complete lack of security, and the endless smoking/drunk driving. As someone who grew up in the ’80s I recognize that yeah, all of that totally existed, but maybe wasn’t that grotesque. I mean the homophobia was rampant, and there was a kid in my high school who showed up in full KKK regalia, but the dangers of smoking were known and I remember plenty of lectures about drunk driving (including multiple presentations from M.A.D.D.)

It is a fun film. Shipka is terrific, as is Olivia Holt as her teenaged mom. The gags are good, the kills are entertaining (if a bit bloodless) but it also feels very much like it was made by a committee. Almost all of the Blumhouse films I’ve watched feel this way. It is as if Jason Blum has created a database of every horror film ever made, broken down the details of each film into categories, and then sorted by box office receipts.

Totally Killer is like if you fed the scripts of Back to the Future and Scream into an AI bot and had it write you a movie based upon them. It seems funny to say that a slasher homage has no directorial voice, but I just wish the filmmakers had something more to say, or at least a more creative way to say it.

The Final Girls stars Taissa Farmiga as Max. Her mother Amanda (Malin Akerman) starred in a Friday the 13th-esque slasher called Camp Bloodbath. When a fire is started at a retro screening of that film Max and her friends tear through the movie screen to escape and find themselves stuck inside the movie.

It is much more clever than Totally Killer, finding fun ways to both skewer the tropes of the slasher genre, while still keeping things exciting and well within its confines. It is very meta in that the main characters all know they are in a movie, know its tropes, and try to subvert them.

While watching both films I kept thinking about Stranger Things, the Netflix series. While not perfect, that series understands the 1980s – its horror movies, Stephen King, John Carpenter, etc. – deep down in its bones. It has found a way to create something new and interesting while still being steeped in nostalgia.

Totally Killer and The Finals Girls both feel like they were made by people who have a casual knowledge of slasher films. Like maybe they’ve seen a few of them (and most of the Scream franchise) and have subscribed to a slasher subreddit, but those films aren’t part of their DNA. They are films that have fun (and are fun to watch) with the tropes of the genre but don’t necessarily love them.

If you are a fan of the genre, even casually, I think you could have fun watching these films. But keep your expectations low.

31 Days of Horror: Doctor X (1932)

doctor x poster


So, I watched and reviewed a movie entitled The Return of Doctor X the other day. As far as I can tell it is not in any way a sequel to this film entitled Doctor X. It seems to be one of those things where one movie was popular and so they decided to make a new film and give it a similar title as a type of cash-in. Or at least the hope of a cash-in, whereupon people who enjoyed the first film might see the second film based on the title alone.

No one involved in the first film was involved in the second one. And while the plots are in the same ball field as one another, there isn’t any lap over in terms of characters or anything else other than a bunch of murders being solved, in part, by a news reporter.

A series of brutal murders have been committed in New York City over the last several months. They always occur during the full moon, and the bodies have been cannibalized.

Ace reporter Lee Taylor (Lee Tracy) is on the case. The police have learned that each victim has been killed by a highly specialized scalpel. One that only exists in one place in the city – Doctor Xavier’s (Lionel Atwill) institution. They figure one of Xavier’s scientists must be responsible.

The scientists are all mad and perfectly suited for these murders – one of them is fascinated by cannibalism, another by how the moon affects our psyches, another fetishized voyeurism, and the other is a grouchy paralytic (and thus could not have possibly committed the crimes…or could he?)

The good Doctor X is worried that if the police rush in and start questioning everybody it will ruin the institute’s reputation. He asks to be able to run his own investigation and surprisingly they agree. He does an early version of a lie detector test, hooking everybody up to some gadgets that monitor their heart rate and then he stages the murder scene. The first test finds no answers but does cause a blackout inside of which someone else is murdered.

Doctor X has a daughter, Joanne (Fay Wray) who mainly exists to give exposition and to be the love interest for Lee Taylor. He mainly exists for comic relief. He mostly plays it too big and too broad to be funny, but there are a couple of good bits including one in which he’s locked inside a closet with a skeleton.

The whole film is goofy, and a lot of fun. The sets are amazing, especially the testing arena. Michael Curtiz directed and he keeps things moving at a clip and makes it all visually interesting. It was shot in a two-tone color format which gives the whole thing an other-wordly feel. Made in 1932 it is a Pre-Code film and while not particularly scandalous when viewed with today’s eyes at the time a film dealing with murder and cannibalism (it also includes a brothel and talk of rape) was quite a thing.

