B’s and Q’s

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A friend who read my review of The Stuff recommended Q: The Winged Serpent.  The former was the first Larry Cohen movie I’d seen, one that I stumbled upon while looking for something free to watch.  I was favorably impressed—it was a comedy horror that worked.  Q was earlier and was more of a low-budget horror, but with elements of satire in it.  As well as social commentary.  If you can handle stop-motion animation, and you want to see the inside of the Chrysler Building dome, you might enjoy this monster flick.  And there was a good deal of theology in it.  It’s certainly worth talking about in the context of horror and religion.  One warning in advance: if you’re like me, all the camera motion—many aerial shots of Midtown Manhattan, it might make you a little woozy.  It did me.

The movie follows a petty criminal who discovers the lair of Quetzalcoatl inside the Chrysler Building.  Meanwhile, a priest of Quetzalcoatl is sacrificing willing victims in Manhattan to bring the deity back.  A cop who’s willing to believe (Detective Shepard) researches beliefs in the Aztec god and tries to connect the sacrificial murders with people who are disappearing—often from Manhattan rooftops.  The question arises: is this a god or just a monster?  That’s a freighted question these days.  This idea is that if it can be killed it’s just a monster.  If not…

The story has its shortcomings and the direction isn’t great, but overall it’s not bad.  A creature-feature with some thought.  As Shepard chases down experts he starts to understand that even if this is just a monster, there are devotees of Quetzalcoatl in Manhattan killing (willing) victims.  At one point Shepard says, upon seeing a victim with his heart cut out, “All we have to do is eat the bread and drink the wine,” or something similar.  This is fairly sophisticated coming from a B movie.  Religion is also behind some of the humor as well.  When the Aztec priest comes after the petty criminal he can’t kill his victim unless he says a prayer.  The criminal refuses, and in doing so saves his life.  Interesting thought.

While having the trappings and feel of a B movie, Q gives the viewer of religion and horror movies something to think about.  The movie doesn’t reference the Bible or quote it, so it can’t make Holy Sequel, but it’s worth a lazy weekend afternoon to give you something to think about.

Demons Amok

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Not all low budget movies are bad, but some really struggle.  Demon Hunter perhaps more than most.  Not only is the script poorly written, the overall story fights for comprehension.  The basic idea—Jake, a half-breed demon, hunts and kills demons for the church when exorcisms fail—is contrived.  It doesn’t help that many aspects of the Catholicism it portrays it simply gets wrong.  And the common issue that most demon-monster movies can’t seem to overcome, that demons are incorporeal, makes this into a slug-fest rather than really having any kind of film with a statement.  Okay, let’s step back a second: Jake is hired by Cardinal White to stop Asmodeus, the demon of lust.  Asmodeus had made it to the earthly dimension and is trying to populate the world with his spawn.  The Cardinal sends a nun, Sara, with Jake but she just can’t kill demons.

When Asmodeus tries to rape Sara, she is revealed to be a half-breed demon as well and she kills him.  Jake tries to rescue her but has no choice but to kill Sara.  The Cardinal, who has tough-guy priests blocking his door, reveals that they knew about Sara all along and knew that Jake would end up killing her too.  Feeling betrayed for the set-up, Jake goes and keeps on killing those who’ve been seduced by demons.  Bad storytelling can be bearable if some aspects are believable, such as the religious elements.  The problems begin from the opening scene, which is an Exorcist knock-off.  The priest is reciting Latin prayers from a Bible instead of the Roman Rite.  He’s also not dressed for an exorcism, but this is California and it was perhaps a warm night.

Cardinal White walks around wearing a stole all the time.  One of the priests attending him is packing heat.  Demons can’t tell demons, or at least half-demons, from human beings.  And Jake can’t seem to respond to anything without a snappy comeback.  Demons are killed with crosses (not crucifixes) with the bottoms whittled down into points.  Although they have inhuman powers they fight to the death with fisticuffs.  I kept looking for something, anything, to hold onto to that might make this movie make some sense.  The story, which is mercifully brief, is padded out with driving sequences that take a little too long.  A few scenes in the movie weren’t too bad, but there weren’t enough of them to redeem this one.  But it does end up in Holy Sequel, for what it’s worth.

