A Land Forgotten

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In case anyone’s noticed (which I doubt) that I’ve been discussing a spate of 1950s sci-fi/horror movies, I have a confession to make.  Several years ago I needed to see Tarantula.  (Anyone with similar headspace will know this need.)  The only place it was available at the time was in The Classic Sci-Fi Ultimate Collection.  Volumes 1 and 2 were sold together.  I did what I had to do.  Then I forgot I had the set before finishing volume 1.  Who knows what might’ve been going on in my life then?  Rediscovering it has been a budget-saving way to address my fix.  I had never heard of The Land Unknown before, and although it has one of the goofiest T-rexes ever, it is actually a good story.  Of course there are holes in the plot, but it is about the necessity of being humane, even when emotion dictates otherwise.

A helicopter crew on a South Pole expedition makes an emergency landing in a volcano that harbors prehistoric life in a hot spot in Antarctica.  The crew has a female reporter with them—these movies certainly have fifties attitudes about women!  Not having the parts to repair their copter, they try to survive among dinosaurs and an aggressive, giant monitor lizard.  There is another person there, the sole survivor of an earlier expedition, who’s become mostly feral.  The commander of the modern crew demands that they give him the dignity and fair treatment that all people deserve.  There’s a bit of drama around who will get the girl (again, the fifties), with the commander ultimately winning out.  How do our heroes escape this peril?  They’re able to repair the helicopter with parts from the earlier expedition’s crashed vehicle.

With its budget the special effects had to be cheap, but the story has redeeming value.  The message that we mustn’t let isolation drive us to bestiality is still as important as ever.  There are those who watch such movies solely to laugh at the special effects.  Hey, I laughed a bit too, but I’m only human!  There is, however, more to this movie than the dinosaurs, which drew audiences then just as the Jurassic Park franchisedoes now.  There’s even some serious talk about evolution, which was often present in these Universal creature features.  There are some slip-ups on the evolution part, but apparently the monitor lizards were meant to represent stegosauruses—did I mention the budget was tight?  I actually found the movie to be worth seeing for its intrinsic value.  Not bad for a forgotten set purchased mainly for one movie in a time unknown.

Praying for Mantis

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Now this is a Cold War movie.  And I mean “cold.”  The Deadly Mantis is one of those movies that hovers between “so bad it’s good” and just plain “so bad.”  I was kind of rooting for the mantis.  In any case, this was an ambitious movie for the time but it reflects the post-war paranoia in the United States.  It also makes very abundant use of stock footage, much of it military.  You almost expect a recruiting ad at the end.  (It does thank the Ground Observer Corps in the closing credits.)  Okay, so here’s the story.  A volcano in the south Atlantic causes the calving of an enormous Arctic iceberg near the North Pole.   That iceberg contains the frozen body of a 200-foot praying mantis from dinosaur times.  Even earlier.   Said frozen mantis, quite hungry after millions of years, begins attacking Arctic radar bases and flying south.  The Air Force calls in a paleontologist to help identify what they’re looking for.

The mantis is so big that it prefers people for food, although, one might note, a polar bear would’ve been easier prey.  In any case, given the technology limitations of the time, the military has trouble keeping track of the insect as it flies over the most populous part of the country.  They do get the cloudiness of the East Coast about right.  Eventually they shoot it down—actually a fighter jet crashing into it does the job—over Newark and the mortally wounded mantis crawls into the Lincoln Tunnel (called “The Manhattan Tunnel” in the film).  By this point the viewer is saying “just let the poor thing die in peace,” but they pump smoke into the tunnel, presumably to hide wires and other props, and commit a protracted insecticide.  

