I’ve talked about the J-Horror craze of the 2000s in these pages a few times. Generally speaking, Japanese horror from this time period relied more on mood than gore. Their stories often involved elements of folklore, and the villains were often ghosts or other supernatural elements.
But there is another side to the J-Horror phenomenon that is part of the larger Asian Extreme horror movement. Folks like Takashi Miike were making films filled with heavy violence and gruesome depravity.
Evil Dead Trap falls into the latter category.
It is the kind of film I would have loved back in the late 2000s, when I was first discovering horror films outside the slashers I loved as a teenager and the classic Universal stories I loved in college. Back then I loved extreme horror. I thought it was cool to discover these weird little films that took gore to the max.
These days I prefer my horror a bit more gothic and subdued.
This film starts out promising. Nami Tsuchiya (Miyuki Ono) hosts a late-night TV show. It is the sort of thing that likes showing off the wild and the weird. She often asks folks to send her videotapes of their crazy stuff. One day she gets a tape showing a woman (that looks remarkably like her) having her eyeballs sliced open and her stomach stabbed. It looks real. She is intriged. She takes her fellow showmakers to an abaonded military base where she thinks the film was shot.
Naturally, things go bad. A killer starts picking them off in some pretty gruesome ways. It feels a lot more like those slashers from the 1980s than a typical Japanese horror movie. This is especially true in the buildup. Our heroes consist of five girls and one guy. Of course they split into groups to explore the grounds. Nami goes at it alone. The guy and the girls have sex. Then he hides and jumps out to scare everyone.
Nami runs into a creepy guy, Daisuke Muraki (Yuji Honma) who says he’s there looking for his brother. He warns Nami to stay away from the place, then goes off on his own. There is a touch of Saw in one scene with a complicated trap set, forcing one of the girls to kill the other. The score is reminiscent of something Goblin would do for Dario Argento, with a main theme repeating every time the killer comes near.
It is unnerving, and it pushes hard into the extreme horror ideas with lots of gore and a pretty horrific rape scene. The last act gets really goofy, weird, and gross.
It really is the kind of film I would have loved twenty years ago. It is one of those things I’d love to ask other people if they’d seen it, feeling cool because they hadn’t. And then going into some of the wilder details.
These days I can admire what it’s doing and appreciate the weirdness, but I can’t say I really liked it.
I love 1980s movies. In particular, I love 1980s horror movies. Sandwiched between the gritty, no-holds-barred horror of the 1970s and the more self aware horror of the 1990s, the 1980s was like the Wild West for horror. Literally anything goes.
The ratings system allowed 1970s horror to be more gruesome than ever before, and the 1980s horror films picked that up and ran with it. The home video market allowed for even more flexibility in terms of violence and sexuality. But it also allowed independent studios to make low-budget films and find an audience like never before.
And while certainly there are all sorts of no-budget, terrible-looking films from the 1980s, the decade also saw a lot of fascinating horror films made on a shoestring by craftspeople who cared about what they were doing and had the artistry to create something fun.
TerrorVision is not a great film by any stretch of the imagination, but it is lovingly made and well crafted. It is a mix of goopy horror and goofy comedy.
On an alien planet, a worker bee periodically converts a monstrous mutant into energy beams and launches it into deepest space. One day he accidentally sends the beams down to Earth, where they are picked up by the Putterman family’s new DIY satellite dish.
Mom and Dad Putterman are pretty careless parents and big-time swingers. Their house is full of sexed-up pop art, she wears tight leather skirts, and he’s all unbuttoned shirts with bit gold necklaces. The grandfather is a conspiracy theorist gun nut who sleeps in a bomb shelter. The daughter is a punk rocker who’s dating a metalhead named OD, and the son is learning to follow in Grandpa’s footsteps.
The alien who accidentally sent the monster to Earth keeps showing up on their TV screens begging them to destroy the satellite dish and turn off the TV. But everybody just thinks its some dumb sci-fi flick being shown by an Elvira-esque TV hots who mostly exists to show off her cleavage.
It is basically one of those alien-invasion sci-fi 1950s movies with a totally ’80s bent. The alien comes in through the TV and starts eating everyone. The effects are wild. It in no way looks real, but it is imaginative and well-made.
