Killer Legends (2014)

2014
Directed by Joshua Zeman
Starring Joshua Zeman and Rachel Mills

It's a first here on the blog - an Honest-to-Christ Documentary.  Not only that, it's pretty damn good!

Sometimes it's funny the things that you unearth on Netflix without even actively looking for it.  Killer Legends popped up in the "Recommended for You" section, and I've got to hand the automaton drones at this faceless company credit, because they picked out a good one.  The subject of urban legends has always been one that I've been fascinated by, dating all the way back to my childhood love for the "Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark" books and those amazing illustrations that used to haunt my nightmares.  A lot of the stories in those books could be classified as urban legends.  And then the movie came out, complete with one of the worst ending twists of all time.  Fortunately, Joshua Zeman is ALSO fascinated by this subject, and has rescued this stuff in perhaps the best way - telling us stuff that's real.

Real life is scarier than fiction 99 times out of 100, and this flick is living proof.  With that, the movie.

It's a documentary with a simple crux.  Take four legendary Urban...um...Legends, and tie them in with some creepy true crime stories of the past that may or may not have inspired the stories in the first place.  Writer-director Joshua Zeman is the main man in front of the camera, along with researcher Rachel Mills.  Both are immensely engaging and likable, and while they might be on screen a BIT too much, they don't hammer you over the head with their presence.  Presentation wise, it's kind of like Law and Order meets a slasher flick, and I mean that in the good way.

The story of the escaped mental patient with a hook for a hand is explored first.  Welcome to Texarkana, where a legendary serial murer spree took place in the 1940s that remains unsolved to this day.  It really was the classic "lovers' lane" murder scene brought to life, as a dude that the press dubbed the "Phantom Killer" attacked and killed several parking teenagers over a three-month period.  If these incidents sound familiar, there's a reason for it, as this was the basis for the 1976 Charles B. Pierce movie The Town That Dreaded Sundown.  Now THAT's a flick that I really need to get around to reviewing.  This segment consists of some very fascinating stuff, exploring both the murders and the town of Texarkana's to-this-day fascination with the murders and the film that made them famous.

Next up is the story of the Candyman, complete with sections of the 1992 masterpiece to remind us what we're dealing with.  This segment, however, is more concerned with some literal candy and the story involving children being handed razor-bladed or poisoned Halloween candy.  The narrative leads us to one of the most tragically evil things I've ever seen.  Ronald Clark O'Bryan's son turns up dead after eating a pixie stick, and a furor erupts when O'Bryan asserts that the candy was poisoned.  Well, it WAS poisoned...by O'Bryan himself, in a heinous insurance fraud plot.  This segment tells the true story masterfully, weaving the insightful comments from Zeman and Mills in seamlessly with archival footage of the O'Bryan trial and interviews before his execution.  Electric stuff all around.

The creep factor turns up another notch with the next story - the Babysitter Killer.  Once again, film footage lulls us into the narrative, with stuff from When a Stranger Calls, Halloween and Black Christmas setting the mood.  Zeman and Mills then travel to a small Missouri town where two unsolved rape-murders took place in the 1950s.  Both involved babysitters, and both were absolutely brutal.  We get an autopsy photograph of one of the victims that will stick out in your mind after you turn out the lights.  We DO get some social commentary here, as the fact that both victims' deaths were blamed on a pair of African-American criminals who were most likely innocent of the murders is explored.  This did take me out of the movie a little bit, but it's a minor complaint.  Another winner.

And then we get the most fashionable nightmare fuel this side of the zombies that I'm still sick to death of.  Ladies and gentlemen, creepy clowns.  I wasn't even aware that there is a story circulating in the Chicago area that there is a gang of clowns abducting children.  Now I do, and now I'm terrified.  As opposed to focusing on any one particular story, we get several tracing the journey of the clown from happy-go-lucky Three Stooges clone to something with an actual phobia name.  Bozo the Clown's haunted TV set and John Wayne Gacy are explored in depth, but the story that really hits a home run is the tragic tale of Showmen's Rest, the final resting place of many clowns and circus performers who burned to death after a train accident.  One word can describe that idea: BRRRRRRRRR.

It's been a while since I've seen a scary film that made me type out such a prolonged praise dump.  I never would've dreamed that it would come from a documentary.  Zeman deserves a ton of credit for his approach to this material; in the hands of a lesser director, it really could have read like a boring history lesson.  But the presentation, the hosting, the investigation and most especially the choice of chilling background music makes for some extremely riveting, scary stuff.  The standouts are the story of Ronald Clark O'Bryan and the visit to Showmen's Rest, but you'd be really hard-pressed to find much in Killer Legends that will bore you.  And if you watch it at night like I did, it'll scare the daylights out of you.