Wooly Sleuthing

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The Sheep Detectives is a family-friendly movie (for the most part) and a sweet story.  I’ll try not to reveal whodunit.  George is a vegetarian shepherd.  He raises sheep for wool, not meat.  He lives just outside the small village of Denbrook, in England.  One night he’s murdered.  The local policeman (singular) doesn’t seem very bright and has to be shown that it’s murder.  The sheep, who loved George, decide to investigate.  (The sheep talk, among themselves.)  George used to read them detective novels in the evening, so they get quite good at deducting things.  Led by Lily they investigate.

One day the sheep head to town.  They can roam freely with nobody suspecting them.  They initially decide on the wrong suspect.  They help the detective come up with a method of investigating by leaving hints for him.  Lily was George’s smartest sheep.  Sebastian is the most world-wise.  And Mopple is the sheep who never forgets anything.  As Sebastian leads Lily and Mopple into the churchyard for the first time, they have the following conversation:

Sebastian: This is the church, where someone named God lives.

Lily: Who’s God?

Sebastian: It’s a bit confusing, God is a shepherd.

Mopple: So he could be our shepherd?

Sebastian: No. Because he’s also a lamb.

Lily: What?

Sebastian: And he’s also invisible. And he’s made of bread. And he damns things.

Lily: Dams things? Like a beaver?

Sebastian: Yes.

Lily: So God is a big invisible lamb beaver, made of… bread?

Sebastian: Yes. And they eat him on Sundays.

The movie is a comedy, of course, but this passage should be exegeted.  Many people believe God lives in churches.  The 23rd Psalm is invoked (“the Lord is my shepherd”), but is complicated by Jesus—the lamb of God.  Of course, God can’t be seen and is therefore invisible.  Made of bread?  Communion, of course.  And the homonymous nature of “damn/dam,” which confuses kids, lead to the conclusion that God might be like a beaver.  This is a fair bit of theological humor for a lighthearted movie.  

The film was based on a novel, written originally in German, but I’m tempted to read it to see if this conversation comes from the book.  In any case, the movie is about acceptance and finding your place in the flock.  And learning not to be mindlessly led to your slaughter—one of the darker themes in the story.  I even enjoyed the good-natured use of “vegetarian” intended as slander.  A fun movie that leaves you with green pastures, it seems to me.  And a message worth considering.

Waking Up

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Moody, gothic, and intriguing.  These are words that might describe The Awakening.  It’s also an ambiguous, somewhat confusing ghost story.  To discuss this some spoilers will be necessary, so please be advised.  When you’re on the lookout for a movie to watch on an afternoon when staying awake is a struggle (which, in all honesty, is just about every afternoon), on a weekend I’ll open my long list of movies to see and compare it against what’s streaming for free on the couple of services I pay for.  Seldom do the list and offerings coincide at all.  In any case, when I find something off-list that looks intriguing I usually check IMDb to see how many stars it’s earned.  On some streaming services four out of five stars will translate to three out of ten on IMDb.  The Awakening had 6.5, which is pretty good.

So, set just after the First World War, Florence Cathcart is a seance buster who doesn’t believe in ghosts and who’s written a book debunking the whole thing.  She’s then invited to a boarding school where a ghost has been frightening the boys, one of them to death.  Her own past is deeply repressed, however.  So deeply that she has a screen memory of an event that never happened to mask it.  After setting up all her equipment she does find evidence of the inexplicable.  Robert Mallory, a teacher and wounded veteran, believes in ghosts.  He says that those who went through the war see them.  He and Florence fall in love—her fiancé was killed in the war—and during the school holiday, she’s left alone with him, Maud the housekeeper, and one student.  Here come the spoilers…

