Grown-up Jane

Leave a comment

Watching Stephen King’s list of scary movies in the 30 years prior to 1980, I’ve found one or two that hardly strike me as horror.  Some of the others remain remarkably effective today.  I had the wrong idea about What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?;  I’d supposed from the title that it had to do with an abducted child, a topic I generally avoid.  When looking up yet another movie on Tubi that was free, but only in Spanish, I saw Baby Jane on offer and decided to give it a try.  I was pretty impressed.  It’s overly long and drags a bit, but the story is good.  One thing about horror films from the period is that they relied on story because the special effects really didn’t exist to make movies such as many we now see—splashy, but shallow.

In case you’re even more outdated than me, Baby Jane was a successful child actor whose sister grows up to outshine her.  Blanche, the sister, is crippled in a car accident that has been blamed on Jane for the last couple of decades.  Jane really can’t act, and once her sister is disabled, the two live on Blanche’s money until Jane’s growing insanity threatens her wheelchair-bound sister.  Trapped upstairs without any means of communicating with anyone who might help, Blanche is tortured and starved by her sister.  There’s an incredible amount of tension, even if the events begin to seem unlikely as the two hours roll on.  There are a few dropped subplots—the neighbor who harbors no suspicions at all, and the musician Jane hires who discovers her secret—but overall the tension keeps building.

One thing that occurred to me was that part of the plot involves leaving a phone extension off the hook to prevent Blanche from getting help.  I pondered how some young people who only know phones as personal devices might not understand this.  How, when I was a child that if you left an extension off the hook no calls could go in or out.  And that the annoying “off the hook” tone didn’t yet exist.  Ironically, now you could watch the movie on your personal phone that you carry with you at all times.  While this isn’t a perfect movie, it is an engaging one on many levels.  The sisterly rivalry, the growing insanity of Jane, and the helplessness of an invalid all work together to create some frightening moments.  Technology sure makes life convenient, but it cuts off some avenues for horror.  Of course, as Unfriended shows, it opens new venues.  I agree with King—this is one of the actually scary films from before the eighties.

Like Father

Leave a comment

There’s just something about old movies.  After Universal discovered that Depression-Era people would still pay to see scary movies, they made a kind of industry of filming new monsters (for them) or spinning off of their successes.  Several years ago, when Universal was selling collections of their famed monster line up on DVD, I bought a few.  I realized recently that I had never watched Son of Dracula, included in the Dracula DVD set.  While it’s not a great movie, it’s by no stretch a bad one.  The story is complex and soulful, and even though Bela Lugosi’s not in it, the film participates in the ever-growing vampire lore.  It also introduced the world to Alucard, a character that would take off in Japan as a vampiric character in video games and manga.

Katherine, a well-to-do southern belle, met a Count Aculard while traveling in Eastern Europe.  He’s now visiting her in America, much to her fiancé’s chagrin.  A local doctor and friend of the family comes to expect that Alucard, Dracula spelled backwards, of course, may be a vampire.  He brings over a professor acquaintance from Hungary to test his hypothesis.  Meanwhile, Alucard, Dracula’s son, marries Kay and in so doing inherits her estate.  She becomes a vampire, which was her plan all along.  She, however, plans to turn her fiancé into a vampire, after they kill Alucard, so they can spend eternal life together.  The doctor and professor figure out what’s going on, but the local police don’t believe them and are ready to commit the doctor as insane.  Frank, the fiancé, refuses to go along with Kay’s plan, so he kills the Count by destroying his coffin before daybreak, and then also immolates Katherine as well, ridding the New World of vampires.

This is definitely a period piece, but it manages to have a southern Gothic appeal.  The black folk are all servants, and the Hungarian doctor sounds just like Peter Lorre, but the story is complex enough to retain interest.  Lon Chaney, as Alucard, doesn’t have as much screen time as you might expect, but there’s a lot going on in various subplots.  The movie was released in 1943, when there was still a ban on horror movies in war-time England.  The concern about invading foreigners is pretty clearly spelled out but the story is fairly well-told, even with some small holes remaining in the plot.  All of this makes me think I’d better check my other Universal monster DVDs.  There may be some other good bits that I’ve been missing.

