That House

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In this season of deportations, thinking about what it means to be a refugee couldn’t be more important.  The horror film His House makes you do just that.  Bol and Rial are fleeing war-torn South Sudan with their daughter.  After a mishap on the overcrowded boat from France to England, their daughter drowns.  Kept in a refugee camp for months, they are finally allotted a council house in poor repair and a meager income.  If they violate any of the rules, which include living anywhere else or trying to earn their own money, they will be deported.  Bol tries to assimilate quickly while Rial is more tied to her traditional ways.  Then the ghost of their daughter, and other dead from the war and the crossing, begin to haunt them.  All the while they face the threat of deportation.  Some spoilers follow.

Rial recognizes the ghosts come from an apeth, a kind of witch that demands repayment for the crossing.  Bol sees the ghosts too, but denies it.  They will not go back, he insists.  When the social workers come to inspect the house, after Bol asks for a different place, Rial tells them a witch is causing the problems, causing the Englishmen to roll their eyes.  When Rial tries to escape, an alternative reality back in Africa shows that when Bol was denied a place on the overcrowded refugee bus, he grabs a random girl—their “daughter”—to get a place on board as the soldiers begin shooting.  The girl’s mother is left behind, screaming for her child.  The apeth is demanding Bol’s life for that of the girl he used to gain his freedom.  Rial, realizing that Bol will die for trying to make their life better, attacks the apeth and lets go of the image of their daughter.

This is a sad and thoughtful kind of film.  We seldom stop to think that refugees, in culture shock already, are stripped of everything familiar and made to feel as if continuing to live is itself a special favor.  They have their own ghosts too.  The real horror here comes through seeing the world through the eyes of someone who has experienced a high level of trauma.  To do so while Trump’s storm troopers are once again separating families, killing people at will, and deporting refugees, is not an easy thing to do.  Horror can be an instructive genre, and although the threat here is supernatural, as it often is in folk-horror, the real fear is all too human.

Uncomfortable Truths

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Horror makes us confront uncomfortable truths.  I suspect Birth/Rebirth might be the kind of movie to contain triggers for some folks.  I’ve watched enough body horror to be somewhat desensitized, but I was uncomfortable at a point or two.  The movie follows two female medical professionals—Morales, a maternity nurse, and Dr. Casper, a pathologist.  Overworked, Morales feels she’s not spending adequate time with her five-year-old daughter, Lila.  Then the unthinkable happens; her daughter suddenly dies from meningitis while she’s at work.  Casper, who works in the same hospital, handles the corpse of the young girl, but Morales learns the doctor has taken her home and, more than that, brought her back from the dead.  Horror fans know that reanimation is always problematic.  In order to discuss this, however, I may need to resort to spoilers.

Casper, ever since her own youth, has been working on regeneration.  She’s somewhat emotionally disconnected from others, doing this work for the sake of science.  Morales, however, refuses to leave Casper’s house once she learns her daughter is there and alive.  The two work together to supply the serum needed to maintain Lila.  She begins to speak and walk again, but the serum, derived from stem cells, requires a very specific profile that Casper has.  When an infection prevents Casper from conceiving (and providing the necessary tissue) Morales has to start taking amniotic fluid from another woman with the rare profile that matches Lila.  Until the other woman decides to change hospitals.  The story, which drew inspiration from Frankenstein, is sad, just as that book is.  A woman has to lose the same daughter twice, but that’s not the end of the story.

I think I’ll leave it there.  The tale raises ethical issues and probes the lengths we will reach not to let go of those we love.  The maternal bond may go as far as, if not murder, manslaughter.  The bond is emotional and Casper works it for the science of regeneration.  If life can be introduced to apparently dead tissue, why shouldn’t it be?  But the result is never satisfying.  There is a permanent line between life and death that can’t be crossed, no matter the emotional need or scientific curiosity.  And yet.  And yet.  Birth/Rebirth takes us to this juncture and forces us to look.  And it makes the viewer wonder just how far they might go.  The answer might make a person squeamish.  But then, uncomfortable truths are like that.