Maybe it is my age, but I much prefer practical effects over CGI. The monster here looks fake. Obviously it isn’t a real alien monster, and you can tell it was made with rubber, wire, and latex. But it feels tangible in a way that CGI never does. With these types of effects, someone had to sit down, come up with the concept, and then try and figure out how to make it with real stuff. That gives it a real quality that some kid sitting down at a computer can never duplicate.
Anyway, there are lots of dumb gags, a whole lot of silliness, and plenty of goopy monster violence. Like I say, it isn’t a great movie, but I appreciate its existence anyway.
In 1974 Shaw Brothers Studio teamed up with Hammer Films to produce The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. On paper that sounds like a dream come true. Both studios are known for making terrific genre films with high production values on low budgets. Hammer was the king of remaking classic monster movies with gothic style and extra violence and sex appeal. Shaw Brothers mastered the art of kung fu style. Mixing them should have created an incredible film full of beautifully drawn castles whereupon kung fu masters battled vampires, werewolves, and other assorted demons.
Sadly, the actual film is rather dull and poorly produced.
The plot is a simple thing. Kah (Chan Shen), a Daoist monk, travels to Dracula’s castle in hopes that he can restore the glory of the 7 Golden Vampires who have ruled a small Chinese village for centuries, but when a poor villager killed one of them, their power was drained.
At first Dracula (sadly not Christopher Lee, but here played by John Forbes-Robertson) is like, “Nah, I’m good,” and “I don’t take orders from people like you; I make them my slaves.” But then he realizes he’s been stuck inside his castle for some reason, and the only way to get out is to take control of Kah’s body. Once that happens, he figures he might as well see what the whole Golden Vampire thing is about. Then he disappears for almost the entire film, only showing back up at the very end.
Professor Van Helsing (Peter Cushing, yea!) is lecturing at a Chinese university about vampires but gets the shrug-off by most of the intellectual community there. Only one kid believes him. Hsi Ching (David Chiang) is from the village of the Golden Vampires, and it was his grandfather that killed one of them.
He convinces Van Helsing, along with his son Leyland (Robin Stewart) and a rich blonde woman, Vanessa Buren (Julie Ege), who is financing the entire thing, to follow him and his martial expert six siblings to travel to the village and kill the Golden Vampires.
The journey is long and difficult and filled with many battles. Eventually they get to the village, fight the Golden Vampire, and then Dracula comes out to fight Van Helsing one on one.
So what went wrong? It was a troubled shoot from the beginning. They shot at Shaw Studios in Hong Kong with a British director (Roy Ward Baker), a mostly English cast (at least for the speaking roles), and a Chinese crew. Communication was difficult as most of the Chinese didn’t speak English and vice versa.
Baker had made some decent films for Hammer, but he doesn’t seem to know what to do with the kung fu aspects of the film. Eventually the Shaw Brothers people hired Chang Cheh to handle the action sequences because Baker was out of his depth with them.
Trouble is they shot most of the film outdoors on the rather barren, scrabble mountains near Hong Kong. Hammer Films is known for its great use of gothic castles, intricate sets, and bold color designs. You get very little of that by shooting outdoors in the sunshine. There are a few scenes indoors, and Baker really shines there, but there are far too few of them to make things interesting.
The kung fu scenes are mostly unremarkable as well. There is none of that jaw-dropping stunt work that made the Shaw Brothers famous. The story is mostly dull. Even Peter Cushing seems to be phoning it in.
Truth is Hammer Studios was running out of steam. Their glory days were behind them. Shaw Brothers would keep making numerous films well into the 1980s, but even though this was shot on their home turf, they seem to have been relegated to the second string.
In the end, this is a curiosity piece. If you are a fan of both studios, it is worth watching, but you’ll probably end up much like I did, wondering what could have been.
In a scene that is clearly aping the opening moments of Halloween (1978), our movie begins with a point-of-view shot of someone walking ominously through a house. There are horror posters hanging on the room and a torture chamber’s worth of weapons and devices hanging on the wall. A hand reaches out and grabs a knife. A teenaged girl takes off her robe and steps into the shower.
From Halloween, our movie switches to Psycho with the camera inside the shower and a knife-wielding maniac seen in shadows through the steam. The curtain opens. The blade stabs. The girl screams.
Our killer is the girls’ young brother. The knife is rubber. The scene turns from horror to goof.
With the runaway success of Friday the 13th (1980), Universal Studios was looking to get into the teenage horror game. They hired Tobe Hooper, still riding high off the triumphs of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) and Salem’s Lot (1979). It would be his first film for a major studio.