Now, I’m one of those people who hates to hurt any animal.  The death twitches of an insect are quite troubling, so I try to catch what I can indoors and release them.  I have trouble with the instructions to kill spotted lantern flies—it’s not their fault that they’re here.  The movie shows a bravado regarding the military and a machismo regarding the main female character that hearkens back to why it was so necessary to evolve out of the fifties.  Of course, we learned nothing from The Deadly Mantis and have catapulted back into a new Cold War and an even more robust military.  William Alland, the producer, had a real love of this genre of movie, and for that we have much to be grateful.  But even the big bug genre can produce a real groaner now and then.

An Interesting Prize

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If you’re born without it, you get by any way that you can.  Capital, that is.  Those of us who inherit nothing but active minds don’t stand a chance, really.  Without connections or the cash to draw others in, we tend to be scrappy.  And cheap.  This is probably the reason I’m drawn to characters like Ed Wood, and those who started American International Pictures.  I get the sense that Mark Thomas McGee must be an interesting guy.  After all, he met some of his idols when he was young.  Fast and Furious: The Story of American International Pictures is available in a second edition, I know, but I tend to find first editions fresher.  They say what’s really on an author’s mind.  Besides, used books have their own charm.

Although American International Pictures (AIP) was early on known for fast shooting schedules and cheap effects, it eventually started to earn some mainstream respectability before the company being acquired by Filmways.  Along the way they engaged some famous champions of cheap, such as Roger Corman.  A number of films discussed in this book were part of my childhood.  And as someone who’s always had to live cheaply (I just don’t comprehend finance), I found this an extremely hopeful book.  Some of these folks never became famous in the lifetimes, but they left a legacy.  And that’s a worthy goal.  I suspect that for those of us who can’t break into mainstream publishing, blogging is about building a legacy.  What some of us want, however, is to appear in print.

And I mean in print.  The book is an object.  I bought this one used.  I sometimes find interesting things in used books.  The former owner of this one (a McFarland hardcover!) carefully glued postcards of AIP movie posters to the covers and endsheets.  They didn’t put their name in it, but they (in pencil) ticked off the movies, presumably that they’d seen, from the filmography.  This is a person after my own heart.  I tend not to write in most books anymore, realizing that someday someone will probably sell them and, hey, it’s hard enough to make money in the book business.  But this personalization is something you can’t find in an ebook.  No, a book is meant to be held and loved.  This one clearly was.  As publishers chase more and more after electronic and audio books (the latter of which are also electronic) and learning moves from reading to watching, we’re losing something.  They’re called books, and they bear their own meaning.

Digging Again

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It’s one of those movies that I know I’ve watched before—probably on a sleepy Saturday afternoon—but couldn’t believe I had already seen.  While viewing The Mole People it looked completely new, but in retrospect some of it had seemed strangely familiar.  Had I bothered to check my own blog I’d have noted that I watched it a mere fourteen years ago.  Not that I’d have spared myself again.  I felt like watching monsters in rubbery suits.  Still, as I mentioned in my previous blog post on it, the antagonist are the underground Sumerians.  These Sumerians speak English—a fact that isn’t worthy of remark by the scientists—and express surprise that outsiders can understand them.  Assuming them to be gods because of their bright flashlight, this Gilliganesque story contains, perhaps unintended, social commentary.  The mole people are really the good ones and the “slave revolt” at the end saves our protagonists.

For about the first half of the film they refer to “the goddess of Ishtar” before finally apparently realizing Ishtar is the goddess’s name.  The “eye of Ishtar,” which looks suspiciously like a sideways Star Trek Federation logo, represents where the sun shines down on their ancient kingdom.  (They’ve become albinos from living without sunlight.)  The interesting thing here is that the monsters aren’t the scary part of the plot.  The high priest is.  Elinu is suspicious of the upper worlders immediately and it is he who plots their demise.  He’s also quite willing to depose the king, whom he sees as too weak in his foreign policy.  (In reality the interplay between religion and politics, historically, has been a tug-of-war over power.)  He succumbs to his own plans, however, and the viewer is glad to see the priest go the way of all flesh.

