Tag: horror movies

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Mr. Vampire (1985)

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My pneumonia is subsiding, but definitely not fully gone. I’d say I’m up about 80 percent on that front. But you may recall when I first started getting sick I complained about having done something to my hip. Well, that is back with a vengeance. I don’t know what I’ve done to it, but it hurt like crazy anytime I stand up and try to walk.

Getting is old is not fun, my friends.

I’m in no shape to write a long review tonight, but since I missed last week’s Friday Night Horror and haven’t written much since then I wanted to talk a little bit about this movie.

I actually started Smile 2 this evening. Got about halfway through then got hungry. When I had finished my meal, my daughter had snuck into my room to watch something of her own. My wife was downstairs and she doesn’t like horror movies so after a bit we landed on this, a rather silly and not very scary horror movie.

Mr. Vampire is the first in what you might call the Hopping Vampire genre of Hong Kong cinema (I previously reviewed a later film in the genre, Encouter of the Spooky Kind (1980). The hopping vampires are actually Jiangshi, which come from traditional Chinese folklore and are something like a mix between vampires and zombies. Or so says Wikipedia anyway.

This film follows a Taoist priest and his two inept assistants who battle a super strong vampire, a couple of other vampires that he’s recently turned and eventually a succubus type ghost.

As you might suspect from that description it is a very silly movie. There are lots of broad jokes, goofy physical humor, and some pretty good kung fu action. It is, perhaps, a little too silly for my particular senses, but ultimately it won me over in its sheer entertainment value.

My wife seemed to enjoy it too. Definitely recommended when you are looking for something different.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920)

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I’m still trying to learn how to watch silent movies. I have the hardest time keeping my mind from wandering. It helps when the film is full of interesting visuals like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and when it comes with a beautiful new transfer like this release. Ditto when it has some good music to go with it. Read my full review over at Cinema Sentries.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: Smile (2022)

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Smile is a horror movie in the vein of The Ring (2002) or It Follows (2014) in that it creates a sustained mood and follows a heroine as she attempts to figure out a fairly complicated mythology of the supernatural thing that wants to kill her. It isn’t as good as either of those films and it has a few too many jump scares for my tastes, but it is still a good time at the movies.

Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) is a therapist at the emergency psychiatric ward of a hospital. She is overworked and always exhausted, but kind and generous with her time. One day Laura Weaver (Caitlin Stasey) comes into the hospital. She says she recently witnessed her professor kill himself and ever since she has been terrorized by an entity that appears as different people smiling strangely at her. This entity has foretold her death. Then Laura gets her own creepy smile and slices her face open.

Rose then begins seeing strange visions of people smiling that same strange smile. She first enlists the help of her boyfriend (Jessie T. Usher) and her therapist (Robin Weigert) but neither of them truly believes what is happening to her. She is able to get her cop ex-boyfriend Joel (Kyle Gallner) to assist her and they learn that she has become cursed by some evil entity that thrives on trauma. Each person with the curse kills themself in some horrible manner in front of a witness causing the curse to be passed onto them.

Rose has previously suffered her own trauma watching her mother succumb to mental illness as a child and being the one to find her dead body after she killed herself. It has become cliche these days for horror movies to be about trauma, but all too often those films don’t do the work. So, it is nice to see a film that understands trauma and how it lingers. And how other characters around you may not understand how your trauma affects you, even when they have well meaning intentions.

Like It Follows I found myself constantly studying the the background, the edges of the screen looking for someone with that smile. Knowing the entity could appear at any moment and look like anyone kept an edge-of-my-seat tension going throughout. I kind of wish there had been more of that. There weren’t enough moments where she’s seeing strangers smile.

In the same way, I wish they’d followed her just a little while longer researching The Smile. Rose and Joel figured out that it affected a few people then basically stop. They talk to one guy who survived it and get a sort-of answer but then do nothing about it. I’m pushing towards true spoiler territory here so I’ll just say the decisions it makes with these things didn’t always work for me. This is especially true of the very end which felt more like a setup for the inevitable series of sequels than a truly satisfying conclusion to this movie.

