Re-Animator

Re-Animator (1985)

What It's About: Herbert West is a medical student at Miskatonic University with an obsession: he wants nothing more or less than to conquer death itself. Under the tutelage of the brilliant German scientist Dr. Gruber, West has devised a serum (glowing green, of course) that will reanimate the dead...but the formula isn't quite perfected yet, and it tends to turn corpses into vicious snarling zombies with little to no mental faculties. Fellow Miskatonic U student Dan Cain rents West an apartment, and before long the two of them start collaborating on the quest to finish West's research. Naturally, things don't go as planned. As the oddly cheerful trailer voice-over says, "Once you wake up the dead, you've got a real mess on your hands!"

Why You Should Watch It: H.P. Lovecraft is, as anyone who knows me can tell you, is one of my favorite authors. His short story "Herbert West - Reanimator" is one of his oddest works, and his poorest if you accept the opinion of various Lovecraft scholars. Lovecraft himself was unhappy with it, as it deviated so greatly from his usual style. It was gory exploitation piece, a satirical take on Frankenstein serialized in six parts, each ending on a cliffhanger, and was actually the first Lovecraft story to mention Miskatonic University by name.

In that regard, Re-Animator -- a gory, exploitative horror-comedy -- always seemed to me one of the most faithful adaptations of Lovecraft's work, and it's one of the great cult classics from the 1980s. The movie made quite a few careers, most notably those of director Stuart Gordon and a young Jeffrey Combs, who would collaborate on future Lovecraft adaptations such as Re-Animator's spiritual successor, From Beyond. Gordon seems like the only director other than Guillermo del Toro who actually gets Lovecraft and makes movies based on his stuff out of love for the work instead of a quick paycheck, even if he does tend to skew pretty far from the source material at times.

Re-Animator is pretty much everything horror could be in the 80s. It's campy, disgusting and gleefully offensive whenever possible, with naked zombies running around, evil undead cats, prehensile intestines and exploding eyeballs. West is actually a pretty interesting protagonist in both the story and the movie, and is generally considered Combs' definitive role -- certainly the one that cemented his place in Lovecraftian lore to this day, having played Lovecraft himself in the much-less-enjoyable early-90s anthology movie Necronomicon: Book of the Dead and provided the voice of obvious Lovecraft stand-in H.P. Hatecraft a few years ago in Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated. West should be a hero. His goal is certainly a sympathetic one, if not particularly well-thought-out. His intentions are good, but he's socially awkward, blunt, cold and ultimately willing to commit increasingly vile acts in the name of his obsession.

Really, if you want a good zombie movie with fine practical effects, a healthy dose of camp humor, and a cast that know exactly what sort of movie they're in and ham it up in suitably grand guignol style, you can't do much better than Re-Animator.

Available On: Netflix.

Pontypool

Pontypool (2008)

What It's About: Pontypool is a kind-of-zombie movie directed by Bruce McDonald and written by Tony Burgess, who also wrote the novel it's based on. Grant Mazzy is a big-city shock jock whose "offend everyone" style of disc jockeying finally gets him exiled to the small town of Pontypool, Ontario, where he takes over as an early-morning radio announcer. On his way to work, he has an unsettling encounter with a distraught woman who vanishes into the early-morning darkness. During his broadcast, Grant and his co-workers, station manager Sydney Briar and technical assistant Laurel-Ann Drummond, receive increasingly bizarre reports concerning isolated incidents of violence which seem to be rapidly expanding into an all-out epidemic.

Why You Should Watch It: This is one of the best zombie movies I've watched in a good long while. It certainly has the most interesting concept, even if it does borrow quite heavily from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash. (At least it doesn't pretend otherwise, as a copy of the novel is seen prominently on display in one shot.) Stephen McHattie is fantastic as Grant Mazzy -- I'd never seen him in anything before, and because of this movie he's become one of my favorite rarely-seen cult actors -- and the minimalist cast serves the movie well. It's about three characters stuck in a snowbound radio station in the wee hours of the morning, listening to a strange kind of zombie apocalypse overtake the region.

