Don't Breathe (2016)

2016
Directed by Fede Alvarez
Starring Jane Levy, Dylan Minnette, Daniel Zovatto and Stephen Lang

Let's run down the various "eras" of this great, grand horror genre in the 21st century.  And boy, have they been some prestigious ones.  We started off the '00s still in the post-ironic Scream-inspired teen flicks with lots of hot actors and witty dialogue.  Then we got a massive load of Japan-style ghost thrillers in the wake of The Ring.  From there came the double-dose of suck that was torture porn and every single slasher film from the '70s on getting the remake bastardization to the point where we haven't had any movies with Michael, Jason or Freddy in six years now, although (supposedly) there is a new F13 coming out in the not-too-distant future, but I digress.  And, finally, we had more ghost movies brought to us by James Wan and all of his Wan-ton (HA!) followers, a trend that I actually LIKED at first but grew tired of in due time.  It should also be noted that this can be said for ALL of the above listed trends!

Folks, Don't Breathe is just the movie that we've been waiting for to break us out of these doldrums.  Presented by Sam Raimi's Ghost House production company, this film was directed by Fede Alvarez, the guy responsible for the Ghost House Evil Dead remake.  This dude intentionally went out of his way to craft something that (a) wasn't a remake, and (b) did not contain a single supernatural aspect.  Couple that with some absolutely kickass execution of its amazingly simple premise and you've got a slam-bang thriller that, while it isn't QUITE up to the poster's bost that this is THE BEST AMERICAN HORROR MOVIE IN 20 YEARS, I would say that it's the best in, oh, maybe five.  If it sounds like I did not study or research that last statement in the least bit, you're a very astute reader.  I haven't seen his version of The Evil Dead, but if this flick is anything to go by, Alvarez is somebody to follow from this point forward.  Enough waxing.  Let's get to the flick.

What we have here is a study in simplicity.  The four actors listed above are pretty much all we get for the VAST majority of the running time, and the first ten pages of Alvarez' script introduces us to three of them.  Meet Rocky (Jane Levy), quick-witted female thief who is flanked by two dudes of varying morality.  There's her boyfriend Money (Daniel Zovatto), the kind of dude who has a punchable face and is given dialogue to match.  And then there's Alex (Dylan Minnette), the trio's requisite "nice guy" who is able to help out in all kinds of ways due to the fact that his dad is some kind of security chief with passkeys to every house in town.  I honestly can't remember what city this movie took place in, but it isn't a big one.  All three want to escape this deadend life and need a big score...and that's when the big tip comes in.

Said big tip is a doozy.  The kind of thing ripe for the picking for three young kids just trying to make it out of their humdrum lives in Jerkwater, USA (thank you to Colonel Sam Trautman for that one).  It seems like there's a single, solitary ex-soldier living all by himself with no neighbors.  Said soldier is in possession of $300,000 in cash after a wrongful death settlement involving his only daughter.  After some lovely bits of character building and making the characters of Rocky and Alex more likable, they head out to the house.  And then all bets are off.

See, the soldier - named Norman Nordstrom in the characters' dialogue but known only as "The Blind Man" in the script - is just that.  A soldier who is blind.  But this dude is superhuman in pretty much every other aspect, and it doesn't take long for the home invasion to go wrong and Money to wind up dead.  Oh yeah, spoiler alert.  The blindness angle works to this flick's advantage, as it's a little bit easier to buy the Blind Man's ability to track these people down with some Rusev-level savagery.  Stephen Lang, though, makes this character COMPLETELY believable.  This is one of the best horror movie performances I've seen in quite some time.  He doesn't have much dialogue, but when he does speak, it counts.  His ACTIONS, though, are something else, and this character is just a badass, along with being completely detestable. 

From here, the movie turns into a very cleverly-paced and plotted game of cat and mouse, with the Blind Man boarding up his house to prevent the two remaining thieves from escaping.  There are a few close calls with death, but for a few brief moments, it looks like Rocky and Alex have managed to find themselves in a secluded part of the house.  And, amazingly, this movie is about to throw us a major curveball as to who this guy really is and what motivates him that makes the final trimester of this movie some pretty sick/awesome stuff.

The three longtime readers of this here blog know that no movie is perfect, and there were a couple things here that prevent me from QUITE going the full Dave Meltzer New Japan match verbal orgasm on this one.  For starters - the character of Money.  Just, the whole character.  I don't fault Daniel Zovatto in the least bit, as I'm sure he performed the lines and actions he was written with plenty of chutzpah.  But he's just SUCH a prick, and not in the good way.  You know how I spoiled his death earlier?  Don't be mad - the second this guy is onscreen, he screams "KILL ME" from the word go.  In addition to this doofus, we also get the return of a current cool trend in many films that I hope dies a death sooner than later, with the director showing us a brief scene from the END of the film before launching us into the beginning.  Which wouldn't be a big deal if it didn't spell out some major plot spoilers for us, except it kinda does.  So word of warning there.

/ end brief bitching

I suppose I should also say a few words about Jane Levy, the lead actress in this film.  Believe it or not, the Pervy Paragraph is getting a one-week reprieve.  However, I can't say enough good about the job she did in this flick.  She's tough, resourceful, and likable as Rocky, and I really felt for her character as the movie built up to its ultimate climax.  She also starred in the Evil Dead remake, but again, I haven't seen it - having nothing but this to go on, she's really good at what she does.  So I'm quite certain that she's destined for non-stardom hell for the remainder of her career.

I also need to confess that I didn't really find this film scary in the traditional way, meaning that I was able to go to bed afterwards and sleep like a baby.  But I DID think about parts of it the next day.  It's not a movie that's going to make you piss yourself in terror, but it IS powerful and disturbing.  And there is one scene in particular that is GUARANTEED to make you gasp and recoil in what could potentially happen.  I'll leave that up for you to discover. 

*** 1/2 out of ****.  This flick was creative, original and boasted a pair of tour-de-force performances from Jane Levy and Stephen Lang.  And if this one launches a new era of "human monster" movies, I promise I won't be sick of it for at least two years.

Christmas Runs Red: Five Essential Yuletide Horror Flicks

Oh yeah - poster spoiler alert for one of the selections. ;)

Folks, the horror genre is all about holidays.  New Year's Evils, Valentine's Day Massacres, the whole Halloween...thing.  Even Thanksgiving has a gigantic killer turkey dude in a movie that, amazingly enough, has a huge anti-drug message.  And the name of that masterpiece is Blood Freak, which was reviewed in a little write-up called "Horror Movie Reviews: The Fun-Sized Edition" by this guy, and it's all right here on the Lick Ness Monster blog! [/shameless self promotion)  But of all the holidays out there, I dare say that none has MORE horror movies devoted to it than the one that we're just days away from kicking off. 

I don't know what it is about Christmas, but it just lends itself so well to scary stories.  And so many VARIED horror stories.  Christmas has slasher flicks, ghost movies, straight-up schlofkests and even a few anthology pieces to its name.  Couple these movies together with twinkling nights and the very natural horror that goes with family gatherings and it's easy to see why there are something like 17 new Christmas-themed horror flicks that pop up on store shelves and online lists every year.  I own something like 10 myself.  In my entire horror DVD collection, I think that total is surpassed only by the number of times that I have purchased the Friday the 13th series, which currently stands at three.  Kids, you don't want to turn out to be me.

But enough waxing.  This Christmas, if you get tired of watching that annoying brat wishing so desperately for his BB gun and all the superfluous crap that happens in between, track down these five flicks and pop 'em in the ol' DVD player because they're guaranteed to liven up any office party or family gathering.

(1) Gremlins (1984)
The first movie that I remember watching, this is one of those rare movies that manages to achieve near perfection with everything that it's trying to accomplish.  Big budget, big stars and the biggest producer who ever lived in Steven Spielberg are all on display here as Billy Peltzer is given a cute, furry and mysterious pet for Christmas and promptly breaks all the rules of handling it, leading to all kinds of chaos as a horde of gremlins invades this idyllic little town.  Stripe, the leader of the gremlins, is just pure badass personified and a creature that has TONS of personality for an inanimate puppet.  Really, though, everything about this flick works.  Absolutely chock full of classic characters and scenes (love that gremlin in the microwave!), and a genuinely HILARIOUS script make this one of the most entertaining movies of all time.  Plus, how can you not love any movie with Phoebe Cates AND Dick Miller?

(2) Black Christmas (1974)
Ladies and gentlemen, it's time for everyone's favorite segment: LICK NESS MONSTER OGLES THE WOMEN OF HORROR FILM HISTORY.  This week's subect: Olivia Hussey.  She's always been a great actress, but she is also insanely hot and this did not change in later years in things like the Mel Gibson Hamlet and as Norman Bates' mother in Psycho IV.  Here, she's the leader of a group of sorority sisters who find themselves trapped and terrorized by a killer with an insanely awesome telephone voice over the Christmas holiday break.  Olivia alone is reason enough to check this out, but it's also a lesson in horror film history.  There are a lot of people who actually consider this to be the FIRST slasher film in existence.  Having said all this, stay miles away from the godawful 2006 remake.  I don't know how you make a movie with Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Katie Cassidy, Lacey Chabert and Harriet the Spy suck, but they did it.