Not Again!

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The only reason I heard of Repossessed is because my wife read about it in a local newspaper.  This is true although I’d written a book about the Bible in horror movies and a book about possession movies.  This one’s been buried deep.  Although not a straightforward parody of The Exorcist, it travels the same territory with Linda Blair reprising her role as the possessed girl—now a mom with two adolescent kids.  The movie was critically panned, but I have a soft spot for bad movies and it was much better than The Exorcist II.  What saves the film is the acting on the part of Blair and of Leslie Nielsen, as the exorcist.  Nielsen is pretty funny most of the time, but the gags fall short here time and again.  The humor tends toward the sophomoric, but some jokes are good; the Chappaquiddick one was unexpectedly funny.  And having a false Donald Trump show up to try an exorcism was an added bonus.  These horror tropes classify this as a comedy horror, and it has a kind of cuteness to it that make it worth seeing.

So Nancy Aglet (Blair), after being exorcised by a young Father Mayii (Nielsen), settles down with a family until a televangelist pair—a clear send-up of Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker—actually cause a demon to come through the television.  It  possesses, or repossesses, Nancy.  Since the original movie spends a lot of time in the hospital, she goes to the doctors who can’t figure out what’s wrong.  Nancy knows she’s possessed, however, and tries to find a priest to help, Father Mayii having retired.  The world’s religious leaders gather as the televangelists fail to cast the demon out on national television, but it’s only when Mayii joins the crew that the Devil is driven out.  Not through the rite, but because he can’t stand rock-n-roll, which the religious leaders perform.  It’s rather silly, of course.

There is an aesthetic to bad movies and Repossessed is a good example of that.  Despite its failings, it’s one of those movies that you’re (mostly) glad to have watched.  At least in my experience.  Largely, as I say, because of the performances of the leads.  Although some people today find The Exorcist itself funny, and although some aspects do open themselves to parody, it takes talent to make fun of it.  This film doesn’t do it particularly well.  Ironically, Ted Kennedy couldn’t run for president because of Chappaquiddick but Donald Trump, despite having a much more sordid past, could and did.  Those two moments in this 1990 movie give me pause.  And the fate of the televangelists in it gives me hope.

Second Wednesday

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Season two of Wednesday isn’t quite as fresh as season one, but it is still chock full of monsters and fun.  The rest of the Addams family is more present in this season, but it is still focused on that dark academic Nevermore Academy.  The Poe connection comes up more than once as well.  I am curious what they will do in season three, besides rescue Enid, that is.  The concept of the series, it seems, wouldn’t really be possible without dark academia.  Nevermore clearly draws from Hogwarts, but Harry Potter is in the dark academia universe as well.  And this season brings a new threat to the Hyde, the nemesis monster of season one.  The presentation of the Adamses is, in many ways, superior to that in the television series with which I grew up.  I’ve only seen one of the movies.

The whole premise behind the show goes back to a series of cartoons drawn by Charles Addams in the late 1930s.  The television show from the sixties was in reruns by the time I grew up, and we didn’t watch it religiously.  I did enjoy the weird aspects of the family, but I didn’t get behind the mythology.  Of course, the mythology really began to grow with the big-budget films of the 1990s, which edged into comedy-horror territory.  Wednesday moves things into the realm of monsters with a dash of the X-Men thrown in.  Even so, the show works.  Wednesday continues to build the back story of various family members, and does so well.  The basic idea of the season is that Gomez’s roommate, a mad scientist, is reanimated and is attempting to cure his mother from being a Hyde.  This clashes against the Addams family.  Also, the new principal at Nevermore is a conman.  Hmm, wonder where they got that idea?