Not Afraid

2 Comments

It’s something many of us do.  Trying to explain why, while religious, spiritual, and moral, we find horror fascinating.  I read Brandon Grafius’ Lurking under the Surface, and when I learned about Joseph Haward’s Be Afraid: How Horror and Faith Can Change the World, I figured I’d better read it too.  Haward is a British Baptist minister who seems to support progressive causes.  He also enjoys horror.  He even finds it prophetic.  I have to admit that when I read the foreword by John E. Colwell I was afraid that this would be one of those books.  You know, the kind that only half-likes horror because their religion tells them so.  Colwell is no horror fan, and his foreword doesn’t set the tone for what follows.  Haward finds horror homiletical.

When I was young I used to see movies and analyze them theologically with my friends.  This was in college and seminary, mostly.  We’d discuss the implications of movies—sometimes horror—and how they fit into our Christian worldview.  This book is like that.  It’s Haward’s reading of various horror films, some television, and some novels, integrating them into his theological outlook.  The book is more about theology than it is about specific horror films, although it does mention quite a few.  The discussion is sometimes hard to follow because the paragraphs are so incredibly long and the style is very theological.  I got the feeling that Haward would be an interesting person to have a conversation with.  His book didn’t really do it for me, however. Some things are simply better in person. (I do know Brandon Grafius, and enjoy our talks.)

I’m not into horror for the violence.  Haward tends to point to that element, but I’m generally looking for the mood.  And avoidance.  Also when I was young I learned the truism, “He who lives to run away, lives to run another day.”  I like to think that I’m brave, but violence really bothers me.  My family finds me a contradiction; I won’t watch movies that are based on “true events” unless they’re speculative.  I don’t need reminding that people can be horrible to each other.  I know that from scanning the headlines and from watching the election results.  No, I use horror to help me cope.  And it works best when I know there’s something supernatural going on.  I’ve grown out of theologizing about movies.  I took plenty of theology courses in college and seminary, but they seemed a bit too abstract to be helpful.  Then I’d go out with my friends and watch a horror movie on the weekend so we could talk about it.  There’s a bit of that nostalgia here.

Not Friendly

Leave a comment

A ghost-revenge story, online.  Unfriended is one of those low-budget horror films that manages to be remarkably effective through the acting and its overall verisimilitude.  It’s also a kind of parable about the dangers of living our lives online.  The only problem is that technology is moving so fast that a ten-year old movie looks outdated.  The scary thing is many people are online even more, especially since the pandemic that came a few years after the movie was released.  Six high-schoolers are chatting on Skype (see what I mean?).  A friend in the group died by suicide a year ago because of an embarrassing video posted of her on YouTube.  Even a mature viewer like me can easily recall how deeply peer pressure cut in high school.  It’s a difficult time for all of us.  In any case, an unidentified person has joined the call and makes threatening comments via chat.

Of course, there are multiple apps (we called them programs long ago) running and nearly the entire movie is on the screen of one of the kids’ laptops.  In real life I was waiting for my low battery warning to come on, because I was watching it on a laptop, and all the notices that appeared on the upper right-hand corner made the thing look real.  Naturally enough, the kids start getting killed off.  Since this is horror their deaths are shown, if briefly, on screen and mostly they’re bizarre.  Hovering in the background is a webpage that warns against opening and answering messages from the dead.  As Blaire (whose screen we’re seeing) comes to realize that the unknown person is the girl who died by suicide, Laura (the dead friend) forces them to play a game of Never Have I Ever.  This leads to dissension and fighting as confessions come out and friends begin dying.