(3) Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)
I don't know if it's fair to call this flick a "dark horse" candidate for a list like this since so many horror fans are familiar with it.  But Silent Night, Deadly Night is a film that everyone should check out at least once in their life.  Gloriously low budget and delightfully sleazy, this is the tender, tragic saga of Billy Chapman, troubled orphan who once witnessed his parents being killed by a killer dressed up as Santa Claus.  He is then raised in a convent and grows up to have a seething hatred for all things Christmas.  The cherry on top?  His job as a toy-store Santa Claus.  Oh, the irony.  This movie definitely ain't high art, and it might not even be technically a "good" movie, but it's a must-see for just how earnest they were with this material and how INTO the role Robert Wilson was as Billy.  Also, check out the sequel.  Why? It has this.

(4) Tales From the Crypt (1972)
Everyone in my age bracket knows about the awesome TV series of the same name that dominated HBO airwaves in the '90s.  One of my favorite episodes of that series was "And All Through the House," the story of a housewife who murders her husband on Christmas Eve only to be stalked and terrorized by an escaped mental patient in a Santa costume.  Little did I realize at the time that this was actually the SECOND time this particular story had been filmed.  Amicus Productions' Tales From the Crypt anthology flick features "And All Through the House" as the second of its five segments, and I actually consider it BETTER than the TV episode.  Joan Collins is simply aces as the murderous wife and mother who desperately cordons herself off from the killer.  In addition, the segment boasts really effective use of "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" and a final twist that's simply horrifying.  Fun for the whole family!

(5) Santa's Slay (2005)
Every list of great Christmas horror movies needs to have one intentionally awful film on it, and I can think of no better example than this cinematic masterwork from 2005.  I remember seeing this beauty on video store shelves when I was in college, slightly stunned that EVERY SINGLE COPY was checked out and wondering what all the fuss was.  Then I rented it, and something like 150 minutes later myself and a small group of friends all had huge smiles on our faces.  The reason it took that long to watch?  We kept rewinding various bits to laugh.  The story here is simply legendary.  You know Santa, the big guy you all love?  Well, he's actually been forced to be good for all these years after losing a curling match bet to an angel.  Only now he's free to kill again.  And Evil Santa is played by WCW/WWE wrestler Bill Goldberg.  Sound like fun?  Believe me, they top everything you would expect.

Well, if you're a longtime reader of this here blog, you all know that I'm not one for poignant wrap-up paragraphs after lists like this one.  This one isn't going to be any different.  So Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Delightful Life Day...whatever, just have a happy horror season.  See you all in 2017!

Some Kind of Hate (2015)

2015
Directed by Adam Egypt Mortimer
Starring Ronen Rubinstein, Grace Phipps, Spencer Breslin, Lexi Atkins and Sierra McCormick

I may or may not have mentioned this before, but here goes again: I'm just really, really not enthused about the current generation of movie "stars."  And going by box office numbers, I'm far from the only one.  It's a big problem that the movie industry at large is facing these days, as they have found no new crop of actors to replace Brad and George and Julia and Will and the Toms.  Now, there are some that I do like.  A great deal, actually.  Bradley Cooper, for starters, who I think truly is someone that is worthy of paying money to watch because he projects himself like a superstar.  Chris Pratt is also all kinds of kickass, and Emily Blunt is probably my favorite of the new bunch of leading ladies, as she can be tough or a girl-next-door with equal ease.  Aside from them and a few others, though...yikes.  Overall, I just think this generation of thespians comes across as way too nonchalant/emo to be taken seriously as stars.  Even worse, I think there have been a lot of missed opportunities when it comes to some of the actors coming up.  Seriously - why isn't Miranda Cosgrove in multiplexes right now?  She's got it all - looks, acting ability, relatability, and comic timing.  But nope.  TV hell with you, young lady.

Which brings me to the movie in question today, Some Kind of Hate.  In a swerve that is probably a little unexpected, this horror flick has better acting than any scary movie I've seen in YEARS.  We've got a crop of good, motivated young actors giving this material their absolute best, including a couple Disney Channel starlets like you've never seen them before.  And it makes me sad that pretty much everybody in this movie is going to be banished right back to the nothingness where we'll pretty much never hear about them again.  Even better, this movie is legit thought-provoking and disturbing at points.  Not SCARY so much, but it does stick with you and powers you right over.  THIS is what horror should be all about these days; it hits home with a story that any teenager could find themselves in (although not QUITE in the setting that this movie chooses, but we'll get to that in a moment), and it's that kind of investment that's missing from this day and age of horror TV shows continually patting themselves on the back for how self-aware and nerdy they are.  American Horror Story and Stranger Things, I'm looking at you.  Anyway, let's get to the movie.

The flick starts off with cruelty and shame, as high school student Lincoln Taggert (Ronen Rubinstein, who I really hope to see more from - he's dynamite) faces the wrath of his alcoholic biker dad (played by Andrew "Lattimer" Bryniarski in a cool little cameo) before heading off to school and facing the wrath of his bullies.  These scenes always get me in movies, although they're almost always exaggerated and it's no exception here, but bear with me.  Long story short, Lincoln - a cool dude who listens to heavy metal practices the "less is more" approach when it comes to dialogue - lashes back at one of his attackers.  With a knife, no less, and it's a move that lands him in reform school as the opening credits roll. 

So, a few words about this school.  If such a place actually exists, I would genuinely be surprised, and it's probably the weakest part of the script (by the amazingly named Adam Egypt Mortimer, who also directed).  The school is located in what seems like the middle of the f**king desert, with not a soul around for miles.  It's run by a couple of guys who operate more like cult leaders than teachers, along with a scorching hot sidekick/aerobics instructor of sorts played by Lexi Atkins.  Without looking up any of the other reviews of this movie, I'm going to go out on a wild limb and say that a fair amount of reviewers have probably napalmed this aspect of the movie, as such a thing is pretty unbelievable.  If you can accept this setting, though, hang on, you're in for a treat. 

Shortly after arriving at the compound, Lincoln - who continues to maintain his stoic demeanor - meets a new friend in geeky tech prankster Isaac (Spencer Breslin) and runs afoul of a new local batch of bullies.  A good portion of the first trimester of the flick consists of Lincoln's periodic verbal and sometimes not-so-verbal sparring sessions with this new bunch of assholes.  The leader of them in particular is a thoroughly dislikable prick, and while these actors aren't quite worth mentioning by name or putting in my handy-dandy pre-review facts rundown, they all do a decent-enough job acting douchy that y the time the s**t goes down a couple of their deaths are stand-up-and-cheer moments.  Of course, there's also a hot student/love interest for Lincoln here in bad girl/ex-cheerleader Kaitlin.  And Kaitlin is played by Grace Phipps.

Time for everyone's favorite section of Lick Ness Monster Reviews: SKEEVY PARAGRAPH TIME.  People...I absolutely adore Grace Phipps.  I have ever since I found myself watching Teen Beach Movie one night out of sheer boredom (don't judge me!) and she was, by far, the most entertaining thing in that piece of drek.  She's hot as liquid magma, she can sing, she can perform, and she has charisma in spades.  Which means, of course, that Hollywood doesn't want to put this beauty in anything big, but that's just fine.  More fun for us horror fans.  From the few things I'd seen her in before, I didn't know if I would buy her in the "dark" role of Kaitlin, but nope, she vanishes into this character like a glove.  When combined with Lincoln, this movie has a one-two punch of characters that we legit pull for.

You might be wondering how this is a horror movie.  Well, I'm glad you were wondering.  After a particularly nasty fight with the bullies, Lincoln runs off to a deserted part of the school and awakens a kindred spirit.  Folks, Some Kind of Hate is a movie about a ghost.  A real nasty ghost named Moira, with the power to kill people.  Moira is played by Sierra McCormick, and she's AWESOME in this role.  The bullies start to die, but Moira doesn't stop there.  She wants acceptance, and she isn't leaving. 

I've seen something like 50,000 horror movies in my life.  As such, I occasionally feel all hoity-toity like I've seen it all and know what's going to happen before it does.  I'll admit that this flick threw me for a loop on multiple occasions.  Since I compare almost every evil ghost movie to Ju-On and the similarities were there, I thought it was going to play out like that with everybody dead.  Nope.  Then, I thought it was going to be like Let the Right One In, with a slow burn leading up to an emotional climax.  Nope.  From the time Moira shows up, this movie is just balls-out ballistic, and everyone must pay.  There's a couple of not-so-surprising surprises in relation to HOW she died here that I won't spell out, but it's addressed.  Even better?  This movie is GORY.  Yeah, baby. 

If there's another complaint I can level at the movie, it's that Lincoln kind of fades into the background a bit once Moira shows up.  The story becomes more about the ghost and his tortured, tragic girlfriend Kaitlin.  It's a shame, because Rubinstein really is something else.  I could see this guy playing great everyman heroes, and unlike Shia LaBeouf, watching him onscreen actually makes me want to do something other than stab out my own ears with scissors.  Really, though, this entire cast was hitting on all cylinders, and you can tell that everyone involved - from Rubinstein to McCormick to Breslin to the red-hot Phipps - truly believed in this material and it shows.  It's kind of an EASY subject to tackle as bullying is such a hot-button topic these days, but it's never presented in a way that takes you out of the action.  And the action in the final trimester here is bats**t insane.

*** 1/2 out of ****.  Check this one out, especially if you're a teenager.

Windows (1980)

1980
Directed by Gordon Willis
Starring Talia Shire, Joseph Cortese and Elizabeth Ashley

Alright, kids, time for a quick detour.  Unlike a lot of my boring reviews, I'll try to make it short.  There are a lot of directors and screenwriters that I admire a great deal, but over the past few years I've become a HUGE fan of Joe Eszterhas. Well, everything pre-Showgirls, anyway.  That flick is unsalvageable.  The "erotic thriller" genre owes a huge debt to this guy, and I genuinely can't believe that there aren't more of these that pop up these days.  There was that one with Will Smith and Margot Robbie that billed itself as such, but it also looked terminally boring.  Why this is, nobody knows.  Well, maybe a quick Google search does.  But sex sells, and nobody did it better than Joe E.  So three cheers to this guy.  Obsessed fan confirmed.

