There's a legend 'round here. A reviewer buried, but not dead. A curse on the interwebz - a death curse. The Jon Lickness Curse. They say he got tired of horror flicks...but he keeps coming back.
Few have seen him and lived. Some, like Rob Zombie and Eli Roth, have tried to stop him. No one can!
They say he is still down there in deepest, darkest Minnesota...waiting...Yes, folks, the legend is true. After a LONG resting period spent buried in metaphorical hallowed ground with my back squarely turned on horror flicks and, to a lesser extent, the few people who actively read me...I'm back. But it's not the same person that you're used to.
A little background information, if by some chance you're just happening upon this here blog site. A few years back, it all started out on what was then known as the Official WrestleCrap Forums (now known as the Official FAN Forum), where THIS GUY (*the douchebaggy thumb gesture makes its glorious return!*) made it his mission to review Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and all of the other long-running (read: never-ending) horror franchises that he had seen. Mission accomplished, only those reviews sucked royally. From there, the man known on the message board as Thomas Rigby became the Horror Nerd, focusing his efforts entirely on movies that he deemed to be technically "good," and set about inducting fifty movies into a personalized and always masturbatory Horror Hall of Fame. Once this very inauspicious task was completed, the Horror Nerd shed that extremely vanilla-sounding name and morphed, not unlike Sadako in the horrible Ringu sequel Rasen, to become Mr. Blood Guts N' Tears. This guy prided himself on writing horror commentary as well as taking on any and all horror movies that made their way into his collection, finally becoming, in the eyes of the author himself, a semi-decent reviewer.
But then, circumstances arose that drove Mr. BG&T away from the horror genre. These circumstances will be serving as those pesky GOOD kids in the slasher film who DON'T indulge in drugs, sex and all other manner of debauched behavior. You know, the hero and heroine. The nice guy and the virginal girl in this (horrible) allegory encompass a lot of different things. A complete lack of any and all horror films at the multiplex, and the only notable one being the certifiably awful The Devil Within (seen it, and it sucked). An unseasonably warm winter that didn't do much to keep me locked indoors, thus robbing me of my usually heavy wintertime horror-watching mood. Real-life issues that are far too boring to even think about getting into. All of it seemed to spell one thing - instant kryptonite for a stalwart horror villain. But little do those smiling, happy campers know that every horror villain has one more resurrection left in him. It only takes the right impetus...
Like, for starters, the fact that comicdom's ultimate bad girl from the wrong side of the tracks is being portrayed by a sweet, innocent girl next door-type who isn't convincing as anything BUT that, no matter how many gritty independent movies or how much "artistic nudity" she does in some desperate attempt to convince us otherwise. But hey, she's hot, and that will sell tickets.With that good inflammatory statement out of the way, I have to state that much like Jason, Freddy and Michael (well, maybe - remember when Michael Myers had NO motive?) themselves, my return to torment/annoy my fellow horror fans was born of hate. See, April is upon us, leaving May and SUMMER MOVIE SEASON (capitalized because...well, it's Goddamn SUMMER MOVIE SEASON) right around the corner.
You know, there actually was a time when I looked FORWARD to this time of the year, when Hollywood would pull out all the stops in an attempt to wow us with their biggest, best, most commercially viable products. Unfortunately, those days are long gone.
I've seen all of the commercials. I've seen the slicked-up ads for The Avengers, and I can't think of anything but where I'd rather NOT be come Memorial Day weekend, or whenever the hell this overblown, overhyped POS is going to be unleashed on the public. I've read a couple of the on-set reports for the new Spider-Man movie, and can't feel anything but disgust over this completely UNNECESSARY overhaul of a series that was definitely NOT beyond saving, all for the purpose of making it more Twilight-fan friendly. And, while we're not getting one this year, I cringe thinking about the day when Johnny Depp's snarling mug is plastered on my tube again, hopefully with a much more apt title describing this latest cinematic opus - Pirates of the Caribbean: Well, Let's Milk This For All It's Worth.
The occasion is very rare when I walk out of a pure, unadulturated popcorn movie and DON'T want to rip my own eyeballs out. Why? They make me think back to the days of my youth, back when a movie with a huge budget was a RARE thing, and back when said movies used to feature tons of genuine love, soul and interest thrown into them. The original Star Wars trilogy (the prequels are dead to me). The '80s Indiana Jones movies (that last one doesn't exist - don't mention it). Terminator 1 and 2 (ditto with the latter films - noticing a trend yet?). The Die Hard series. The James Bond series before they went all emo, ultra-realistic and completely fun-free. These were movies that felt like a big deal before walking into that darkened room, and remained as such after walking out. Then I think about the countless action epics that dot the landscape these days with budgets roughly equal to a small nation's GDP, about how they SHOULD be cool and awe-inspiring, yet universally leave me cold. It's all sizzle-no sausage at cinemas these days, with boatloads of cartoony explosions and absolutely no time spent on, you know, the IMPORTANT stuff, like getting us emotionally invested in the events that are transpiring up on the screen and building up character motivation.