Sometimes billed as science fiction, this is more fantasy horror fare.  It’s literally swords and sandals among the the lackluster Sumerians.  The monsters make it horror, but they aren’t evil, although they do kill one of the protagonists.  To their credit these pre-Civil Rights Act Americans realize that the treatment of the eponymous mole people is unfair.  There is, at the same time, no regret expressed that these scientists have brought the five-thousand-year-old Sumerian civilization to an end.  The Mole People is one of those “so bad it’s good” movies.  Its plodding pace doesn’t make it idea for too sleepy an afternoon, but the story is different than a typical monster flick from the era.  And it is biblically based, as my previous post on it noted.  And a lot has happened in the intervening fourteen years.

No Demons

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There’s a connoisseurship about it.  Making bad films, that is.  It’s a wonder that Night of the Demon—I should specify 1980 as the year—hasn’t really become a cult film of any standing.  You can tell the maker tried hard to shoot a reasonable film, but with a nearly Ed Woodsian level of incompetence.  It lacks Woods’ artistry, however.  For those just getting on the Bigfoot kick in the new millennium, it might help to know that Sasquatch was big in the seventies.  Yes, the first real efforts to sort this thing out came about when the psychedelic seventies were underway.  The documentary The Mysterious Monsters came out in 1976.  The first serious efforts to explain Bigfoot as not just a hoax began.  And James C. Wasson, Jim L. Ball, and Mike Williams took a shot at making a horror film of the hairy guy.

The acting is about the worst you’d care to see, and the script is abysmal.  The effects are anything but special, and the flashback scenes incongruous.  But it does have significance for religion and horror.  It goes like this: a professor and some students go to investigate a series of Sasquatch-related murders.  They’re led to “Crazy Wanda,” who lives alone in a remote cabin.  Wanda, when finally persuaded to talk, reveals that her crazed preacher of a father killed her Bigfoot-hybrid baby.  His followers still perform demonic rituals in the woods, worshipping the Sasquatch.  Wanda had burned her father to death in retaliation for killing her child—she kinda likes Bigfoot, it turns out.  The professor and students, naturally, fall victim to the beast.

Only the professor survives.  He’s assumed to be criminally insane and suspected of murdering his own students.  It’s almost painful to watch a movie where everyone is trying so hard to do it well, but just can’t seem to manage it.  The plot line about the cultists is immediately dropped after an intended rape ritual is interrupted by the professor.  Wanda’s preacher father, who seems to fit into no particular form of Christianity, has no motivation beyond avoiding Hell for himself.  At one point he seemingly admits killing her mother.  There’s even a scene where Bigfoot kills two Girl Scouts.  With all of this going for it, you might think it would’ve picked up a following.  It has some fans, I’m sure, but I’m not certain that it’s well enough known to make it onto lists of worst movies of all time.  More’s the pity since it would absolutely deserve it.

Not Murphy’s Mansion

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One of the dangers of streaming is that you can be talked into a movie by the fact of its availability.  Curiosity drove me to Disney’s The Haunted Mansion movie and that led to the discovery that there had been a reboot.  I’m drawn to haunted houses but not to theme parks, but well, you wonder how they might’ve thought they could’ve done it better.  The original movie failed to rock the critics, so, as the saying goes, try, try again.  Last year’s Haunted Mansion is over the top.  The story is more complex, with an ensemble cast, and not really funny or scary.  Based on a sad premise—two families with deceased spouses—they’re drawn, with three other New Orleans outsiders, to a, well, haunted mansion.  The main ghost is looking for a soul to harvest but as the two hours wend on, the characters reveal their sadnesses (one doesn’t).  Perhaps the idea is catharsis, but there are too many subplots and too many abrupt shifts of mood.