With that verbal orgasm out of the way, allow me to introduce you to the amazing film that is Windows.  Released in 1980, this was a piece of Joe E Murderotica that had everything but the world's coolest Hawaiian shirt-wearing bearded guy penning the screenplay.  It might be more of a thriller than an out-and-out horror film, but the flick was designed to scare audiences.  And it's my blog, so it's going in here, dammit.  The film was directed by Gordon Willis, the guy behind the camerawork of some of the greatest films of all time (anyone with the Godfather films on their resume can safely lay claim to this).  It had Talia Shire, fresh off the mammoth success of the first two Rocky flicks and pretty much at the peak of her popularity and hotness.  So where did it go wrong?  Well...it's cheesy.  Like, really, really cheesy, with writing choices that would make M. Night Shyamalan blush.  Sound enticing?  Read up.

Ladies and gentlemen, it's Lick Ness Monster ogles the women of cinema history time.  This movie stars Talia Shire...and oh man.  She's such an amazing actress, and in 1980, I dare say that few women on the planet were more attractive.  Not so much from a physical standpoint, but she had this amazing girl-next-door vibe.  And I'll cut myself off there.  In this movie, she has a role that's tailor-made for her talents.  Emily Hollander is recently divorced, all-kinds-of-vulnerable, and living alone in the big frightening city of New York.  She also has a stuttering problem to make her relatability quotient radiate all that much more.  As such, I was almost immediately in love with her and instantly drawn in when the movie wastes no time hitting us with a right-handed wallop in the form of the creep who breaks into her apartment.  Folks, you've never seen an assault movie like the one this one has, as this big dude holds a knife to her throat.  But he doesn't want rape - he just wants her to moan.  I swear on the church, this actually happens.  There's Adrian Balboa, making orgasm noises onscreen for all to enjoy.

If you want to know what the hell the plot of this movie is, we're getting there, believe me.  Of course, this incident devastates Emily.  And then comes the arrival of Andrea Glassen, her helpful new neighbor who provides her with a shoulder to cry on.

I think any casual observer who has never heard of this movie knows where this is going.  But the EXECUTION of this material is...well, it's something else.  Andrea, played by Elizabeth Ashley like a cross between a 7-years-too-early "Fatal Attraction" villain and the stereotypical romantic comedy BFF character, is utterly obsessed with Emily.  Who wouldn't be?  This is Talia Shire we're talking about.  It turns out that she was the one who paid the burly cab driver to break into her apartment and force her to make throes-of-passion noises, attaining a tape recorder of the incident that she repeatedly plays back for her personal enjoyment.  I'll give Ashley credit for diving into this role wholeheartedly.  The scenes where she listens to the tapes are comedic gold, mostly due to her insane level of overacting.  When held up next to the scenes involving her character and Shire getting to know each other and becoming friends, it results in this flick being a pretty jarring experience.

It's also where things start circling the drains.

See, this is about where the police detective in charge of the case enters the fray.  He's played by Joseph Cortese, he's very early '80s Italian dude, and he's the new love interest for Emily.  As you can imagine, certified wackjob Andrea isn't too happy about this.  Time for the script to start amping up the eyeroll-worthy stuff, including this one scene where Emily finds herself getting a cab ride from the same dude who broke into her apartment from before.  This scene is followed by the cops giving her what has to be the worst advice I've ever seen law enforcement give in any movie...ever.  And THIS is followed by an ending sequence that must be seen to be believed, and not in the good way.

Windows is a flick that almost nobody has seen, let alone heard of.  It was a flop then, and unless you were able to buy a copy from a video store's going-out-of-business sale like I was 10 years ago, it's pretty hard to find these days in places other than YouTube.  A huge money loser, this was the first and only movie that Gordon Willis ever directed, and (I believe) the last time that Shire ever got top billing for something other than the Rocky series.  And the PC police circa 1980 didn't like it, but you don't come to the Lick Ness Monster blog for information about stuff like that.

It really is a shame, because unlike the vast majority of critics, I think this story actually had some promise.  The two female leads are great, with Shire in particular able to get the audience on her side better than 99% of the lifeless pieces of cardboard you see in multiplexes these days.  And Ashley is just an insane cartoon character as Andrea, for better or worse, but I always dig it when somebody just dives right in to a crazy villain role and just goes totally over-the-top.  The bit with the staged rape and the audiotape is a creative setup.  As such, it really sucks that Act II veered so completely into the laughable.  So with all of that said - how about a remake, Hollywood?  Give a movie that WASN'T amazing to begin with another shot!  Sooner or later, this WILL happen, and it's going to be glorious.

** out of ****.  The first act hooks you right in and then we get a hard right turn into hilariously bad territory.  There's definitely worse ways to spend a night.  Check it out if you can find it online or for cheap somewhere.

I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (2016)

2016
Directed by Osgood Perkins
Starring Ruth Wilson, Paula Prentiss, Bob Balaban and Lucy Boynton

Kids, this is one of those films that is very difficult to review.  Why?  Because...there's nothing.  And I actually mean that as a compliment.

Seriously, I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (and I'm going to try to keep mentioning that title to a minimum, because typing it is a pain in the ass) is one of the most low-key and downright MINIMAL films I've ever seen.  I've seen Roger Corman flicks that contain something like seven spears and five loincloths and manage to recreate the Roman empire, and this one has it beat.  See those four actors listed above?  They're pretty much the only people in this movie, but it's not just volume that we're talking about here.  It's everything.  Thus, if you want to see Lick Ness Monster play mental gymnastics, this is the review for you.

Just released on Netflix, this film (1-for-1 on not typing that title again!) is the brainchild of Osgood Perkins, son of legendary actor and Norman Bates himself Anthony Perkins.  He's directed a couple other movies, but I haven't seen nor even heard of them, so I'm not going to italicize them.  You know...Osgood.  Now that's a name that seriously needs to make a comeback.  If we had more Osgoods running around, I dare say that the world might just be a much more happy place.  And now I'm just talking out of my ass to prolong this paragraph.  So Osgood wrote this movie as well, and I've got to commend the guy, because this script couldn't have been any more than like 40 pages and he managed to get 90 full minutes out of it.  A classic example of the "less is more" concept that gives me a half chub if there ever was one...so, let's delve into the dark, slow, and slightly impenetrable world of I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House (that's two).

Stripped down to its barest essentials, the film is essentially a haunted house story.  A live-in nurse named Lily (Ruth Wilson) has just arrived at a rather sprawling residence to serve as the hospice care for aging horror novelist Iris Blum (Paula Prentiss, a former friend of Osgood's late father who came out of semi-retirement to do this mostly silent role).  See that last sentence?  That's almost all of the plot we get for the vast majority of the running time.  In this case, it's all in the spice and the presentation.  Fortunately, I can report that these are areas where Osgood really excels, along with the talent of his actors.

It's a good thing.  Keeping with the minimalism theme, the movie is also VERY sparse on both dialogue and background music.  If memory serves correctly, I can actually NAME the scenes that contain dialogue.  There's a bit early on where Lily calls one of her friends after arriving at the house while the camera conveys to the audience that something horrible is just out of frame.  There's the scene where Mr. Dalrymple from Seinfeld shows up as Lily's boss to give us all the exposition we need involving Iris Blum's most famous novel that may or may not be about the house's original residents.  And there's Lily's narration as she goes about reading the novel...or trying to.

See, Lily is kind of a wuss.  Her defining character trait is that she's skittish and afraid of everything.  The book in question is her Pandora's box, because she believes it to be connected to the strange noises that she hears at night in the house.  Why?  The earlier exposition involving Mr. Dalrymple, that' why, who explained that Iris explained that she wrote the novel not as fiction, but as it was dictated to her by a ghost that lived in the house.  And I think you know where it's going from here, especially since we'd seen some creepy flashback scenes earlier involving the original owners of the house.  What this film lacks in originality, though, it more than makes up for in execution and the tour-de-force performance from Wilson.

Quick side story: when I was a little bastard (like, 10 years old), I wrote a horror story for one of those "short story" assignments in school called "Fear of Blood" about a kid who finds himself facing off with a psycho killer.  The TWIST PART (proving that I, Jon Lickness, gave M. Night Shyamalan everything he knows) was that said kid had a crippling fear of cuts and blood.  Amazing writing, I know.  I even drew a title page for the story with big block letters dripping blood that probably got me more than one mention to the school doctor.  I mention this story because I wish this was a plot device used more in horror films - either a specific fear or a non-specific one that a character has to deal with in addition to the external threats, because it does WONDERS in getting us into a character.  Wilson does a fantastic job playing a scaredy cat, and because of this, we're fully in her corner.  +2 cool points.

So it goes with this movie.  Lily is able to read the book in roughly one-page increments, and, bit-by-bit, the haunting becomes more bold and pronounced.  It avoids the cliches of every other haunted house movie where the ghost starts to specifically target our heroine - it really does seem like we're dealing with your garden variety residual haunting (google that term if you're not a paranormal aficionado like me) in this movie instead of a malevolent one.  A lot of it is really clever, well-shot, and achingly tense.  And then the ending hits, one that is horrifying but left a sour taste in my mouth. 
As usual, it's probably just a case of me being a moron.  I'm sure that a film critic who knows their movies will tell you that the ending of this flick is all kinds of poetic, unexpected and awesome, and they're probably right.  And...I really don't know what I expected or how I would do things differently.  But I just wanted something different from what we got.  No spoilers here, and your mileage might vary.  The flick is easily viewed on Netflix for anyone interested, and it's something that I would actually heartily recommend despite how much I disliked the ending, because there's plenty to admire about this film.  There's atmosphere, there's creepiness in spades, and there's Ruth Wilson, who I really hope to see more from in the immediate future, because she's dynamite.

