Veronica (2017)

2017

Directed by Paco Plaza
Starring Sandra Escacena, Bruna Gonzalez, Claudia Placer, Ivan Chavero and Ana Torrent

It's pretty fitting that the final movie that I'm reviewing comes with Hype.  Capitalized because there was a lot of it.  It had been a LONG time since I heard about a movie strictly via word-of-mouth, with the kind of hushed tones usually reserved for kids telling other kids about how to summon the Candyman.  I heard about this flick from a small group of coworkers - none of which had seen the film, and all of them knew only the rumors.  That this was a movie that was, and I quote, "so scary that 99 out of 100 people can't finish watching it."  My response?  Bring it on, bitch.

Veronica is a movie that was actually released last summer in Spain, and took its native country by storm.  Slick and relatively big-budget considering the material we're dealing with, it didn't take long for the buzz to spread about it and for executives here in the States to take notice.  The most important executives to take notice, of course, are the ones who dole out big checks for the streaming rights.  Thus, if you've got Netflix, you've got access to this film, and that's where I saw it.  Remember back when I used to despise Netflix and swear that I would never, ever get it because it wasn't as pure as the virgin snow like the video stores of my youth?  Those were some good times here on the blog.  At any rate, this film got the Roman Reigns rocket push right out of the gate, and now a lot of people had seen it.  So what's it like?

Well, it's loosely based (and this is yet another example of a movie that uses the phrase "loosely based" as a cover for "pretty much entirely fictional in everything but theme") on a true story about a young girl in 1991 who mysteriously died after using a Ouija board.  In real life, she had a different name, but in the world of this film she is renamed Veronica.  The script gives us some nice early examples of "show, don't tell" as to why we should care about this character as we see her take care of her three younger siblings due to the fact that their father just passed away and the mother works long hours to pay the bills.  The character is admittedly very likable, and the actors playing the little kids (Bruna Gonzalez and Claudia Placer as twins Irene and Lucia, and Ivan Chavero as bed-wetting tyke Antonito) manage not to get too grating, a feat in and of itself when it comes to movies like this.

The plot kicks into gear in short order, with Veronica heading off to Catholic school where a solar eclipse is about to take place outside.  With everyone else on the roof doing their best not to look directly at the sun, Veronica and her friends take the opportunity to hold a Ouija seance in the creepy basement.  The goal: Contact Veronica's recently deceased father.  What actually happens: Something decidedly other than that, and I think you know where we're going from here.  Ruh-roh.  Also present in some of these early scenes is a blind nun character that everyone at the school refers to as "Sister Death," and her presence is admittedly a little unnerving the first few times you see her.  Undertaker-esque eyeballs tend to do that to the viewer.

Horror films that focus on Ouija boards and demonic phenomena are nothing new to fans here in the U.S., so it comes as no surprise as to what happens next.  Namely, a long slow burn section of the film where weird things begin happening to Veronica in and around the household.  There are two nightmare sequences that are played out in exquisite detail that are admittedly pretty bizarre, one where Veronica sees a vision of her father and the other where the younger kids, well, attempt to cannibalize her.  They were definitely prepared to go all the way with the weird in this movie, kids.  We also get some helpful exposition from Sister Blind Nun along the way to give us all of the information we need.  Namely, that Ouija boards are SRS, SRS, SRS business and that someone else now walks with Veronica. 

This all leads us to the epic finale sequence as Veronica attempts to shut the door on the demon with the help of her siblings.  I will give the movie some points here due to the fact that I actually cared about what was happening; all along the way, the script has done a good job showing us reasons why we should be invested in Veronica the person.  But I can't claim that I was biting my nails in tension as the battle with the demon plays out.  The emotional ending twist also fell flat for me, mainly because I thought I had seen the same bit done much better in Ju-On.  Now there's a blog callback that I haven't done in a long, long time.  I used to talk about those films a lot, didn't I?

To be fair, there was a lot to admire about this movie.  First and foremost is the performance of Sandra Escacena in the title role.  I've already given the screenplay its due as to taking its time and doing the work of getting you invested in this story, but it was still up to Escacena to pull it off, and she delivered.  Like a boss.  Watching her in this movie, I was reminded of how I felt about Lina Leandersson way back when I first saw Let the Right One In.  This young lady has a bright future, and let's hope that we get to see more of her.  From a film-making standpoint, this is also a pretty impressive little flick, as the directing, camera-work and atmosphere are all top notch.  In short, the movie looks great and it's competent in every way.