A movie should know, it seems to me, what it wants to be.  You feel for the sadness and loss of the characters but  I know something about using horror cathartically, and this movie doesn’t do it.  There are jokes and running gags, but they’re not really funny.  There’s religion involved, but it turns out to be fake, with even a faked exorcism.  There are literally 100 ghosts.  And really only one bad guy among them.  There’s drinking to drown sorrows, murders, and even adult humor that is somehow deeply disturbing.  There are a few nods to the original movie but the plot is quite different and it leaves you feeling drained.

With a budget of about $150,000,000, stops were pulled out all over this organ.  It doesn’t, however, have a focus.  In the original film, the Evers family really has a need to reconnect.  The mansion does that for them, through its ghosts.  The reboot implies at the end that two broken families might heal each other and that evil leads to its own punishment.  Still it leaves open the question: what is this movie trying to be?  The more cynical might say it’s only for money (the worldwide gross didn’t reach covering its budget), but I have to think that those who make movies do so for more than just a buck.  Coping with death is a profound human need that begins when a pet or, more seriously, a family member dies.  I’m not sure that Disney is the best authority on the subject.  At least not for those of us who use horror as therapy.

The Movie Maker

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Roger Corman has died.  So passes an era.  I’ve always had an appreciation for the speculative films of the fifties and sixties.  Many of these involved low budgets and content intended to shock.  Or at least excite youngsters.  And Roger Corman was a huge name among directors, producers, and promoters of such schlock.  He entered the realm of horror in 1955 with Day the World Ended.   Attack of the Crab Monsters a couple years later put the focus firmly on monsters.  Producing and directing three or more movies a year, he built a reputation for being cheap and quick, but that didn’t prevent him from creating some good movies.  A film’s producer is the one responsible for overseeing the production.  Often they come up with the ideas of what to film.

Roger Corman, publicity still; public domain via Wikimedia Commons

As the sixties were dawning, Corman produced several films “based on” work by Edgar Allan Poe.  I remember seeing some as a young person and wondering what they had to do with the Poe I’d been reading.  Still, he managed to grace cinema with House of Usher and The Masque of the Red Death.  These are good films, despite limitations.  At the same time, Corman was still producing creature features as well, wracking up an impressive list of nearly 400 produced films.  As an established player in cinema he also took on the role of distributor from time to time.  When The Wicker Man was being ignored in Britain, Corman undertook the role of US distributor, likely saving the movie from total obscurity.

Circling back to Day the World Ended, we’ve become accustomed to believe that some kind of divine or human ending is in the offing.  These ideas get embellished over time, as I suggested in my new piece on Horror Homeroom.  Corman knew that this putative end would get the attention, whether or not there was any truth to it.  Perhaps that was the genius of his work—he knew how to attract attention.  And he wasn’t afraid to do so.  The business of cinema is one of attracting viewers.  Telling stories we want to hear.  We remember reading Poe, and even if the movies differ from the stories he penned, they are nevertheless reminders, reminiscent of what we’ve read.  If there are monsters they are somehow perhaps even more effective for not really being believable.  In short, Corman was a showman.  He made a living doing what he loved.  And he influenced many lives along the way.

Movie Prophet

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Is there such a thing as a movie so bad that it can distort reality itself?  If so, I nominate A Haunting in Salem.  A little explanation.  I am trying to develop an aesthetic for bad movies.  I’m finding it not too difficult for movies that are so bad they’re good.  Usually such movies are fun—whether intentionally or not.  But there is a class of movie that is poorly written, poorly acted, poorly lighted, poorly set, poorly premised, poorly directed, poorly paced, and all without a hint of humor.  That’s this movie.  I watch bad movies because of my expensive habit.  I stream movies.  Since I work 9-2-5 and I’m tired by 5, I do this on weekends.  I’m not paid enough to afford renting movies every single weekend, so I look for what I can find on the services I can access—Hulu, Netflix, and, mostly, Amazon Prime.  I try to find something that grabs me.