I’m fascinated by the growth of such phenomena in popular culture.  Tim Burton has a way of bringing dark Americana into his orbit, and this is another example.  The thing is, this set of cartoons began what has now become a large franchise.  You never know when you put something out there, whether it be a poem (“The Raven” is clearly a major part of American culture), a story, an obscure novel, or cartoon, if someone in the future might not see the potential in it to make it a big thing.  And since dark academia is having a moment, the time is right for Wednesday and the growth of more dark Americana.

About Demons

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Six college kids in a house where twenty years earlier a group of six young people held a seance and all but one ended up dead.  Demonic doesn’t really offer anything groundbreaking on the horror front, but it does give a less church-oriented possession story.  There will be spoilers here, so be warned.  John is Michelle’s boyfriend.  With a group of friends, including Brian, Michelle’s ex-boyfriend, they decide to hold a seance in the house where a mass murder-suicide took place.  Once they get there, as tension builds between John and Brian, it is revealed that John is the son of a woman who was in the house the night of the carnage, but had escaped.  Thereafter follows a confused set of jump startles and unexplained phenomena.  All but three of the college kids are killed, and one (John) is found and interrogated by police.

It seems the seance summoned a demon that could only be released if everyone died.  Brian, one of the survivors, is found and shot by police.  Michelle, the other survivor, is found alive but as police unscramble the data on the cameras the kids were using, they realize that John was the guilty party.  Beyond that, he hanged himself before the police got there, so they had been interviewing a demon the whole time.  Although James Wan is one of the producers, the film received theatrical release only abroad, receiving a television release in the United States.  Really, given that it doesn’t give much that’s original, or thought-provoking, or really all that scary, the decision makes sense.

The demon movies that really make an impact tend to have a few things in common.  Usually a young woman possessed (this is something Poe understood).  A body out of control that defies religious efforts to bring it back to conformity.  A believable spiritual world behind the threat.  None of these things fits Demonic.  I guess I was looking for a follow-up to Succubus which, although flawed, wasn’t that bad.  Sometimes the group of young people in a haunted house trope works pretty well, but here the unanswered questions outweigh any real fright, or even mood.  Many low-budget horror films involve ghost-hunter imitators with more devices than thought toward the plot.  Things can jump out at you, of course, but this one fails to reach any kind of existential dread.  I guess I really need to start paying more attention to the ratings viewers give before deciding on a demon movie.  Someday I’ll learn.

Oz Undone

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Horror is notoriously difficult to define.  Two friends recently suggested that I watch Return to Oz, which, for them, was horror.  Although rated PG, it does shade into horror at several points.  It begins with an eerie soundtrack and a disturbing idea: Dorothy hasn’t been sleeping and really believes in Oz, so she’s to receive electroshock therapy.  She escapes the gothic hospital during a storm and after almost drowning, lands in an Oz gone wrong.  Any number of scary things happen there, and the story is one of constant tension.  First Dorothy encounters the “wheelers,” which equal blue-faced, flying chimps for terror.  She is taken to the residence of a wicked princess who has a collection of heads and changes them at will.  At one point she chases Dorothy with no head on at all, perhaps referencing the headless horseman.  People turn to stone or sand, depending on whether the Gnome King or the deadly desert gets them first.

Dorothy tries to find the Scarecrow but he’s been captured and imprisoned by the Gnome King, who turns people into objects.  When she frees the Scarecrow the gnomes—scary monsters, not bearded little people—attack.  Dorothy and friends are chased to a point that they’re about to be eaten by the Gnome King.  This is dark Disney.  There’s a minor Halloween theme and a living jack-o-lantern.  Fairuza Balk, who plays Dorothy, would go on to play horror and gothic roles.  Even Pumpkinhead, the jack-o-lantern, would be used as the title of a legitimately scary horror movie.  All in all I was impressed with how well this fits into PG horror.  It’s scarier than some other intentional horror with the same rating.

