Wildwood
I’m sorry to interrupt the Halloween week horror programming, but it would be negligent not to write about a unique theatrical experience that may pass you by soon: the extravagant stop motion fantasy WILDWOOD. Director Travis Knight (KUBO AND THE TWO STRINGS), writer Chris Butler (director of PARANORMAN) and the studio Laika (CORALINE) live up to their usual high standard of entertainment while aggressively pushing the envelope of what can be done in this medium.
I’m referring more to its scale than its subject matter. It’s a PG-13 movie, it has some stuff that might be too much for most little kids, but it’s basically a young people movie, based on a book by Colin Meloy of the band The Decemberists, illustrated by his wife Carson Ellis. I don’t know anything about any of that, but I can appreciate a LABYRINTH type going-into-a-fantasy-world-to-rescue-the-kidnapped-baby adventure as much as the next dork. This is a good version of that for a couple of reasons, the biggest and most obvious being that it’s maybe the most technically ambitious stop motion movie ever made, just staggering to look at if you appreciate the art form. (read the rest of this shit…)
Clayface
CLAYFACE is the latest motion picture from the Detective Comics movie universe. It’s set mostly in Gotham City, retelling the origin of one of the great Batman villains, but it’s R-rated horror, and not much like a comic book movie, for good and bad. The good – it stands completely on its own, with none of the little movie universe connections, cameos or credit sequences that people used to demand but now get so mad about. The bad – I’d say it could use more of that heightened feeling of the best movies based on drawings. It doesn’t stand out that much from all the other horror movies that are not based on comic books. But I liked it. It has some clunkiness that will probly draw fire under the heightened scrutiny of comic book shit, but that I can forgive.
Matt Hagen (Tom Rhys Harries, DRAGONHEART: BATTLE FOR THE HEARTFIRE) is an actor on the rise. He famously had a hard childhood on the rough side of Gotham City, but now he’s a popular heartthrob who just got nominated for an Oscar (or unnamed Oscar-type award) for best actor.
(If you know comic books you can forgive that the famous actor Clayface was Basil Karlo and Matt Hagen was a different character, because they combined them so well in the classic Batman: The Animated Series episodes. But if you know Oscars you don’t like that this shows the nominations announced in the middle of the afternoon and not in alphabetical order. Come on guys, that’s not canon.) (read the rest of this shit…)
Blood Frenzy
BLOOD FRENZY (1987) was a perfect Slasher Search suggestion from Mr. Majestyk. It’s exactly the type of movie I was digging through for years and I don’t know how I missed it, since it’s one of the remaining VHS tapes in the “Stalkers and Slashers” section at Scarecrow Video. My only guess is maybe I was scared off by the story credit for Ray Dennis Steckler. But also I really don’t know that guy’s movies so I maybe would’ve had to be mixing him up with Jim Wynorski or somebody.
Anyway I would classify it as a bad movie, but the type of bad movie that brings me comfort. It’s shot without any grace or sense of style, in a bland location, and most of the cast either read the lines like they’re not clear which word to emphasize in any given sentence, or like they’re a hungry community theater actor throwing their entire being into every squint or turn of the head. Each of their characters is introduced with one psychological condition that determines most of what they do in the movie. There’s not much thought of doing anything else with them. (read the rest of this shit…)
Street Fighter (2026)
STREET FIGHTER (2026) is the new film based on the Street Fighter video game franchise. I have less of an affinity for Street Fighter than Mortal Kombat since it’s not one of the few games I’ve played, but come on. Larger-than-life characters who live to engage in martial arts competitions, sometimes with cartoonish powers? Obviously it piques my interest. Maybe I’m even the prime audience for this movie since I’m Interested In This Sort of Shit (IiTSoS) but with no preconceived notions of how these characters or concepts need to be adapted. And I have evidence to support this theory.
1. I thought STREET FIGHTER: THE LEGEND OF CHUN-LI was kind of fun. It has a 3% on Rotten Tomatoes.
2. I went to see this with a friend who’s a games journalist and he had all kinds of complaints afterwards that I didn’t relate to.
3. When the first trailer came out that showed this version’s cartoonish approach, the buzz on the internet seemed to be “that looks like the absolute worst shit ever shat from a butt,” but when I saw it I thought, “Oh wow, I gotta see that!”