I watched A Haunting in Connecticut and A Haunting in Georgia, as well as their remakes.  The Salem in the title made me think this might have something to say about the Witch Trials.  Perhaps it did but I was so busy groaning that I couldn’t hear it.  Although set in Salem it was filmed in Pasadena (who would notice?).  They used a 200-year-old house as a 400-year-old house, as if there’s no difference.  There’s a scene where the daughter asks her mother about her father’s PTSD.  She says something like, “He shot that man in the war.  He thought he was a bad guy, but he was a good guy.”  It’s difficult to write this badly, even if intentional.  Sorry, I’m getting away from Salem.  Well, it turns out that the witches were buried on the property of Judge Corwin’s house and they kill every sheriff and all their families, when they move in.  This has been going on for four centuries but nobody has caught on?  Even a scene where the mayor is shown raising the flag outside his office had me scratching myself bald.  Is that one of the mayor’s duties?

Most of the time the actors act like there was no direction—showing the wrong emotions and not even remembering what was said just a minute ago.  And you can’t really feel for anyone other than the deputy who seems to be trying to be a nice guy.  Maybe this is my calling in life—to serve as a prophet warning my small band of readers what movies not to watch.  I can’t recall the last time I couldn’t wait for a movie to end so that I could wash my eyes out with soap.  Avoid A Haunting in Salem.  Don’t even consider it.

They Come in Batches

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There’s horror and there’s comedy horror.  And then there’s just plain silly.  Gremlins 2: The New Batch falls into that last category but with the strange factor that it’s silly without being funny.  There are a few smirk moments, and sometimes the self-parody approaches clever, nevertheless it’s bad.  It’s a big budget bad movie.  The idea that the gremlins try to take over New York City is funny, at first, but other than Phoebe Cates and Christopher Lee, they don’t seem to know this is a satire of Gremlins.  I guess not knowing about the plot—I tend not to read reviews about movies before I see them—I was expecting something more like the first one, which I thought was pretty good.  The only reason I knew the movie existed at all was that the Blu-Ray version of Gremlins comes with The New Batch.  The late eighties and early nineties I was spending holed up in Edinburgh working on a Ph.D.  We didn’t have much money and didn’t see many movies.  We had no television (there is, or was, a television tax in the UK), so I never heard of the sequel.  

I presume we all know the three rules of mogwai, and needless to say, they immediately get broken.  The eponymous new batch takes over the Manhattan tower of Daniel Clamp.  His high-tech building needs no gremlins because the technology already doesn’t work well.  The high rise houses, among other things, a genetics lab where Christopher Lee camps it up, but which means the gremlins have access to formulas that allow them to grow wings, tolerate sunlight, and become spiders.  Sound silly?  You betcha.  One of the gremlins is even able to talk.  I watched with increasing stupefaction. 

Bad movies and cult followings are the peanut butter and jelly of cinematography.  Some bad movies never attain cultdom, but I can see why this one has.  The big budget ensured glitz and special effects.  Even the self-awareness to have Hulk Hogan being able to control the gremlins in the theater with a threat almost gives the movie an art film feel.  The horror, mostly based on the fact that there are monsters, is tightly constrained.  Although I felt increasingly like I was wasting my time as the movie went on, upon reflection I can see why some people have glommed onto it.  It may just have edged over into the so bad it’s good category.  I’ll need to think about it.  And avoid eating after midnight.

Which Witch Where?

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I like to think of myself as a kind critic.  I’ve been on the pointy end enough to know how it feels when those who don’t like my work are unkind.  I’ll try to find a nice way of saying Witches of Amityville, or Witches of Amityville Academy, must’ve been shot on a very modest budget.  It must’ve been written by someone who’s still working hard to master the craft.  And the actors are continuing to improve as the director gets better at that role.  Why did I watch it?  Amazon Prime gives it four stars.  The incongruity of Amityville and witches suggested it might be a bad movie, and in that regard it did not disappoint.  So what’s going on here?