The one boy left behind is the ghost of her step-brother.  Florence grew up in that house and Maud was the housekeeper, and mother of the boy.  Her unhinged father killed Florence’s mother and was trying to shoot her as well but accidentally shot his son by the housemaid.  He then killed himself.  Florence has to remember her past to realize she’s been seeing ghosts she doesn’t believe in.  It’s an eerie film but the plot is bit confusing.  It brings religion into the story, and even the Bible.  The tale of Holofernes’ beheading from Judith is represented in a painting.  Her debunking book is kept next to the Bible.  By the end we’re asking ourselves if Florence is a ghost.  This is a good, spooky film.  A bit ambitious, but it gets more stars than the usual freebie on a sleepy afternoon.

Annabelle yet Again

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Over the past decade, sometimes with years between, I’ve been viewing the original Twilight Zone episodes.  In the way that firsts so often do, it influenced much of what would come after.  Recently when my wife was out of town, I was going through season five in the evenings.  I reached “Living Doll,” an episode I never remember seeing before.  The haunted/possessed doll/dummy has a long pedigree, of course.  I’ve discussed it several times on this blog; memorably it occurs in Dead of Night.  An earlier Twilight Zone episode, “The Dummy,” raised the specter in season three.  And, of course, Child’s Play took the idea and ran with it.  And ran.  And ran.  The highest grossing horror series in cinema, of course, is The Conjuring franchise.  It features, in more than one installment, the doll Annabelle.

The story behind Annabelle, purportedly, goes back to the 1970s when Ed and Lorraine Warren took the demonic “conduit” from the hands of a nursing student.  She was concerned that the doll moved on its own.  The student and her roommate had a psychic tell them the Raggedy Ann doll had belonged to a girl named Annabelle.  Of course, the Warrens saw this as a demonic case and famously locked the doll in a glass holder in their occult museum.  Annabelle, apart from having her own spin-off series, appears in the very first Conjuring film.  Since the Warrens passed on, the doll circulates in tours, drawing in those attracted to this particular kind of thrill. 

The Twilight Zone episode “Living Doll” is aptly credited with giving us the creepy doll Talky Tina as a blended family struggles to integrate.  The unsympathetic step-father, Erich, seems unsympathetic to the fact that his young daughter Christie is feeling rejected.  Her mother buys her a Talky Tina and Erich immediately complains about the expense.  The doll famously tells him it will kill him.  And it does.  The interesting thing is the girl’s mother’s name is Annabelle.  This gets me to wondering if some psychic a decade later had seen this episode and, perhaps subconsciously, drew the name from Jerry Sohl’s ghostwritten episode for Charles Beaumont.  It wouldn’t surprise me.  The Twilight Zone was an immensely influential series.  In the late fifties and early sixties, television had seen nothing like it.  Of course, haunted dolls, dummies, and puppets already inhabit those first steps into the uncanny valley where we know they’re not really human (AI, anyone?) but they look like they could be.  Only Annabelle knows for sure.

Period Exorcist

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The prediction was that it would be forgotten in five years after it lost the Oscar for best picture to The Sting.  The Exorcist, however, is a movie that continues to spawn new books and analyses.  I read The Story Behind The Exorcist because I wanted a contemporary account with its seventies impressions.  I didn’t see the movie when it opened; I was younger than Regan at the time.  I certainly heard about it, though.  Throughout my childhood it was whispered of as the scariest movie ever.  Peter Travers is a well known movie critic; the book was written before he joined Rolling Stone.  Stephanie Reiff is a little more difficult to pin down.  She wrote two other books, both about the occult, published in 1977.  Travers would’ve been in his early twenties when the book was published.  It shows in the at times punchy style.