The comedy often takes you out of the horror/mystery elements and none of it gels very well, but mostly it is a fairly forgettable, but rather enjoyable little film.

31 Days of Horror: The Secret of the Blue Room (1933)

blue room

The Criterion Channel is hosting several horror films made before the Production Code was rigidly enforced starting in 1934 – calling it Pre-Code Horror.

Pre-Code films are fascinating in part because it sounds so tantalizing. Films made before the Code got away with a lot and they can be shocking to someone who watches a lot of films made under the scrutiny of the Code. But it isn’t like these films were employing hard-core nudity and extreme violence. They were still under the preview of the cultural morals of the time.

The Secret of the Blue Room is not particularly scandalous at all. The most worrisome moment in the entire film is when a young lady kisses her father and three suitors full on the mouth, but that seems more like an old-fashioned cultural moment than anything actually scandalous.

The woman, Irene von Helldorf (Gloria Stuart) is celebrating her twenty-first birthday with her father, Robert (Lionel Atwill), her suitor Thomas (William Janney), and two other dudes who’d like to get with her, Walter (Paul Lucas) and Frank (Onslow Stevens). For some reason, they celebrate the birthday at the stroke of midnight and then tell the story of the blue room.

It is a locked-up room inside the Helldorf’s mansion. Years ago three people on separate occasions died inside the room at exactly 1 in the AM. Men being men they all decide that they will each successively sleep in the room to prove their manliness to Irine and probably win her heart.

The first one disappears without a trace, the second is shot dead and Irene is attacked in the room one morning by a mysterious man. Somehow, through all of this, none of them think to do something logical like call the police. Or search the house for the strange man. Or systematically go through the room looking for secret entrances, or try to understand the mystery.

Eventually, they do report things to the police and an investigation of sorts does occur. None of it is particularly interesting, but it isn’t grown-worthy either. I find a lot of really old films have this effect on me. It is like watching a television series from my youth. I recognize that it’s not really all that good, but it is a pleasant enough way to spend an hour of your time (The Secret of the Blue Room clocks in at 66 minutes.)

It is a remake of a German film from 1932 and it was remade two additional times, once in 1938 and again in 1944. Which just goes to show that Hollywood was cannibalizing itself long before its current trend of only making films with existing IP.

31 Days of Horror: The Return of Dr. X (1939)

the return of dr x

One of the things I enjoy about watching old movies is being able to chart the rise (and sometimes fall) of some of my favorite stars. You can, of course, do that with modern stars, but you never know where they will wind up. With classic movie stars, you get the entire picture.

Humphrey Bogart is my all-time favorite actor. He stars in my all-time favorite movie, Casablanca, and a slew of other great films including The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo, The African Queen, and many more. For much of his career, he was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood.

But of course, he wasn’t always a star. While he became famous for playing roles in which he was something of a reluctant hero, in his early films he often played the heavy – gangsters and bad men. He was good at it too. I sometimes wonder where his career would have taken him if he’d never become the big star.

The Return of Doctor X was made towards the end of his gangster period and just two years before becoming a huge star with The Maltese Falcon in 1941.

Reportedly Bogart hated the film and refused to talk about it in interviews. I can kind of see why. It isn’t a good film. It is the only horror movie he ever made and it is decidedly different from anything else in his filmography.

But, it isn’t that bad. It is kind of fun, actually. And Bogart is terrific.

It is supposedly a sequel to Doctor X, a film we’ll talk about in a few days, but really it has nothing to do with that earlier movie.

Several people have recently been murdered and completely drained of their Type One blood. Ace reporter Walter Garrett (Wayne Morris) is on the case. His investigation leads him to Dr. Flegg (John Litel) who, as it turns out, has created a synthetic blood that he has used to bring life back to the dead.

For his first patient, he grabs a recently executed man, Dr. Maurice Xavier (Bogart, naturally), fake buries him, and brings him back to life. Then forces him to act as his assistant. Trouble is the synthetic blood doesn’t replicate itself and so Xavier must murder (and presumably drink, or inject) the victim’s blood in order to stay alive.

Bogart, sporting slicked-back black hair with a shock of white in it, is utterly creepy as Dr. X. His skin is made to look pale and his eyes are sunk in as to make him the living dead and he plays it like a man half-dead.

The story is very silly, and it plays up the comedy angle, with the reporter being a bit of a ham. It isn’t at all scary, nor actually very good, but there is a goofiness to it that I found enjoyable and Bogart really is quite good. So, not the film I’d point anyone toward to discover why Bogart is my favorite actor, but certainly one worth watching if you are a fan.