*** out of ****.  Check this one out, because it's creative, original and actually genuinely SCARY.  But...that ending.  Man.

The Legend of Hell House (1973)

1973
Directed by John Hough
Starring Pamela Franklin, Roddy McDowall, Clive Revill and Gayle Hunnicutt

The horror genre has many different flavors.  There are movies that actively try to creep you out.  There are movies that are all about throwing the most out there gore and syrupy makeup at the camera as possible.  There are movies that are almost bad on purpose.  And then...there is 1970s horror, something that deserves an entire row in the great Neapolitan taste profile of cinema.  Simply put, '70s horror is DARK, man.  A lot of them were about demons and devils, still more of them were mystery-killer flicks with out-there endings a la Dario Argento and Mario Bava, and quite a bit of them ended with some hint of the idea that evil had, in fact, won.  This was still a relatively fresh concept in horror at this time, and the shock of seeing a lot of this stuff as it unfolded must have been as startling as anything Platinum Dunes can throw at the screen with loud noise stingers.  '70s BRITISH horror amps up that darkness even more, and The Legend of Hell House fits this motif like a glove.

This flick really is a prime slice of what British horror is all about.  It's one of the rare ones that I've seen that isn't produced by either Hammer or Amicus; instead, it was distributed here in the States by 20th Century Fox and boasted what had to be an impressive budget for 1973 horror standards.  More than anything, though, it's got that unmistakable British horror glow (if it's accurate to use that word about this sort of thing).  There's lots of creepy atmosphere, lots of fog, soul-destroying synthy music, and plenty of sexy chicks parading around on the screen.  This film has one of Lick Ness Monster's personal favorites in Pamela Franklin, the sex kitten who first wowed audiences in 1969's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and later went on to appear in a small host of horror films.  Nonetheless, seeing her name in the credits gave this movie a +1 from the jump, and then the movie hits you with its story.

Hey, kids, you want to know why horror is the best genre?  Because, most of the time, there is absolutely no time for bullshit, unlike my reviews.  LIKE a lot of the movies I review, this one follows the "keep it simple, stupid" edict with getting a story together.  There's a rich guy who wants to learn about life after death.  There's a creepy old castle that is reputed to be the most haunted house in the world (actually said in the film).  And rich guy wants to hire a group of paranormal researchers to venture to the house and see if they can attain proof of the ghost world.  With that, it's off to the film's omnipresent Belasco House, named after family patriarch and supposed head-ghost-in-charge Emeric Belasco, where all of the movie's seances, happenings, and other assorted chicanery unfolds.

First things first - the atmosphere in this movie is fantastic.  The Belasco House is made up to the hilt, with director John Hough and his production team decorating the place with enough menacing colors and shadows that this set could have easily been used in a Gothic period piece film.  +52 additional Fonzie cool points to the movie in this regard.  But where the movie starts to fall short in a few areas is its surrounding characters. 

Make no mistake, The Legend of Hell House has a fantastic group of ACTORS at its disposal.  In addition to Franklin, you've got Roddy McDowall up on the screen doing his thing.  Weirdly enough, I'd never seen this guy in anything until the last couple of years, but now he seems to be popping up in everything that I'm watching.  A first-season Columbo episode, the pilot movie of Night Gallery...yeah, while the rest of the world cares about zombies and Game of Thrones, I'm all about '70s horror TV, baby.  Clive Revill and Gayle Hunnicutt are also good actors all things considered.  But with the exception of Franklin, it's the characters that they play that let the material down. 

So...Revill plays the leader of the group, a scientist named Lionel Barrett who quickly establishes himself as the unabashed and slightly annoying skeptic in this story.  He's accompanied by his lovely wife Ann (Hunnicutt), a character who is essentially just along for the ride and to provide some sexual tension later.  Oh yeah, spoiler alert.  But Barrett's aces are the other two - the pair of mediums, one a spiritualist (Franlin) and the other a physical manifester (McDowall, and yes, I know that "manifester" isn't even a word - deal with it).  The early goings of the film have Barrett and his mediums attempting to contact the spirits of the house and get their holy proof, an early sequence granting the audience an earth-shattering long glimpse of Pamela Franklin in her medium...um..."costume."  And it's glorious.

This movie is all about the slow build.  Fortunately, the middle portions pick up after introducing us to this group of mostly milquetoast characters as the movie becomes all about Florence Tanner, the younger medium played by Franklin.  See, Tanner is convinced that the house is haunted by many ghosts, including family members and victims of the notoriously cruel Emeric Belasco.  There's a fascinating little saga involving Tanner attempting to release an entity that she believes to be Belasco's son from his prison in the house.  The relationship takes on the air of a tragic romance at points, at one point even evolving to the point of Tanner stripping down to nothing and inviting the ghost into her bed to share some ghostly action with.  Much like the medium costume scene, it's a cinematic masterpiece.  While all of this is going on, McDowall is in the background, simply watching the proceedings.  His character was involved in a similar operation years ago that ended with everyone besides himself dead, so surely you can understand his apprehension.

If I haven't spelled it out enough already, there's a heavy undercurrent of sex to this film.  There's a curious subplot involving Revill's wife Ann consisting of scenes where the prim and proper scientist's wife, who may or may not be acting under the influence of the ghosts in the house, throws herself at McDowall and feverishly describes what she wants to do to him.  For his part, McDowall always throws her away, although this does cause tension with Revill.  Since I'm a moron, I'm unable to gleam any of the metaphor that the film-makers were going for here, so suffice to say, we've got lots more near nudity to play around with.  Trumpets from the heavens.  Supposedly, the sex was actually toned down quite a bit from the book that this movie was based on.  Said novel was also written by Richard Matheson, a guy who created, among other things, the awesome TV series Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which everyone should add to their Netflix list RIGHT NOW.

I realize that I haven't reviewed much of the plot of this movie, but really, it's not at all about plot.  It's all about the build, and that's a good thing, because the final trimester kind of flies off the rails.  We get a couple of quick character deaths followed by a wholly unsatisfying climax that involves lots of one particular actor doing a lot of shouting.  I won't reveal which actor this is...but really, it's a lot of shouting.  Figure it out. 

For all the things that this movie DOESN'T do well, it succeeds marvelously in crafting that sense of dread, something sorely lacking in most modern horror films.  That atmosphere is Richard Matheson's calling card; he wrote the script for this movie, adapting his own novel, and everything that I've seen with his name attached to it has that signature dark, foggy quality that looks like it could be appearing in the days of Jack the Ripper.  That dread makes up for the faults in The Legend of Hell House, along with the sheer conviction of its great cast.  British horror films from this time period are always a pretty safe bet to have great acting, because when you have David Warner, Peter Cushing, Pamela Franklin and Roddy McDowall at your disposal, you've got no excuse.  Yeah, it falls a little flat emotionally due to its weaksauce characters.  But I can guarantee that you'll remember this movie when it's over.  That's enough to get an endorsement from me.

*** out of ****.  Not an all-time classic or anything, but definitely worth a watch.  And hey...it's on Netflix instant as we speak.  Check it out.

Sorority House Massacre (1986)

1986
Directed by Carol Frank
Starring Angela O'Neill, Wendy Martel and Pamela Ross

I've seen something like 2,084 slasher films in my life, and Sorority House Massacre is definitely one of them.  We're off to a rip-roaring start with this review, aren't we? 

Flashback to the '80s, where there were a whole slew of "Massacre" titles released within a few years of each other.  Slumber parties, beach houses, nail guns complete with amazing evil laughing bad guy.  Name the locale or the weapon and we got it during this period.  This particular movie has a little bit of an interesting twist in that it was partially produced by the legendary Roger Corman and it has the incredibly rare quality of being both written and directed by an Honest-to-Christ FEMALE, one Carol Frank.  We need more female slasher directors.  Thus ends the Lick Ness Monster Women in Slasher Movies initiative.  With that background, I was actually pretty excited to click "Play" on this bad boy and let it unwind...but alas, it's not very good.

If you're even a casual fan of horror movies, you've basically seen this one before.  Let's break down what we're dealing with here.

SLASHER MOVIES FOR DUMMIES, as pioneered by the great John Carpenter (and perfected/ripped off by Sean Cunningham):

(1) The past evil, embodied by some bad incident from the days of yore that comes back in the present day;

(2) A group of good-looking kids in a cut-off environment;

(3) Various circumstances that ensure that the clueless adults can't help the kids in peril.

This would be Sorority House Massacre to the letter.  Slasher movies were a dime a dozen at this time, so you don't see a movie like this one for its subverting of genre rules or anything.  It's all about the execution.  Unfortunately, that's where the flick falls way short.

The main character is Beth, played by Angela O'Neil doing her best Jamie Lee Curtis impersonation.  As a kid, Beth survived a horrific murderfest propagated by her brother Bobby (John C. Russell).  Bobby is still in an asylum, and you can take three guesses as to who will crash Beth's party.  O'Neil is a decent-enough actress all things considered, but that might be slightly skewed considering what we're dealing with around her.  The plot has Beth at some college that I'm not even going to look up the name of on Wikipedia wanting to pledge to a sorority (shocking, I know) and spending her first few nights at the house.  The 74-minute run time leaves precious little moments to introduce all of the surrounding characters, and it's a good thing, because it covers all the bases of slasher movie stock characters quite well.  We've got the rich girl, the slightly bitchy girl, and the fellow nice girl who maybe-sorta might survive along with Beth at the end.  It's not really interesting, with the exception of...