But that tension building really worked for me and there are several truly great jump scares. Sosie Bacon is terrific and it is always great to see Robin Weigert in anything. The direction from first-timer Parker Finn is mostly good but there were far too many crooked angle shots and that thing where a shot starts out upside down and then it slowly rights itself.

If you liked It Follows and The Ring then I’d definitely give this one a shot.



The Friday Night Horror Movie(s) – Someone’s Watching Me (1978) & The Ward (2010)

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John Carpenter is one of my favorite genre filmmakers. He’s one of the few guys making genre films that has no pretensions as to being any other kind of filmmaker. He wasn’t making horror films as a means to fund his arthouse projects, he was making them because he loves horror movies.

When he was good there were few better, when he was bad…well I started to say I don’t want to talk about when he was bad, but I have to talk about The Ward.

After I watched The Ward but before I sat down to write anything I decided to put on another movie. Browsing through the Criterion Channel I discovered another John Carpenter movie Someone’s Watching Me, and I decided to make it a double feature.

Made in 2010 The Ward remains the last film Carpenter ever directed. Considering that was 14 years ago, that he’s now in his mid-70s, and has expressed no desire to ever make a film again, I think it is safe to say it will be his last film.

Made in 1978 Someone’s Watching Me was the third film he’d ever directed, coming just after the experimental student film Dark Star and the low-budget, independent (but still great) Assault on Precinct 13.

The Ward was made by an elder statesman with nothing left to prove. A man who had grown tired of making films. It was his first film after a ten-year break from feature films. A man who admitted he was burned out, and fallen out of love with filmmaking.

Someone’s Watching Me was made by a young artist, hungry. He not only directed his previous two films but wrote their scripts and scored them. Warner Brothers asked him to write the script for Someone’s Watching Me based on a true story that happened in Chicago. When they decided to turn it into a made-for-TV movie they offered him the director’s chair. Carpenter jumped at the chance.

It would mean a bigger budget (even 1970s made-for-TV money was more than he was used to working with) and access to better equipment and good crews. It even gave him his Director’s Guild union card.

It isn’t that The Ward is a bad film, it’s just generic. Were it made by any other filmmaker it would be largely forgotten. But because it was made by Carpenter and it was his “comeback” film after 10 years away it is nothing but disappointing. His films weren’t always great but they were never generic, they were always made by a filmmaker with a vision.

There are generic aspects of Someone’s Watching Me’s plot, it is your basic woman being stalked by an unknown stranger story that has been told many times. But Carpenter infuses it with style and does his very best to keep it interesting. It is full of camera movement and shots that clearly took time to set up and were well thought out.

The Ward feels dull in comparison. It is a story that has been told many times before as well. A young woman finds herself in a psychiatric ward where something is stalking her and her fellow patients. But is it real or is it all inside her head?

But Carpenter does nothing with the material. Unlike most of his films, he didn’t have a hand in writing The Ward and he didn’t score it either. It was more or less a director-for-hire type film and he phoned it in.

It was fun watching these two films from both sides of his long, storied career. His best material lies between the two (he almost immediately started making Halloween just after he wrapped on Someone’s Watching Me and he says he learned many of the techniques he’d use on that horror masterpiece there). But is always interesting to see a filmmaker at the beginning of his career and then at the end.

For the pedantic film nerds among you, I am aware that Carpenter directed two episodes of the Masters of Horror series after that ten-year hiatus, and he recently filmed an episode of John Carpenter’s Suburban Screams, but those weren’t feature-length films so I made an editorial decision and left them out of the discussion.

The Friday Night Horror Movie: The Leopard Man (1943)

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We are halfway through November and I’ve only written about two film noirs. Truth be told I’ve only watched nine film noirs this month. Work has been physically exhausting these last few weeks and when I come home I’m often too tired to watch much of anything, and certainly too tired to write about what I watch. Then we had those plumbing issues that kept me away from the house last weekend, and I’ve had some things to watch and review for Cinema Sentries.

Things should lighten up now on all fronts so hopefully I’ll be able to get some good noir viewing in and do a little writing too.