That girl in the shower is Amy (Elizabeth Berridge), and she’s got a hot date. Her father warns her not to go to the carnival, for two kids were killed at one not that far away a few weeks ago. She promises she won’t, but her date Buzz (Cooper Huckabee) insists, and besides, they already told their two friends Liz (Largo Woodruff) and Richie (Miles Chapin) that’s what they were going to do.
It’s a pretty cheap and sleazy carnival with deformed animals and half-naked ladies on display. Our heroes have a good time, and Amy begins to fall for Buzz. They visit a psychic (Sylvia Miles, having a blast) but get kicked out of her tent for giggling too much. Meanwhile, Amy’s little brother sneaks out of the house and visits the carnival.
Our heroes decide it would be fun to stay the night at the funhouse, so before everything shuts down, they find a place to hide. And have some sexy fun times. But before things get too heated, they hear something. Someone has come into the room below. It is the psychic and a large man wearing a Frankenstein mask. He’s nonverbal. She tells him if he wants it, he has to pay. He finds some cash, and she strips down. But our boy’s a little too excited, and he finishes before even getting his pants off. When she says there are no refunds, he kills her.
Yikes! Zoinks! Our heroes find that they are trapped inside this funhouse with no way to escape. Frankenstein’s (Wayne Doba) daddy, the Carnival Barker (Kevin Conway), scolds him, then beats him, knocking the mask off his deformed, monstrous face.
One of the kids drops a lighter, alerting our villains, and the rest of the movie has them chasing our heroes around the funhouse.
Periodically we’ll find the little brother wandering around the carnival, oblivious to everything. The film hints that he’s going to be killed, even having him caught by some creepy-looking dude. But he turns out nice and calls the boy’s parents, and the boy is never seen again. It is a nice little fake-out. The film does that a few times when the story will lean one way and then go another.
It is a film best left with your brain checked out. Otherwise you’ll find yourself wondering why a roaming carnival has a funhouse with multiple stories, a long hallway with a giant ventilation system, and a room full of killer gears and rotating hooks. Seriously, that temporary funhouse is enormous.
But if you can push such analytical thoughts aside, you might find there is a lot of fun to be had in this film. Hooper dives into the goofiness of the carnival aspects. It comes across like a mix between classic 1980s slasher films with something even more classic from Universal with a dash of Freaks thrown in for good measure. Not a great movie by any stretch, but an interesting one.
For the third (and final) film in the Ginger Snaps series, they went back to the beginning. Or rather the beginning of the beginning. Or something. What I’m saying is they made a prequel.
Set in 1815, this film follows two sisters, Brigitte (Emily Perkins) and Ginger (Katharine Isabel), as they battle werewolves and try to keep Ginger from turning into one after she’s been bitten.
If you’ll remember, that is exactly the plot of the original film, even down to the same actresses playing characters with the same names and (more or less) the same personalities.
Instead of being two modern girls living through the hell of high school and being obsessed with death, these sisters have survived a terrible accident that killed their parents and everyone else in their party while exploring the great wilderness.
They come upon a nearly abandoned fort filled with suspicious characters. The people inside have been waiting for a party to return with food and supplies, but they are two months late. Wolf-like creatures have been attacking the fort regularly.
One night Ginger discovers a strange, deformed boy hidden in a room. The boy bites her. It will come as no surprise to learn the boy was bitten by a werewolf and is starting to turn. Soon enough Ginger will start to turn as well.
To keep that from happening, she needs to kill the boy. But her father is none too keen on that happening, and killing a child proves a bit difficult for her as well.
The original Ginger Snaps was a terrific little horror film that blended the smart high school satire of Heathers with a good dash of bloody horror. This third entry feels like they just took the same concept and threw it into a different time period. The sisters act just like they do in the original film, down to the way they talk (which is rather off-putting since it takes place in the 1800s). There also isn’t much satire to it. It really doesn’t feel like they took the time to think through the earlier time period but needed it to be a sequel since (spoilers for the previous films) Ginger is dead and Brigitte is a full-fledged werewolf.
The end result isn’t terrible. It is a perfectly serviceable horror film. It just pales in comparison with the first one.