There’s a witch academy in Amityville.  Although all the cars have steering wheels on the right, everyone speaks with American accents, apart from a couple of characters.  The interior shots, however, are also pretty British for the most part.  There does seem to be some awareness that Amityville is in the new world.  In any case, said academy is run by an evil coven that is seeking to release the demon Botis.  To do so they have to sacrifice college-age women (and no, it’s not that kind of movie).  One of their intended sacrifices escapes and is found by three white witch sisters who also live in Amityville.  They decide to train this young woman who, as it turns out, is a very powerful witch.  Problem is, the director of the academy can’t release the demon without sacrificing this particular victim.  So she kidnaps her back.  The three good witches burst on the scene, actually more like just walk on, and prevent the sacrifice.  The bad witch kills herself and releases the demon, but the young witch is so powerful that she destroys him.  In the end the witches must go to Salem.

What’s not to like?  Some of us, day by day, year by year, work to improve our writing skills.  We write stories that incorporate whatever ability we’ve managed to scrape together.  And we struggle to find publishers.  I like bad movies because they are a great place to find hope.  The world’s a big place.  Even the entertainment industry is large enough to absorb movies produced by Amazon, Hulu, and Netflix, among others, including the big studios.  They’ve got to be looking for content, right?  Those of us who channel our creativity towards writing, and who keep trying to get it published, have a chance, don’t we?  What’s the harm in believing in the power of magic?

The Third

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I don’t know what possessed me—and I use that verb intentionally—to suggest Shrek the Third for weekend viewing.  Apart from a Rosemary’s Baby and Exorcist mashup scene, it is a bad movie.  I’ve been watching bad movies over the past few months, and developing an aesthetic for them, but I just can’t warm to Shrek the Third.  The first two movies were quite good, and sequels frequently struggle.  I’m trying to put my finger on why this one leaves such a bad taste in a viewer’s mouth.  For one thing, it’s the writing.  Not as snappy or crisp as the first two, it drags with politically correct emotional adjustment as Arthur tries to learn to be king and Shrek reconciles with being a father.  What happened to the histrionics of Lord Farquad?  Or the cluelessness of the fairy tale creatures with no leader?  Instead there are hugs and reassurances.

Not that hugs and reassurances are bad, but they’re not Shrek material.  Sudden character shifts don’t help either.  The real thing, however, seems to me, to be the music.  Many movies patch in contemporary songs to set the mood.  The first two Shreks did this remarkably well, with one narrowly edging out two in several places.  The Third lacks this artistry.   The pop songs chosen just don’t fit.  They tank the mood time and again.  Music is important.  It can make or break a film.  In this case it’s only one problem.  To me even the animation seems rushed.

There is an aesthetic to bad movies.  I guess I was hoping to find it here (I’d seen it before, years ago).  Maybe badness in movies is harder to make good when they’re animated.  There’s an intentionality about everything when you know everything on screen was planned to appear exactly as it does.  Good bad movies entertain.  There’s a reason we come back to them, even knowing they’re not great.  As someone who’s written for his entire literate life, I tend to think that good writing can redeem most movies.  We can put up with low budget effects if the writing is strong.  There’s a reason Casablanca is a classic, despite the low budget.  The Third has the tag line, “The best Shrek yet.”  Considering the bar set by the first two, that was a boast not likely based on anything like facts.  Or taste.  I’ve got to wonder, however, when big budget animations start going off the rails, when is it decided to simply let them go and hope that a classic will emerge?

Not The Sting

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Why do we make the decisions we do?  Watch the movies we do?  I have to confess that for me a number of strange factors combine to make for some weird choices.  For example, Invasion of the Bee Girls is difficult to explain apart from compounding oddities.  One is that Amazon Prime auto-suggested it too me (for free).  Yes, I have a history of watching bad movies and this definitely fits that bill.  Fuzzy-headedness during my weekend afternoon slump time probably played into it.  Along with the fact that I’d been researching bees and that brought the movie The Wasp Woman back to mind.  Wasp woman, bee girls?  It’s free and I’m not going to be able to stay awake otherwise.  The movie is about what you’d expect from a low-budget 1970s sci-fi horror film.  It did make me think I should read about movies before I watch them rather than after.