AMAZING SCENE ALERT.  Roughly 20 minutes into the movie, Rich Girl leaves to do...something, I can't quite remember what.  T kill time, the other girls decide to invade her expansive closet and try on her clothes, complete with CLOTHES-TRYING-ON MUSIC MONTAGE.  If that wasn't great enough, throw in the quick cuts of clothes flying in the air in time with the music and you've got some George Carlin-esque levels of comedy.

See, Beth is having all of these weird visions as she walks around the sorority house.  Through some miracle, it's the same home that Bobby killed her entire biological family in, with the script using that convenient "she blocked it out" thing to write this inconvenience off.  There IS a little bit of a twist here in that Beth and her brother seem to have a psychic link, with the latter sensing that his surviving sister has returned to their home.  Which means that it's time to break out and start killing people.  It should also be said that his breakout scene involves such cunning tactics as waiting behind a desk with a zombified look on his face and then simply getting up, nailing a double axe-handle smash and leaving.  Not quite another Amazing Scene, but it's close.

I love horror movies, but I'll be the first guy to admit that riveting plots isn't why I (and many other people) watch a lot of them.  Some horror movies have deep, subtextual plots, but definitely far from a majority.  For most horror movies, it's all about the fun factor.  Sorority House Massacre is severely lacking in this with the exception of those two borderline hilarious moments that I've already mentioned.  There's no Tom Savini or Rob Bottin-level gore effects to gawk at, there's no creative kills (it's mostly just relatively bloodless stabbings), there's not even any Crispin Glover-style quirky side characters to get involved with.  And...oh yeah, that's right, all of the side characters' boyfriends show up halfway through the movie, and the whole thing becomes suicidally boring with romantic subplots for like 20 minutes just before the killing starts.  Which promptly killed most of the interest that I had with how this turns out.

When it was released, this movie got a lot of criticism for its similarity to Halloween, and it's a fair complaint.  It pretty much ripped everything right out of the John Carpenter playbook word-for-word, with the exception of the lead heroine's psychic link with her psycho brother.  What we've got here is Halloween with all of the atmosphere, awesome music, slow-burn murder sequences and likable characters removed.  So...Rob Zombie's Halloween, then.  Wow.  Amazingly, in Zombie's SECOND Halloween film, he even had his hick version of Laurie Strode do the "psychic bond" thing with Michael.  I think I'm on to something here.  Illuminati proof confirmed.

That's about all I've got to say about this one, other than what the killer LOOKS like.  As in, he's pretty much just a regular dude with a regular haircut.  Kind of funny considering the way-over-the-top weird faces and masks that populated this era, but it doesn't make the movie much more interesting.  Yeah, kids, this one wasn't exactly a classic, and the best part is that there were TWO MORE of these godawful things that I haven't watched yet.  * 1/2 out of ****.

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

1999
Directed by Ed Sanchez and Dan Myrick
Starring Heather Donahue, Josh Leonard and Michael Williams

I'll admit it - the new trailer got me.  When I saw that Adam Wingard was going to be directing a movie called The Woods, I was confused...yet interested.  So imagine my shock when the curtain gets pulled back from this film and we all learn out that it's actually a new Blair Witch movie.  All three of you who follow this series of masturbatory reviews know that my town of 13,000 people is currently bereft of a movie theater, so thus, making me drive 40 minutes to the nearest multiplex means I'm way more than just confused...yet interested.  Nonetheless, I was there for Blair Witch 3, ready to be riveted just like I was all those years ago when this flick hit me in the face in a movie theater.

Spoiler alert: It sucked.  But maybe that will be a tale for another day.

Confession time.  I hadn't watched the O.G. 1999 Blair Witch Project in something like 15 years, because it's actually one of the five or six movies that I won't watch by myself, at night.  I was far from the only one back then.  I still remember being directed to the web site for this movie by a friend in late '98, reading through that timeline and looking back at the "Missing" posters crafted for the three lead actors.  This flick had buzz, and it seemed to be everywhere in the early days of the internet.  Then came the first TV ads a few months later.  And then came that ungodly "Curse of the Blair Witch" documentary that aired on the Sci-Fi channel.  I don't think that anything had ever frightened me as profoundly in my life as that stupid thing did back when it aired.  I shit you not, I was up almost all night sweating bullets.  Of course, we all know now that all of this stuff was simply a brilliantly executed marketing tactic for this cheaply shot but chillingly effective film made by people who wanted to actually, you know, make movies scary again.  All these years later, I can report after another viewing that I still think they succeeded with flying colors.

This review is going to be a little different.  Don't expect my usual bit of waxing where I look at characters, three-act structure or gore FX.  This is going to be a blow-by-blow of how this whole movie came to be.

The Blair Witch Project was the creation of Haxan Films, in particular a couple of film students named Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez who noticed (correctly, IMO) that documentaries about serial killers and paranormal phenomena were actually way scarier than horror movies were in the '90s.  With no money and no investors on their side in the day and age when Roland Emmerich and Michael Bay were already on their way to killing popcorn cinema for good, they hatched on an idea that would combine that belief with storytelling - a faux documentary in the vein of The Legend of Boggy Creek, a.k.a. the movie where Charles B. Pierce went stumbling around the Arkansas sticks looking for Bigfoot.  Somehow, that film worked.  Surely, one about a friggin' murderous witch could.  Time to craft a background.

Now, anybody can go on Wikipedia and learn what they did.  The phony history of the Blair Witch was written, "documentary" footage was filmed involving some of the good people in Burkittsville, Maryland, and a trio of unknown actors trained in improvisation were hired to head off into the woods and get hunted down by an unseen force.  The Blair Witch Project was far from the first "found footage" film, but it DID invent the term, as the prologue contains the sentence "A year later, their footage was found" to describe what we see from the three student film-makers.  We've had something like 9,781 found footage movies in the years since (although, weirdly, the massive wave didn't come until a decade later starting with Paranormal Activity).  For my money, though, this is still the most effective of the lot by FAR, because everything they did to these people was, in effect, real.

The shoot started with a quick course given to the actors about how to use the film-making equipment, and then it was off to the very...um, wildernessy...wilderness of Maryland for what Myrick and Sanchez thought would amount to something like 20 minutes of their finished film.  Shooting mostly in Seneca Creek State Park, the actors were given GPS tracking devices and were fed coordinates every day to hike to.  Every day, each actor would be given a separate sheet with some very bare-bones instructions about how to act that day, along with directions to a milk crate containing food and supplies.  Everything that they did in between was completely improvised, with the actors staying in character pretty much 24-7.  Picturing the giant trailer that George Clooney undoubtedly retreats to every time he gets done looking down, looking up and squinting, it really does give you an appreciation for what these people went through.

The sense of suspense was heightened on the actors as each day ticked by.  They were given less food and more detailed, angsty instructions about the in-fighting between the characters.  By night, Sanchez and Myrick - along with partners in crime Gregg Hale, Kevin Foxe and Mike Monello - would do everything they could to get the actors to piss themselves on camera. 

This approach is what gives this movie its edge; in a sense, it really was all REAL.  There are things that take me right out of movies like Paranormal Activity, where we get the oh-so-convenient plot device of the demonologist guy who suddenly has to vanish for a conference just as the climax hits and that incredibly hokey ending of The Last Exorcism that turns the damn thing into a monumentally stupid movie.  For my money, the only thing in this movie that feels staged is the fact that it occurs to nobody to follow the river instead of just picking a direction to walk every day.  That decision is still a little iffy.

The film-makers crafted this story while looking at the dailies every night, and as this thing went on, they knew that there were about to be some big changes to their planned fake documentary featuring the story of the three kids who got lost in the woods.  They realized that what was happening in Seneca Creek was enough for an entire narrative story, and the plan started to involve less and less of the fake documentary that didn't quite crank it up to 11.  When shooting was finished and it was time to cut everything together, Myrick and Sanchez eventually decided to make the entire film the stuff that Donahue, Leonard and Williams shot, with the documentary getting recycled into the aforementioned "Curse of the Blair Witch" Sci-Fi special that terrified me to my very soul as a teen-ager who knew about this movie from its slick web site.

From there came the buzz.  And from there came the sale to Artisan Entertainment.  And from THERE came the marketing budget that dwarfed what this movie cost to make, and from there came the quarter of a billion dollar box office gross, contributed to by this guy.  I'll never forget sitting in the theater watching this tick by with rabid anticipation, hating Donahue's character along with everybody else and feeling the sense of dread sweep over that entire darkened room.  The movie closes with a slam-bang double-dose of classic scenes, as Donahue cuts that classic snot-covered speech that's been spoofed in a zillion crappier movies since and that chilling final shot.  End communication (/Kodos).

When this movie was released, it got a boatload of critical praise to go along with its Scrooge McDuck-esque box office haul.  But it polarized audiences; some, like myself, found the whole thing to be an ingenious concept pulled off to near perfection.  Others found it lame, a movie where nothing happens and were disappointed that the witch never shows up on camera.  To those people, I would point them to The Last Exorcism, 'cus that one has everything you're looking for and then some, believe me.  Nevertheless, all these years later, I was able to get somebody else to watch this flick with me after it sat on my DVD shelf untouched for a decade-and-a-half.  And it still holds up, just like it did in 1999 when this was one of just a few movies that has ever legitimately kept me up at night.