*** 1/2 out of ****.  Highly recommended for people who like some true-life with their scary stuff.  Hell, I'll recommend it even if you don't.

The Prophecy (1995)

1995
Directed by Gregory Widen
Starring Christopher Walken, Elias Koteas, Virginia Madsen, Eric Stoltz and Viggo Mortensen

Alright, kids, it's time to take another AVGN-style trip back to the past.  The Prophecy was a movie that got a fair amount of hype back in 1995.  It was a Miramax movie, and the Weinstein bribe-the-press factor was in full force for this one.  The advance raves were pretty...uh, ravey, with critcs by and large treating this WAY better than your average fantasy-horror film.  And it had Christopher Walken in one of his legendary Saturday Night Live hosting gigs to promote it.  If I remember correctly, it was even a season opener.  So this movie's name was definitely out there.

To be sure, it's a very well put-together little flick with an enormously appealing main hook: former seminary student who loses his faith finds himself in the middle of a modern-day war between the angels in heaven, with the fate of humanity at stake.  It's also got an amazing cast of actors (seriously, look at that list above - it's got Christopher Walken, Virginia Madsen, Casey Jones, Brundlefly II and Viggo Mortensen when he's not being a douchebag) all of which do anything but sleepwalk and give this material every ounce of emotion that they could muster.  Ordinarily, I'd be all over this sort of thing.  Thus, it's kind of a mystery why this one fell a little flat with me.  Or maybe I just need to stop watching movies on Friday morning after I've been through an entire work week on something like 12 combined hours of sleep.

Actually, I CAN pin the blame on one thing.  This movie takes a LONG time to get going.  Something like 45 minutes into the movie, it still felt like it was setting everything up.  Secondly, it's got a SLOW pace.  And when I say slow, I mean SLOOOOWWWWW.  That can be great when you're dealing with a movie that has sporadic bits that are really scary.  While there are parts of The Prophecy that are definitely tense, it's not going to make you piss yourself in terror.  So two strikes there. 

While Walken's name is the first on the marquee, it's Elias Koteas who is your star here.  The opening gives us a ceremony inducting two young men into the Priesthood.  Thomas Dagget, Koteas' character, can't bring himself to go through with it after seeing horrific visions on the altar.  Flash forward several years, where Dagget is now a detective with the LAPD who finds himself investigating a series of bizarre, mutilated, supernatural f**ked up dead bodies, many of whom are affected in some way by angels.

Angels, you ask?  Why yes.  Angels.  The first of these we meet is Simon, with Eric Stoltz in full Pulp Fiction hippie mode.  We start to get the basis for the conflict between the angels.  It seems that one faction, led by the ever-so-gaunt and ever-so-influential Gabriel (Walken), were none too happy about God's (capitalized because it's God, bitches) decision to give human beings souls, leading to some very unsightly heavenly congestion.  Simon, however, continues to serve obediently.  The main crux of the storyline involves finding the dead body of a sadistic Korean War veteran, with Simon hiding this guy's soul in the body of a little girl while Gabriel needs to possess the soul himself to increase his power on the Earth realm.

Speaking of Gabriel, yup, it's Christopher Walken in full-on villain mode.  As always, he's awesome, with his start-stop vocal delivery and impeccable physical mannerisms owning this role every time he's onscreen - which, actually, isn't very much.  I'd say he's far less featured than Koteas, Stoltz and Virginia Madsen's characters, with the freakin' little girl who plays "hide the soul" also getting a fair amount of camera time.  This would be another strike against the movie, as it seems like The Prophecy suffers a little from "too much going on" syndrome.  Proof?  I haven't even mentioned Madsen's character yet, a teacher who contributes very little to the plot other than befriending the girl who is now in hiding from Gabriel.  Or Adam Goldberg as a suicidal loser who Walken recruits to help him out in his mission.

Now, the movie DOES pick up when Mortensen shows up as a surprisingly helpful Satan, with Koteas also suddenly becoming a lot more important to the goings-on.  I actually wish that the movie had focused a bit MORE on Thomas Dagget; it's a very sympathetic and fascinating character, and I'm always a big sucker for the "recovering faith" plot in movies like this.  I don't know.  As big of a fan as I am of Virginia Madsen, I'd say that her screen time could have easily gone to Koteas here and nobody would have really noticed.  But I'm getting off track.  The third act, with the s**t hitting the fan and Gabriel's army causing all sorts of chaos.  But boy, is it a long build to get there.