For tonight’s horror movie, I wanted to watch something…if not an actual noir at least noir adjacent. Something that emerged in the 1940s when film noir was at its peak. Something with some great noir-ish lighting and camera work.

The Leopard Man fits those bills perfectly. It was directed by Jaques Tourneur who also directed Out of the Past, one of the great film noirs, and Berlin Express which I watched the other day and hopefully will write about soon.

There is a lot to love about The Leopard Man but it also feels disjointed – like a series of vignettes instead of a cohesive story. With a runtime of just 66 minutes, I wish they’d added another twenty minutes of story or so and fleshed it out a bit more.

Kiki Walker (Jean Brooks) is a nightclub singer in a small New Mexico border town. One night her manager Jerry Mannin (Dennis O’Keefe) concocts a foolish bit of promotion and has Kiki drag a leopard out on the stage while her rival Gabriella (Margo) is performing. Wise to the shenanigans Gabriella uses her castanets to frighten the leopard causing Kiki to let go of its leash and send the leopard fleeing into the night.

Later that night a young woman is out shopping and is attacked and killed by the leopard. A night or two later another young woman is killed while visiting her father’s grave. And then even later yet another woman is killed. All of the deaths seem to be caused by the leopard, but Jerry begins to suspect a human killer. He and Kiki investigate.

The film looks great. Tourneur and cinematographer Robert De Grasse created these wonderful images bound in deep shadows and creeping light. The film creates a wonderfully suspenseful atmosphere with some excellent local color. Tourneur always seems to be sensitive to his characters of color and minorities, and here he makes his Mexican characters real people and not just caricatures. Unusual for its time he also casts Latino actors for the roles instead of white people in brownface.

The story he’s telling is quite good too. I enjoyed the mystery and the various vignettes. But like I say I wish the film had an additional half hour to tell them. All too often a character will be introduced only to be forgotten about in the next scene.

For example, the first woman who is killed has a mother and a brother. We get a nice little scene with them. The mother is fussing at the girl to go to the shop for her, and the brother teases her that she’s scared of the dark and the leopard. The girl is killed on her doorstep, banging on the door while her mother desperately tries to save her. But then we get nothing. We see the mother at the official inquest but she has no lines. Then we don’t see her again at all.

This type of thing happens a lot. There just isn’t enough time to flesh out any character stories save the leads.

But what we do get is quite good.

Killer Klowns From Outer Space (1988) 4K UHD Reivew

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The ’80s were weird. People gave the Chiodo Brothers – three dudes who had never made a movie before – $2 million to write/direct/produce a horror film about a bunch of space clowns who come to Earth and turn people into Cotton Candy Slurpees.

And it’s pretty good.

I wish we had more of that weirdness today.

You can read my review of the film over at Cinema Sentries.

31 Days of Horror: Jeepers Creepers (2001)

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I’ve talked many times on these pages about how much I like Wes Craven’s Scream (1996) and to a lesser extent the many sequels that followed. Oddly enough I didn’t actually watch a lot of the many (many) films that followed in its wake and were influenced by its winking, meta-narrative.

There are a variety of reasons why that is true. I was becoming a true cinephile around then which meant I was more interested in the Coen Brothers, Steven Soderberg, Akira Kurosawa, Francois Truffaut and the like – directors who made “real” cinema rather than horror which wasn’t great art. I had started dating the woman who would become my wife and she doesn’t like horror movies.

But mainly my horror interests were changing. I was starting to discover J-Horror and Giallo. There was this wonderful world of world horror that I had previously not known existed. Suddenly my desire to watch silly little American horror starring hip, young TV stars disappeared.

Over the last few years, I’ve enjoyed going back and watching a lot of those films from that period that I missed the first time around.

Mostly. Some of those films weren’t very good and I was smart to have skipped them.

Jeepers Creepers begins with a car ride across a lonely stretch of Florida. Siblings Trish (Gina Phillips) and Darry (Justin Long) are coming home for Spring Break. They talk and argue, and they play the type of silly games you play on long road trips.