I’ve written about Scream (1996) several times before. I grew up watching slashers in the late 1980s, and Scream did this amazing job of both satirizing the genre conventions and actually being one of the best films in the genre. The characters are all self-aware. They seem to know they are living inside a horror movie. Well, not that exactly; they are real characters, but they all know the horror conventions. They constantly talk about horror movies, and at one point one of the characters breaks down the “rules.”
I loved that. I’d never seen a movie where characters talked about pop culture in the same way I did. I’d often thought about the rules of horror, even if I’d never exactly put it that way. To see characters on the screen that were like me was revolutionary.
There were two immediate sequels, followed by what are now four legacy sequels that started just over a decade after the third one ended. They have mostly been a series of diminishing returns. This latest one is the worst in the franchise.
Scream satirized the entire horror genre, specifically slasher films. Scream 2 turned its eyes on sequels, and Scream 3 attempted to go after trilogies. Then there were shots at remakes, YouTube Videos, and Legacy Sequels. Scream 7 seems to just be satirizing itself, as if there are not other aspects of the genre it can poke fun at.
The legacy films in this series have been a mixed bag. Sometimes they’ve felt like they are trying to set up a new group of characters to carry the torch, and yet they can never seem to let go of the old familiar faces. I’ve seen them all, but I would be hard-pressed to tell you anything about the last three films.
Due to a salary dispute, Neve Campbell did not appear in Scream 6, but she is back front and center for this one. As is Courteney Cox. Melissa Barrera, who was set up as the main lead in Scream 5 and Scream 6, was not asked to be back for this film due to some social media-related kerfuffle. Jenna Oretega then decided not to return.
I’ve said an awful lot here without actually talking about the film at hand. There just isn’t that much to talk about.
The cold open features a couple of Stab fans (Stab being the in-movie films that basically fictionalize the events of the Scream films, if that makes sense). They come to the house that most of the characters died in the original Scream,as a sort of dark tourism satire and promptly get killed.
Sidney (Campbell) has now moved to a rural town, gotten married to a cop (Joel McHale), and has a kid who she named Tatum (Isabel May) (the name of one of her friends in the first film who was horribly killed – which is kind of weird when you think about it – and the characters in this film do think about it).
Ghostface Killer finds them and starts murdering people in very gore-filled but not so imaginative ways. He video calls Sidney and has the voice and face of the original killer in Scream. But it can’t be him because he was killed in that first film. Or can it? By this point in the franchise, anything can happen (but mostly doesn’t).
There are a lot of secondary characters who are also suspects. There is the weird kid obsessed with Sidney and her (many) run-ins with killers. There’s the boyfriend and movie nerd girl. Plus a couple of kids from the last film. There is some decent meta-humor where characters literally call these people by the names I’m using (weird kid, boyfriend, etc.).
They have the now perfunctory meta-discussion on who the killer could be, but they put no real effort into it. Gayle (Cox) eventually shows up. Her entrance is pretty good, but then they don’t seem to know what to do with her.
Scream is one of my all-time favorite horror films. I’ve enjoyed many of the sequels even while recognizing they are never as good as the original. But this one just doesn’t seem to have a reason to exist. Yet, I’m not mad I watched it. I even spent good money on it to see it in the theater (something I haven’t done since Scream 3).
But if they make another one, I hope they get rid of the entire original cast and find a way to make it feel original again. At this point this series is starting to feel like the films the original was so good at making fun of.
This was one of the first Dario Argento films I ever watched. I had definitely watched The Bird With the Crystal Plumage before, and probably Suspiria, but I was not well versed in Argento or Giallo at that point. I watched it on an old DVD that I bought on the cheap. It was one of those packs of multiple films all put onto a couple of discs where the quality is god-awful. This was a pack of like ten slasher films on two discs.
I didn’t know anything about the film; I’m not even sure I knew it was an Argento, but it sounded interesting, and I gave it a go. I mostly liked it, but I didn’t love it.
I’ve seen it a couple of times since and have come to enjoy it more. Having now seen almost all of Argento’s filmography and a whole lot of Giallo, I can better see how it fits inside those things and appreciate it more. It still isn’t anywhere close to my favorite, but it’s a long way from the worst. I do find it interesting that I watched it so early.
The Cat O’ Nine Tails was the second film Argento ever directed and is the middle part of what has become known as his “Animal Trilogy” (the first is Bird With the Crystal Plumage, the last is Four Flies on Gray Velvet.)