**** out of ****.  The granddaddy of all found footage flicks still has the title.  The kids out there are advised to give this one a watch, because it's a bigger mindf**k than any of the gazillion hidden-camera films that popped up post-2009.

Trollhunter (2010)

2010
Directed by Andre Ovredal
Starring Otto Jespersen, Hans Morten Hansen, Tomas Alf Larsen, Johanna Morck and Glenn Erland Tosterud

Polarizing review time.  Get ready.  I'm sure everyone is just hyperventilating with anticipation.

Trollhunter is a movie that gets a ton of praise in the online horror and fantasy communities.  Like, a real lot.  More than any recent movie that I've reviewed since The Babadook, and that's saying something, since the vast wave of reviews that came in for THAT particular film were nothing short of flat-out verbal orgasm.  Peruse the IMDB external reviews for this Norwegian found-footage flick and you're likely to read lots of stuff like "visionary," "hilarious," "triumphant," and, dare I say, "scrum-tralescent."  It's won awards, and not just the horror movie awards that don't count.  Real awards.  The kind that they have actual TV shows for.  Well, at least in Norway, where this movie was made.

And...I didn't like it.  At all.  Boring life and times of Jon Lickness break alert: I've been showing a friend as many classic horror movies as I can for the better part of two years now.  By this point, we've exhausted pretty much all of the main eventers (Jason, Michael, Freddy - but we still have Leatherface to go) and were looking for a break, so we decided to hit Netflix to see what they had.  I remembered that the guy who runs the Good Bad Flicks YouTube channel heartily recommended Trollhunter and it looked good based on his video exploring its production, so we decided to give it a shot.  The short version?  We both found the flick entertaining at points.  But...no substance.  And long stretches of boredom, unfortunately.

Yes, folks, this is a found-footage movie, made during the time when that particular trend was all the rage.  It's also Norwegian.  The last thing I ever expected to find in the archives of the great, grand horror genre was a Norse found-footage film, but rest assured, if you can think of a comedy sketch about a horror film, someone has made it for real.  Directed by Andre Ovredal on a fairly decent budget for a movie of this nature, it's clearly a semi-satire of the genre and has comedic elements to go along with its story about a dude who keeps the monsters of Norway at bay with his arsenal of high-tech weapons.  But most of it, for me anyway, falls flat.

The concept of the movie is undoubtedly pretty cool.  It's the how and why of getting there where the movie falls short.  Meet the main characters (unfortunately): a trio of college students doing a report on illegal bear poaching.  There's Thomas (Glenn Erland Toseterud), Johanna (Johanna Morck), and cameraman Kalle (Thomas Alf Larsen).  For everyone who bitches about the characters in The Blair Witch Project being dislikable asshats, check this movie out, it might give you a newfound appreciation for Heather Donahue's prolonged improvised bitchiness.  Oh yeah, upcoming review spoiler alert.  Thomas in particular was a character that I just could not stand, but I digress.  The group is doing a documentary about illegal bear poaching in the Norse countryside, and this is what brings them to Hans (Otto Jespersen).

Expectedly, this dude wants nothing to do with the camera crew, and justifiably so.  When one of them is Thomas...dude, I get it.  Supposedly, Otto Jespersen, the guy who plays Hans, is actually a reasonably well-known Norse comedian, and I'll take Wikipedia's word for it, because he's undoubtedly the most entertaining thing about the movie and easily the most likable character.  After a few close calls with the local government and a few bloody bear corpses are found, the film crew continues to follow Hans, where they find out that his actual job is to corral the army of gigantic trolls that live in the Norwegian countryside and occasionally kill the ones that wander outside of designated areas.  Wut.

I will give it to the movie in a couple places.  First, the special effects, considering the budget, are really impressive.  The trolls look more fluid and lifelike than just about anything you'll see in a Michael Bay movie.  Secondly, it handles some of the folktale aspects of trolls with a lot of cleverness.  In particular, the whole "turning to stone" thing and how it's accomplished is done in a really effective way.  But this is also where the movie loses its way, because for every cool little scene that we get involving Hans nuking the trolls, we get a bunch of boring exposition from scientists or doctors giving us every minute technical detail about the biology of trolls as animals or something that lessens the effect and derails the momentum that the movie had managed to achieve.  Since these scenes also involve spending more time with Thomas and his band of merry men and women, it's like a Monkey's Paw wish of epic proportions.

That's the story of the movie for me.  There are bits of it that I really liked, but for every one of those bits we get like 10 minutes of tedious explanation scenes.  All of the exposition, background and biology lessons take up what seems like a third of the running time of this movie, and it ain't no short one - at 103 minutes, it's LONG for a found-footage movie.  And since these characters are so one-dimensional and forgettable, I didn't give a shit about what happened to any of them.  There's a long sequence where the group find their way into the lair of a group of trolls that might have negative tension for this reason.  And the climax, involving a giant troll with some sub-name that I long ago forgot and refuse to look up on Google, is the drizzling shits. 

It's kind of a shame, because, again, this concept is cool.  I can't help but think that it would have been much better without the whole found-footage gimmick.  Supposedly, this might actually come to pass, because a U.S. remake has been in the works for a while.  I would be down for that, considering some of the possibilities.  Picture, say, Robert Downey Jr. in the Hans role.  I'd buy seven movie tickets, myself.  It's also a project that fits the definition of what a remake SHOULD be about, because there's plenty of stuff to improve upon.  Especially the characters.  Folks, these characters (again, with the exception of Hans the troll slayer) are middling at best and semi-hateable at worst, and they bog the whole thing down.  There's no tension because of them, and no sense of fear or dread in any of the troll encounters.  Fix that error, and everything else falls into place.  Book it, Vince.

With that, time to assign my annoying contrarian rating: * 1/2 out of ****.  Sorry, every film critic on YouTube.  I can't join in the fun and recommend this one.

The Wolf Man (1941)

1941
Directed by George Waggner
Starring Lon Chaney Jr., Claude Rains, Warren William, Ralph Bellamy, Patric Knowles and Bela Lugosi

So it's come to this.  The final review in Universal Monstober.  Kids, I've done my best to try to tell a story with this series of reviews, no doubt doing just as poor of a job as I do with pretty much everything else.  So P.S. apologies.  But for my legion of fans out there, let's sum it up.

I chose to review the "Mount Rushmore" of Universal Monsters this October.  We've already covered Dracula, Frankenstein and the Mummy, all of which released in either 1931 or 1932, all of which mammoth hits.  The studio kept cranking these things out throughout the '30s, but the short story is this: there were a lot of ups and downs for the Universal horror machine throughout this period.  Sometimes, the highs were glorious, like 1935's classic Bride of Frankenstein, a movie that many consider to be the absolute best movie in the entire "Golden Age of Horror" catalogue.  But then there were the valleys, some of which being financial disappointments in addition to being forgettable.  Trust me, it's the truth, and I'm not going to get into specifics because there's people out there (likely even some people reading this right now) who are way bigger Universal horror connoisseurs than me.  But then 1941 arrived, the lord blessed us with Lon Chaney, and horror was BACK, baby.

Confession time: I'd seen the previous three movies that I reviewed this month years before reviewing them here on the blog, but only bits and pieces of The Wolf Man.  I'd seen the 2010 remake, and really liked it up until the ridiculous CGI wolf battle ending.  So I'm reporting on this film with a fresh perspective, and folks...this movie lives up to every ounce of hype it has. 

For starters, it has an amazing cast.  Just check out those names that I listed above.  Every one of them was also cast perfectly, a cool feat in and of itself, particularly these days when producers just throw whatever names they can on the poster and expect that to desperately sell their crap film before it hits digital 3 months later.  Whoa.  Bitter much?  But this cast really does deserve harping on.  Emotion is key.  It's the key to everything that movies are about, because people, this is why we watch movies:  We watch them to fool ourselves into feeling emotions about things that aren't actually happening to us.  There are many ways to accomplish this, but the tried-and-true method is crafting likable characters, putting them in a perilous situation, and building up to a climax.  This is The Wolf Man.  It's back to basics in every sense of the word, and it's awesome.

The running time on The Wolf Man is 70 minutes.  Once again, it's all lean and mean, which leaves absolutely no time for extraneous bullshit, and I love it.  Meet Larry Talbot, played by Lon Chaney Jr. in legit one of the five or six best horror movie performances I've seen.  He's not as "steal the scene" crazy as Jack Nicholson in The Shining, this guy is all about relatability, so if you're looking for the Jimmy Stewart of horror, this would be it.  He's returning to his home in Wales to reconcile with his father, Sir John (Claude Rains, who is fantastic here - and someday I'll get around to reviewing the the Invisible Man flicks, I promise).  In screenplay terms, your first 10 pages (equivalent to 10 minutes of screen time) are very important, and the movie does a great job hooking you in here as we're introduced to pretty much every main character.  Larry is shown to be a very nice, amicable guy, an everyman in a strange land of decidedly non-Dee Snider proportions, and romantically interested in antique store clerk Gwen Conliffe.  She's played by the gorgeous Evelyn Ankers, and she's both interesting and fantastic to look at.  And then he buys that damn staff.