Until it isn't. About two-thirds of the way through, it shifts into a kind of postmodern deconstruction of language and the meaning of words. Unfortunately, this is where it starts to fray at the seams, turning from a smart, tense horror film into a weird zombie siege that's at once less comprehensive and more reliant on standard zombie movie cliches. It's not bad, by any means. The last third just isn't as strong as the first hour or so, though I do give them credit for making Canadian French/English bilingualism a plot point, and the post-credits scene is impressively bizarre. The "plague" is just more frightening when it's audio-only, and given its connection to language, the idea that certain words are infected and can only be cured by destroying their meaning in the mind of the infected person, it's no coincidence. I've heard that originally, it was only going to be audio -- the pre-credits sound wave was to persist through the entire movie. That might've been a bit too far in the other direction. As it is, the movie is fantastic for a while, then just good. Overall, it's better than most, and it's certainly unique.

Available On: Netflix.

Munger Road

We're back after a week's hiatus. Before we get to the movie, I was nominated for the "ice bucket challenge" by a friend of mine from across the pond. You were probably tired of seeing and hearing about it at least two weeks ago. As was I. But the way I've come to see it, if it takes a stupid internet phenomenon to make people aware of a good cause and maybe even donate to it, then so be it, I hope something can be as successful in doing the same for other good causes in the near future. It's dumb and it's a bit too "look-at-me" for my tastes, but as so-called first-world problems go, I think "Damn, my Facebook feed is nothing but this water bucket crap now" is up there near the top of the list. It also reminded me that if I'm going to actively try to have a new, less irritable perspective on life in general and be a happier person, I should also be a more charitable one. So I'm donating to ALSA (after some research into various charities) to help, even in a small way, to fight ALS, also known as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis or Lou Gherig's Disease. I encourage all to do the same, even if it's only a few dollars; those add up, and something tells me they won't be getting as many donations next year. And as a bonus, you get to see your humble blog author dump some ice water on his head.

Now, on with the movie.

Munger Road (2011)

What It's About: Munger Road takes place in the smallish city of St. Charles, Illinois, where the annual autumn Scarecrow Festival is about to take place. Since evil is naturally attracted to holidays and town festivals, a van transporting serial child-murderer Shea Gunther breaks down, and it's up to Police Chief Kirkhoven (Bruce Davison, aka Senator Kelly from the first X-Men movie) and the somewhat weird Deputy Hendricks to track him down before news of his escape spreads panic and ruins the festival. Meanwhile, four unlikable college students take a trip out to Munger Road, where local legend has it that ghost children will push your car onto the train tracks if you wait around long enough in the middle of the night. (Ghosts do everything in the middle of the night, because they know it's scarier that way.) Now it's up to Kirkhoven and Hendricks to find the local kids before Gunther finds them first.

Why You Should Watch It: Munger Road isn't an amazing movie. The most it could muster up for critical praise on its poster, as you can see, is a three-star review from Roger Ebert, and that sounds just about right. I'm still reviewing it here because, while it isn't amazing, it's better than a lot of other movies you'll find on Netflix, and it's also one of the three movies that inspired me to start writing this blog again, along with Absentia and The Last Will and Testament of Rosalind Leigh. None of these three movies are perfect, but they are all unique and quite watchable.

I have to say that the college kids are pretty much the weakest part of the movie. They fight about stupid crap, their drama is tiresome -- so they're pretty much like real college kids. The more interesting parts of the movie are the ones where we follow Kirkhoven and Hendricks around the suburbs and the fairgrounds while they look for Gunther and run into various denizens of St. Charles. More than anything, it's the sense of place that makes this movie kind of fun. Location generally doesn't matter much unless it's Hollywood or New York or New Orleans, and they usually don't get those right. Munger Road's St. Charles is a creepy, quiet autumn nightscape, with diners, back roads, churches and a network of Underground Railroad tunnels where something or someone might lie in wait for you. I'm not entirely sure how accurate the movie's portrayal of its setting is, but from what I gather, it was filmed there and it's generally spot-on.

Another thing that makes this movie a good deal more tense and spooky is the excellent soundtrack by Wojciech Golczewski. The main theme's actually been stuck in my head off and on ever since I watched the movie last year. Just when I think I've forgotten how it goes, it pops back in. Excellent stuff.

One thing that must be mentioned -- this isn't one for you if you're the kind of person who wants their movies tied up with a bow at the end. Which, to be fair, is probably most people. By the end, you don't know what was supernatural, what was coincidence, what was pure hoax or even where the main plot stands with regard to Gunther and the ghosts on Munger Road. This is because it ends -- I'm not kidding -- with a big "TO BE CONTINUED" just as the two main plot threads come together. I kind of doubt that we'll see a sequel (or maybe "second half" would be more accurate), since this was made three years ago. Still, it's effectively eerie while it lasts, and unanswered questions aren't always a bad thing. You can always write a fanfic about how everything ends up.