31 Days of Horror: Urban Legend (1998)

urban legend movie

By the early 1990s, the slasher was dead. Or at least bankrupt. There were no new ideas and fans had stopped watching them. Then came Scream. Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson turned the slasher upside down and made it self-aware. I loved it. Lots of people loved it. It was a huge hit. Like a lot of huge hits, imitators followed.

Unfortunately, most of these films missed out on what made Scream so good. Mainly a self-aware, clever script, and genuine thrills. The imitators copied the up-and-coming cast from hip TV shows, a hip soundtrack featuring up-and-coming alternative rock bands, and lots of (not too gory) violence.

Urban Legend poses the idea of what would happen if a serial killer used actual urban legends as his/her inspiration? Which is both an utterly stupid and kind of amazing idea for a horror film.

I’m not by any means an expert on urban legends so take this thought with a grain of salt, but it does feel like the late 1990s were a real hotspot for urban legends. The Internet had just taken off in a very big way which allowed urban legends to flourish like never before, but we weren’t so internet savvy (or cynical) as to easily debunk them. So, the idea of using urban legends for your slasher movie makes sense.

The movie is bad though.

It is set at a fictional New England university that is populated by beautiful, hip, kids who get picked off one by one in not all that interesting ways.

Our hero is Natalie Simon (Alicia Witt) a sweet, sincere, student who is very upset over the news that a student was recently decapitated in her car (that’s the legend where a creepy dude (the always great Brad Dourif) freaks a girl out while trying to warn her that there is a killer in the backseat).

Jerod Leto is the school newspaper reporter who knows all about urban legends and is obsessed with scoops. Rebecca Gayheart is the best friend, Tara Reid is the party girl who hosts a sexy call-in radio show, and Loretta Devine in the sassy security guard.

Oh, and Robert Englund is the professor who specializes in urban legends because that’s a thing.

Some of the urban legends discussed and used to kill people include the don’t flash your lights at another car who doesn’t have their headlights on legend, the aren’t you glad you didn’t turn on the lights last night because I was secretly killing your roommate in the dark legend, and the don’t drink soda with a mouthful of Poprocks legend (one of these didn’t actually kill anybody).

The kills are all fairly tame. The reveal of the killer is downright awful. Everything in between isn’t all that bad, but neither is it particularly interesting.

Don’t Look Now is the Pick of the Week

dont look now criterion

When I talk about horror movies I suspect a lot of people think of harsh violence and heavy gore. For sure some horror movies specialize in that type of thing, but many of them do not. To tell the truth, as I get older, and especially now that I have a young daughter, I find I have less tolerance for the ultra-violence on screen. Especially sexual violence.

But horror doesn’t have to include that. I love eerie haunted house movies and movies that terrorize you with the threat of something awful happening. I love a good psychological horror.

Don’t Look Now is a film that has very little on-screen violence. In fact, it has very little violence at all. But it does have horror, mostly coming from a sense of dread and grief. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie play a young couple who recently lost their son due to a tragic accident. Sutherland’s character has taken a job in Venice and they are both using it as a way to escape. But you can’t escape that kind of grief. It is a beautiful, powerful, and yes horrific film. Criterion has just released it in a new 4K addition and it is my pick of the week.

Also out this week that looks interesting:

Prey: Predator is a ridiculously dumb 1980s action film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger who goes to the jungle to fight a killer alien. It is also kind of awesome. It somehow managed to launch an entire franchise. I haven’t seen all of them, but I’ve seen quite a few of them and they are definitely a mixed bag. Prey is really freaking good. It is basically the same premise as the first one except for this time the alien lands on Earth some 300 years ago and a Comanche Indian has to fight it with primitive tools.

Talk to Me: I’ve heard good things about this horror film about a group of friends who conjure spirits using an embalmed hand. They become hooked on it, go too far, and unleash the spirit world upon them.

Evil Dead Rise: The original Evil Dead is a low-budget horror masterpiece. The sequel, Evil Dead II, took the same premise (dumb teens go to a cabin in the woods and unleash evil) and turned it into a slapstick horror/comedy masterpiece. That spawned another sequel (Army of Darkness, not as good, but fun) and eventually a TV series (Ash Vs Evil Dead, I’ve only seen a few episodes, but I liked it). Then came a soft reboot which went back to its roots (dropped Bruce Campbell and the humor). And now it has a sequel. That’s a lot of words to say that I have no real desire to see this. I saw the reboot and didn’t much care for it. Like I said earlier, hard-core violence just doesn’t do it for me anymore.