See, this staff is his in to talk to the clerk, and it has a wolf's head at the end.  From here, there are not just one but TWO crazy fortune-teller type characters, one an actual fortune teller (Maria Ouspenskaya in a landmark performance of weirdness), the other her son Bela (Mr. Lugosi himself).  In between that goodness, we get the romantic plot between Larry and Gwen.  Believe me, it has anything you've seen in the five thousand Twilight movies and every ripoff that came in its wake beat.  But then tragedy strikes as Larry rescues Gwen's friend from an attacking wolf, killing it with his new staff and boasting a brand new bite in the chest from the creature in the process.  Cue the ungodly gypsy woman cutting her promo on Larry telling him that strange, strange things are about to happen to him, and this is where the flick turns really sad. 

The Wolf Man is not scary.  Like, at all.  I've probably said this before in this series of reviews, but it bears repeating: you don't watch this movie for jump scares or to be creeped the fuck out afterward.  As part of the wave of what made up Ground Zero of horror, you watch a movie like this for a fascinating lesson in what storytelling is all about.  As a story, the movie works on pretty much every level.

People grade movies on different scales.  I'm a big structure guy, in addition to emotion.  And really, this script was just perfect by every criteria from a structure standpoint.  It hooks you in with the first 10 minutes on an emotional level, it has a clearly defined three-act structure, and the execution of everything is just amazing.  All of the actors give this thing their all, and it really does make me weep when I have to suffer through stuff in theaters nowadays boasting all of these performers who no doubt have every advantage over the performers from this era and still come off as slackerish emo drones.  The set design is again top notch, with eerie fog, creepy forests and even the dank city streets making up the landscape.  The makeup stuff on the Wolf-ified version of Larry isn't quite the legendary creation that Frankenstein's monster was, but it's still memorable enough.  And the ending really hits you in the gut, even if it is terribly abrupt like seemingly all of the other films from this era are.  Brief bitching moment: I've noticed that a lot of movies before a certain point seemed to just have their ending and then not have any kind of cathartic resolution.  Like, the final thing will happen, and then the credits just roll, and it happens ALL THE TIME.  Anybody else agree, or am I just weird?  But that's not really a complaint, it's just an annoying nitpick.

Thus concludes the first-ever Lick Ness Universal Monstober Review-a-Thon, and I award this movie **** out of ****.  Along with Dracula and Frankenstein, I can't think of a better way to spend your Halloween night.  As for me, I'm unfortunately taking the year off from candy duty on the greatest street in the history of streets this year since October 31st falls on a Monday and I have work at midnight.  That weekend, however, is going to involve lots of Universal monsters, lots of John Carpenter, and more Snickers bars than I can count.  Long live childhood, and happy Halloween.

The Mummy (1932)

1932
Directed by Karl Freund
Starring Boris Karloff, Zita Johann, David Manners, Edward van Sloan and Arthur Byron

No Encino Man in sight, kids. (/obligatory Brendan Fraser joke)

One year in to the great Universal horror movie project, literary monsters were already pretty much a craze.  People couldn't get enough of Dracula and Frankenstein the previous year.  Off moderate investments, Universal was raking it in off the backs of characters that were created something like 870 years ago.  There are some things that never change regardless of what era we're talking about, and just like today when Paranormal Activity comes along and we get something like 1,481 found footage films within the next few years, Universal kept cranking out horror movies.  With the two main eventers out of the way, they had to go scrounging for some other stuff.  Undead vampires and scientifically-created monstrosities are hard to beat, but they tried by introducing mummies into the lexicon.

Unlike the last two flicks that I reviewed here on the ol' blog, this one was NOT based on a play.  Instead, it was a totally original creation of screenwriter John L. Balderston, with cues taken from the opening of King Tut's tomb in 1922 and basically nothing else save for a few VERY loose pulls from an Arthur Conan Doyle story.  This time around, the material wasn't QUITE as strong as the stuff they had with the stage plays.  What this movie did have, though, was Karloff.

Ah, yes, Karloff.  The man who was so important in 1932 that they didn't even need to give him a first name on the poster.  Seriously.  Christ himself could have come down from the heavens and implanted his likeness on that poster, and Karloff would have still gotten top billing over him.  After playing Frankenstein, Boris Karloff was like Jesus and John Lennon's collective fame combined, which would also ironically not be the only time that those two would be mentioned in the same breath together.  Wait, what?  All bad jokes aside, Karloff's star was riding high at this point, and this was his movie, baby.  He owns it, he's onscreen a lot, he gets a lot of DIALOGUE in a very refreshing turn, and by all accounts this was where the dude truly cemented himself as one of horror's all-time best leading guys. 

In The Mummy, Karloff is your title character.  The plot, as it is, is given to us essentially within the first five minutes, as a team of archaeologists is in some indeterminate area of Egypt doing the stuff that archaeologists do.  There's lots of dirt, maps, and years being tossed around in the conversation, so you know it's important.  The body of Egyptian priest Imhotep is soon unearthed, and in one of the true "derp" moments in all of horror history, is immediately resurrected when the main characters read from an ancient magical scroll. 

Flash forward 10 years to the present day of 1932, where the main plot of the film unspools.  Something that I wish to comment on, at this point, is the subject of the horror movie romance.  A lot of folks who aren't into this stuff would be surprised by this, but romance is actually a pretty big part of horror history.  King Kong, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, the masterpiece that is The Return of Swamp Thing...the whole "monster in unrequited love with a woman" is one of my favorite tropes in this genre.  That's our story here, as Imhotep is now wandering around in Egypt under the assumed name of Ardath Bey to find his reincarnated long lost love.  Truly a realistic goal that anyone should aspire to.

Fortunately, this means that we get plenty of Karloff in this movie.  Whenever Ardath Bey is on screen, this movie is greatness.  Yeah, he gets to talk, unlike Frankenstein's monster.  But he's also very good at displaying emotion.  The whole movie hinges on audiences buying Imhotep's desire to find his bride, so Karloff nailing this character like he did was an absolute must. 

The subject of his affection: Helen Grosvenor, a young woman who bears a striking resemblance to his former bride Anck-es-en-Amon (forgive me if I'm wrong there; as of this writing, I just watched this movie a week ago and I'm not operating with Wikipedia benefits this time).  Zita Johann got the call to play Helen, and actually has fantastic chemistry with Karloff in their few scenes together.  Gotta say that I much prefer her to Fay Wray when it came to "romantic damsels in distress" from this period of horror history.  Thus, the whole tragic love plot of The Mummy is one that works very well, with the threat coming in the form of Imhotep/Ardath Bey's resurrection method.  How, you ask?  He has to kidnap Helen, kill her, mummify her and resurrect her with his dead wife's reincarnated soul.  Gruesome stuff, I must say.

What this movie DOESN'T deliver on as much as the previous Universal Monster epics was a well-rounded supporting cast.  The two main archaeologists are a couple of Keystone cops, and the heroine's good guy love interest, while he's a likable enough dude, isn't terribly interesting.  Whenever the movie has that "thrill of the chase" thing going on with the heroes, it loses a bit of steam.  Kind of like The Big Bang Theory whenever it's focused on anyone other than Sheldon.  Alas, there's no R.N. Renfield complete with amazingly creeply laugh equivalent in this film.

All things considered, though, The Mummy is still an effective, emotional little horror film.  Actually, "little" would be a pretty big misnomer, since this was another monster hit for Universal Studios in 1932.  The role that they were on with horror movies at this time was unlike anything that had ever been seen in the movie business at this point, and the public simply couldn't get enough gross-looking tragic monsters, unexpected romance and atmospheric settings.  That's something about this movie that I forgot to mention - the atmosphere is again off the charts, and the production designers on these films were John Matrix-esque commandos when it came to making these movies look ominous and uninviting. 

Rating time: I'll give this flick *** out of ****.  As sure as his name is Boris Karloff, this one is a Thriller.

Frankenstein (1931)

1931
Directed by James Whale
Starring Colin Clive, Mae Clarke, John Boles and Boris Karloff

Welcome back to the Lick Ness Monster October Universal MonsterFest.  Truly a title worthy of any marquee in in the universe!

Universal Studios expected Dracula to be profitable, but not the huge deal that it would become.  When it made enough in 1931 profits to buy a solid-gold island, it didn't take long for them to commission more horror films.  Thus was the beginning of movie studios viewing horror movies as a surefire, low-risk way to make some bucks and scare plenty of people doing it, but it really does stand out once again how much Universal really did seem to LIKE this stuff.  I don't sigh often, but this is truly one of those situations that is sigh-worthy, isn't it?  Can you imagine a movie studio thinking so much of literary horror monsters today that they would devote so much studio space to filming a bunch of them in a row?  Then again, movie studios these days are also pretty much extinct, since virtually nothing is actually filmed in California anymore, but I digress.  But while Dracula was a very successful flick, nothing could have prepared Universal for what was to come with the advent of the freakiest looking monster that cinematic audiences had ever seen in 1931.

Just like Dracula, this movie was based on a stage play rather than a strict adaptation of the original novel.  This move really was a stroke of genius by the Universal brain trust, because it meant that not only were things more filmable, it also meant that a limited number of sets needed to be built.  The basics of the Frankenstein story are here, and surely everyone knows this stuff: nutty, misguided doctor pieces together a human body out of dead people, brings it back to life, mayhem ensues, moral lesson at the end about tampering in God's domain or something. 