I missed Return to Oz when it came out in 1985.  I’d graduated from college and began seminary that year, so I was a bit distracted.  The movie has gathered a cult following and was praised by Neil Gaiman.  Interestingly, the writer/director Walter Murch noted in an interview that he’d used the book Wisconsin Death Trip, a nonfiction book of unusual events and deaths in a small section of, well, Wisconsin, to get ideas for the script.  This seems a strange inspiration for a Disney film, and indeed, Murch had a rocky time as the director.  The end result is strangely affecting and fits what might be considered horror for children.  The squeaky clean image that Disney has cultivated in recent decades hides a history of films that can legitimately scare the young.  Return to Oz is one of them.  And it has a fascinating back story.

If You Do

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Folk horror is particularly open to religion.  The powerful Euro-horror film, The Damned, is nearly worthy of Robert Egger status.  Indeed, the movie reminded me of Egger’s work, so perhaps Thordur Palsson is his Icelandic incarnation.  Set in a fishing station in a remote arctic bay in the 1870s, the owner’s widow oversees the operations of six fishermen and the woman who cooks and keeps the house.  Her husband died at sea the previous year, and the fishing has been very poor, threatening their existence.  They need to eat their catches, as well as their bait, trying to stay alive until spring.  Eva, the young widow, sees a ship foundering on the distant, jagged rocks.  The men insist that if she orders them to help, their food supplies will quickly be depleted, and the rescue operation would put them all at risk.  Lured to the wreck by a food barrel that has washed ashore, they encounter more men than they can keep and have to fight them off of their small fishing boat, killing one in the process.

The helmsman of the boat falls overboard and drowns as the survivors try to climb aboard.  The small boat manages to escape, however.  Helga, the housekeeper, warns Eva of the draugr, a monster of Nordic folklore that is a kind of zombie.  If it gets into your head, she warns, it will led to death.  Skeptical of folktales, Eva begins to change her mind as her small group of companions begins dying off.  Helga disappears.  One of the men dies after being stopped from killing a companion.  Eva is now left with only four men.  One of the men insists they are paying for their sin, and begins erecting a large cross as an act of penitence.  After seeing a man in the mist, the new helmsman dies by suicide.  Now convinced the draugr is real, Eva leads an expedition to find and destroy it.  This leads to the death of yet another crew member.  The three remaining people decide to flee by night in the boat.  Eva, however, encounters the draugr in the cabin and destroys him by fire.  A spoiler follows.

The shocking end reveals that the draugr was actually a survivor of the shipwreck and his presence explains the “supernatural” events they believed the monster caused.  Eva, delusional, kills the man.  The story plays heavily on both the isolation of the fishing station and the guilt the characters all undergo after leaving their fellow sailors to die on the jagged rocks.  Their fear transforms fevers into deadly paranoia as they kill one another and themselves off.  This is set against the stunning arctic scenery of the fjord that houses the station in a stark winter landscape.  And the conflict between religious systems is right there on the surface and deep within the minds of those isolated, far from civilization.

Hunting Season

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Back when it came out in 1997, I’d heard that it wasn’t a particularly happy movie.  It was a good movie but it dealt with two damaged men.  I was frightened off from seeing Good Will Hunting until it became associated with dark academia.  Will Hunting is a genius but he was born in a bad part of town and earned himself a police record.  He works as a janitor at MIT, but he also solves proofs instantly that professors labor over for years.  The only way he can keep out of jail, however, is with the help of a therapist.  Sean Maguire, who teaches at Bunker Hill Community College, is a psychologist who shares the background of Will’s rough neighborhood, but who recently lost his wife to cancer.  He’s been traumatized by his life and the two come to realize, once Will learns to trust, that they have helped heal each other.

