Awesome ’80s in April: Monkey Shines (1988)

monkey shines poster

For some reason, I assumed this movie was based on a Stephen King novel. I think that was because the poster features one of those toy monkeys with cymbals in its hands. King wrote a short story featuring the same toy (which I’ve read part of, but didn’t finish because the audiobook had to be returned to the library). It is based upon a book, but not anything by King, but rather a British author named Michael Stewart. The film has nothing to do with a toy monkey either. But its plot does run into Stephen King territory.

At the beginning of the film we know something is going to happen to law student Allan Mann (Jason Beghe) because he is out running on a beautiful morning and all seems to be right with the world (and films don’t begin that way unless something bad is going to happen.) Since it features him running athletically and focuses on his muscular legs, he’s naturally hit by a truck which renders him a paraplegic.

He has a tough go of it in the beginning and tries to kill himself. But fails. His kooky scientist friend, Geoffrey (John Pankow) hooks him up with a helper monkey. Geoffrey doesn’t tell Allan that he’s been secretly injecting the monkey, named Ella, with a human brain cell-laden serum.

At first, things seem great. Ella is super helpful and seems to anticipate Allan’s every need. But because this is a horror movie, one directed by George A. Romero no less, things go sideways quickly. Actually, quickly isn’t the right word here, because the film takes its time to get to the psychotic monkey killing people. But they do eventually get there.

Basically, the monkey forms a psychic connection with Allan and it especially attaches to Allan’s anger, and unlike people who might think they’d like to kill someone in a fit of anger, the monkey translates things literally and does some bad, bad things.

There are a few too many side plots involving, among other things, Geoffrey’s boss (who doesn’t like his experiments, and is played by Stephen Root in his first film role), Allan’s Nurse Ratched-like healthcare worker, and Allan’s wife having an affair with his surgeon (Stanley Tucci in his third film role – the wife is played by Janine Turner). There is also a romance with the monkey’s trainer that includes a very interesting sex scene (one of the few on-screen sex scenes involving a paraplegic.)

Romero handles the material well, but this is definitely one of his lesser films. It isn’t exactly boring, but I was very much ready for the monkey to turn psycho much earlier than it did.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Chopping Mall (1986)

chopping mall poster

“Well, if you are going to watch a movie from the ’80s it ought to have a mall in it.” My wife, when she learned what movie I was watching tonight.

Although malls were popular from the 1970s through the 1990s there is something so very 1980s about them. They were a staple of my life growing up. I almost never go to the mall these days (the nearest Apple store is located in one and I sometimes have to take my phone in for repairs there, but that’s about it). It seems most people don’t go to malls these days either. As they all seem to be closing down. But there was a time when malls were the place to be.

Mention to me KB Toys or Spencer’s Gifts or Orangejulius or a dozen other stores and my memories are flooded with nostalgic glee. I’m sure it does for many others as well. There is a reason why large chunks of Season Three of Stranger Things was set in a mall. Malls are the 1980s.

It makes perfect sense that they’d set a horror movie from the 1980s in a mall. I’m surprised they didn’t set more of them there.

The plot of Chopping Mall is pretty simple. The Park Plaza Mall has just installed a state of the art security system. Impenetrable steel shutters block all the entry doors after the mall closes and three high-tech robots roam the floors at night subduing any trespassers.

On the very first night this new security system is implemented a group of young, attractive mall workers decide to throw a party at the mall’s furniture store. After a bit of partially nude sexy times all hell breaks loose. A lightning strike short-circuits the robots and they go on a killing spree, killing everybody but a Final Girl and the dweeb.

That’s it. That’s the plot.

The movie is all kinds of dumb, but it is also kind of fun. You could call it dumb fun. In fact I just did.

In an early scene some smarmy executive types introduce us to the robots. They ensure everyone that they are perfectly safe and all they are armed with are some darts that will knock out any would-be robber. In reality the robots are equipped with much more – electrodes, plastic explosives, welding guns, and freakin’ laser beams.

Oddly enough they are not equipped with any sort of chopping equipment which would have been appropriate considering the name of the film. Victims are electrocuted, thrown over a ledge, strangled and one poor girl has her head exploded, but not a single person is in any way chopped to death.