Available On: Netflix.

Ben Wheatley Double Feature, Part 2

A Field in England (2013)

What It's About: With a week to go before the Ben Wheatley-directed season premiere of Doctor Who, here's another Wheatley movie review. What is A Field in England? Well, it's a movie about a group of English deserters who flee a battlefield during the English Civil War and encounter an alchemist, who captures them and forces them to dig for treasure in the middle of a giant field. Also, they're tripping on some psychedelic mushrooms they ate in a stew. Also, it's in black and white, and it has a strobe warning at the beginning.

Why You Should Watch It: In case you couldn't tell from the basic plot summary, this is...a unique movie, to say the least. It's basically a historical thriller with a lot of occult mysticism involved, though how much of it is "real" is ambiguous at best. Whitehead, our protagonist and one of the deserters, is an alchemist's apprentice, and clashes with rival alchemist O'Neill -- played by Michael Smiley, who played Gal in Kill List and will also be in one of Wheatley's upcoming Doctor Who episodes -- over some object of significance that he's stolen from Whitehead's master. While the others dig in a pit for the treasure O'Neill insists is buried in the field, the inevitable "wizard battle" between Whitehead and O'Neill basically comes down to Whitehead eating massive quantities of mushrooms and tripping his head off while everyone else still living tries to shoot O'Neill.

It is a very weird film, even harder to classify than Kill List. You're never quite sure what's going on, and it's unclear -- especially toward the end -- what's actually happening and what's hallucination. It's interesting just how much Wheatley and screenwriter Amy Jump do with so little. There's nothing to the movie other than five guys in 17th-century clothing and a wide-open field, but it manages to be funny and unsettling and frightening despite being entirely minimalistic. There are a lot of weird shots of the characters standing around in tableaus evocative of woodblock prints from that period, more weird shots of them pulling on a rope they find in the middle of the field for some reason, and some more weird shots of an ominous black planet descending from the sky (to which Whitehead expresses concern that "if you do not cease we may be blasted by an ill planet!"), and after Whitehead eats more mushrooms to gain more magic power so he can defeat O'Neill, there's a sequence that explains why they had that strobe warning. And because it's a Ben Wheatley movie, there's plenty of close-up physical trauma and facial destruction thanks to doglock pistols fired at point-blank range.

If there is a message at all, I think it boils down to "Don't eat those mushrooms you found."

Or maybe that if you find your courage, you can be your own master (and wear a cool coat and hat). But also the mushroom thing.

Available On: Amazon Prime.

Ben Wheatley Double Feature, Part 1

Kill List (2011)

What It's About: We’ve only got two weeks to go before Doctor Who returns and we can all start arguing about it again, so I thought hey, why not review a couple of movies by Ben Wheatley, who directed the first two episodes of the new season? Naturally, when I think of people who should be involved in family television, the director/co-writer of two of the mind-screwiest, most unpleasant horror movies in recent memory is the first one that comes to mind.

Kill List, directed by Wheatley and co-written by Wheatley and frequent screenwriting collaborator Amy Jump, has a fairly simple setup. Jay is a hitman who’s been out of work for the last eight months after he and his partner Gal botched a job in Kiev. He’s out of money, tensions are rising between Jay and his wife Shel, and their son Sam is suffering for it. When Gal comes to visit and tells Jay of a new client willing to hire the two of them, Jay has no choice but to accept the offer. Gal is rightfully a bit creeped when the client requires that the contract be signed in Jay’s blood, but Jay doesn’t seem to think much of this, and they get down to business. As they work their way down the list of victims -- a priest, a librarian and an M.P., in addition to a few pro bono killings along the way -- it becomes more and more apparent that something much stranger is going on here than either of them signed up for.