The darkness in this academia is mostly social.  Even today, those of us who grew up in rougher locations don’t easily fit in academia.  We’re blithely ejected from it in favor of those with more proper backgrounds.  And connections.  There were a few personal triggers for me watching this movie, but I had been wanting to see it for some time.  Robin Williams, who plays Maguire, had starred in what may be the epitome of dark academia movies, Dead Poets Society.  In both he plays his part convincingly.  The term “dark academia” wouldn’t be coined, however, until the year after he died.  Education is supposed to lead us out of darkness, but given what humans are, it creates its own form of gloominess.  That’s probably why some of us find the category of dark academia so intriguing.  Compelling enough to get us to watch films that will perhaps come with their own brand of trauma.

Children born into similar, or nearly identical situations may react to it quite differently.  Although both in academic settings, Will and Sean have different experiences of it.  With his life experience as a war veteran, and an educated world traveler, Sean invested his life in love and helping others.  Will struggles with his fear of rejection to finally try to love someone more than upholding his own walls of self-protection.  There’s some real depth here.  It’s no wonder that the screenplay won more than a couple awards.  It would take another couple decades, however, until the category of dark academia would be named.  And if it hadn’t, I wouldn’t have risked watching this amazing movie.

Old Horror

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One of the early horror movies not in the Universal lineup was Doctor X.  It deals with themes that are perhaps surprising to modern viewers of old movies since the Motion Picture Production Code had not yet taken effect.  The story itself is slow paced, as is typical for the time, and not very scary according to modern standards.  Police are investigating a series of full moon killings and have traced them near to Dr. Xavier’s institution, the Academy of Surgical Research.  There he, along with four other scientists, are conducting advanced, but unorthodox medicine.  Dr. X convinces the police that he will investigate thoroughly and if the killer is among his colleagues, which he does not believe he is, he’ll learn which one.  There’s quite a bit of screwball humor introduced by the investigative reporter and even the butler and maid.  Hooking everyone up to a machine that indicates excitement, Dr. X has the murder reenacted to determine guilt among the watching scientists.  This is an early form of polygraph, apparently.

One of the colleagues, Dr. Wells, is excused because he is missing a hand and the murderer clearly used two.  The lights go out during the experiment and the “guilty” doctor is found murdered.  The solution Dr. X proposes is to do the experiment again, using his daughter (with whom the reporter has fallen in love) as the “victim.”  In order to prevent anyone from moving around, all but Wells are handcuffed to their chairs that are bolted to the floor.  Wells is then shown transforming himself into a monster by using “synthetic flesh” that he’s developed, allowing himself to animate a second hand and also, to disguise his face, freeing him from being identified.  He attacks Dr. X’s daughter, but the scientists are all handcuffed to their chairs.  The comic reporter saves the day by destroying the monster.

These early horror films blazed trails for later monster movies.  The science is a mix of plausible sounding theory and mumbo-jumbo.  I wasn’t sure what to expect since I knew the movie by name only.  Dr. X is a kind of mad scientist, but he’s not evil.  There’s a theme of cannibalism that runs through the story as well, since this is where Wells gets the material for his synthetic flesh.  The themes are scarier than what’s shown on the screen, of course.  These were the days when Boris Karloff in Frankenstein monster makeup could cause viewers to faint.  Doctor X was never as popular as the Universal lineup and although Wells is grotesque enough, he’s no Frankenstein creature.  He is, however, part of cinematic monster history.

Don’t Stop Moving

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Stopmotion is a strangely affecting horror movie.  Body horror as well as Euro-horror, it follows the dream-like world of Ella, a stop motion animator.  She learned the trade from her mother who, suffering from arthritis, has Ella do the work for her.  After her mother has a stroke, Ella continues working on her final film but in a new location.  Tom, her boyfriend, gets her an apartment in a run-down building where Ella meets a precocious and odd little girl who tells her she should film a different movie and proceeds to tell Ella how it should go.  To her chagrin, Ella has to admit that the little girl’s story is better than her mother’s.  With the girl’s help, Ella animates a monster, the Ash Man, who is pursuing a girl lost in the woods.  Then Ella starts receiving visits from the Ash Man, or at least she believes so.  She ends up in the hospital. Spoilers follow.