This is definitely a strange movie, one that I can actually commend Gregory Widen for his ability to take on such a huge subject.  It's not the most coherent story in the world; at times, it's pretty damn confusing and we're left to kind of guess what's going on.  When it's on, it's on, and that would be anytime Walken is onscreen pontificating on the nature of human beings (or "THE MONKEYS" as he refers to them) or the sporadic fights between the angels that lead to severely mutilated bodies.  Unfortunately, though...that build.  That meandering, meandering build.  If you're sleepy, watch the first half of this movie, because it's guaranteed Zquil.

** 1/2 out of ****.  I'd recommend it for a watch if you're into more religious-themed horror like I am, or if you're a big fan of Christopher Walken.  But this one leaves a LOT of its amazing potential on the table, and that's kind of depressing.

Ghostbusters (1984)

1984
Directed by Ivan Reitman
Starring Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Sigourney Weaver, Harold Ramis, Rick Moranis and Ernie Hudson

Yeah, yeah, I know.  It's not a horror movie, yada yada yada.  But I'm reviewing it anyway, because (a) it's got more legit frightening things in it than a lot of horror flicks that I HAVE seen, and (2) it's my blog and it has 7 followers.

Well, maybe you've seen it and maybe you haven't, but the trailer for the upcoming Ghostbusters remake is out there.  To put it bluntly, yeah, it hasn't gone over very well.  The negative fan reaction has been both passionate and hilarious, and the official trailer video itself has more dislikes than likes.  And there's no point in dilly-dallying around it: it's justified, because the movie looks f**kin' atrocious.  All the charm - gone.  All the intelligence - gone.  All the sense of fear and dread - gone, and then some.  That, and it looks like Leslie Jones is simply going to be screaming all of her lines.  The whole trailer makes the movie look like a sledgehammer to the head, and it's a sledgehammer that's nowhere near as much fun as one that Triple H would wield (/tomatoes).

Enough about that.  Since fans are so upset about the way that this movie looks, it clearly must mean that the original movie is beloved.  Well, it is, and for good reason.  1984, a prime original cast Saturday Night Live group of cutups, fantastic handmade special effects, enough quotable lines to choke a donkey, it's awesome.  See that poster above?  Simple, classic, and utterly effective, as the hype that this movie had in the buildup to its release built to a fever pitch.  The result?  A $250 million box office gross on a $30 million budget, a place in the National Film Registry, and getting the 2016 Paul Feig bastardized remake treatment.  So what works so well in this movie?  Let's take a look.

Meet misfit parapsychologists Peter Venkman (Murray), Ray Stantz (Aykroyd) and Egon Spengler (Ramis).  Each of them has an instantly recognizable personality that fit their actors like a glove.  You'd guess that Murray would be the wiseass, Aykroyd is the deadpan scientist, and Ramis is the eccentric nerd, and you would be correct on all counts.  Each of the main three is awesome here, but Murray particularly devastes, especially in that classic opening scene with his character where he conducts an ESP experiment that consists of him shocking the hell out of a poor sap while doing his best to weasel a date out of the other test subject.  It's one of at least 10 classic comedic sequences contained in Ghostbusters, and it's all built around the characters and their intelligence.  If you're in the mood to laugh, look no further than this flick.

After capturing video (and some ectoplasmic slime, which Venkman eloquently states is like blowing your nose and keeping it) of a ghost at the New York Public Library, the guys summarily lose their University grants and are forced to take their knowledge and skills into the real world.  But Venkman has a plan - they've collected enough data to be able to actually trap ghosts.  His idea - professional ghost eliminations, and a potential massive franchising opportunity. 

The movie turns into loads of fun in a hurry.  Staking their headquarters in an abandoned firehouse, the movie starts hitting its marks fast and furious.  The first elimination is an ungodly sequence in an expensive hotel with a legendary ghost based on John Belushi himself.  They use weaponized nuclear blasters to stun and trap the ghosts, traveling around town in a beat-up hearse vehicle complete with an overloud siren.  Kids in particular just seemed to really connect with this aspect of the film, as this job looked like all kinds of fun to...well, pretty much anyone in my age bracket.  Yeah, I had the toys.  More than a few of them, in fact. 

That's the basics, but it's in the particulars where Ghostbusters really shines.  Underneath the frenetic action and comedy stuff with the Ghostbusters going about their job, there's also a fantastic overarching plot.  Dana Barrett (Sigourney Weaver, aces here as always) is experiencing all kinds of trouble in her Central Park West apartment.  It starts out showing us very little - brief glimpses of bizarre dog-like demons in her refrigerator of all places.  Dana becomes the team's first client and a romantic interest for Venkman, and also the beneficiary of the movie's most scary sequences. 