There’s a heavy moral element involved—the teens are being “punished” for typical teen behaviors.  Interestingly, toward the end I noticed that Blaire had a crucifix on her bedroom wall.  The kids don’t talk about religion at all (something I did do as a teen) but they all have a moral sense of what they did wrong.  The webpage about not answering online messages from the dead suggests confessing your sins, if you do open such a message.  Blaire tries to confess, but she has a secret that’s kept until the very end, so I can’t say what it is here.  I wouldn’t want to be unfriended for providing a spoiler.

Slimy Monsters

Leave a comment

Stuart Gordon apparently had in mind to do an H. P. Lovecraft cycle, as Roger Corman did with Poe.  I first saw Dagon—clearly his best—and some time later picked up Re-Animator.  From Beyond was his second Lovecraft movie and it doesn’t have the visual appeal of Dagon, but it is certainly a passable gross-out for those who enjoy slimy monsters.  Gordon was pretty obviously of greater libido than Lovecraft ever was.  From Beyond puts sex in the spotlight’s periphery without making it absolutely central to the story.  A Dr. Pretorius has built a “resonator” that allows him to see extra-dimensional beings.  It does this by stimulating the pineal gland.  His assistant Dr. Tillinghast, is present when a creature from, well, beyond, kills Pretorius by wrenching off his head.  Tillinghast is suspected in his murder but is being held in an asylum rather than a traditional jail.

Dr. McMichaels, the love interest in the film, believes that Tillinghast is sane and that he actually did witness these beings from beyond.  As a scientist, she wants to see if the resonator really works.  It does, but in addition to providing the ability to experience the other realm, it also boosts the sex drive of those under its influence.  She decides, against the warning of Dr. Tillinghast, to try the resonator once more, but this time the other-dimensional Pretorius has become strong enough to prevent her from shutting the machine down.  Tillinghast is transformed into a modified human with an extension from his forehead and as she tries to explain what she witnessed, McMichaels is classified as insane.  She and Tillinghast escape the asylum and McMichaels manages to blow up the machine, ultimately going insane for real.

Lovecraft strenuously avoided sex in his written work, limiting the number of women characters who appear.  I suspect he would not have been pleased with this treatment of his story.  Gordon went on to make one more Lovecraft movie beyond Dagon, a television movie of Dreams in the Witch House (which I haven’t seen).  Of the three theatrical releases, I find Dagon the most convincing since the mood is serious and it seems to capture much of the feel of Lovecraft’s “Shadow over Innsmouth,” one of his best stories.  Lovecraft himself apparently didn’t care that much for that particular tale.  And he was critical of the conversion of stories into movies.  It’s a good thing that one doesn’t have to see eye-to-eye with Lovecraft to appreciate his works.  And some of them transfer to film reasonably well.  Especially if you’re in the mood for slimy monsters.

Non-Believer

Leave a comment

Heretic may be the ultimate horror and religion movie.  It’s also a film you may need to see multiple times to follow the all-important dialogue.  It’s a movie that would’ve been front and center in Holy Horror.  And it’s deceptively simple.  As I’ve written many times before, I try to know very little about a film before I watch it.  This if often difficult with the internet and people wanting to tell you about the latest cinematic marvel.  I managed to watch Heretic knowing only that it was about two Mormon missionaries visiting a potential convert.  If you want to leave your level of knowledge at that point before seeing the movie you might not want to read on.  You have been warned.

e two women in on an inclement evening, assuring them his wife is in the next room.  He then, ever so innocently, questions them about their beliefs and about religion in general.  The missionaries grow increasingly concerned that there is no wife and that Mr. Reed (Grant) has been toying with them.  They find themselves locked in his house as he unrelentingly questions them and asking them what, and why, they really believe.  Charmingly he assures them they can leave at any time, but they have to pick a door—the lady and the tiger-like—marked either belief or disbelief.  (Both lead to the same place, and it’s not out.)  Using a trick he attempts to get them to die by suicide.  When they refuse, he kills one of them but the other discovers the truth, “the one true religion.”  I won’t tell you what it is.