The Exorcist was a phenomenon.  My awareness of it was second-hand for many years but I did hear about the long lines to get in to see it.  A whopping box-office success, it was the first horror film to be nominated for a best picture Oscar.  Horror films still tend to be shunned by the Academy, despite their frequent financial success.  In any case, when I discuss horror movies with those born in, say, the eighties or later, The Exorcist rarely comes up as among the scariest films.  It is, however, largely responsible for the way that demonic possession is understood.  No possession movie since hasn’t owed a debt of gratitude toward it.  The Exorcist often lands on lists of the greatest movies ever made.  It’s interesting to read the dismissive period reviews of the critics reproduced in the book.  The film is over fifty years old and still discussed.

While I don’t spend much time on social media, the other day a friend posted a picture of himself reading a book about The Exorcist.  I’ve read at least five on the film specifically.  Interestingly, William Friedkin, the director, never reached these heights again.  William Peter Blatty, author of the novel as well as screenwriter and producer, never replicated the success.  Not only was the movie a runaway hit, it represented the true coming of age of the horror genre.  It attempted things never before seen.  And it influenced religion itself in ways nobody dreamed mere celluloid could.  I’m still reading books on it.  This particular one doesn’t have the greatest depth, but it captures the feel of the times.  Adding The Roman Ritual as an appendix, however, may have been playing into the Devil’s hand.

Underground Sydney

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It’s probably best, if horror movies have taught me anything, not to go exploring underground.  As far as found footage films go, The Tunnel isn’t bad.  It didn’t make me ill from camera motion, so that puts it ahead of most recent efforts.  Some explanation of the monster would’ve been good, but even so, it does keep you watching.  The premise is that an Australian news team, in need of a big story, decides to go down into the tunnels that create a virtual second city under Sydney.  The story is that the government had planned to reclaim the water that filled some of the tunnels to help alleviate a drought.  The plans are suddenly and silently dropped, suggesting an untold story.  Knowing that the homeless use the tunnels, the team of four breaks in and finds evidence of squatters.  And more.

While getting some ambient sounds recorded, their audio engineer disappears.  Finding a room splattered with lots of blood, the remaining three have to decide whether to keep looking for him or try to go for help.  On the way they realize that some kind of humanoid monster is stalking them.  It attacks and kills a security guard who’d initially tried to keep the crew out.  The three, each of them attacked underground, manage to find their way to an active subway station.  But the producer dies while awaiting medical help.  The reporter, the only woman in the group, blames herself for putting her need for a big story over the welfare of her colleagues.  There’s also a fair bit of bitterness at having lost the producer when plenty of people, who might potentially help, were around.  Only the reporter and her cameraman survive.

Ever since The Blair Witch Project, it’s been tricky to determine which found footage horror films really work.  Paranormal Activity did.  And this one does too, at least to an extent.  Since they ostensibly tell you no more than the characters know, fixed answers are difficult to come by.  Thus we’re left wondering if the monster here is a human, mutated or not—it does move faster than most people can manage—and what its backstory might be.  The conceit of using tunnels to house it, while not unique, does offer some possibilities in the cinéma vérité realm.  It is a world of which few beyond the homeless and city engineers have direct experience, thus it’s foreign even to the locals like the news team.  Probably there are no monsters in such places, but caution, it seems to me, wouldn’t be misplaced.

Pointedly

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Beaks, aka Birds of Prey, is either a knock-off of, or tribute to Hitchcock’s The Birds.  Some have suggested it should be considered a sequel.  For my part, I was looking for an animals gone wild movie to watch one weekend when I was alone.  It was free on one of my streaming services, so why not?  The acting isn’t great and the dialogue feels a bit forced, but this 1987 movie wasn’t completely bad.  The plot we’ve seen before.  There is a stronger environmental message here—the birds are attacking because of environmental pressures brought on by humans—than in Hitchcock.  I’m on board with that.  The story follows Vanessa, a news reporter, and Peter, her cameraman, as they cover, reluctantly, birds attacking humans.  The pacing is a bit off.  The opening paragliding sequence is really too long and confusing (where are these people?).  I did wonder, however, how the birds had been trained.