I was also intrigued to read that director/co-writer Kitao Sakurai was one of the main people behind The Eric André Show and also directed André’s very funny movie BAD TRIP. That’s just not who you would expect to do a video game movie, suggesting it could be something interesting. Had I known that Sakurai had, as a child actor, made his debut in BEST OF THE BEST 3: NO TURNING BACK, that would’ve also been a selling point too. (read the rest of this shit…)
Hallowarrior / Bloody Tennis
As usual October is passing me by and I feel like I’ve barely started with the horror movies. But also as usual I’m gonna watch them year ‘round anyway so what am I worried about? Stay tuned for many more, but today I’m dipping into two new releases on Shudder.
I wanted to watch HALLOWARRIOR since, as the title implies, it is season. It’s about a young woman who calls herself Pumpkin (Milly Shapiro, Tony winner from Matilda who had a memorable fate in HEREDITARY). She lives in the house she grew up in, all alone now because four years ago a virus killed much of the population and all of the crops.
But somehow she’s still hanging in there, it’s October 31st, she loves Halloween, and she’s damn sure gonna celebrate. She explains this over a radio, begging for someone to come trick or treat, or see the haunted house she made. She found a candy store to loot so she has more than enough to fill a bowl, and she carved jack o’lanterns out of a basketball and a gas can and some other stuff. (read the rest of this shit…)
Pulse (2001)
I finally watched Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2001 film PULSE (Kairo). I don’t think I’ve seen any of this acclaimed director’s 30+ films, but this is the one people seem to mention most. And I get it now. There’s something very distinct about the potency of its forlorn, foreboding mood and the unusual way it combines a ghost story with an early internet thriller that then dissolves into a surreal apocalypse. The overcast skies, small, impersonal apartments and emphasis on staring at chunky turn-of-the-millennium computer monitors is already depressing before it starts to feel like depression may be its primary subject.
Michi Kudo (Kumiko Asō, CASSHERN) works with a couple other people at a small nursery in Tokyo. She’s waiting for her co-worker Taguchi (Kenji Mizuhashi, TOMIE, GODZILLA MINUS ZERO) to get her a computer disk he was supposed to prepare for her, and he hasn’t shown up for a few days, so she goes to check on him at his apartment. He’s there, but acting kind of weird, and then out of the blue he goes into the other room and hangs himself. (read the rest of this shit…)
Psycho Killer
PSYCHO KILLER (2026) was written by Andrew Kevin Walker (BRAINSCAN, David Fincher’s THE KILLER), so obviously it was advertised as “FROM THE WRITER OF SE7EN.” But it’s not that type of movie. It reminded me more of HIGHWAYMEN – an odd, mostly quiet, sometimes audacious serial killer thriller, with a determined protagonist chasing a mysterious weirdo across the country. Its tone is grim and serious while its premise invites you to take part in satanic panic, and maybe if I thought it was trying to convince me that was real I would be bothered by it. Like if it came from Angel Studios. But I was not bothered. I had fun with it.
If you’re expecting something like SE7EN, the cool opening titles don’t necessarily dissuade you. I checked and they are not designed by Kyle Cooper/Imaginary Forces, but by Alexei Tylevich (TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2022, BARBARIAN, REBEL MOON – PART ONE: A CHILD OF FIRE, and ALIEN: ROMULUS). Their film scratches and strobes may owe a debt to Cooper’s work, but they’re tinted red to tell us this is the Devil variant. We see pentagrams, pills, bullets, inverted crosses, negative images of newspaper articles with headlines like “WAVE OF HORRIFIC MUTILATION.”
These are a few of the title character’s favorite things. The movie opens inside his noisy car roaring down the highway, close up on his mirrored glasses (we will never see his face). Played by 6’ 6” ex-WWE wrestler James Preston Rogers (OUTLANDER, DEFENDOR, BEVERLY HILLS COP: AXEL F, Hulk Hogan in WEIRD: THE AL YANKOVIC STORY), he’s a big muscle guy with long hair, trenchcoat, boots, sometimes enjoys a custom gas-mask type mask (pretty cool), always has his voice lowered like he’s a whistleblower having his identity protected in a tv interview. That’s even with the mask off – I’m not sure how he does it. (read the rest of this shit…)
V/H/S/Mixtape
The V/H/S brand property franchise has been going for 14 years now. Its previous entries are V/H/S, V/H/S/2, V/H/S: VIRAL, V/H/S/94, V/H/S/99, V/H/S/85, V/H/S/BEYOND, V/H/S/HALLOWEEN, and also a “Snapchat-released miniseries” called V/H/S: VIDEO HORROR SHORTS. But until the new one V/H/S/MIXTAPE I had never seen any of them (unless you count Jason Eisener’s KIDS VS. ALIENS, spun off from a segment in V/H/S/2).