The budget is decidedly low, the direction from Jim Wynorski is sloppy and the acting pretty shabby. The violence consists mostly of explosions (lots and lots of explosions, actually) but there is very little gore (save for one scene).

The robot lasers are capable of exploding a head, and blowing up doors. But sometimes they merely cause a slight wound to a leg, or crack a vase. At one point a robot shoots a mirror and apparently that repels the blast back and electrocutes the robot. I say apparently because it really isn’t clear that’s what happened, but there was a mirror in the scene and the robot was electrocuted so I pieces these things together and decided that’s what happened. It is that sort of film. You sometimes have to guess as to what is actually happening.

There are some nice cameos for fans of low budget movies from the ’80s. Dick Miller appears for a nice death scene, and Mary Waranov and Paul Bartel show up as a couple of wiseacres in the opening scene. Kelli Maroney is the Final Girl (sorry for the spoiler but it is pretty obvious from the very beginning she’ll be the one who survives.) I just watched her in Night of the Comet and now I’m declaring myself a fan.

So yea, Chopping Mall is a dumb movie. But it is a good dumb movie. Sometimes that’s all I need.

Awesome ’80s in April: Night of the Comet (1984)

night of the comet poster

While working on my list of movies I wanted to watch during the Awesome ’80s in April I headed over to Letterboxd, turned on their giant list of all films, filtered out everything but movies made in the 1980s, sorted it by highest rated, and systematically made my way through the entire list. I was looking for movies I had never seen, but had always wanted to watch. Or movies I’d never heard of but that looked interesting (one of the cool things about Letterboxd is that it lets you see how your friends rated any film, and read any reviews they might have written).

Night of the Comet falls into the latter category. I’d never heard of it before, but it was rated pretty highly by people whose thoughts on movies I respect and the plot sounded interesting.

Honestly, even after all of that, I expected something much cheesier. The plot synopsis sounds like Buffy the Vampire Slayer meets Night of the Living Dead at the end of the world. But what I got was something more thoughtful, and well-made than that synopsis makes you expect.

An opening salvo tells us that a huge comet will be passing by Earth for the first time in millions of years. Everybody is excited. Parties are being held outside to watch the comet pass. The whole world is outside watching. The whole world except for Reggie (Catherine Mary Stewart) and Larry (Michael Bowen). They work at a movie theater and Larry has convinced Reggie to help him rent out a reel to some guys who will illegally duplicate it. Reggie really wants to see the comet pass by, but Larry is willing to pay her a whole $15 bucks and that’s hard to turn down.

They wind up spending the night in the steel-lined projection booth. The next morning they wake up to find that the comet has turned everybody (well, almost everybody) into red dust. A few people did survive but they seem to have been turned into brain-eating zombies. Larry meets his end pretty quickly and Reggie returns home to find her sister Samantha (Kelli Maroney) is still alive. Turns out that after an argument with her mother Sam slept in the steel-lined shed.

Together, they do what any red-blooded American teenager would do after a zombie apocalypse – they head to the mall. Actually, they head to the radio station first because a DJ’s voice can be heard playing records and they figure finding another human alive would be a good thing. The DJ is actually just a recording on a tape, but they do discover Hector (Robert Beltran) at the radio station. Hector almost immediately leaves the girls as he needs to find out if his mother is still alive (he’ll come back to the movie a little later). That’s when the girls go to the mall.

There are some scientists types who survived by hiding in an underground bunker. They must now try to rebuild humanity and that begins by running tests of the few other humans who survived to see if there is a chance at finding a vaccine to counteract the effects of the cosmic rays.