This film suffers from it leaning more towards the murder mystery aspects of the Giallo and away from the more lurid and stylistic parts of the genre.
Someone breaks into the Terzi Medical Institute but steals nothing. The institute studies genetics and has just made a breakthrough. It seems that individuals with an extra Y chromosome—making it XYY – have a much greater tendency toward violence. That extra chromosome is quite rare, but a study inside a prison found that those convicted of violent crimes had it at a much higher rate.
Since nothing was stolen, the police basically shrug. But a newspaper man named Carlo Giordani (James Franciscus) takes an interest in the story, as does Franco “Cookie” Arno (Karl Malden), a blind man who loves working puzzles.
Before they can figure it out, the bodies start piling up. Someone is strangling people that at first seem random, but they ultimately are found to have some connection to the institute.
There are lots of groovy scenes featured from the killer’s point of view, usually as he’s killing someone. In the midst of this, Argento often gives us extreme close-ups on the killer’s eyes, but until the end we do not see who the killer is. With that and Cookie being blind, Argento’s themes about what we see and what we don’t are none too subtle. But still effective.
The editing is rather fascinating. Between scenes, the film will often give us flashes of what is to come. As one scene is ending, we’ll see the beginning of the next scene flash cut into the previous scene for a few seconds. There are a few nicely staged scenes and some typical Dario style, but mostly he plays it straight. Which is too bad because the actual story doesn’t quite have enough in it to keep me completely interested.
It is well worth seeing if you are a fan of Argento or Giallo. It isn’t the first film I’d turn to if you are interested, but it is definitely a nice way of seeing how things developed.
As an aside note I’m counting this as part of Foreign Film February even though the copy I watched was an English dub. Like a lot of Italian films from this time I believe Cat O’ Nine Tails was filmed with everyone speaking in their native tongue and then in post production it was dubbed into English and Italian (with the main actors using their own voice when possible – so Karl Malden speaks in English, and was presumably dubbed by an Italian for that version.) So this was a foreign made film directed by an Italian so I’m counting it.
Last night the family and I went to see the King Cabbage Brass Band in concert. I’ll probably have more to say about that later, but for now I’ll say we had a blast. It was a great show. To get there we had to leave about 6:30, and we didn’t get home until almost midnight, at which point I was utterly exhausted, and was not capable of sitting down to watch a horror movie.
I had actually planned for this and watched a movie earlier in the afternoon. I got about half of this post written before it was time to go. So, I’m finishing it now, and we’re calling it the Saturday Morning Horror Movie. I guess I could call it the Friday Afternoon Horror Movie since that’s when I watched it, but let’s not make things complicated.
—
There is just too darn much stuff to watch. My daughter wanted to watch Hamilton a couple of weeks ago, and the only way to stream it is to get Disney+. Apparently, the only way to get Disney+ is to bundle it with Hulu. Being the good father that I am, I ordered both, and we all enjoyed Hamilton.
Then I started to enjoy Hulu. They’ve got some good movies, and some great shows, and I decided to keep it for another month. Tonight I figured I’d see how their horror selection was and came across this film. The trailer looked intriguing, and I gave it a go.
Turns out it is part of a horror anthology series from horror stalwarts Blumhouse Pictures. Into the Dark, as the series was called, ran for two seasons with roughly one movie coming out per month. Each movie was holiday themed, grabbing whatever big holiday happened during the month it aired.
Somehow, I’d never heard of this. Like at all. Which is weird because this sort of thing is right up my alley. Like I say, there is just too darn much stuff to watch.
But now that I’ve watched this, I’m kind of glad I’d not heard of it before. There are some intriguing ideas in All That We Destroy, but none of them are explored with any real gusto.
Dr. Harris (Samantha Mathis) is a geneticist who has found a way to make perfect human clones. In her house. It is perfect timing because, as it turns out, her son Spencer (Israel Broussard) is probably a serial killer. He’d shown all sorts of signs of that growing up, but when he actually kills a human – a drifter named Ashley (Aurora Perrineu)—she’s sure of it. Instead of turning him in or getting him some kind of therapy, she clones Ashley and lets him keep killing her.
The idea is that if she observes his killings, then maybe she can figure out what makes him tick and change him. Or at the very least, killing a clone will get those instincts out of his system (for a time), enabling him to live a normal life. And whenever those instincts pop back up, he can come home and kill another clone.