Tom, who visits her there, is worried that Ella has let this go too far.  He threatens to delete the film while she’s immobile in the hospital.  Ella’s mother dies and with the little girl’s help, Ella gets back to her apartment to finish the film.  When Tom, and his plagiarizing sister, come to return Ella to the hospital, she kills them both.  She then, with the girl’s help, finishes the film.  The film results in her own death, or at least that’s the way she sees it.  The film features quite a lot of stop motion animation although the movie itself is live action.  It’s a very artful, if gross, film.  The little girl is never seen by anyone else, nor explained, suggesting that she’s a younger Ella following her own creativity.  And paying the price for it.

I can’t claim to understand everything that happens in this movie.  That doesn’t make it bad, but worth pondering.  Those of us who live creative lives experience dry patches, and often, self-doubt.  I know that when I compare my writing to that of others, I suffer in the very comparison.  When Stopmotion first ended, I felt both confused and intrigued.  Euro-horror of recent years, to generalize, emphasizes the art of the craft.  There was a lot of symbolism in this movie, some of which I couldn’t connect to the action.  I suspect repeated viewing might bring some of this to light.  My family has often told me that with my focus and interests, I would’ve been a good stop motion animator.  I certainly have the creating monsters part down pat.  It’s just a matter of deciding which narrative to follow.

Mirroring Reality

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I watched Oculus for two reasons: it kept coming up as a “freebie” on a service I use, and I’d been thinking about haunted mirrors.  Well, three reasons—I also liked the sound of the title.  (Not all decisions are a matter of science.). I was pleasantly surprised that it turned out to be pretty good.  I’ll probably throw in a spoiler or two, so if it’s on your list, you’ve been warned.  Kaylie and her brother Tim were attacked by their parents, but Tim was being framed by the mirror.  Both parents attempt to kill the children, but end up dead instead.  Tim is sent to an institution since he pulled the trigger, and Kaylie has spent eleven years researching the mirror.  When her brother is released she convinces him that they have to keep their promise to destroy the mirror.

The problem is, the mirror messes with perceptions of reality.  The two go back to their childhood home where Kaylie has set up a device to drop an anchor onto mirror.  This is set to happen with a wind-up timer since the mirror can control electronics.  She’s also set up the room so that everything is being recorded.  If she can prove the mirror is what she believes it to be, her father will be exonerated and her brother proven innocent.  The movie gets a little tricky to follow since their current story is intercut with flashbacks as to what happened when they were children.  Also, the mirror records events on the cameras that didn’t really happen.  Add to this the fact that Tim has undergone therapy for eleven years and he’s convinced that his sister is delusional.  It’s one of those movies that messes with your perception of reality.

When Tim doesn’t see his sister in front of the device meant to destroy the mirror, he accidentally kills her.  The police arrive, believing he has repeated his murderous attack from eleven years before.  The ending is rather nihilistic, but the scares are effective.  There are a few gross-out scenes and some jump startles, but overall it is the story that conveys the fear.  For me, the mental issues were almost triggers.  But then again, I watched it on a day when I was a bit fuzzy-headed because of waking up too soon.  I really didn’t know what to expect when I hit “play.”  I’ve done that enough times and ended up with films that were wastes of time, so I was glad to have found a competent one this time.  These are my reflections, in any case.

Hungry Madness

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It’s been on my wishlist of movies to watch for a few years, In the Mouth of Madness.  A tribute to Lovecraftian horror, as well as a probing of insanity, it is a heady mix.  In keeping with my usual rules for movie watching, I hadn’t pre-read anything about it that would give away the plot.  Coming to it fresh, a number of things stood out.  There were some very good scenes and parts of the movie made me want to like it a lot.  It is a great movie for religion and horror analysis, and in that regard it’s much better than Prince of Darkness (despite Alice Cooper).  In fact, had I been able to see it years ago, it would’ve been included in Holy Horror.  That itself is noteworthy since two of John Carpenter’s other movies were in it: The Fog and the aforementioned Prince.  I suppose I should provide a little summary (if possible) in case you haven’t seen.