It Came From Outerspace: Very silly-looking 1950s science fiction flick gets a nice release from Universal Studios.

The Movie Journal: September 2023

cottage to let

I watched 44 movies in September. 40 of them were new to me. 30 of them were made before I was born. 22 of them were British films.

British films were of course my theme of the month. I had a lot of fun with that. I didn’t expect to watch so many British films from the 1930s and 1940s. I didn’t expect to watch so many World War II films. But I did, and I loved it.

I mention this nearly every time I do a monthly movie theme, but the point of doing them is for me to watch movies I might not otherwise watch. That was certainly the case this month as I watched a lot of films I’d never even heard of before.

Humphrey Bogart to number two on my actors list with 6 films watched. He’s my favorite actor of all-time so that makes sense. Boris Karloff still leads the list with 8 films. I suspect I’ll watch another film or two with him in it this month as he did a lot of horror films. The director list looks mostly the same except for Terence Fisher who enters the list with four films watched. He directed a lot of Hammer films and I watched a lot of those last month.

Anyway, here’s the full list.

Gone Girl (2014) – ****
The Return of Doctor X (1939) – ***
Experiment Perilous (1944) – ***
Urban Legend (1998) **/12
Messiah of Evil (1973) – ***
Infinity Pool (2023) ***
Teknolust (2002) **1/2
Ladies in Retirement (1941) – ****
Local Hero (1983) – ****
Marlowe (2022) – ***1/2
The Last Voyage of the Demeter (2023) – ***
Countess Dracula (1971) – ***1/2
Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb (1971) – ***
Spree (2020) – **
Get Carter (1971) – ****
King and Country (1964) – ****
The Seven-Ups (1973) – ***
The Heart of Justice (1992) – **1/2
Night Train to Munich (1940) – ****
Went the Day Well? (1942) – ****
Contraband (1940) – ****
Tales of Terror (1962) ***1/2
The Purge: Election Year (2016) – ***
The Purge: Anarchy (2014) – ***
Cottage to Let (1941) – ****1/2
Moss Rose (1947) – ***1/2
Little Women (1933) – ****
Wichita (1955) – ***
The Big Knife (1955) – ****
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) – ****
Murder She Said (1961) – ****
The League of Gentlemen (1960) – ****
Night of the Living Dead (1968) – ****1/2
Life (2017) – *1/2
Island of Terror (1966) – ***1/2
Modesty Blaise (1966) – ***
The Wicked Lady (1945) – **1/2
Against the Wind (1948) – ****
They Live (1988) – ****
Borsalino (1970) – ***
Night Boat to Dublin (1946) – ****1/2
Slaughterhouse Rules (2018) – ***1/2
Quatermass and the Pit (1967) – ****
The Innocents (1961) – ****

31 Days of Horror: Messiah of Evil (1974)

messiah of evil poster

The 1970s were a fascinating time for horror movies. The studio system was dead, and independent cinema was on the rise. The production code was out and the ratings system was in. Sex, nudity, pervasive language, and violence were suddenly not only permissible but encouraged. The real-life horrors of the Vietnam War were all around. Also, Watergate, Nixon, and racial tension pervaded the minds of America. If horror is a reflection of what a culture is going through at any given time, in the 1970s we were going through a lot.

There were tons of great horror movies released in the 1970s – The Exorcist, Halloween, Suspiria, Dawn of the Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, etc., etc., etc. It was a great decade for horror.

Something I’ve noticed about a lot of horror films from the era is that they often have this gritty, impending sense of dread. Horror movies can be entertaining. Some of them are even fun. But horror in the 1970s was often dreary, filled with a sense of hopelessness and doom. I suppose that is a sign of the times, of all those things I just mentioned – war, politics, struggling for basic rights.

That can make for a great horror film. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is incredibly bleak, but it is also one of the greatest horror films ever made. But when not done well, that sense of dread can be a real bummer.

Messiah of Evil isn’t a bummer, but it isn’t a lot of fun either. The basic plot – a woman travels to a small seaside town looking for her father only to discover it has been overtaken by cultish cannibals – isn’t particularly clever or all that fleshed out, really. There are long sections that I found to be rather dull.

But there are a couple of terrific set pieces. One in which a woman wanders into a grocery store only to find the customers are all munching on raw meat and then eye her for the next course. Another whereby another woman goes into a deserted theater to watch a film only to have it slowly filled with those crazy cannibals in a manner that eerily resembles a similar scene in The Birds.

There is also some wonderful set work. The father’s house is painted with incredibly detailed, and quite uncanny murals.