Nevertheless, I’m trying to develop an aesthetic for bad movies.  If you’re a regular reader you’ll know that I have a fascination with Ed Wood and his films.  I even read a book about him and also read a book on why it’s okay to like movies that we tend to label as bad.  No matter how you parse Invasion of the Bee Girls, it’s bad.  The acting, the writing, the plot.  Still, some of us have a taste for films from the seventies—it’s kind of a nostalgia trip since I was really only becoming aware of the odd world of science fiction about then.  Nicholas Meyer, who wrote the initial screenplay wanted his name removed after he saw the changes that’d been made.  That should be telling you something.

Meyer, while not a household name writer, did pen some good detective stories about Sherlock Holmes, and wrote, uncredited, both Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and Fatal Attraction.  Invasion of the Bee Girls has a somewhat salacious plot that fits the Zeitgeist of the seventies of which I was unaware, growing up.  The seventies were my sci-fi high point, it was good escapist material for someone living in a situation less than ideal for day-to-day living.  I watched, for example, Killdozer about that time and thought it was great.  Now that streaming is how we watch, the amorphous internet has a record of what we’ve seen and then recommends products for us based on our record.  I really thought we outgrew being tracked all the time.  Little did any of us know that it was only getting started in high school.  And as long as you have a penny to spend, those who track us will try to figure out how to take it.  You could get stung.

One Demonic Night

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I only discovered after watching Night of the Demons (2009) that it was a remake.  Eventually curiosity got the best of me and I had a spare moment to watch the 1988 original.  It’s still kind of a bad movie, but it is scarier than the remake.  It’s also a horror comedy, but the emphasis is a bit more on the horror here.  A group of ten high schoolers go to Hull House, which used to be a funeral home, for a Halloween party.  When the power goes out they decide to have a séance.  Unbeknownst to them, however, there is a real resident demon.  This demon gets passed on through kissing, and it animates the kids who’ve been killed along the way.  Although the final girl is pretty clear from the beginning, in a usual twist the only surviving guy is African-American, the son of a preacher.

The concept of demons here is explained as entities that were never human.  This is the explanation Ed and Lorraine Warren used, often without making reference to fallen angels.  Since the demons are using the physical bodies of the kids, they can be stopped by locked doors, but killing them doesn’t really help, since they keep coming back.  It seems that there’s really just one actual demon, a dragon-headed entity that lives in the crematorium.  Rodger, the Black man, brings the element of religion to the story.  He objects to the séance in the first place, and suggests that they pray as he and Judy, the final girl, are attempting to escape.

In-between all this is sandwiched the gore and violence that make it pretty typical horror.  The humor involved, however, makes it less intense than a typical slasher.  Although I didn’t walk away thinking this would be a favorite movie, I could see why it’s garnered a cult following.  As is often the case, the original is better than the remake.  For one thing, it understands that religion seasons horror quite well.  Demons are, by definition, religious monsters, at least traditionally.  And the two “good kids” who survive are uncomfortable with messing with spiritual forces to begin with.  Judy just wants to go to the dance, after all.  The movie went on into sequels as its cult fandom grew.  If I ever do a sequel to Nightmares with the Bible I’ll need to include this franchise, I guess.  For a sleepy weekend afternoon, there are worse bad movies to watch.

Out There

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While Amazon Prime includes a few A-list horror movies, those that it does I’ve already watched.  Since I can’t afford to pay for this habit, I watch what’s free.  That brought me to the horror comedy There’s Nothing out There.  Written and directed by a twenty-year-old guy, it’s kind of what you might expect.  Its main claim to fame, apart from being a low-budget monster flick, is that it anticipates Wes Craven’s classic Scream.   The latter is famous for being so self-aware.  One of the characters keeps telling the others what happens in horror films and, of course, those things happen.  Although There’s Nothing out There is silly, one of the characters does exactly that.  In the funniest moment in the movie he looks directly at the camera and says “It’s a distinct possibility” in response to one of the girls asking “So you’re saying we’re in a movie?”  Craven didn’t borrow that, but then, Scream is a landmark.