Night of the Comet does a great job of blending comedy with horror and thriller elements. The Buffy mixed with Night of the Living Dead elements I mentioned at the beginning of this post are more apt than I thought. Although it is more like Dawn of the Dead since a great portion of the movie is spent inside a mall. But it is a much better film than that synopsis might indicate. It was made on a tiny budget, but they put every dollar they had to good use. It is funny and thrilling, and has a nice sense of what it’s trying to do.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Barbarian (2022)

barbarian movie

It is very rare that a movie surprises me. Rarer still is a horror movie that surprises. Barbarian surprised me at least twice and left me breathless on multiple occasions. We’re not talking jump scares – though there are plenty of those – or just general weirdness (though it is a deeply weird movie). Barbarian surprised me in ways that supplanted my expectations. In the best possible ways. That it doesn’t quite stick its ending, and that its Horror was a little too much for me, doesn’t change the fact that this is exactly the kind of horror movie I love to see.

It is also a movie that truly is best seen completely cold, so I will do my best to remain vague and spoiler free.

Tess (Georgina Campbell) travels to Detroit for a job interview. She books an Airbnb and arrives late at night in the pouring rain. The lockbox opens but is missing the key. The rental agency does not answer the phone. Just as she’s leaving, a man, Keith (Bill Skarsgård), opens the door. Turns out he also rented the place for the night.

Being in a strange city, in the middle of the night, during a rainstorm, finding herself stuck staying in a house with a complete stranger doesn’t exactly make Tess feel comfortable. The film has a lot of interesting things to say about the ways men and women must travel through the world in different ways to feel safe.

It also does a great job of building tension around this situation. We (and therefore Tess) are never quite sure whether or not Keith is a potential friend or a danger. In order to not spoil what comes next I’ll fast forward to a second story the movie tells.

But let’s just say this is a horror story.

AJ Gilbrade (Justin Long) is a working actor – not quite rich and famous yet, but he’s getting there. He’s introduced driving a convertible down an ocean-side highway singing along to Donovan’s “Riki Tiki Tavi.” A phone calls interrupts this happy moment and he’s informed that his costar on his upcoming television series has accused him of sexual misconduct.

Losing that job and basically becoming untouchable to everyone else, AJ realizes he needs to liquidate some things fast in order to have the money to live on while things get sorted. Queue him traveling to Detroit to sell one of his rental properties.

Guess which house is his?

The two stories intersect but again it goes in directions I was not expecting at all.

Justin Long is a likable actor and we naturally assume that his declarations of innocence over the misconduct allegations are true. The film teases out what actually happened in some really interesting ways, and makes some comparisons to…well, again I don’t want to spoil anything.

I’ll say no more about the plot. Writer/director Zach Cregger has created a most interesting story and found ways to interject something new into some pretty familiar-sounding horror tropes. As a director, he creates a good sense of space and an eerie sense of mood and creeping horror.

The jump scares mostly worked on me but they were the least interesting aspects of the film. Likewise, the actual horror parts of the film, by which I mean the more atypical scary parts of the movie (sorry, I do want to be vague and that makes it difficult to say what I mean just here) were a little too over the top for my tastes. But otherwise I completely fell for this film.

Final Destination (2000)

final destination poster

A group of American high school kids boards a plane headed for Paris for a few weeks. One of them, Alex Browning (Devon Sawa) falls asleep before the plane takes off and has a vision of the plane exploding mid-air. He awakens with a fright and freaks the heck out. One of his classmates, Carter (Kerry Smith) aggressively tells Alex to chill out and a fight ensues. In the aftermath Alex, Carter, and a few others including Clear Rivers (Ali Larter), Billy Hitchcock (Sean William Scott), and their teacher Mrs. Lewton (Kristen Cloke) are all kicked off the plane.

Sure enough, moments later the plane takes off and then explodes killing everyone on board. Since Alex told everyone the plane was going to explode before it did, the FBI thinks he must have been involved. Everyone at his high school just thinks he’s a freak. Only Clear Rivers believes him.

Soon enough some of the others who survived the explosion begin to die under mysterious circumstances. A visit to the morgue and a chat with Tony Todd reveal that when you cheat death, death comes at you. Surmising that the kids are now dying in the order they would have died on the plane (by using the seating plan and extrapolating where the explosion occurred) Alex figures out who will be next and tries to save them.

He’s not very good at it.

I knew this movie was gonna be dumb, but I had no idea what dumb depths it would dumb down to. I don’t usually nitpick movies over little details. I don’t mind small plot holes. But I was shaking my head over this one within the first few minutes.