Trent is an insurance investigator, and a hardened skeptic.  A horror writer who outsells Stephen King, Sutter Cane, has gone missing and Trent’s sent to investigate.  He discovers that Cane is in a town that doesn’t exist (Hobb’s End) and that his books are not fiction.  In fact, Trent is a character in one of his novels.  When people read his latest book, In the Mouth of Madness (a title adapted from Lovecraft), they go insane and begin killing others.  The plot gets a bit busy because people are starting to transform into slimy, Lovecraftian monsters and this reality, if the book is read, or movie watched, will spread to all of humanity, leading to our extinction.  A bit too ambitious, the plot can’t hold all this weight, but it really isn’t bad.  There’s just too much going on.

The religion elements come in because Cane has holed himself up in an unholy church.  He refers to his latest novel as the “new Bible.”  “More people,” he says, “believe in my work than believe in the Bible.”  He later refers to himself as God.  I haven’t seen all of Carpenter’s films, but there seems to be a trajectory of his earliest major films being his best.  Halloween and The Thing are classics.  The Fog isn’t bad.  When he brings religion into his stories, as in The Fog, things begin to cloud over a bit.  Prince of Darkness doesn’t deliver a believable Devil.  In the Mouth of Madness doesn’t quite hang together well enough.  It’s not a bad movie, though.  It has given me some ideas for another book, if I can stay sane long enough to write it.

Reptile Puppet

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I read about Reptilicus, but I can’t remember where.  A monster movie shot simultaneously in English and Danish in 1960, with two different directors, it was universally panned.  Some times you just have to see a bad movie.  This one qualifies.  I actually laughed out loud a time or two.  The idea behind the story holds promise: some animals can regenerate lost limbs, or even entire bodies from a severed piece.  What if a giant reptile could do the same?  The film’s problem is in the execution.  So, a team drilling for copper above the arctic circle—they’re sweating and working with their sleeves rolled up in a temperate forest—hits a frozen animal in the permafrost under the tundra.  Taken to an aquarium in Copenhagen, the animal’s tail is kept frozen until someone leaves the door open overnight.  When it thaws it begins to regenerate.

Once fully formed—and nobody could see this coming—it breaks out and terrorizes Denmark.  There are some scenes thrown in to show off Copenhagen, and the film makes liberal use of stock footage from military exercises.  The dialogue, poorly written, is delivered with wooden earnestness by actors who struggle to be convincing in their roles.  The monster, Reptilicus, is so obviously a puppet that it could scare no-one.  But it’s a monster movie!  Those of us who grew up on such fare sometimes feel a need to go back to the well.  To appreciate a bad movie, I always approach it with a certain hopefulness.  Here I am, over six decades later, watching the film.  If that can happen, perhaps someone will see that publishing my novels isn’t the worst you could do?  It makes for a crooked kind of logic.  

The main thing Reptilicus has going for it is its near indestructibility and its ability to regenerate.  How is it finally destroyed?  We’re not shown.  In one scene the general asks the head scientist, something like, “If we can knock it out, you can kill it?”  Receiving an affirmative answer, they drug the monster and send the scientist off to do his work (after he’s suffered a heart attack).  I’ve read novels where it seems pretty clear that the author was unsure how the resolution actually goes—I’ve painted myself into that corner a time or two, so I know how it feels.  If you’ve got a budget and backers, however, you have to deliver something.  The movie performed reasonably well at the box office, which shows just how indestructible some monsters can be.