The film is remarkable in that there is no horror without religion.  I made a similar argument about The Wicker Man, in my book on the movie.  When we ask ourselves what makes a horror film scary, seldom is the answer overtly “religion.”  Usually it’s a monster of some description.  Or the threat of annihilation.  Or plain old death.  Religion can be scary.  In fact, it has historically been the nepenthe for death and sorrow in this life.  Some would trace the origin of religion to that very phenomenon.  I’ve been writing for years on this blog that religion and horror belong together.  They overlap.  They blend.  They, on occasion, may be the same thing.  Heretic displays that clearly.  If I haven’t spoiled it for you, I highly recommend it.  I can honestly say it’s the first movie that has literally given me nightmares, in many, many years.

Book Stages

Leave a comment

Books appear in stages.  All publishers are different.  These platitudes encapsulate my experience in finding a venue for my ideas.  Sleepy Hollow as American Myth has just appeared in McFarland’s spring and summer catalogue.  I haven’t seen the proofs yet, but I suspect I will before too long now.  What’s with the spring and summer catalogue?  Well, believe it or not, books are seasonal.  Publishers go by seasons.  For many academic publishers there are two seasons: Spring/Summer and Fall/Winter.  The timing of certain books may fall in a specific place within those seasons but many academic books are aimed at classroom adoptions so early spring and early autumn are the most popular times.  It’s no coincidence that academic conferences also cluster around the semester system, the big ones being either autumn or spring.  Academics have a migratory instinct.

Personally, I’m hoping Sleepy Hollow will be out in late summer.  I don’t have any control over that, but it’s about then that normal people’s thoughts start turning toward falling leaves, long nights, and monsters.  Every year there’s a day in August when I step outside and literally smell autumn in the air.  As a kid seasons seemed like something as rigid as a biblical law: spring was March through May, summer June through August, and so forth.  The older I get, the more I realize how negotiable seasons are.  The Celts celebrated the start of spring in February.  Yes, there are lots of cold days yet to come, but the early signs of spring have begun.  For early risers, we finally start to observe earlier sunrises.  (These technically start around January 10, but they’re slow getting out of bed.)

You might think the ideal season for a book on spooky stuff, like Sleepy Hollow, would be timed for release in the fall/winter cycle.  Not necessarily.  Both Holy Horror and Nightmares with the Bible hit the market after Halloween.  Normal people’s thoughts had shifted to Thanksgiving.  I’m pleased that Sleepy Hollow will be released a bit earlier.  Summer is ideal for Halloween-themed books.  And yes, I devote a chapter to Halloween and the Headless Horseman.  They are closely related.  So I was glad to receive McFarland’s spring/summer catalogue and find my book on page two.  I don’t have a publication date yet, but I’m looking forward to being part of the discussion about one of my favorite ghost stories of all time.  Speaking of which, it’s almost time to begin gathering firewood for next winter, or at least it will be in summer.  And it’s not that far away.

Worse Seed

Leave a comment

Not too long ago I watched The Bad Seed.  In the 1950s it probably wasn’t considered horror, but it is quite a scary movie.  I’d classify it as horror—not all fifties horror was guys in rubbery suits.  When reading about the movie afterwards, I learned the novel had a darker ending (the movie was pretty dark as it was).  So I decided to read the book by William March.  The movie’s fairly faithful, up to the ending.  As usual, the novel adds more detail and reveals some things rather differently.  For example, Christine Penmark, the mother of Rhoda, can’t ask her father if she’s adopted.  She “learns” this through inference.  Indeed, the book leaves you wondering if she’s actually mentally unstable.  The proof that she’s the daughter of a serial killer is strong but not definitive.  And her father is already dead when the story opens.

The school outing, where Rhoda claims her second victim, is where the movie opens.  Rhoda is expelled from the school because the women who run it can’t abide Rhoda’s dishonesty.  The character of Leroy is very well portrayed in the movie, but he too seems to have some kind of mental illness.  Monica Breedlove is accurately presented as a busybody, but she too spends a lot of time analyzing people, including herself.  Rhoda is, of course, a literal sociopath.  It’s fair to say the novel is an extended exploration of mental illness of various sorts.  I remember from growing up in the sixties that many conditions that are now regularly diagnosed simply weren’t recognized.  Kids were blamed for bad behaviors that were, in all likelihood, caused by being somewhere on the spectrum.