The whole point of these movies (and there are a lot of them) is to create larger and more complex methods for the kids to be killed – call them Rube Goldbert deathtraps. I’ve not seen any of the sequels, but apparently, they get really ridiculous. Here they are pretty fun, but not particularly impressive. The last one goes over the top in a way I won’t spoil, but that I found really enjoyable to watch.

I don’t know why I’ve never seen this film until now. I was totally on board with the post Scream cycle of self-aware horror films and this came out at a time when I watched just about every movie that came to my local cineplex, but I must have missed this one. I’m glad I was able to catch up with it now, and I’ll probably eventually get to the sequels, but I can’t say I’ll be in a hurry to do so.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986)

the texas chainsaw massacre part 2

The original Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of the best horror movies of the 1970s. It is gritty, dirty, and full of Texas sweat. Like a lot of films from that decade, it is documentarian in style, not realistic exactly but textile, you can feel it in your bones – the heat, the dirt, the blood.

In contrast, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is totally ’80s in every way. It is a neon, day glow, music video of a film that doesn’t take anything seriously except for its attempts to have serious fun with the material.

It stars Dennis Hopper as Lt. Boude “Lefty” Enright the uncle of two of the victims of the first film. The movie is set thirteen years after the original film and an opening scrawl informs us that the crazed chainsaw-wielding cannibals from the first film are still on the loose and on the move. We see them chase down a couple of frat boys driving recklessly on the highway and cut them up.

The boys were on the telephone with a local radio DJ, “Stretch” (Caroline Williams) when the attack occurs and she recorded the entire incident. She takes the recording to Lefty and the two of them go on the search for the killers.

Before long they are trapped inside an underground funhouse full of leftover amusement park junk, skeletons, skulls, and dismembered corpses.

Leatherface (Bill Johnson) falls in love with Stretch, while his family members chop up humans and turn the meat into chile to sell for the famous Oklahoma University vs Texas football game.

It is hard to explain just how over-the-top nutso this film really is. It is intentionally ridiculous, verging on camp. For the first twenty minutes or so I was really annoyed by it. I love the original film and this seemed like a terrible parody of it. Then I realized that was kind of the point and learned to sit back and enjoy myself.

More or less. It really is a bit too much. I can handle my gore pretty well, and I’m not opposed to using excess to create comedy. But eventually, it becomes boring. I was exhausted by the end.

At least Dennis Hopper seemed to be enjoying himself.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Hell of the Living Dead (1980)

hell of the living dead poster

George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) was a huge international success. It made over $1 million in Italy alone. In 1979 Lucio Fulci made an unofficial sequel, Zombi 2 (Dawn was titled Zombi in Italy). It was quite successful as well and for the next few years, the Italians began churning out one zombie film after another.

In 1980 Bruno Mattei got into the game with Hell of the Living Dead, aka Virus, aka Night of the Zombies, aka Zombie Creeping Flesh, aka half a dozen other things. It is, well it is a mess, but kind of a glorious, ridiculous, god-awful mess. It’s also a lot of fun in a late-night weekend kind of way.

The plot, such as it is, involves a research facility in Papua New Guinea that accidentally releases an experimental gas called “Operation Sweet Death” which turns the recently deceased into flesh-eating monsters.

The government sends in an elite SWAT team to take care of business. Along the way they run into two reporters and together, they make their way through the jungle, battling hordes of monsters, to the research facility to…well it’s never exactly clear what their ultimate goal is, but there sure takes a lot of gore-filled violence to get there.

Most of the plot makes very little sense. The dubbed dialogue is hilariously bad, and the acting is atrocious. There is a ton of very obvious stock footage of animals and natives thrown in to boost the run time. The score is by the very excellent band Goblin, but all of it is recycled from various other films.

The characters make ridiculous decisions after ridiculous decisions. Though early on they figure out the only way to kill the zombies is to shoot them in the head, they constantly shoot them everywhere but the brain pan. One guy liked to taunt them and dance around them for some reason. Whenever a zombie attacks the other characters literally just stand there for the longest time watching them eat their friends until finally decide to act. Etc,. etc.