In the Water

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On a list of hard-to-watch horror, I found the South Korean offering The Isle.  I was feeling particularly brave that day, I guess.  I was unfamiliar with Kim Ki-duk’s work, and looking for something that wouldn’t cost me any money to watch.  I found out this was one of those vomit or faint body horrors, but it is otherwise filmed so beautifully and gently that the contrast is downright shocking.  It all takes place at a low budget fishing platform rental business where the proprietor is a mute woman.  She ferries customers to their platforms, delivers food, and female companions, and occasionally takes revenge when customers treat her badly.  One day a fugitive arrives.  She doesn’t immediately know that he’s on the run, but she’s intrigued by him.  She prevents a suicide attempt and the two begin to bond.

Wanting to make sure her customer is satisfied, she starts bringing him a prostitute, but she gets jealous when they start to bond.  When the police come to find potential fugitives, he again tries to kill himself in a particularly gruesome way.  (Probably one on the vomit scenes.)  The proprietor again saves him and hides him from the police.  Apparently drawn to that type, she gets close to him and sees the prostitute as a threat.  She kidnaps the woman and when the prostitute falls in the water, hands and feet tied, she drowns.  The proprietor sinks her body and when the pimp comes looking for her, she drowns him.  The fugitive now realizes that they both have murder in common, but he feels trapped and escapes with her boat until she uses a reverse method of his suicide (another vomit scene) and he rescues her.  The police discover the bodies of their victims and the two take the platform house to a hidden location.  Apparently Kim Ki-duk likes enigmatic endings because the final scene is the proprietor drowned in a partially sunken boat.

I’m not quite sure what to make of this one.  I would agree with the hard-to-watch assessment.  Not only are there gruesome, self-destructive acts, I’m pretty sure that some animals were harmed in the making of the film—particularly fish.  I’m not often in the mood for body horror, but sometimes when I’m trying to save money, I’ll settle.  I very much doubt I’ll ever watch The Isle again.  K-horror is sometimes compelling, though.  This one manages to be emotional, and of art-house quality, but the only monsters are humans and they seem more to be misunderstood than anything else.  And I didn’t vomit or faint.

Nostalgic Shadows

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Nostalgia is a funny thing.  Although it can strike at any age, somehow after the half-century mark it’s particularly easy to get swept into it.  As I written about many, many times, I was drawn into the Marilyn Ross Dark Shadows novels as a tween.  In my mid-to-late forties, when the internet made it possible, I started to collect all the volumes from 1 through 32.  It took several years.  I had to find them via BookFinder.com and our level of income didn’t support buying more than one every few months.  Then in 2022, having difficulty locating the last of the original series, I found a seller on eBay offering up the whole set.  The price for that set was less than the least expensive final volume I could find.  I did what any nostalgic guy would do.

We don’t really buy antiques, but I’d been looking for an office desk (this was before the scam).  I’d been using a craft table for a desk for years and it seemed that I really needed something with a better organizational range.  This led me to stop into a local antique shop.  They ended up not having much furniture, but they did have aisles of nostalgia.  A few weeks later when it was too hot and humid to be outdoors, I revisited the shop.  This time, relieved of the burden of seeking a desk, I was able to browse at leisure.  It’s like going to a museum but not having to pay admission.  I turned a corner and I saw something I’d never seen before.  A collection of Marilyn Ross Dark Shadows books.

It wasn’t a full set, but I had, prior to finishing my own collection, never seen more than one or two together in any single place.  As a child I’d buy them at Goodwill.  As an adult, on BookFinder.  All those years in-between, I always looked for them when visiting used bookstores.  I visit said shops whenever possible.  In decades of looking I’d only found one in the wild once or twice, and always by its lonesome.  This was a completely new experience for me.  It was also quite odd to be seeing them and not having any need to buy them.  I have a full set.  The nostalgia was almost overpowering.  I couldn’t help but think of how even a few years ago I’d been pawing through to see if there were any I hadn’t yet found.  All for reliving a bit of my childhood.