Why You Should Watch It: Kill List is hard to classify. It starts out as a domestic drama, changes into an unglamorous crime thriller -- sort of the opposite of a Guy Ritchie movie -- and finally moves along into supernatural horror without ever contradicting its own atmosphere or tone. I’ve heard it compared often to The Wicker Man, though I suspect that’s just because when mainstream critics review horror movies, they tend to have small reference pools since they don’t like horror, and certain developments toward the end of Kill List make for an easy visual comparison. Thematically, it has much more in common with Angel Heart, which I should review here sometime since it's on Netflix. It’s also shot through with a dark thread of Arthurian legend. King Arthur is a recurring theme, and the story itself was inspired by the trials Arthur’s knights had to undertake in order to prove themselves worthy of a place at the Round Table. Neither, I think, is the fact that the knights of Arthurian myth were essentially a bunch of violent thugs who just happened to be better than average at killing lost on Wheatley.

Kill List is a tense movie, sometimes difficult to watch, often so bleak and humorless that it might alienate some viewers. It’s never sarcastic or witty, never pokes fun at itself or at anything else. None of the characters are “badass,” they’re just violent. Said violence is brief but unflinchingly gruesome and unstylized (one scene in particular will turn even strong stomachs). The soundtrack is suitably droning, the imagery stark and Kubrick-influenced. It’s what critics would call a “slow boil,” as opposed to "a rip-roaring entertainment ride." When it finally does erupt into outright horror at the end, it’s nightmarish (which is to say dream-like) and seriously scary. Definitely not a “fun” movie, but a very well-made one. I actually recommend watching this twice -- there’s a lot of expertly-handled foreshadowing early on that you’ll catch the second time around, and one bit that makes the ending all the more dreadful in retrospect.

Available On: Netflix.

Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan

Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan (2013)

What It Is: Well, it’s a really terrible straight-to-video movie about a bunch of morons at a first-time offenders’ boot camp out in the wilderness. Pretty soon they run into Paul Bunyan, who looks something like a super mutant from Fallout wearing a flannel shirt and starts chopping everyone in half with his axe. Local crazy wilderness guy Joe Estevez gives everyone shelter in his cabin, where he tells them about how Paul Bunyan was a good (giant) kid and kept to himself until a group of settlers killed Babe the Big Blue Ox and ate him, driving Paul Bunyan into a rage and turning him into an axe-wielding slaughterhouse who tolerates no outsiders in his woods. There’s also a subplot of some kind involving Foreman Bill, played by Grizzly Adams, but it’s never particularly clear how his stuff relates to the main story, such as it is, until he and all the gun-toting militia guys who hang out at his bar show up at the end to deal with Bunyan. Then there’s a song called “The Ballad of Paul Bunyan,” which is about Paul Bunyan going nuts and killing a bunch of people with an axe.

Why You Should Watch It: Honestly, if you need someone to tell you why you should watch a direct-to-video horror movie called Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan, you probably shouldn’t watch it at all. The very fact of this movie’s existence makes my life just that little bit happier. There’s so much about this movie that amuses me to no end. That they included Babe the Big Blue Ox at all is delightful, and even better/worse since he’s a really awful CGI blue ox. Paul Bunyan’s size is also never consistent -- he could be anywhere from fifteen to forty feet tall from shot to shot because it’s a terrible green-screen effect -- which actually is consistent with the folk tales, which also never seem to agree on his size, but I don’t think the people who made this movie were thinking about that. The “early 19th-century settlers” look like they shop at TJ Maxx.

The thing is, I’m reasonably certain that the people who made Axe Giant are aware of all this, if only because the alternative is so unlikely. The Wrath of Paul Bunyan is a cut below the Asylum’s movies, and that...actually takes some effort. I think the people behind Axe Giant just run with it anyway, for what it’s worth. It’s not particularly jokey or self-aware, because the premise is ridiculous enough. If the title alone doesn’t at least make you giggle, this is probably not the movie for you. If it does, then the rest of the movie probably will too. For all its awfulness, it’s an enjoyable train wreck. Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan has heart, damn it. It is probably better than Think Like A Man or Grown-Ups 2. That's my endorsement.

Available On: Netflix, Hulu, YouTube. Seriously, it’s on everything except Amazon Prime. The YouTube stream is official. Please, do not pay money to watch Axe Giant: The Wrath of Paul Bunyan. I promise I’ll review something actually good next week.

Hey, You Kids Like Frankenstein?