That question kept coming back throughout the movie.  The attacking birds are mostly pigeons or doves, and in the scenes where they really look like they’re attacking I wondered how they managed them.  Of course, actors can act like they’re in distress as birds go after food placed on their person, but the effects made it seem more sinister than that.  For this aspect alone the movie deserves some credit.  The opening sequence involves attacks by eagles, a bit harder to manage, it would seem.  The fatalities at the beaks of pigeons, however, are less believable.  Yes, they could attack eyes and ears and noses, but the injuries seem sustainable, and not life-threatening.  The attacks, for the most part, are realistic enough.  (When child actors are involved the attacks are far less convincing.)  The critics, it seems to me, are a bit too harsh.

A Mexican movie in English, it was filmed in Acapulco, but also Spain, Italy, Puerto Rico, and Peru.  The travel sequences, which are apparently meant to show that this is a worldwide phenomenon, sometimes feel tacked on.  More could’ve been made of the firebirds of the Inca returning.  It would’ve made for a more speculative film, of course, but it could’ve been good.  Beaks isn’t the kind of movie to which I’d give any kind of unqualified recommendation, but it isn’t without merit.  You do have to put up with quite a bit to get to the payoffs, though.  Still, when it was over I was left with the temporary paranoia about birds that Hitchcock’s film creates, so it wasn’t all bad.

Not Hill House

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I was tardy in seeing The Legend of Hell House.  Part of the problem is the number of similarly titled films: The House on Haunted Hill was a 1959 movie with Vincent Price.  Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House was published the same year.  It was adapted into a noted film, The Haunting, in 1963.  Richard Matheson’s novel Hell House was published in 1971 and this adaptation was released two years later.  Going back to the book versus film debate, I’d been hoping to read the book before seeing the movie, but circumstances—always the circumstances—meant that I’ve watched the cinematic version first.  Speaking purely for the movie (I haven’t read the book yet), there are resemblances to both the similarly named movies, but especially to The Haunting.  Not fast paced by current standards, the movie is nevertheless well made with an atmospheric haunted house and able actors.

The film opens with not a claim of being based on a true story, but a statement that such phenomena are indeed possible.  An elderly millionaire wants proof of the afterlife and offers a substantial sum to a scientist who might prove it.  Lionel Barrett agrees to take this on and brings his wife with him.  He will be accompanied by the spiritualist medium Florence Tanner and the sole survivor of a similar set up from two decades earlier, Benjamin Fischer.  Fischer is a physical medium.  Barrett intends to prove that spiritual energy is not a survival of the personality beyond life, but rather a form of energy that can be scientifically neutralized.  As the four gather at the house obvious manifestations take place and even Barrett doesn’t deny that they came come from external energy.  He just doesn’t believe that it’s personal survival.  He has a machine delivered that will drain the house of said energy.

Things don’t turn out as the scientist plans, although the machine does appear to work.  What Barrett failed to realize—that spirits are real—leads to his demise.  The movie is well made and has attained a kind of classic status, which is why I ended up seeing it before reading the book.  (That, and I found a streaming copy on sale.)  In many ways the story resembles Jackson’s classic.  Haunted house movies are among my favorites when it comes to horror films, so this one wasn’t a disappointment.  It has made me curious to read the book, so that will come in due course.  As long as I can keep the similar titles discrete.

Movie Memory

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Memory is a funny thing.  And selective.  For a recent project I was going back over some movies I’d watched over the last few years and was amazed at how many I could barely recollect.  Others had stayed with me, some intensely.  Something in our brains makes them decide that this ninety minutes is worth storage space while that ninety minutes is not.  I’m not sure what it is.  It could be that when we discuss “good movies”—those that are well made—that we have encountered something qualitatively superior.  Even if we can’t say precisely how, we know that others have  also found them memorable.  Admittedly, I often watch movies to prevent myself from falling asleep on weekend afternoons, after the chores have been done.  Even so, some seen at that hour are fresh in my mind, after years, while others I saw a couple months ago left barely a scratch.