That’s an interesting idea, but again the film doesn’t do much with it. It doesn’t really explore what makes him tick. The mom could turn into a great villain. It makes a certain sense that any mom would protect their son, but she just keeps churning out clones for him to kill. Even when the clones start to have memories of themselves and increasingly seem human, she just keeps making them.
The trouble is Spencer knows he’s killing a clone. That makes her not human, and he can tell the difference. It just isn’t the same killing a clone. Enter Marissa (Dora Madison), the cute, effervescent neighbor who takes a liking to Spencer even though he speaks in monotone and acts very strangely. She becomes the love interest but also a real human he might have to kill.
Spencer’s Dad (Frank Whaley) shows up at some point, but only through these very strange virtual reality phone calls with his mom. When he calls, the mom picks up these little dots she attaches to her head and gets transported to a virtual world where they both walk and talk together. There are some other odd technological moments in this film that seem to exist to show that we are living in the near future or something.
The script does nobody any favors. Madison and Perrineau give it their best, and both are quite good with what they’re given. There really is something to this story, but it’s like the filmmakers didn’t quite believe in it enough and wound up falling back on some stupid tropes.
As it is Foreign Film February, I wanted to do a non-English language film for my Friday Night Horror flick. It has also been a long day, so I grabbed the thing closest to me, which was my Paul Naschy boxed set. There are five films in that set, and I hope to watch and review them all over the next couple of months. I love the idea of reviewing all the DVDs I own, but that is a monumental task.
Vengeance of the Zombies is an absolutely bonkers film. In the booklet that came with this set, Naschy (who wrote the film) is quoted as having probably been on hashish when he sat down at his typewriter. That definitely checks out.
It also checks out that this was a chepie exploitation flick. Technically there is a plot, but it is so haphazardly put together it is impossible to make sense of.
Someone is killing a bunch of women in London. Then someone else, a voodoo priest named Kantanka (Paul Naschy), is bringing them back to life as part of his zombie horde. Naschy also plays Krisna an East Indian mystic.
Elvire Irving (Romy) thinks Krisna is one cool cat and follows him to his big mansion out in the country. The big mansion was once the home of an evil family who were eventually murdered and hung upon the trees in the yard.
There are a lot of dream sequences where Kantanka and some other foul faced fiends attack Elvire. In one particularly groovy dream sequence, Paul Naschy plays Satan, to whom various others make sacrifices. Another sequence (which may or may not be a dream; it is difficult to tell), a lady wearing a big box painted like a man’s face dances around while Kantanka pours blood onto corpses to turn them alive. Or something.
Scotland Yard gets involved but is mostly useless.
Seriously, I just watched this film, and I’m having a hard time remembering anything about the actual plot.
There is lots of murdering. Plenty of ladies wearing sheer nightgowns. And loads of gratuitous sex.
I do love the sex scenes in these types of films. During one scene, the housekeeper is upset over something. Krisna tells her everything is going to be ok. Then he looks at her, the music starts up, and he then pulls down the covers, pulls down her top, and gropes her breasts three times. She then sits up and passionately kisses him.
In another scene, Elvire goes into a barn only to find a woman with her head nearly chopped off. Then she is attacked by a dude with a scythe. Krisna jumps in and saves the day. They then go to the house, where she tells him that he should call the cops. He brusquely says “no” to which she responds by making out with him.
I’ve been doing my seduction techniques all wrong, I guess.
The music is a wild mix of popular rock and funk. It is so crazily inappropriate for most of what’s happening on screen.
This is a ridiculously bad film in every imaginable way. But it’s also a lot of fun to watch. It is the kind of film you want to watch late at night with a group of friends while getting loaded. Check your brain at the door and get ready for ridiculousness.
When I first began writing these Friday Night Horror columns, back in 2022, I didn’t really write full reviews of the films. They really were Friday night movies. After supper, me and the family would go upstairs to my bedroom and watch a Doctor Who episode, and then I’d write my Five Cool Things column (which was published on Fridays back then), and then I’d start watching a horror movie. But by then it was usually pretty late. Many times I’d actually fall asleep on the couch before I’d finished the movie. Even if I did make it to the end, it would be way too late for me to be able to write a full review. So usually, somewhere in the middle of the film, I’d dash off my column with promises to write my full thoughts the next morning (usually this didn’t happen.)