The reasons for this are numerous, and not all of it has to do with the storylines and characters sucking (although that's definitely the biggest part of it). The magic is completely gone from this type of film. I can remember, as a kid, seeing Mrs. Voorhees get her head chopped off in the climax of the original Friday the 13th, and thinking, "WOW! I wonder how they did THAT!" Now, I can look at planets exploding, robots pounding away on each other in intricately choreographed fights, and effeminate pirates staging colossal wars at sea, and I don't even think twice about any of it. I don't wonder how anything is done, because I KNOW how it's done. By some geek sitting on a laptop (which, you know, is VERY different to what I'm doing right now ;)). CGI makes creating ANYTHING a screenwriter can dream up relatively easy, but when you can do everything, ironically, you can't do anything.
I hate modern blockbusters. Just hate them. Hate every single overbudget, overproduced, audience-insulting one of these that hits the market. Hate the fact that these films with EVERY advantage, from top-notch effects teams to the best casts money can buy to highly heralded screenwriters churning out approximately 17 rewrites, can STILL find a way to suck.
Even the ones that I DON'T consider outright terrible are utterly forgettable in some form or another. Take last summer's Thor. A decent movie with a likable lead, but that promise quickly gets buried in its sea of never-ending fight scenes and thrills that depend on the theater's sound system to pull off. While I was ambivalent to it in theaters, have I ever once felt the need to watch the movie again? No. A year before that was Christopher Nolan's Inception. While the movie no doubt had a cool concept and solid execution, I'd be lying if I told you that I gave two s**ts about anything that happened in it. Free screenwriting tip: In your big, expensive summer sci-fi/action film, it's wise to make your stakes higher than whether or not a nondescript businessman can gain market share in the energy sector. Just sayin'.
So there I was, ready to march into another Summer of Discontent and more than likely to play like Willem Dafoe and take the pain when an unexpected Messiah descended from the heavens. A Friday the 13th popping up on the calendar. In April, no less, scant weeks away from the nonstop onslaught of special effects doomfests. Which meant that, for the first time in several months, I popped a horror film in the ol' DVD player...
And, like so many times before, I haven't stopped watching them since. Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter gave way to The Prowler, which gave way to My Bloody Valentine, which gave way to Prom Night, which gave way to Ju-On...you get the idea. Compared to the films that dominate the box office charts from here until September, these movies are such a welcome change. As opposed to featuring the world's greatest visual effects maestros, big names above the marquee and still smacking of laziness, these movies are labors of love, no matter how "bad" some of them may technically be.
I can't hate any movie made under the circumstances that so many of these movies are made. I respect them. I respect the hell out of the fact that some director took an inane script (that may have even been written by the director himself!), that actors chose to portray these roles as written on the page, that a gifted makeup wizard spent untold hours slaving away at a work bench to make the exploding-head death in scene 37 look JUST right. That EVERYONE involved in these films did their absolute damndest to make them as good as they could possibly be given the almost unbearable conditions that they were placed in. Screw Transformers and G.I. Joe and their precious $200 million worth of CGI fire. Give me handmade special effects, a mediocre-but-hardworking cast, and a Filet-o-Fish value meal budget ANY day.
Last winter, Mr. Blood Guts N' Tears suffered a long, painful death at the hands of fate. And thus, over the course of one weekend, he was revived by a combination of love and hate. Only now, he is something much worse. Undead. Unhinged. And Unstoppable. Love for campfire scary stories, cheesy soundtracks and cliches, guys named "Crispin" and girls named "Takako" back and stronger than ever. Hatred for (most) zombie movies, rock singers attempting to write "horror," and beat-you-over-the-head "message" flicks also back and stronger than ever. Someone who is completely forsaking Hollywood's prime time summer season now and for the ever-foreseeable future. Ladies and gentlemen...this is Lick Ness Monster's Horror Movie Mayhem!
You know, it's times like this that I really wish I was more tech-savvy, and that I had a friend who knew how to edit videos. Because let me tell you something (brother)...the vignette that I have pictured in my head that would air right here is something else. Just imagine that sexy guy you saw firsthand in the Basket Case 2 review getting berated by a few friends for leaving the horror genre behind, a brief interlude of me watching Highlander and other non-horror material, opening up my DVD cabinet, the once ever-increasing horror collection now stagnant. Then, I see a series of ads for upcoming action movies and become incensed. You know where it goes from here. Running up and down stairs to the tune of Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger," taking in movies ranging from Don't Go in the Woods to Manos: The Hands of Fate, clubbing away on a speed bag, the camera reversing the angle to show that I'm beating up on a cutout of Michael Bay's face. Priceless, I tell ya. Or maybe it's a lot funnier in my head than it is in prose writing form. Or maybe I'm just a moron.Anyway...what to expect from here on out? We're going back to the past, back to a time when cheaply made horror movies weren't relegated solely to the direct-to-DVD production line. Back to a time when a lot of them actually made it to THEATERS, bah gawd. Back to the time of my childhood, which also not-so-coincidentally happens to be the '80s and early '90s, when many, many Saturday nights consisted of trips to video stores and return trips laughing with my brother (RIP, bro) about what lay in store for us when we got home. Back to a time when a whole slew of movies about "little demons" of some sort or another came to be in the wake of the success of Gremlins...
TO BE CONTINUED!
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