Now, the ghost librarian in the intro scenes scared me enough as a kid, but those demon dogs...yikes.  They haunted my nightmares.  Watching this flick today is a wistful experience for that reason, as it hearkens back to the times when a big-budget action-comedy like this also wasn't afraid to do things that might, you know, scare people.  Especially kids.  Despite my own frightened states, I popped this VHS tape in the VCR something like 100 times as a kid.  As the incidents pile up, Ray and Egon are able to research Dana's building and find out that it was built as a vortex to summon an evil deity known as Gozer into the modern world.  The purpose?  The end of the world, and it all goes down soon.  Along with recent recruit Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson, who does a great job as the guy who explains the Ghostbusters' techno-jargon to the layman audience), it all builds to a final showdown at the top of this Gothic skyscraper with the scariest androgynous demon chick in cinematic history.

There's so many classic touches in this flick that it's hard to list them all.  Dana has a nerdy neighbor played by Rick Moranis who might be one of the five or six funniest characters in movie history, an accountant named Louis Tully who blathers on endlessly about the money that he saves by inviting strictly clients to a party and using it as a tax write-off.  We get a fantastic little story of misplaced identity when Gozer's demonic minions possess both Dana and Louis, leading to stuff that's simultaneously disturbing and comedic.  And then there's the slimy human villain, an EPA bureaucrat played by the pest-like William Atherton.  This dude is like WWE's Hornswoggle times a thousand; he's oh-so-hateable, and it's great.

Really, the whole movie is great.  At the end of the day, it's also a textbook example of classic three-act structure, with the added bonus of having immensely likable characters, funny jokes and thrilling action stuff.  Oh, and it's got stuff that will scare the bejeebers out of kids, but do it in a way that keeps them coming back for more.  There were a ton of really talented people involved in the making of this movie, and director Ivan Reitman claims that roughly halfway through filming, he realized they were in the midst of something special.  That confidence is apparent throughout the entire running time, because Ghostbusters devastates like an unlicensed nuclear accelerator.

**** out of ****.  One of my ten favorite movies of all time, and a certified classic with loads of soul and edge.  Check this one out.

Friday the 13th Part V vs. The Veil: Bad Movie Smackdown

It's times like this that I really wish I was good with Photoshop, because the WWE-style match graphic that I have in my head for this one...let me tell you, it's something.

Folks, in the horror genre, there's a lot of shit movies.  I don't think this is a secret to anyone, even to myself and fellow geeks LIKE myself who actually enjoy this stuff.  But this is what makes us the most loyal, awesome, heralded group of crazies out of any entertainment genre.  We'll suffer through anything - ANYTHING - to get to the good stuff.  And I've seen some crap.  For every Shining, there's a hundred crap found footage movies that you have to sit through first.  However, in running the gauntlet of all of this cinematic excrement, sometimes, you find that extremely rare gold nugget at the top of the heap - the Good Bad Movie.

Those Good Bad Movies might even be the most fun flicks out there, because you can watch them for more purposes than just the educational, stuffy English major purpose.  You can take in the bad dialogue and plot twists, throw snide comments at the screen, even have a fun evening laughing at them with friends.  *raises hand* Done this.  Many times.  So today, we're going to do a little experiment.  We're going to take a couple of bad horror movies that I've seen - one from the awesome '80s, and one from the post-ironic 2000s - and compare and contrast in terms of Good Bad Movie traits.

I think.  This might work, or it might be a total train wreck.  Enjoy!

THE MOVIES:

Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning - Released in 1985, this is (obviously) the fifth go-round in the slasher franchise that was reviled by pretty much every critic then and now.  Jason Voorhees is dead.  Like, really, for reals, as in they intended for him to be gone for the rest of the series.  Plotwise, this flick is more of the same, as we get an impostor killer (spoiler alert) offing a bunch of oversexed and annoying teens at a halfway house, with the surviving kid from Part IV serving as our main hero.  In between, there's the whole mystery angle of who the killer is that ends in one of the most hilarious non-surprises in movie history.

The Veil - Brand spanking newly released to Netflix, it's 2016 and it's a slick flick (slick flicks - I should copyright that) about a suicide cult and the people that it affects.  We've got two alternate timelines, as the nutbag leader of the Heaven's Veil group (subtle, I know) launches the biggest mass suicide in U.S. history.  Years later, the one survivor returns to the site along with a film crew.  The leader of this crew is also affected to the massacre, as her father was one of the FBI team members who raided the complex.  Commence series of creepy ghostly stuff, a lot of which was meant to take place as a found footage movie.