Suddenly a large, old truck begins tailgating them. It weaves back and forth and honks its horns, scaring the two half to death. Finally, it passes them and all is calm. Sometime later they spy that same truck parked next to an abandoned old church. A man gets out of it carrying something wrapped up in a sheet tied shut with ropes. Our heroes have seen the same scary movies we’ve all seen so they naturally assume it is a body. The dude then throws the object down a drainage pipe. As he turns around he realizes those two have seen him do it.

He gets into his truck and rushes after them. Apparently, this old truck has a souped-up engine because he catches them quickly and rear-ends them multiple times. But when he finally runs them off the road he rushes on ahead instead of stopping to kill them.

Instead of acting like normal, intelligent people who would zoom as fast and as far away as possible and perhaps call the police when they get to a safe space, these two decide to go back to the church and have a look around.

Maybe one of those people tied up and wrapped in bloody sheets is still alive Darry muses. Maybe they – these two people without any medical experience – can give them emergency care before calling in any real help.

The pipe goes deep underground leading to what was the old church basement. Darry tries to take a look and instead slips falling to the bottom where he discovers…well I won’t spoil that but it is pretty gruesome.

I will spoil that the guy in the truck isn’t a guy at all but a monster. A poorly designed monster who is on the hunt. And now he’s got the scene of Darry and Trish.

Though there are periodic meta-references to other horror movies these two characters make all the dumb maneuvers people in dumb horror movies make.

After the first attack, seeing the horrors in that basement, and then watching the policeman they finally tell about all of this get ripped to shreds, they do not get the heck out of Dodge as fast as they possibly can, but rather stop at some random house in the middle of nowhere. Trish declares they need to call someone. Exactly who she wants to call and what she will tell them is unclear. Even after Darry asks those exact, and very reasonable questions.

While watching this insane monster do insanely horrible things the two just sit and stare at him. Again, they don’t run. This film is all reaction shots. Over and over again something horrible will happen and the characters will just sit there, mouths agape. The camera cuts between the action and their reactions. Back and forth. Back and forth until I’m screaming that someone needs to do something. Maybe that’s supposed to be shock or something. Maybe real people would act that way when exposed to something so traumatic. But in a horror movie, they need to run or start shooting.

The acting is passable, the script isn’t half as clever as it thinks it is, and again the monster design is bad. Yet, I think I kind of liked it.

It has this laid-back, breezy quality to it. The film never takes itself seriously, but it isn’t winking at us either. It isn’t a hipster film smirking at its audience. The in-film stakes are very high – life and death – but the film never really expects you to care all that much. It wants you to have a good time watching a movie and that’s exactly what I did.

31 Days of Horror: The Fog (1980)

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John Carpenter’s The Fog begins with a cheesy old campfire tale told by an old man that essentially gives us the backstory to the movie we’re about to see. Both the backstory and the actual story are pretty silly. The monsters are goofy, and the ending somewhat anti-climatic. Yet I love the film through and through.

Carpenter is the master of creating a mood and The Fog finds him at his moodiest. Since time immemorial (or at least the time in which films have existed) movies have used fog to create a spooky, eerie mood. Fog was made for cinema. It is both opaque and translucent. It obfuscates your vision and yet seem to reveal. It crawls in and moves with the wind. And it looks great when lit up.

One hundred years ago, on a dark foggy night the founders of Antonio Bay, a small coastal town in Northern California murdered a group of lepers for their gold. Now as the town celebrates its centennial anniversary the fog is back, as are the lepers and they are looking for revenge.

Our heroes are Stevie Wayne (Adrienne Barbeau) who owns and DJs the coolest looking lo-fi radio station inside a lighthouse, fisherman Nick Castle (Tom Atkins), and Elizabeth Solley (Jamie Lee Curtis) the hitchhiker Nick picked up one foggy night.

Stevie spends most of her time in the lighthouse talking to her listeners (and us) whilst playing light jazz records. She acts almost like a narrator, feeding her listeners (and us) information. Nick and Elizabeth run around trying to figure out what is happening.