So what’s it about?  There are seven young people who head to a cabin in the woods.  Actually, it’s a regular house, and quite a nice one at that.  The three couples are there for sex but the single guy (Mike) is the horror expert and gets on everyone’s nerves.  He’s right, of course, that there is a monster on the loose.  A slimy green thing with a huge mouth full of pointy teeth, has fallen from space into the neighborhood and it slimes the guys, digesting them, and tries to mate with thee girls.  And if it shoots lasers into your eyes you become its servant, helping out with its mission.  The kids are picked off, of course, with Mike surviving along with one of the couples.  Before they can stop the monster a plumber also gets eaten.

Horror comedy is a strange genre.  It tends to work because there are elements of humor in much of horror.  It’s not all blood and gore—the best examples use that sparingly, in any case.  And horror comedy doesn’t really frighten since it’s pretty clear that it’s being played for laughs.  Sometimes such movies venture into the bad realm—there’s a reason some movies are free on Amazon Prime—but at times they actually have quite a bit to offer.  There’s nothing scary about There’s Nothing out There.  It’s the kind of movie that tends to grow into a cult classic over the years, however.  And while it’s not A-list material, it’s still worth watching for free.

Through the Woods

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The thing about appreciating bad movies is that it’s difficult to be disappointed.  On a recent weekend I’d watched a horror film that didn’t sit well with me (or maybe it was the last night’s supper), and I decided I needed to see something else.  Something that was free on my streaming service.  I’d read about Transylvania 6-5000 someplace, but I couldn’t remember where.  The list of stars won me over: Jeff Goldblum, Ed Begley Jr., Jeffrey Jones, Geena Davis, Michael Richards—why don’t more people talk about it?  Because even for a comedy it has trouble working.  Well, a horror comedy, to be precise.  Emphasis on the comedy, which tries too hard.  I couldn’t get over the fact that this was a tall guy movie—Goldblum, Begley, Jones, and Richards are all over six feet tall.  Usually other actors literally have to look up to them.

Even though it’s a groaner, it’s not without worth.  It was filmed in what used to be Yugoslavia when it was rare for anything to come from behind the Iron Curtain.  Set in Transylvania, it wasn’t too far off.  (Transylvania is located in Romania, of course.)  Some of the performances aren’t bad, Davis’ vampire nods to Frank-N-Furter in Rocky Horror, and Carol Kane is fun to watch as Lupi.  The male roles are generally the problem.  In case you’re wondering, the plot is that two reporters—Goldblum and Begley—are sent to Transylvania to find a story.  The locals laugh at them, insisting Transylvania’s a modern country with no monsters.

When the classic monsters do appear, they all have rational explanations.  There are riffs off vampires, werewolves, Frankenstein’s monster, swamp monsters, and the mummy.  There’s even a mad scientist.  The problem is the movie really doesn’t give itself over to either comedy or horror.  There are ways to make that combination work.  And, as with C.H.U.D., the title put me off.  I didn’t know until reading about it later that it was also a riff, but from the Glenn Miller song “Pennsylvania 6-5000.”  I’d never heard the song before and was unfamiliar with its title.  Rudy De Luca, the director, had worked with Mel Brooks and perhaps if they’d collaborated on this one the results might’ve been better.  So, it’s a bad movie.  That doesn’t mean it isn’t worth watching.  Movies like this sometimes serve as an homage to the monsters with whom we grew up, and who even met Abbott and Costello in their own lifetimes.  Just be prepared not to take it too seriously and not to laugh too much.