Photo by Denise Jans on Unsplash

Movies shape our views of reality.  The evidence is all around us.  I remember when Reagan was president (the beginning of an unfortunate spiral for the Republican Party), he used to cite things from movies as reality.  And it wasn’t just his senility.  We all do it.  Movies are impactful.  They’re more than entertainment.  We couldn’t afford to go to movies much when I was young.  I can remember, however, some scenes that influenced my perceptions of all kinds of things, from snakes to how scary dogs can be.  (My cynophobia likely goes back to a movie that included a segment called “The Tinderbox.”)  As a society we treat movies as if they aren’t such a big deal.  What an Odyssey!  It’s more than money.  Just ask anyone who’s quoted Ezekiel 25.17 (including current government officials).

I’ve never been too certain about reality itself.  I like to keep an open mind regarding what’s possible.  Science deals with measurable phenomena.  Even psychology is considered a “soft science” because it has to do with that squishy area of human consciousness.  I’ve said it before: our brains evolved to help us survive, not to determine what is objectively real.  We see movies and they get added to the evidence base against which we draw all kinds of inferences.  So, looking through the movies I watched over even the past year, why have some simply fallen out?  Sometimes the title gives me no clue.  I have to read my own blog post about them to recall what they were about.  If I’m remembering correctly, that is.

Demons, Once More

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Victoria Jaye’s book got me thinking, once again, how powerful movies are.  Ever since I was a child, I think, I had some awareness that movies were more than simply entertainment.  Things I saw that scared me stayed with me.  They’d come back in nightmares or unguarded moments.  Indeed, they would frame what I thought of as real, or possible.  I read Hell, Horror and Despair in preparation for my appearance on the Nine Gates Podcast.  Perhaps it’s a combination of my age, how busy I am at work, and how I move from one project to another, but I do tend to forget things about the books I’ve written.  I needed to remind myself about Nightmares with the Bible, and reading Jaye’s book definitely helped ring a few bells.  I remain interested in all the subjects I’ve published on, from Asherah to Sleepy Hollow (and beyond).

Hell, Horror and Despair is about demonic fantasy—broadly, the ideas culture sustains about demons, largely influenced by movies.  Jaye recognizes, as many authors do, that The Exorcist was formative.  The more I ponder it, the more I think it might be the most influential horror movie ever.  William Peter Blatty famously wanted it to draw people back to faith.  I think it probably did that and mostly through the fear it inspired.  The money brought in attracted other filmmakers.  There’s gold in them thar hills!  Counting the number of movies I’ve seen featuring some kind of demon would take more than an hour or two.

And maybe they weren’t only fiction after all.  Demonic fantasy is fiction about demons that derives from the media.  The beliefs that The Exorcist kick-started have grown and evolved over the years until all kinds of beliefs about demons are held, but not tested against evidence.  Any evidence itself is dismissed by science, so people turn to the only available source: the fiction of movies and pop culture.  This is really a fascinating development.  Now we have congressional leaders, and a Vice-President, who believe UFOs are demons.  Talk about your Middle Ages!  Since science doesn’t investigate the immeasurable world, and since experts in religion tend to be unemployed these days, of course this kind of thing is going to happen.  Jaye’s book points out the problems with demonic fantasy.  Historically, prior to movies and television, it often contributed to literal witch hunts.  Today it is used to make political opponents seem evil.  And it contributes to a belief that demons are everywhere—something the Catholic Church tried to tamp down after the Dark Ages.  I’ll be on the podcast on Tuesday evening.