The monsters apparently only appear between the hours of 12 midnight and 1 AM. They show up the first night mostly messing with electronic equipment and freaking everybody out, and then on the second night, the night of the actual anniversary they start killing people.

Whatever, the story takes second chair to the general creepiness Carpenter is creating. As usual, Carpenter wrote his own score and it is terrific. The film looks terrific and there is an enormous amount of creepy fog drifting into town across the bay, floating across streets and into rooms. The film lights it up giving it a hypnotic look.

It isn’t particularly scary and there are just a few scenes of genuine violence (although none of it is bloody) but the general vibe is excellent.

31 Days of Horror: Cursed (2005)

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Several years after creating the hugely successful Scream franchise writer Kevin Williamson and director Wes Craven teamed up to make a werewolf film starring Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg, and Judy Greer. If that sounds like a good time at the movies you should know that the studio, specifically the Weinsteins, had their perverted, gnarled hands all over it.

They demanded numerous reshoots, edited down Craven’s original R-Rating down to a PG-13, and exchanged Award Winning special effects artist Rick Baker’s physically-made Werewolf designs for lousy-looking CGI ones.

The end results aren’t terrible, but they aren’t great either.

Ricci and Eisenberg play siblings Ellie and Jimmy. On a drive home one evening something jumps in front of them causing their car to crash. Let’s not be coy here with the plot, that something was a werewolf and it bites them. Slowly they will start turning into the beast as well.

But not too much because we like these guys and we can’t have them turning so bad they wind up having a bunch of mutilated corpses on their hands. Jimmy will find himself lying naked in the garden at one point, and Ellie keeps getting little bodily changes from time to time.

In this story, they can keep from becoming full-on werewolves if they can find and kill the werewolf that bit them. A lot of time is spent with them trying to figure that out (and the audience guessing it might be one of the assortment of semi-famous actors who keep showing up.)

You can see hints of what could have been an interesting film tucked into the corners of what we actually get. Looking online and it seems a lot of folks absolutely hate this movie. I didn’t hate it, but it doesn’t do anything original or all that interesting. If Craven and Williamson’s names weren’t on it and if we didn’t know the Weinstein’s mucked with it I suspect the general consensus would be, well not great, but not hated. It is very, as the kids like to say, “Mid.”

Bring Out the Perverts: What Have They Done To Your Daughters? (1974)

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Italian Cinema was dominated by two genres in the 1970s – the Poliziotteschi and the Giallo. The Poliziotteschi was a particular type of crime drama that is noted for its gritty, down-and-dirty take on police work featuring loads of violence and action sequences, highlighted by corruption at the highest levels. Gialli were murder mysteries featuring graphic violence, hyper-stylization, overt sexuality, and wild soundtracks.

What Have They Done To Your Daughters? is an interesting blending of both genres. Plotwise it is very Poliziotteschi as it follows the police as they try to catch a killer and are then pulled into a child prostitution ring with ties to the upper echelon of the city’s political sphere. Stylistically it is mostly gritty like a Poliziotteschi, and it features a couple of terrific chase sequences, but it also has a few stylish Giallo-esque moments.

There is also a black-gloved, motorcycle helmet-wearing, hatched-yielding psycho going around hacking people to death, and a few moments of sleaze where the camera lingers on naked female bodies (one of which is supposed to be a 15-year-old girl – the actress is of age – which makes it particularly gross).

I cover the basic details of the plot in my old review of the Arrow Video Blu-ray release (which you can read at Cinema Sentries) so I’ll skip them in this write-up.

I mostly really dug the film this go-around. I think I enjoyed the Poliziotteschi elements more than the Giallo. The story is good, the investigative elements are interesting, and the action sequences are top-notch. It is not unusual for this type of crime drama to dive into underage sex rings, but it still grosses me out, especially now that I have a young daughter. And this film gets a bit skeevy in that area.

I did dig the hatched-wielding killer, but like, why is he running around in a motorcycle helmet (other than the film keeping us from seeing his face I mean)? It is especially weird since the cops figure out who he is fairly early in the film (it is the guys who hired him that remain a mystery).

Overall, a very enjoyable cinematic experience.