Much water has passed under the bridge since the fifties.  This book was a bestseller then, but I only learned about it last year.  Indeed, it’s been adapted to film three times and was a Broadway play before all that.  There was a sequel released a couple years back.  Rhoda Penmark is herself a trope of the narcissist who lacks empathy.  Hmm, where else do we see that?  It’s still analyzed as primarily a “nature verses nurture” novel, but I suspect there’s something more going on.  We’ve moved beyond Freud and this novel probes what goes on in the minds of those who spend too much time alone, as well as who happen to be the mothers of pathological child murderers.  And the ending is different, but the movie’s is equally as bleak.  The Bad Seed a good book for this particular January.

Old Movies

1 Comment

Something strange is happening.  (“How’s that new?” you might well ask.)  There seems to be a bifurcation taking place in my brain, what techies might call “partitioning.”  Specifically it regards what I think of as “old movies.”  By this I don’t mean movies from the sixties or before.  No, I mean movies I saw some time ago, often on DVD or even VHS, sometimes in theaters, that became part of my standard repertoire.  I imagine most cinephiles have certain films to which they keep coming back.  But for me, the “old movies” are those I haven’t blogged about.  Also, they predate streaming so, in that sense, they are “old.”  You see, I’m not a very internet-savvy thinker.  It took me quite a few years to figure out I could link my posts with other posts on my own blog so that in the rare event that someone might want to read more they could click on the links like you do on Wikipedia.  (Now that you’re here, stay a while!)

Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

This blog was started in 2009.  For most of its history it has been daily.  I didn’t automatically start blogging about movies, though.  For a few years I tried to tie all my posts into religion, widely conceived.  Then, kind of establishing my own “brand,” I started writing about less ethereal topics.  Including movies that don’t have religion in them.  By far most of the movies I discuss on this blog are first-time films for me.  Occasionally I’ll go back and address one of my “old movies.”  This occurred to me the other day when I went to link to Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride.  I thought I’d posted about it, but it’s one of my oldies, so I hadn’t.  I don’t even remember when I first saw it.  If feeling nostalgic, I’ll look backward, as an historian is wont to do, but it doesn’t happen often.

Since we can’t see ahead in our lives with any real clarity, I didn’t anticipate this blog focusing on darker themes. When I started, finding a position back in academia seemed like a possibility.  For me this blog is therapy, but this is as good a place as any to talk about movies, and most of mine fall into an ill-fitting genre called “horror.”  Even among these, my “old movies,” like The Exorcist, The Amityville Horror, Sleepy Hollow, or even Paranormal Activity, which now more or less define my research, were missed out for having been too old (having been seen too long ago).  Most of the movies discussed in the past few years here have been streamed.  Many of them are easily forgotten.  But the old ones, they’re stuck, apparently for good. Such is the power of old movies.

Light Shadows

Leave a comment

I often do things backwards.  It’s not really intentional.  You see, I’m busy with my day job and something most people may not realize is that researching and writing are also a full-time job.  Only they don’t pay well, unless you’re a professor.  In any case, I find out about things in odd ways.  A friend got me watching What We Do in the Shadows, the current FX television show.  I then realized it was based on a movie so I decided I should see that before going any further.  The movie is funny, but the television show develops some of the same bits so really, it is best to see the movie first.  It turns out that while I’ve been busy working, and writing books on other types of horror movies, this franchise has been developing.  So what’s it about?  Vampires unliving together.