I’ve seen a lot of bad horror movies. I’ve seen a lot of bad zombie movies. This is one of the worst ones I’ve ever seen. And yet, under the right circumstance, in the right mood this film kind of works.

Aftershock (2012)

aftershock movie poster

If you think Eli Roth is a terrible director (and he is), wait until you see him as an actor. For some reason, he is the lead in this really, really bad horror film set in the aftermath of an earthquake in Chile. No, wait, for half of the film’s run time it is set just before the earthquake where we watch a bunch of inane people do inane things while partying, or trying to get to a party. Then an earthquake happens and all sorts of horror begins, but it is so poorly done that the biggest shock of all is that it never seems to end.

In the nearly ten years since I watched Aftershock I had managed to remove this terrible film from my memory, but reading my review has brought it all back.

Foreign Film February: One On Top Of The Other (1969)

one on top of the other poster

While I obviously like horror films, I wouldn’t exactly call myself a super fan of the genre. I’m no horror hound who goes to see every horror film as soon as it is released. I’m not exactly a snob about it either, as there are plenty of really terrible horror films that I love. But for most of my life horror wasn’t necessarily something I set out to watch on a regular basis. I watched new horror films that were getting good reviews, and I tried to watch the classics, but weeks or even months would go by sometimes between my viewing of that genre.

Then sometime in the last few years, I started watching horror movies on Friday nights and that became the Friday Night Horror Movie and now I am seeking horror films on a regular basis. More than ever before I’m actually seeking out new horror films to watch. That’s allowed me to not only watch some of the classics that have been on my list for a while, but to find new films, or to dig deeper into certain directors’ catalogs.

Lucio Fulci is one of the godfathers of Italian horror. I’ve now seen 18 of his films. I wouldn’t consider any of them masterpieces. Some of them aren’t very good at all. They mostly slide into that good, but not great category, with bonus points being given to the great practical effects he uses for the large amounts of gore he likes to add to his films.

One On Top Of The Other is more of a crime film than a horror one. It feels like his attempt to remake Vertigo as a film noir with a copious amount of sleaze and a terrifically wonky jazz score.

A wealthy doctor has a sick wife and a pretty girlfriend. The wife dies and he gets a large insurance settlement. An anonymous tip leads him to a strip club where one of the dancers bears an incredible resemblance to his recently deceased wife. The police have been following him due to the insurance money and when they discover the doppelganger, well, things start to get hairy for our hero.

There are a lot of cool twists and turns in the story and it all looks and sounds good. But Fulci seems more interested in watching the women take off their clothes and get sexy with various men than he is in paying attention to the story. This is too bad because there is a pretty great film hidden underneath all the sleaze.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Titane (2021)

titane poster

I watch a lot of movies and it is very rare that a movie genuinely surprises me. When you watch movies like I do you get used to the way most films work, the way they hit certain beats and behave in certain ways. That’s not a bad thing necessarily, sometimes it is comforting. But when a movie does come along and does something completely different it makes it all that more rewarding.

Titane completely knocked me out. It is completely and utterly surprising. I genuinely had no idea where it was going to go next. I’m not sure I loved where it always went. I’m not sure I didn’t, either. It is a film I’ll be thinking about for a few days to figure out what exactly I thought of it. But I loved not knowing what was coming next.

It is a film worth coming into not knowing anything about, so I won’t say much. It involves a girl who gets into an accident as a child and has a metal plate inserted into her skull. As an adult, she works as a dancer and after a rough night she goes on a long journey that takes her places you cannot believe.

It has been compared to a David Cronenberg film and that’s apt, but it is also very much its own thing. I watched Cronenberg’s recent Crimes of the Future directly before watching Titane and let me tell you they make for one freaky double feature.

Agathe Rousselle gives an absolutely astonishing, brave, bravura performance in the lead and Vincent Lindon is quite spectacular as well. He plays, well I’d get into spoiler territory if I said who he plays, but he’s really good.

It is a film that is exciting and repulsive – sometimes I couldn’t turn and other times I had to close my eyes. This is something I don’t want every film to do to me, but it sure is exciting when they do.