THE CHARACTERS:

Friday V - Boy, oh boy, does this movie have a lot of them.  First and foremost is Tommy Jarvis, the aforementioned survivor from the previous movie, played by John Shepherd and speaking something like 15 words in the movie in between bits where he beats the shit out of people.  We've got two nymphomaniac kids who wander off into the woods to get slaughtered as my favorite victims in the film, and that endless scene that establishes fat kid Joey as a likable oaf only to off him minutes later.  As for developed people, though, we've also got Reggie "The Reckless," a heroic 10-year-old who gets all of the movie's best lines.  And I remember all of these people by name.

The Veil - To be sure, this movie has some big names on its marquee.  Jessica Alba plays Maggie Price, the leader of the crew and daughter of the FBI agent who committed suicide shortly after raiding the Heaven's Veil complex.  And she's...pensive?  And inquisitive?  Those are traits.  Sarah Hope is the now-adult former member of the cult returning to the defunct camp who wants closure because the script tells us so.  Undoubtedly, the best character is the leader of the cult - Jim Jacobs, a colorful-to-the-max dude played by Thomas "How am I not a Bigger Deal?" Jane.  The rest of the dudes on the film crew are just actors thinking about Alba's Maxim shoots.


THE CHEESY STUFF:

Friday V - New Beginning is well known for its gleeful, almost blackly comedic tone, and this is where this movie becomes loads of fun in a crowd setting.  Time and time again, this movie will introduce characters, establishing clearly defined but simple traits only to off them minutes later.  It's ALMOST an intentional running joke, but not quite, and that makes it great.  But it doesn't get any better than Ethel and Junior, the two random hillbilly characters living near the halfway house who really, really hate all those crazy folks up in the hills and serve as the worst red herrings that you've ever seen in anything ever.

The Veil - Now, there's a lot of cheesy stuff contained within this flick.  The unfortunate part?  It's not easy to write about.  There's lots of jump scares, there's lots of insipid dialogue, and there's completely one-note, boring characters.  Yes, folks, I just dropped the 'B' word.  Confessions of an anal fanatic: I like my paragraphs in "list" posts like this to look pretty uniformly equal in Notepad, so thus, I'm just typing a bunch of sentences for the sake of length now.  The catch?  There really isn't much more to say about The Veil, and all of the cheesy stuff is jackrabbits Adele pancakes diorama.


THE MEMORABILITY FACTOR:

Friday V - Recently, I showed a friend of mine all the Friday movies in succession.  Months afterward, he still remembered Demon's "You're gonna get it, bitch!" line and quoted it to me randomly.  I don't know too many people who have watched New Beginning without remembering some of its quirks, no matter how bad some of them might be.  Who's Demon, by the way?  He's Reggie's Michael Jackson-impersonating brother played by Juwanna Mann himself.  How is that not memorable?

The Veil - To be sure, I remembered the HELL out of Thomas Jane's performance as Jim Jacobs.  Every time this dude is onscreen, he nails it.  According to the ever-accurate Wikipedia, he even rewrote all of his character's dialogue.  It shows.  Everything else, pretty much, is instantly forgotten the second the movie is over.  There's jump scares, there's a by-the-numbers story, and there's a resolution that qualifies as yet another of those "ugh" modern horror movie endings.


THE VERDICT:

Without a doubt, New Beginning is almost the dictionary definition of a Good Bad Movie.  Technically, it's pretty terrible.  But it doesn't matter in the least bit, because it's just so much fun to watch.  Bad characters, bad acting, an insanely telegraphed main twist ("you talkin' to me, Sherriff?"), and a downright stupid amount of kills = fun. 

The Veil, on the other hand, really is indicative of a lot of what plagues modern horror movies.  It's competent, it's decently acted, it's got a carefully constructed plot.  In other words, it's just clinical.  Movies these days don't seem to have any grand ambition - they just go through the motions, content to just NOT SUCK and calling it a day.  It bothers the hell out of me that the people have set their bars so amazingly low that "not sucking" is now considered good entertainment, because this movie is not entertaining. 

Believe it or not, Friday V had a grand ambition - it wanted to set up the next killer in this massively successful slasher series.  Since we were right back to Voorhees in the next go-round, it's safe to say that if failed big time.  But in this reporter's opinion, those massive strikeouts are way more entertaining than bunt singles.  Thus, the whole time that I was watching The Veil on Netflix, all I could think was how much I'd rather be watching the worst Paramount Jason flick.

And you ain't so good lookin' yourself, ya know.