It’s a Series

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The transition between Lemony Snicket’s The Wide Window and The Miserable Mill, volumes three and four, respectively, of A Series of Unfortunate Events, is the gulf between what was portrayed in the 2004 movie and what wasn’t.  The books do show their age a bit in that some of the villains might be considered offensive these days, but the writing is clever and even educational.  Dealing with two of them together is, like the film, an attempt to forge a transition.  The Wide Window, which is both compressed and elaborated in the movie, doesn’t resolve itself as portrayed on the screen.  Of course Count Olaf is at large again and the Baudelaire orphans are left homeless once more.  In the movie Jim Carrey’s Captain Sham is perhaps his best character with his attempts at a cross between a sea captain and a Newfoundland landlubber.  The book raises the ethical issue of what laws it’s permissible to break to save your life, which is missing in the film.

The Miserable Mill, book four, reflects how dark these tales can be without the movie to lighten the mood a bit.  Maybe not quite enough to categorize them as horror, but enough to make them somewhat scary.  Here the orphans have reached the end of their family connections and are passed off to the owner of a lumber mill who puts them to work right away.  Of course, Count Olaf is lurking nearby and is working with an ophthalmologist who specializes in hypnosis.  It is actually a frightening thought to be hypnotized against your will.  The orphans learn to appreciate how difficult their siblings’ specializations are and, of course, make it through together.

Hypnosis is something I’ve never experienced.  I went to a show once where the stage performer attempted to hypnotize the audience.  I was fervently religious at the time, and it didn’t work on me.  I’d read that religious people are difficult to hypnotize (that is, those who haven’t been hypnotized already).  Since that time I’ve been curious if I might be hypnotized as an adult, and, if so, what it would be like.  As a mental state, hypnosis is still poorly understood.  It is used in literature, not uncommonly in horror.  I will, of course, continue working my way through A Series of Unfortunate Events because once you get started it’s difficult to stop.  It is obvious, however, that I’ve watched the film enough to have a sense of what transpired through The Wide Window.  Now, with and after The Miserable Mill, I have little recollection of what might be ahead.

Scary Painting?

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The Painted tries.  It really does.  The premise is good but the execution makes it all look rather silly.  The failure comes from the writing, the acting, and the directing.  The idea of the plot is that paintings in a house inherited by Evelyn and Adam come to life because a jilted ancestor became a succubus and her painting controls the others in the house.  There are several points at which the logic of the premise breaks down and even more points where the family (Evelyn and Adam have three children) act in a way no sane person would act in such circumstances.   Plot points are raised and dropped.  Some of the special effects are pretty good, however.  Overall, though, this horror film doesn’t scare and it inadvertently becomes funny.  It’s really too bad because there is potential here.

The Elster family has inherited a gothic house from a cousin who died in a murder-suicide with her new husband.  This is because, using a grimoire, he summoned a painted demon who’s actually a succubus.  The Elsters move in and quickly determine that the paintings are attacking them.  Adam, who likes pornography because his business is failing (!), has a fling with the succubus but doesn’t tell anyone.  The family flees the house in the middle of the night, but the succubus has come home with them.  The parents, discovering this, leave the kids alone so they can go back to the inherited house to take care of things.  When they get there the paintings attack, but they end up burning them on the lawn and going home.  At home, naturally, things have gone wrong.

Their college-age son has locked himself in the basement with their youngest daughter to sacrifice her.  The parents arrive home and get the key (which the high school-aged daughter apparently couldn’t do), free their youngest, and lock their son in said basement.  He’s very nearly broken out by the time they begin the ritual, but it doesn’t work.  Adam finally confesses to his affair with the succubus and decides his suicide is what’s needed to take care of the issue.  It helps, but only when the image of the succubus is burned out of the painting does the danger really pass.   There is a sincerity to the movie—as I say, it clearly tries.  It’s not intentionally bad nor is it completely mishandled. It’s just altogether it doesn’t fill the frame.  Spirit painting is a wonderful idea for a horror film.  The Painting, it seems, was released just a bit before it was fully dried.