One of the contradictions about vampires, as the undead, is that they live by certain rules that make them distinct.  Going back to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, they don’t always live alone.  In fact, three female vampires live in Castle Dracula (although the Count moves to England without them).  What We Do in the Shadows is based on the premise of vampire roommates in contemporary housing.  How would they get along as roommates?  Many of us have experienced roommates and we know the kinds of conflicts that normally arise.  Would the undead have some other complications?  In case you haven’t gathered so already, this is comedy.  There are a few vampire chase scenes and a hilarious interaction with werewolves, all filmed as a mockumentary.  It’s pretty funny stuff.

There’s nothing too serious here, but there is bloodshed, of course.  And the developing of different characters for the undead and putting them together in one house does lead to all kinds of situations, some of them adult.  The television show is binge-worthy, if you’ve got the time and if you like vampires.  If you want to start from the beginning, the movie sets the premise well.  Vampires are so well established culturally that there’s plenty of room to fly.  Comedy horror has really come into its own.  Vampires have been culturally ascendant for quite some time now.  They are yet another thing I was fascinated by as a child that later became cool.  I wrote one of my senior term papers on vampires in high school, before college convinced me such things were puerile.  Now I’m finding that the culture has gone after them.  As I say, sometimes I do things backwards, even on a large scale.  

Poe Day

Leave a comment

Perhaps best known for his rabidly racist The Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith was nevertheless influential in early filmmaking.  I’m fascinated by how literature made its way to celluloid, particularly in the early days.  It was thus that I discovered Griffith’s Edgar Allen [sic] Poe, a silent film from 1909.  A dramatized version of Poe’s writing of “The Raven,” this seven-minute movie opens with Virginia Poe—the “Lenore” of the poem—in the process of dying at the Poe’s hovel.  Not able to keep warm or to find nourishment, she languishes on a cot until Poe arrives home and covers her with his coat.  At that moment a raven appears on the bust of Pallas above the chamber door, leading Poe to write the poem in a white heat.  He knows it’s a masterpiece and leaves Virginia promising success.

In a scene only too familiar to any writer, Poe takes the poem to the publishers, three of whom simply dismiss him, the third laughing at his work.  This particular scene rings so true.  A fourth editor buys it from him on the spot.  This is, in fact, how publishing works.  I’ve had 33 short stories either published or accepted for publication.  By far the majority of them were rejected multiple times.  One of them, previously turned down by six editors, ended up winning a prize.  So it goes.  You’ll never find an editor who “gets” you every time.  Even those who like your work may eventually start sending you elsewhere.  I often wonder how many writers of what would be classics died unpublished because of some editor’s choice.  But back to Poe.

Screenshot: public domain,

Newly paid for his work, he buys food and a blanket and returns home jubilant.  Of course, it is only to find Virginia dead.  Poe’s life did have its share of intense drama.  His death remains mysterious all these years later, and Virginia’s death was a severe blow to him.  “The Raven” was published in 1845 and Virginia died two years later, with Poe himself passing yet two years beyond that.  This film, which I learned about from Jonathan Elmer’s In Poe’s Wake, was made sixty years after Poe’s death.  He’d already become an icon by then, instantly recognizable in pancake makeup.  But even now, more than a century later, publishing is still a matter of the same process.  One of my own novels has been declined over 100 times, despite having once been under contract.  I do know the feeling of being rejected by publishers, even as I participate in a ritual as old as writing for publication.  Happy birthday, Mr. Poe.

Old Dracula

Leave a comment

Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula is one of the “old movies” about which I posted some time back.  I’ve seen it at least a couple of times, and I wrote a previous blog post about it (October 11 2009).  This is a film about which I have conflicted feelings.  It has immense visual appeal and it influenced a tremendous number of followers.  It also did exceptionally well at the box office.  Since 1992 was a year in which I’m pretty sure I saw no movies in the theater (finishing a doctorate, moving back to America, and commuting weekly from Champaign-Urbana to Nashotah House drained my time and energy.  Besides, still being fairly newly married, I had not transitioned to horror movies again (that’s a different story, also involving Nashotah).)  Being a former literalist, when I first saw it I resisted the title since it takes significant liberties with Stoker, but the overall story is probably the closest of any vampire movie I’ve seen.

