Brain Blasters

As I’ve indicated in this space before, one of the joys of the DVD age is the chance to see, at long last, films that one might have heard about since childhood, but that were unavailable until now. A recent addition to Fox’s Cinema Classics line is a case in point. Fox Horror Classics consists of three movies directed by John Brahm, and the one I want to talk about today is The Undying Monster (1942), which I first read about over thirty years ago.
Read More

So I was musing over the last couple of days once again on the nature of the appeal of what I’m (extremely) broadly defining as cult movies. I’m not explicitly looking for a Grand Unification Theory here, though I wouldn’t turn my nose up at one if it turned up. There are some easy answers, but they’re very much only partial ones.
Read More

The wonderful thing about cult film fandom is the peculiar obsessions that typify it. I’m thinking specifically here of the enthusiastic loyalty fans have for a given director or performer, whatever said person’s standing in the mainstream film community might be (and very often in defiance of such). Hence, for instance, the following that Joe D’Amato commands. As for performers, let’s think for a moment about character actors. I’ve already documented my great fondness for Michael Ripper, he of the bulging eyes and multiple bit parts in Hammer films. Well, I have in my hands a delightful little tome that does me one better.
Read More

Time for another entry in the Wish List, my lament for sorely absent DVD releases. Today: Paperhouse, to date available only in Region 2 and 4 imports, which is a real tragedy. Allow me to explain.
Read More

So I’m in the middle of working my way through Severin’s latest Black Emanuelle box set, and a screening of Black Emmanuelle/White Emmanuelle (actual title Black Velvet) has prompted these musings, which I inflict on you here rather than in the review itself. Now, European sexploitation movies from the 70s aren’t exactly the deepest experience going, but there’s plenty of food for thought in this film, even despite (or because of) its flaws.
Read More

It must stop! Somebody has to take a stand, and I guess that somebody has to be me. But surely I will not be alone. Surely I will have comrades aplenty in my march to justice. Surely the day of victory cannot be too far over the horizon. With courage and determination, we can stamp out the scourge. What scourge? Surely I don’t have to spell it out. Surely you know I am referring to the twist ending.
Read More

When, in the 1950s, television became widespread and began to take a serious chunk of the audience away from cinemas, the movies fought back in a number of ways. Gimmicks were rife (hello, William Castle). Colour became standard. Widescreen arrived. But other than colour and widescreen, every other innovation turned out to be a brief novelty, never to be seen again. There was once exception, a gimmick that was more popular than most, never became a standard, but refuses to die, resurfacing again and again after periods of dormancy, and that’s 3-D.
Read More

One of the great oddities of film from the 1960s (or, indeed, ever) is a modest little horror film by the name of Incubus. Emerging in 1965, it was shot in Big Sur, and tells the mythic tale of a young soldier returning home to become the target of a female demon. His innate goodness, however, winds up seducing the demon instead, and the titular male demon vows revenge, specifically targeting the soldier’s blind sister. This is already a somewhat odd tale for a mid-sixties American horror film, and the fairy-tale setting is even more unusual. But the real oddities are yet to come. The lead is played by a William Shatner (in his last film before Star Trek). And all of the dialogue is in the artificial language Esperanto.
Read More

Bert I. Gordon. Now there’s a man who knew no shame. Here was a director who combined the hucksterism of a low-rent William Castle (who wasn’t exactly living on the Boardwalk of Monopoly board of producer-directors, if you catch my drift), the willingness to pile on the spectacle of an even lower-rent Cecil B. De Mille, and the technical competence of a slightly (but only slightly) higher-rent Ed Wood. Here was a director who not only did his own special effects, but for some unfathomable reason thought they were good enough to show for extended periods of time. Perhaps he thought his back-projection techniques in The Amazing Colossal Man, Attack of the Puppet People and Beginning of the End (grasshoppers!) were actually impressive. They weren’t. But they had a certain goofy charm.
Read More

My very first horror film book, acquired in Grade 3, was Denis Gifford’s A Pictorial History of Horror Movies. Among its many stills were a number for films identified by title, but with no other information provided. The result was rather tantalizing. One of those stills was for a 1969 Japanese ditty called Horror of Malformed Men. At long last, thanks to a new release from Synapse (with the title pluralized to Horrors of Malformed Men), my curiosity has been more than satisfied.
Read More

The current issue of Rue Morgue has a retrospective look at Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead, just ahead of yet another DVD release (September 11). Over the course of the interview with O’Bannon, interviewer Dave Alexander asks the director how much he had to do with the new release. This is his response:
Read More

A little while ago, I looked at a recent (and very strong) example of the Evil Kids movie. I mentioned some of the big names in the field (The Omen, the original Village of the Damned, The Bad Seed), but today, for your consideration, a half-forgotten effort from 1974 (smack in the midst of the golden era of grindhouse and drive-in sleaze): Devil Times Five.
Read More

It seems to me that it was around this time last year that I was lambasting the desperately misconceived remake of The Wicker Man. Here we are again, then, with another entry in the disastrous remake sweepstakes. Halloween may be a little more mainstream than is, strictly speaking, the concern of this space, but when has that ever bothered me before? While Rob Zombie’s atrocity is in the theatres, I feel it is my solemn duty to warn you off.
Read More

Ils (“Them”) is another recent bit of cinematic nastiness from France, and worth a look from horror fans. Lucas and Clémentine are, respectively, a writer and a teacher who have recently moved to Romania. Their house is big and isolated, and one night, intruders close in, leading to a grueling night of terror. If that sounds like a pretty simple plot, it is, but the film is very tight (a mere 73 minutes long), essentially functioning as one long suspense set piece once the home invasion begins. The DVD boasts solid picture and sound, but has no subtitles, forcing non-French speakers to contend with the English dub. Fortunately, much of the film is devoid of dialogue, so this isn’t a deal breaker.
Read More

Nacho Cerdá made his name on the underground horror circuit with Aftermath, a short feature that made everyone’s worst surmises about autopsy tables look hopeless optimistic. The question that looms around his feature debut, The Abandoned, just out on DVD, is how on earth he might top Aftermath’s taboo-busting calling card. Wisely, he attempts no such thing. Though there is one notable moment of “yeeeurrrrgggh” in the film, it otherwise marks a very different approach to horror, as well as making clear that Cerdá is the kind of talent that horror desperately needs at this juncture. It’s a criminal shame that the film received to theatrical distribution to speak of, but here’s hoping it will find the audience it deserves on DVD.
Read More