In Hollywood

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Serial killers, depending on how they’re portrayed, often get a movie a horror rating.  But not always.  And not even when Quentin Tarantino writes and directs it.  My wife had been wanting to see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood while, I must confess, I’d heard nothing about it.  I find the movies I watch through websites that tend to favor horror, or sometimes sci-fi.  After I realized she wanted to see it, the next trick was finding an evening that would allow for an almost three-hour movie.  (This is, I confess, entirely my fault.  I wake up very early and can’t stay up too late watching movies without completely trashing the next day.)  We finally found a weekend with enough wiggle room to fit it in.  Random murders, like those of the Charles Manson family, always bother me.  Still, this film makes it seem not so threatening.

The story is somewhat complex, but basically a fading actor and his stuntman buddy are trying to survive in, well, Hollywood.  The actor lives next door to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate in 1969.  Much of the plot follows his efforts to stay relevant and his, in reality, scene-stealing stuntman’s antics.  Brad Pitt’s acting in this role definitely earned him that best supporting actor Oscar.  While the actor (Leonardo DiCaprio) struggles, unable to get over himself and his alcoholism, the stuntman meets some members of the Manson Family and visits Spahn Ranch.  I got uneasy at this part.  I’ve never been a fan of true crime and I’ve only had a passing idea of what took place with the tragic Tate murders.  Also, I didn’t know if the movie was depicting things as they might’ve actually happened or not.  (It isn’t, in case you’re as clueless as me.)

Overall, there is a comic resolution as the murderous plot gets turned back on the Manson kids.  Curiosity drove me to read about what had happened in California when I was six years old and I found myself getting dragged down a true crime rabbit hole I wanted to avoid.  Maybe it’s my age, or maybe it was because the movie was still lingering in my head, but the facts didn’t bother me as much as I thought they would.  There aren’t too many auteurs whose work I follow (Robert Eggers and Damian McCarthy are ones I do), so before Once Upon a Time, the only Tarantino film I’d previously seen was Pulp Fiction.  But then again, I’m more at home amid straightforward horror.  Preferably without serial killers.

KK from OS

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It was probably a silly reason—the misspelled word—that kept me from watching Killer Klowns from Outer Space.  That, and the bad taste left in my eyes from Morons from Outer Space.  Then I noticed it was leaving the streaming service in a matter of hours.  Killer Klowns came out during that liminal period between finishing my master’s and beginning my doctorate.  It was a time of not much money (some things never seem to change) and we didn’t go out to a lot of movies.  I was preparing to move to Ann Arbor at the time since my wife, fiancé at the time, lived there.  And I wasn’t watching much horror then.  Killer Klowns is sci-fi horror and comedy horror and I was expecting it to be much worse than it is.  Camp, yes.  But camp played sincerely by the actors (apart from the purely comic roles).  Given the many people these days who are afraid of clowns, it’s fairly easy to see what the film has become a cult classic.

As the name implies, the klowns are actually aliens who fly around in a spaceship shaped like a circus tent.  They kill and consume people using standard, but deadly clown props.  The curmudgeonly police officer Mooney doesn’t believe any of it while his partner, Dave, is willing to listen to his ex-girlfriend Debbie, who witnessed the klowns and saw a couple of their victims.  The ship lands in a closed amusement park where Dave, Debbie, and her boyfriend Mike find them.  Several other people are killed along the way, but not with the gore that many horror films use so gratuitously.  Although the plot is farcical, it’s nevertheless well done.  It winds up with a happy ending, at least for the principals.  Many of the others wind up encased in cotton candy.

Comedy horror always has the danger of devolving into schlock, but Killer Klowns somehow manages to avoid that without taking itself too seriously.  Visually, the colors used add to the appeal.  The horror/fun house of the ship’s interior encourage viewer interest.  While the klowns are difficult to take seriously, they are scary-looking, even for those of us with no inherent fear of earthly clowns.  For a movie from the late eighties, it manages a lot without CGI, making it somewhat impressive in the effects department.  That title, with its misspelled word, gives the viewer a good idea of the silliness in store.  It manages, however, to make it scary when it needs to be.