Yes, we've gotten movies that are much closer to the original novel.  1994's Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is probably the closest, but all these years later, this is still the definitive film version of Frankenstein for many.  Myself included.  What can I say, a lot of people have screw fetishes.  Clearly, this was also true back in the early '30s as this flick made something in excess of $12 million (which was ASTRONOMICALLY HIGH back then) off of its $200,000-some production budget.  I don't throw this word out there often, but that...is scrum-tralascent. (/Will Ferrell)

Yes, this movie does look like a big deal, but it starts in decidedly smaller moments.  Within roughly a minute of screen time, we meet pretty much every main principal human character.  Doctor Victor Frankenstein himself is played by Colin Clive in one of those performances that truly encapsulates the whole "mad scientist" subgenre of characters.  The basics are left intact from the book, as Victor has an assistant (named "Fritz" here, and his hunchback is truly the stuff of legend) and a fiance, Elizabeth (Mae Clarke), who is worried that the guy she is marrying spends so much time in a creepy watch tower.  Eh, don't worry about it, honey.  I'm just...thinking up here.  It doesn't take long for the movie to give us a true laugh-out-loud moment as Fritz manages to steal the WRONG BRAIN to put in the beast that they're pasting together from MacGyver-style used parts, resulting in a creature that doesn't quite behave the way the good doctor wants.

So yeah, ol' Victor is obsessed with wringing death from life and actually manages to do it (complete with lots of nifty electrical set imagery, special effects and that legendary "It's alive!" scene that I knew well as a fan of Weird Science).  But the movie really kicks it up a notch when the creature himself makes his first appearance.  Played by Boris Karloff, with makeup coming straight out of the 1931 population's nightmares, the character is an icon for a reason.  It might not have been quite what Mary Shelley intended when she wrote the book, as director James Whale definitely went for the more "shock and awe" approach.  In this reporter's opinion, the move paid off big time.  How?  This flick is in the godforsaken Library of Congress Film Registry.  So suck on it, accuracy Nazis.

After a couple close calls and a couple notches in the movie's body count, the creature escapes.  This is where the movie really shows its true power, as both the script and Karloff do a phenomenal job getting us to care about the monster.  Now, I'm not going to give everyone a fourth-grade level English class lecture about what we're going for here with this story, but it is a tragedy.  The middle portion of Frankenstein consists largely of the monster wandering around in the countryside interacting with various town denizens.  The BEST sequence in the movie consists of his meeting with a little girl where he learns to skip rocks.  Only little girls don't skip like rocks.  Really, really awesome, powerful stuff, but this is also the incident that clues the rest of the world in on the existence of the beast.  Time for the angry mob to grab their pitchforks...

Yeah, there's room to nitpick here with some of the script decisions.  The fact that Frankenstein escapes at the end has always sat at least a little wrong with me since his fate in the book seemed so much better and more poetic, but it really doesn't matter in the least bit.  This is a movie that's all about kinetic energy.  It starts off moving really fast and just keeps moving.  Not in the crappy way that Michael Bay likes to do it; this stuff actually makes sense.  It's refreshingly brisk at something like 75 minutes.  The horror stuff is all quick and relatively painless.  The emotional scenes hit just the right notes in that timeframe.  Even the performances have this really cool little sense of urgency, with everyone seeming to talk and move just a little faster than usual.  Karloff was so awesome here that he would parlay his fame from the movie into a career that lasted another 30 years, almost exclusively in the horror genre. 

In short, there's a reason why this movie has managed to stay popular for 70-odd years.  Yeah, it's a history lesson and you're not going to be pissing yourself in terror.  But in terms of history, you're not going to get much better than Frankenstein.  Oh, and I once carved a jack-o-lantern of Boris Karloff's creature face.  Yeah.  October. 

Without guilt, bah Gawd, I award this flick **** out of ****.  Everyone should check this movie out at least once in their life, because it's basically moviemaking 101.

Dracula (1931)

1931
Directed by Tod Browning
Starring Bela Lugosi, Helen Chandler, David Manners, Dwight Frye and Edward Van Sloan

Cue your Ozzy Osbourne song of choice.  October is finally here!

Yes, folks, Halloween season.  Samhain.  The celebration of the harvest, whatever you want to call it, the most glorious time of the year has arrived, and we're ringing it in with style here on the Lick Ness Monster blog.  I'm sure that all...eight of my subscribers will appreciate it.  Kidding aside, this month will always have a special place in my heart for reasons that I've waxed rhapsodic about endlessly already.  You all know about the Greatest Street in the History of Streets that I grew up on that still gets 1,000+ visitors every year on October 31st, my past with the Friday the 13th series and how it quite literally saved my life in 2007-08, my ten favorite horror villains, every movie in the freakin' Halloween franchise.  Yes, folks, we've had some good times here on the blog over the years.  And now, we're covering pretty much ground zero of American horror films - the Universal Monster Movies.

Now, I know some people who are just absolute connoisseurs of the Universal House of Horror.  For the uninitiated, this was pretty much IT when it came to horror in the golden era of Hollywood.  Universal Studios had the rights to do the movies to all of the big literary monsters at the time, and while they weren't quite as much of a factory as Britain's Hammer Studios would be in the '50s and beyond, they cranked these things out at a pretty impressive rate.  Sequels, spinoffs, crossovers, even parody movies, they did it all with these classic characters.  Thus, while the movies aren't all that scary today, they're worth watching for the history lesson alone.

Fortunately, they're worth watching for much more than that, because I highly doubt that anyone reading this besides myself watches these flicks for their historical context.  Hell, most people on Facebook seem to exclusively care about baby pictures and food selfies.  So if you're looking to have fun, these movies are also a good place to start.  Watching these films today, it immediately becomes clear just how PROUD Universal Studios was of this output.  It's not like back in the '80s, when Paramount was so embarrassed by Friday the 13th that a book was eventually released where just about everyone involved in it did nothing but trash the thing.  'Cus, you know, you're all such amazing actors that getting killed by Jason is what you're best known for.  Not so here.  These movies had big budgets, big promotion, big casts, slick scenery, you name it.  It was all in the presentation, and it would only get better with time.  But every dynasty has to start somewhere, and it started in 1931 with a director named Tod Browning and the first truly epic film version of Dracula.

There had been Dracula flicks before this one, but...well, they sucked.  They were either silent (color me uncultured, but I just can't get into silent movies) or bad.  Universal pulled out all the stops with this one, taking a script based on a 1924 stage play, trotting out character actor extraordinaire Bela Lugosi as a Svengali-esque titular vampire, and a whole lotta fog.  And that would make a hell of a Led Zeppelin song (/bad joke).  Pretty much any Dracula movie comes down to four elements: (1) The dude playing Dracula; (2) The way that the writers decide to interpret Bram Stoker's original novel; (3) The supporting characters; and (4) The atmosphere.  Having said that, let's look at how it played out on the big stage here.

You'd be hard-pressed to find to find many critics out there who express anything other than the utmost respect for Bela Lugosi here, and it's well-deserved.  The movie is far from a direct interpretation of the book; that much is established when the guy's all-powerful telepathic ability becomes his biggest superpower early in the film.  Simply put, Lugosi is money.  Every time the guy speaks, you believe every word he says.  That's another thing about watching old movies - the acting was much more theatrical and unrealistic, but it's infinitely more memorable.  Bela Lugosi is memorable, amazing, and projects just the right amount of menace.  If you've seen the movie Ed Wood, you know how the guy eventually turned out in real life, and it lends watching this movie a little sadness that actually ADDS to the poignancy.  +2 cool points for Bela Lugosi.

The story.  What sets this movie apart from everything that came before and after was how much of a focus it has on the Renfield character.  In this movie, he's played by the unreal Dwight Frye, and he has the greatest creepy laugh in the history of cinema.  People who have read the book know the basics of the Dracula story, so I won't reiterate it here, but it's Renfield who gets the focus instead of Harker in the early goings before setting up shop in a sanitorium that oh-so-conveniently adjoins Carfax Abbey, Dracula's new digs in London.  Mina is now Dr. Seward's daughter, she is still engaged to Jonathan Harker, and Lucy is still the family friend who becomes Dracula's first victim.  However, there's a big focus on the unsavory side of Victorian life in this go-round as the sanitorium becomes one of the movie's key locales.  It's different, but it works.  Oh, and in addition to Dracula turning into a bat and sucking blood, he constantly hypnotizes people with his creepy stare.  And the vampire killer himself, Dr. Van Helsing?  Yeah, he's here, and he's just as much of an ass-kicker as ever.

Moving on, we focus on the characters.  Personal opinion here, but I think there was a point in cinema history (probably sometime in the '50s) when the art of fleshing out characters truly hit its stride.  Thus, we have paper-thin cardboard cutouts here, but they're paper-thin cardboard cutouts that are played with plenty of energy and zeal.  Edward Van Sloan was especially good as Van Helsing  The only person who I didn't respond to strongly here was David Manners as Harker.  For some reason, I've never seen a truly good portrayal of Harker on film.  Ironically, the best might actually be Steven Weber in the freakin' Mel Brooks parody movie.  Other than Lugosi, though, I gotta go back and give more props to Dwight Frye's performance as Renfield.  So much focus is put on him, and he was totally up to it, not caring in the least about acting - and looking - like an ass.  Seriously, this guy cranks up the grease to Philip Seymour Hoffman levels, and he doesn't even care.  Can't give him enough 85-years-late kudos.

Finally, let's look at the atmosphere.  I've touched on it already, but we got glorious black-and-white darkness, fog, and visuals that just look like a funeral dirge.  It works really well with all of the stuff in the sanitorium, although, I'll confess, it doesn't hold a candle to the sheer Gothic madness of the Hammer Dracula films.  Personal preference, glandular condition, call it whatever you want.

Overall, this is a really fun, really QUICK (the running time is 70 minutes - I wish more modern movies would take this example) watch that you can pop in any ol' time and be entertained.  *** 1/2 out of ****, and it's nothing if not a very solid start to a very solid line-up of classic monsters.  And we're just getting started...