The strengths of the movie include its interaction with religion.  Vlad begins by renouncing God and becoming an agent of evil, stabbing a cross, and drinking the literal blood that pours out.  A number of Stoker’s own religious elements are also portrayed, and the ending brings God back into the picture, implying a kind of redemption for the defeated vampire.  The stylishness and opulence of the movie also make for engaging viewing.  It doesn’t have the gothic feel that it might—there seem to be some almost Burtonesque elements to it and some of the casting decisions feel ill fitting.  Anthony Hopkins just doesn’t do it for me as Van Helsing.  His one-liners feel out of place, and his interpretation of Van Helsing as a whole doesn’t resonate with me.

I do like Gary Oldman’s Dracula, however.  He’s right up there with Lugosi (but not quite at that level).  The conflicted vampire is an appealing character—much more intriguing than the pure evil kind.  This Dracula forsakes God because church rules about suicide keep his Elisabeta out of Heaven.  Even now the rulings seem not to allow for much nuance.  At heart, the vampire is a religious monster.  Fear of the crucifix may go back to Bram Stoker, but this movie tries to give it a backstory.  It’s a question of theodicy—why bad things happen to good people, essentially.  This is probably the biggest reason people end up turning away from religion, and it’s something theologians ponder.  While it isn’t my favorite vampire movie, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is stylish and accurate to a degree.  But it also turns back the pages a bit further than Stoker’s book does.

Car Talk

Leave a comment

Body horror isn’t my favorite sub-genre, but Titane (French for titanium) had been recommended in several places.  Body horror directed by women takes on a particular cast, especially since pregnancy is, I imagine, kind of scary.  Certainly from a male perspective it can be, so I suspect such major body changes must involve some psychological adjustments for women as well.  The story is strange.  Alexia, after a childhood car accident, has a titanium plate in her skull.  After being released from the hospital, she starts to really love cars.  I mean, really love.  She works as a car model and ends up making love to her showroom car one night.  After that she becomes pregnant.  Emotionally distant from most people, including her parents, she becomes a serial killer.  She’s not a complete sociopath, however, because she realizes this is wrong.

Wanted by the authorities after killing everyone at a house party, she tries to change her identity by cutting her hair, breaking her nose, and wrapping her torso in body tape to pass herself off as a man.  A firefighter chief whose son has been missing for a decade, believes Alexia is his son and he takes her in.  She won’t speak, which he supposes is part of the trauma.  He gives Alexia work among the other firefighters, who are generally sexist and not a little suspicious.  Especially since the chief gives Alexia preferential treatment even though she doesn’t know what she’s doing.  In one scene he tells the firefighters he is God to them and Alexia is his son.  One of the firefighters quips later, that Jesus is white and gay.  (Alexia is pretty and the broken nose only makes her appear androgynous.)

Her painful pregnancy, which involves motor oil, eventually forces her father to acknowledge that she’s not his son, but the lonely man still vows to care for her.  When it’s time to give birth the baby is part titanium (as is Alexia’s distended belly).  She dies in childbirth but her “father” accepts the hybrid baby as his own.  This art-house Euro-horror won several awards.  Exploring issues of both sexism and women’s body changes during pregnancy—particularly an unwanted one—the movie has something to say.  And it’s something that a male writer-director simply couldn’t do.  There are no jump-startles here, and the horror is a slow dread as the viewers’ sympathies tend to be with Alexia.  The first murder we’re shown is when a fan attempts to make love to her (it doesn’t go as far as rape), despite her lack of interest.  She has a motivation and it doesn’t seem evil.  And, of course, there’s a good deal of fantasy at play.  Like most Euro-horror, it leaves you thoughtful.