But so much of the rest of the film seems to just meander about. The woman, Arletty (Marianne Hill) comes to town looking for her father. She asks about and everybody says they’ve never heard of him, but they all seem to be hiding something. Eventually, she finds some people in a hotel who may know something. But first, they interview an old drunk (Eisha Cook, Jr.). He tells some old stories about weird happenings in the town a hundred years ago. The man (Michael Greer) says he’s interested in old stories, folklore, and the like.

But none of this really goes anywhere. We hear some more about the town and those strange events from 100 years ago. They seem to be happening again, but the film doesn’t explain any of it. I’m okay with a film not explaining every detail about what is happening, but this one only muddies the water in unsatisfying ways.

Thom and his two female companions loaf about in Arletty’s father’s house. The girls becomes jealous of her while he tries to seduce her. Etc. and so forth. It all feels like a lot of padding for those two (admittedly incredibly) set pieces.

It is definitely worth watching for those two scenes, but otherwise it is a bit of a drag.

31 Days of Horror

Just over a year ago, Amazon Drive gave me notice that they were discontinuing their service. That forced me to make a decision I had been pondering for quite some time anyway: should I keep The Midnight Cafe going? Or should I shut it down?

Obviously, I decided to keep it going, but I did make some major changes. I quit doing individual posts for individual shows and started doing one post each day with a link to the downloads via Google Drive. I started writing lots of movie reviews, posting YouTube music videos, linking to cool stuff, and generally turning this site into an old-school blog. Like what I used to write when I first started. I also started making public all of my old non-bootleg-related posts from years ago.

I am genuinely curious as to what everybody thinks of the site, one year later.

But also it is time for 31 Days of Horror again. That was the first major non-bootleg series I did on this site since making this change. I remember having a lot of fun with it and I’m very pleased to be doing it again.

I guess this feels like an anniversary of sorts, and that makes it seem like a time to look back. I don’t have any big thoughts on all of this, except to say I really enjoy writing these movie reviews and talking about things that interest me beyond just posting downloads to live music. I hope you do too.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Infinity Pool (2022)

infinity pool poster

David Cronenberg is one of the most interesting directors of the last few decades. He began by making low-budget body horror flicks (a genre that he essentially invented) and grew into one of the more intellectually stimulating horror directors ever with occasional stints into science fiction, crime, and straight dramas.

His son, Brandon has recently started directing films and so far he hasn’t strayed far from his father’s roots.

Possessor from 2020 was a film about an assassin who is able to take control of people’s bodies with some kind of brain implant technology. I quite liked it.

Infinity Pool is weirder and far less interesting.

James (Alexander Skarsgård), a failed writer looking for inspiration, and Em (Cleopatra Coleman) the rich daughter of a book publishing mogul take a holiday at a resort in a vaguely Asian, and apparently backward and rather hostile country.

They are not supposed to leave the gated resort, but when they meet Gabi (Mia Goth) and Alban (Jalil Lespert) they are talked into sneaking off to a beach for a bit of fun and drinking.

I don’t know how to talk about this film without spoiling some of its central concepts so be warned.

On their way back James, driving a bit drunk, hits a local man killing him instantly. The next morning he is arrested and told this country has very strict punishments, but a rather unique way out of it. For the killing, he is to be executed, but if he can pay a large fee they will clone him and it is the clone that will be killed.

He does just this and is forced to watch the son of the man he killed take a knife and stab his clone to death.

That night Gabi and Alban introduce James to a group of people who have all been through the same ordeal. But rather than be devastated over this, they have found it freeing. Here is a country that will literally let them get away with murder, as long as they can pay the fine. Having to watch their clones get executed afterward is just a bizarre perk.

The film has a lot to say about nepotism (which is really interesting since Brandon is a nepo baby) and how the rich can get away with anything. Both Goth and Skarsgård give really good performances. But it all left me wanting for more, or at least something different. It is an unsettling film, I felt very uncomfortable while watching it, but I couldn’t exactly pinpoint why.

Some films give you a feeling of dread – they make you feel like something terrible is going to happen to their characters and you dread the moment it comes. This had that same feeling, but all of the characters in Infinity Pool are terrible people, I was kind of hoping the bottom would fall out.

Cronenberg disorients us on several occasions. It begins with idyllic scenes of the resort with his camera turning upside down, making you feel a little seasick. There are several drug-induced hallucinations where he quickly cuts a lot of different images, many of which are flooded with psychedelic lighting that did nothing to help the film but did make me dizzy.

In the end, it felt like a film with some interesting ideas, some good performances, but the messy filmmaking dropped it all on the floor.