I’ve just been stubborn, I guess. There’s no real reason not to give them a shot. I’ve just been skeptical because I think the anthology format almost by definition creates a half-weight, insubstantial movie, almost guaranteed to be a mixed bag at best. And I am much less fond of found footage horror than of anthologies, so combining the two sounded like the worst of both worlds.
Still, I can understand why it’s been an enduring series, since the relative ease of making a V/H/S segment vs. making a real movie or even a short that anybody would ever see makes it appealing for up-and-coming directors as well as established ones looking for something fun to do. Some of the directors who have taken part who I have enjoyed movies from include Adam Wingard (THE GUEST), Ti West (PEARL), Chloe Okuno (WATCHER), Nacho Vigalondo (COLOSSAL), Johannes Roberts (THE STRANGERS: PREY AT NIGHT), Scott Derrickson (THE GORGE) and Casper Kelly (THE FIREPLACE).
And yes, of course, I know that Timo Tjahjanto (THE NIGHT COMES FOR US) & Gareth Evans (THE RAID) famously did one in part 2 that is the only thing every single person who has ever tried to justify V/H/S ever points to. The Daredevil-hallway-fight of V/H/S. Okay, I will at least watch that one. I’m sorry. The way they finally got me to watch one, though, is to say it’s music themed and it has segments by RZA and Flying Lotus and features GWAR. Sounded fun. (read the rest of this shit…)
Office Killer
Cindy Sherman is an artist known for her photographic self portraits. A bio on the Museum of Modern Art websight calls her “among the most significant artists of the Picture Generation, who came of age in the 1970s and responded to the mass media landscape surrounding them with both humor and criticism.” Madonna sponsored (whatever that means) MoMA’s 1997 exhibition of Sherman’s most famous series, Untitled Film Stills. It’s comprised of 69 black and white photos shot between 1977 and 1980, in which she’s posed playing various characters in fictional movies from the ‘50s and ’60s. That same year she also made her one actual movie, OFFICE KILLER.
This time Sherman pointed her camera at someone else: Carol Kane (THE PALLBEARER) as Dorine Douglas, sort of the Milton-from-OFFICE-SPACE of the Constant Consumer Magazine staff. Her late father (briefly seen as Eric Bogosian in flashbacks – a huge get since he’d already done UNDER SIEGE 2: DARK TERRITORY and BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD DO AMERICA) was one of the founders, but she’s kind of an under-appreciated misfit in the office, tucked away in a cluttered corner doing her copy editing. (read the rest of this shit…)
Lee Cronin’s The Mummy
“What the fuck was our daughter doing in a 3,000 year old sarcophagus!?”
Yeah, I know, it’s real funny that LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY is called LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY. I’m not normal, so I saw that title and knew Lee Cronin was the director of an okay movie called THE HOLE IN THE GROUND (2019) that got him the job on EVIL DEAD RISE and now this is his third movie. Normal people see that title and think I don’t know who the fuck that is. So it’s funny that they wouldn’t let him just call his mummy movie THE MUMMY and made him put his name on it. This is true. But let’s move on.
Now, to the important business: this is a good movie! Research confirms it got mostly bad reviews, but I’m telling you, there are delights to be had here. I had heard people say it was more like an EVIL DEAD movie than a mummy movie, sometimes meaning that as a complaint, but obviously it’s a selling point for me. To me the worst EVIL DEAD movie (Lee Cronin’s) is better than the best modern mummy movie (the Tom Cruise one). But now this is the best modern mummy movie precisely because it uses some mummy tropes but with the energy, momentum, style and outrageousness of an EVIL DEAD. It’s very gross, it takes itself seriously but has a great sense of absurdity and dark humor, it has a momentum to it even though it’s over two hours. (I’m sure it helps that they have Bryan Shaw, editor of EVIL DEAD 2013, EVIL DEAD RISE and nine episodes of Ash vs. Evil Dead. Director of photography David Garbett is also a veteran of RISE and Ash vs.) LEE CRONIN’S THE MUMMY quite firmly fits into the spookablast category, so I recommend it to fellow aficionados of such blasts. (read the rest of this shit…)
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