At some point my daughter got older and started having friends over on Friday nights (or she’d go to their house), and the Doctor Who watching kind of stopped. Then I stopped writing Five Cool Things on Fridays, and suddenly I had a lot more free time to start my weekend. Truth be told, I often watch my horror movies on Friday afternoons.
Short thoughts on movies I hadn’t even finished became full-on reviews, and here we are. I say all this to admit one thing: I can barely remember watching Black Phone (2021). When trailers started dropping for Black Phone 2, I remembered I had seen the first one, but I couldn’t remember anything about it. I was pretty sure I had written about it, so I searched my site hoping to find a review to refresh my memory. I found my Friday Night Horror column on it, but then had to face the fact that it was written at that time when I wasn’t writing full reviews. And in the case of this movie, I was so spoiler-avoidant I hardly said anything about the plot.
I started to watch it again because I wasn’t interested in the sequel, but I’ve got a stack of Blu-rays on my desk that need watching (and reviewing), so I didn’t feel like I had time. So I watched a couple of trailers and refreshed myself with the basic premise of the films and sat down with the sequel.
Black Phone 2 takes place four years after the original film. The hero of that film, Finney Black (Mason Thames), the only survivor of the Grabber’s (Ethan Hawke) reign as a serial killer, is haunted by his experience. His sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), who helped find Finn when he was trapped in the Grabber’s basement, is now haunted by nightmares featuring young boys being murdered at the Alpine Lake Christian Camp. When she receives a phone call from her dead mother and discovers that she once worked at Alpine Lake, she convinces Finn and her friend Ernesto (Miguel Mora) – whose brother was killed by the Grabber – to visit Alpine Lake and investigate.
They tell the camp they are interested in becoming counselors in training. The camp agrees, but by the time they arrive, a great blizzard has rolled in. Most of the staff went home to stay out of the storm, and none of the other counselors (or campers) have arrived. This leaves our heroes alone with Armondo (Demián Bichir) the camp supervisor; Mustang (Arianna Rivas), Armondo’s niece and assistant; and Barbara (Maev Beaty) and Kenneth (Graham Abbey) two employees of the camp and staunch Christians.
As someone who grew up in a conservative Christian environment and who attended a Christian summer camp for several years, I have a little complaint to make. Our heroes – two boys and a girl – arrive at this camp in the midst of a terrible storm in the middle of the night. They are greeted rather coldly and then immediately separated – boys in one cabin, Gwen in another. When Gwen asks about this arrangement, not wanting to be left alone in this strange place in the middle of a storm, she’s told by Mustang that there is a law against underage boys and girls sleeping in the same cabin. Furthermore, while Mustang would like to stay with Gwen, she also is not allowed by law because she is not a licensed counselor.
What the what? I’ve been to numerous Christian camps and retreats, and while it is true they don’t allow boys and girls to bunk in the same house as each other, it isn’t because of some law but rather because they fear the sexy. Boys and girls can’t be trusted with their lust and therefore must be separated. Even if it is in the middle of the night, in a strange place, and there is a scary snowstorm. Even if one of the boys is the girl’s brother. And almost every adult I’ve ever known in this situation would absolutely let Gwen either stay with her brother or with them. No way are they making her sleep by herself.
But I digress.
Gwen continues to have dreams. A payphone (for some reason located outside by itself, very near a frozen lake) starts ringing even though it is disconnected. Finn answers it and discovers the Grabber isn’t dead, and he’s ready for his revenge.
Armondo is suspicious these kids aren’t really the Christian camp counselor type (Gwen’s hilariously foul mouth tips him off), and soon enough they confess to him why they are really there. He remembers the mother and agrees to help.
Gwen’s nightmares were shot using Super 8 and Super 16 cameras, which give it a wonderfully gritty and old look. Unfortunately, they are mostly gore-filled jump scares that didn’t do anything for me. The rest of the film didn’t fare much better.
My (admittedly vague) memory of the first film is that it was very tense and thrilling. The sequel has none of that. They don’t attempt to add anything to the lore. They don’t try and explain how the Grabber is still alive. He’s come from hell, I guess. They do some variations on his creepy mask, which is kind of cool, but he isn’t terrifying here.
I didn’t hate the film. There are moments that are interesting. I do appreciate that they tried to go in a different direction instead of imitating the original, but they missed the goal line.
themidnightcafe.org 