I’m tired of your arty Norwegian vampire kiddies and your CGI-Guillermo del Toro bullshit. Gimme some oozing latex, an unrecognizable namecheck of HP Lovecraft, and a gratuitous sex scene. That’s right, give me a Stuart Gordon 80s movie!
Well, I’ve seen Re-Animator enough times, though many of those times I was 17 and stoned, but I feel I’ve seen it enough. So I took up Netflix’s offer to watch From Beyond, Re-Animator’s follow-up with much of the same cast and crew.
A mad scientist invents a machine that opens a doorway to another dimension, letting those creatures (mostly eels and jellyfish) interact with our own realm. And by interact, I mean bite the head of said scientist.
Oh yeah, the dimensional disturbance also causes the pineal gland to mutate, makes you horny, and liable to easily melt or grow long fingers, whichever might be of slightly more use on any given occasion.
Honorable mention to Ken Forree, the former pro football cop who tries to keep it all together wearing a leisure suit and/or really tight orange underwear, but is eventually devoured by flies. Foree continues to make horror movies AND appear in shows like Matlock, Life Goes On and this gem.
They do not make movies like this any more. That is just a simple fact.
I should watch these again–I remember the great delight in a crowd cheering on that Yul Brynner-lookin’ bastard. . .
Ah, Halloween! The season of straight-to-dvd, a flurry of titles out of which the occasional rare bird escapes. Alas, my first two stabs were shite, made by people slumming it, rather than real aficionados.
For the record: Pig Hunt follows some cityfolk in the country running into crazy sexy pot-growers and the more conventional redneck brigade. The film opens in a pan over murals about American soldiers arriving in Iraq while M. Ward warbles on the soundtrack, and the film’s pedigree includes a script by a reasonably funny writer and music by Les Claypool…. and it’s a dull mess. It aims for outre and barely reaches up-tempo. How can a movie with a giant marauding tusked pig be bad? They show how. (I recommend, instead, the sublime Razorback.)
Suck has Dave Foley, briefly, Iggy Pop, briefly, Alice Cooper, less briefly, Henry Rollins, briefly… it’s trying for an Edgar Wright vibe, with real gore and real laughs, but its characters are types and its comedy tedious. I was ready to blame the non-cameo cast for playing it overboard, but this is on the director–there’s a hint of something interesting which Pop and Cooper really nail, some sense of the insider revelations which the film desperately needs to sell its take on the bloodsucking costs of fame. But no.
The winner is a sly, very low-budget alien film called Monsters. I’ve heard it described as mumblegore, but while the reference to that indie style is apt the film is determinedly subtle, reliant more on mood and tone. A journalist and his boss’ daughter are trying to make their way home from a city in Mexico, just below the “infected zone” with its shuffling, tentacled inhabitants. The film focuses intently on the two individuals, but even with them its “plot” is not center-stage. It’s a rare “monster” film that is interested in reflections from the corner of an eye, small details rather than what’s spelled out in the scripted dialogue. It’s a wee bit long, and if you look head-on the central characters and storyline can seem rather dull. But the film works on the margins, works wonderfully at crafting that sense of an other world. (And its possible political undertones are also best considered from that oblique angle–spell out an allegory and you dispel the impact here. Pay attention to the inflections, though….)
I have heard good things about Monsters. Is it on DVD already?
Tried to watch Carriers the other day. The monotony of cookie-cutter caricatures was only broken up by my determination that Christopher Meloni is in fact the host of “Cash Cab” and I kept waiting for a Red Light Challenge.
I saw Monsters on demand–it’s just getting a small release in theaters.
Is Carriers the end of the world thing with the new Kirk? I liked that okay.
I have a couple flicks by a guy named Scott Phillips–who some friends met at a con. They seem awesome: Gimme Skelter and The Stink of Flesh are on deck….