Frankenstein's Army (2013)

What It's About: Frankenstein's Army is the closest thing to a Wolfenstein movie we'll probably ever see. And if we do ever get one, this will probably still be the better movie. A team of Russian soldiers on a reconnaissance mission in Germany venture further behind enemy lines to rescue a group of POWs being held in a small town. This part of the movie is that thing that always happens in horror movies -- the sort of twenty-minute grace period where we get to know the characters and realize that they're kind of a bunch of dicks, so we needn't feel that bad when they all inevitably end up slaughtered in gruesome fashion. The soldiers spend some time harassing the locals, film some footage for the propaganda movie they're supposed to be making and finally march into town to find the whole place deserted. There's a pile of dead nuns, a bunch of weird machinery and -- OH CRAP, SON, it turns out the Nazis are making cyborg Frankenstein soldiers! And everybody gets killed. That's basically it, and if you're watching a movie called Frankenstein's Army, that is also pretty much what you're here to see anyway, so that's fine.

Why You Should Watch It: The last two movies I reviewed have been at least a bit cerebral, so I thought I'd review one that was just about the polar opposite of cerebral this week. This is a B-movie, make no mistake. It's a goofy, gory, sort of intentionally schlocky 1980s-style mad-science movie in the vein of Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator and From Beyond, and while it's more or less a straight horror movie, it also has tongue at least somewhat in cheek. It's never boring, because some new crazy steampunk Frankenstein shows up every ten minutes or so. There are Frankensteins with drill faces, swords for hands, airplane heads, diving helmet heads, head-crushing heads, seriously any kind of head you can think of, and one that looks kind of like a jukebox holding up a swastika. They heil Hitler, they growl and scream, they actually run after you waving their arms in the air -- when was the last time you saw a movie monster do that? The characters are pretty one-dimensional. Sergei the leader is the least assholish of the bunch, so he's the main character; Vassili is the psycho guy who wants to rape and kill everything; Sacha is the new kid; Dmitri is the cameraman with a secret; and secondary characters generally get killed off about ten minutes after they're introduced.

I like this movie for a few reasons. It's a silly monster-mash, but it's also, particularly toward the end, kind of disturbing in a 1970s Nazi-sploitation movie sort of way, where you feel kind of gross after you're done watching. I actually really like Frankenstein himself a lot, here -- Viktor Frankenstein is played by Karel Roden, who you might (or might not, I guess) remember as Rasputin in Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy, and he's one of the few movie mad scientists I've seen in recent years who actually fits the bill. "Mad scientist," in movie-speak, tends to be synonymous with "unethical scientist," and if anything, they also tend to be cold and detached rather than mad, because everyone in Hollywood knows that being emotional and passionate is better than being smart, and if you're smart, chances are you're also nasty and devoid of basic human morals. Roden's Frankenstein is completely manic, puttering around his laboratory, throwing severed body parts over his shoulder, joking with his creations and his victims alike because he's really a pretty happy guy. He's the sort of mad scientist who will, for example, cut out half of a living Communist's brain and replace it with half of a Nazi brain in an effort to make the two sides understand each other so they can stop fighting. And when it doesn't work, he's the sort of scientist who totally loses interest in the experiment and moves onto something else at the drop of a hat. He's ridiculously energetic, he enjoys his work, and, in a pulpy setting like this, where making a super-soldier consists of replacing a dead guy's head with a propeller and shocking him with electricity, he's also ostensibly a genius.

The movie's also a testament to the power of imagination. Okay, that sounds corny, but it's true. Frankenstein's Army was made on a very low budget, the monster designs are inventive and the effects are fantastic. Not to mention almost entirely practical, which seems to be a dying art in the age of Bay and Lucas stuffing as much shit as possible into a shot and then filling the rest in later with CGI. The best practical effects are still recognizable as practical effects, but one cannot ignore the artistry behind them. I remember an interview with the cast of Joe Cornish's sci-fi action comedy Attack the Block where they said that the monsters were part man-in-a-suit and part animatronic, and their reactions in each scene were far more convincing as a result; the thing that was supposed to be scaring them was right there in front of them. In an effects-based movie, practical effects help draw the scene together and keep it cohesive. Frankenstein's Army is a throwback in that sense -- a tribute to the years where, if you wanted to show an exploding zombie head, you soaked some cauliflower in red dye, put it inside a cast of someone's head and then took a sledgehammer to it. It's a hell of a lot of fun, if you've got the stomach for it.

(An afterthought: If there's one thing I don't like about this, it's that the found-footage format is forced. It adds nothing to the movie, and color film was seriously expensive back then, so they probably wouldn't have sent a bunch of soldiers into a potential combat situation with it. They could just as easily have dropped that aspect of it without any detrimental effect.)

Available On: Netflix.