Meanwhile, on Earth

Leave a comment

Low budget doesn’t always translate to cinematic disaster, but in The Crater Lake Monster, it unfortunately does.  I have a soft spot for those who attempt to make movies but don’t succeed the way that they’d hoped.  The Crater Lake Monster is poignant in that respect as the production company, Crown International, apparently messed up the financials and insisted on cutting scenes that helped to make a bit more sense of the story.  The actors are certainly not those at the top of their game, but the stop-motion plesiosaur isn’t half bad.  The story itself doesn’t seem to support its tonnage, however.  A meteor crashes into Crater Lake (not the famous one).  Some months later a monster begins attacking people after it eats up all the fish.  There are a handful of characters who are concerned, and some just casually passing through.

The sheriff, at first skeptical, becomes a believer after seeing with his own eyes.  The doctor, who examines a victim’s body, thinks there’s something in the lake.  A couple passing through on their way to Vegas see the monster up close and survive, but their trauma is so great that they can’t talk about it.  A pair of guys who rent out boats to fishers are having trouble because there’s no fish left.  And a pair of archaeologists from “University Extension” insist that the creature should be kept alive since, well, you don’t often come across dinosaurs.  They also figure out that the hot meteorite incubated a fertile plesiosaur egg that had been at the bottom of the lake for millions of years.  There’s even a story of a liquor-store robber thrown in.  The robber’s only tied to the plot by getting eaten by the monster.  The monster is finally killed by the sheriff with a bulldozer.

Some of the people that worked on this film, especially the stop-motion crew, had some recognizable chops in the biz.  One of them had worked on that childhood Christian kids’ show Davey and Goliath, and another was concurrently working on Star Wars and went on to work on Jurassic Park.  Meanwhile, Crater Lake is so bad that it’s a bit surprising that it hasn’t really become a cult classic.  Creature features are a guilty pleasure.  With a bit of coaxing, and financing, this one might’ve been made passable.  Who doesn’t like to see the underdog achieve some success?  Of course, it did come out the same year as Star Wars, with its budget, and clearly couldn’t compete down here on Earth.

Re-untold

Leave a comment

In retrospect, Universal’s Dark Universe, itself a shadowy concept, could have been a thing.  With the budget behind it, Dracula Untold could’ve been spectacular.  As so often happens, however, poor writing seems to have brought Vlad the Impaler to his knees.  I suppose it was rather tacky of me to fall asleep during it when a friend showed it to me shortly after it was available on streaming.  My excuse was that we started late and I’m a very early riser.  Finding it on a network to which I have access, and on a free weekend, I decided to give it another try.  I didn’t fall asleep the second time, but I did end up disappointed.  Action-horror is a tough sub-genre to pull off well.  As some critics pointed out, if Dracula could defeat 1,000 men singlehandedly (which he does shortly after being turned), then why does he not do so when it’s crucial?

What I did find intriguing is the older vampire that lives in Broken Tooth Mountain.  What is his backstory?  And why, if Dracula can just die, does the older vampire not do so himself, when he clearly wishes to?  He just has to step out on a sunny day.  The menace of the classic vampire isn’t on the battlefield, but in the one-on-one situations.  At night, when you’re sleeping.  Or otherwise unable to protect yourself.  The movie does have some good moments—and with a budget like that, it should have—but overall it struggles.  

Part of the difficulty is understanding Vlad the Impaler being, at heart, a nice guy.  Although he impaled thousands of people, he really just wants peace and a domestic life with his wife and son.  He’s reluctant to challenge the Turks until one taunts him upon taking his son hostage.  He tries to protect his people, but when they help save him (as vampires that he personally has turned), he destroys them all when it’s over.  The question of motivation hangs unanswered over the whole thing.  Dracula is never evil, not even when he declares himself the son of the Devil.  He attacks only in self-defense and although he does shed unnecessary blood, it is only in the fog of war.  And the motivation issues also apply to his pre-vampiric allies.  They don’t seem to be able to make up their minds whether Vlad is a good guy or not.  They try to kill him then they fight next to him.  There’s a lot going on here—maybe too much—and it seems that the story wasn’t thought out well enough to make it all work.  Vampires, it seems, don’t always cooperate.