So why did I feel disappointed after watching it?  Well, I didn't find it scary.  At all.  Folks, let me tell you one of the great failings (and there are many) of Jon Lickness, horror movie ambassador to the world.  I've loaned out Sleepaway Camp to a few people, and with only one exception I promised them the most shocking ending in the history of cinema.  And in every case they gave the movie back to me stating that they saw it coming a mile away.  After all of those mistakes, I finally figured out that I was building the movie up too much, and eventually showed it to one friend blind.  And it ripped his face off just like it did with me.  Maybe if I'd seen this particular movie without all of that advance hype, I would have been a little more frightened by it.  But "the scariest movie ever?"  Yeah, not quite.  I was able to sleep like a baby immediately afterward.  Horror movies are the name of the game, and scary this movie is not.

With that, it's time to give out the final rating of my movie reviewing career: ** 1/2 out of ****.  I'm going out just like I came in - like an annoying contrarian.  So completes the month of May and the final series of recent movies that I wanted to cover before retirement, but we still have one month to go.  The next four posts are going to be special, as I prepare to wrap things up in a nice little bow for the few people who actually read these things.  Get ready...

Creep and Creep 2 (2014 and 2017)

2014 and 2017
Directed by Patrick Brice
Starring Mark Duplass, Patrick Brice and Desiree Akhavan

We're approaching a lot of "lasts" here on the ol' Blog.  Of which, I'm sure that exactly zero people care about.  Well, we're about to be looking at the last found footage movies that I'm going to review.  To be fair, I have a really long, love-hate relationship with this particular subgenre of horror.  I've been tired of them for a long time, and while they've kinda gone by the wayside in more recent years, there's still a decent amount of them floating around out there because they cost roughly five bucks to make and always turn a profit.  And some of them have been great.  But I walk away from a lot of them these days just thinking that the movie would have been way, way better off without the gimmick of someone walking around with a camera "filming" everything as if it's real.

In the few horror circles that I stalk around on, these particular movies actually have a decent amount of hype.  Creep and Creep 2 get a lot of praise for the performance of Mark Duplass, the lead guy who used to be one of the stars of The League and now runs a production company with his brother.  But these flicks are the brainchild of director Patrick Brice, who even co-starred in the first one along with Duplass.  I watched both movies back-to-back on the same night, an easy enough accomplishment since both are only about 75 minutes long.  They're kind of a strange beast; there were points, especially during the first movie, where I found myself hitting the pause button to check to see how much time was remaining.  But they gained momentum, and then...I thought about them when they were over.  Movies that can do that are hard to find.  So what are these movies about, and why exactly are they Creepy?  Let's find out.  Advance warning - this review is going to be spoilerific.  Like, to the max.

Well, as I previously mentioned (I suppose one could say that it was AFOREMENTIONED - aren't you glad that some of these stupid non-jokes are approaching their final days?), director Patrick Brice is your de facto protagonist in the first film.  His character's name is Aaron, and he is a videographer answering a Craigslist ad promising a decent payday if he'll only follow this mysterious guy around for a day.  Said mysterious guy is, of course, Mark Duplass under the guise of the name "Josef."  Quotation marks because there be a lot of surprises on the way.  Brice himself is likable enough in his role, but Duplass just owns this role.  You know from the first time you see him that there's something lurking under his tragic front story involving dying of cancer and recording a video for his family.

What you need to know about that first movie is this: as it goes on, it becomes apparent that Josef changes his story seemingly every ten minutes.  There are sections of it that terminally drag, particularly the whole bit where the characters go out to a local watering hole and then a restaurant for a little game of "truth and more truth."  It reaches its zenith when nightfall arrives back at Josef's amazingly large home in the woods where he tells a weird story about the fate of his wife that eventually results in Aaron hightailing it home.  The end result?  He starts getting...some DVDs in the mail from Josef, escalating into a shock ending that admittedly did catch me off guard but left me with the simple question that Josef, now exposed as a full-on serial killer who has done this sort of trick with tons of people in the past, poses to the audience - why not simply look behind?  It was a decent ending that admittedly had me intrigued for more.

The second movie carried forth on that momentum.  Unlike the first, where I was admittedly just waiting for the entire running time just to see what this dude's M.O. would turn out to be, this one was much more suspenseful specifically because you know what a sadistic f**k this guy is.  You look back on various incidents from that first movie and think just how much he enjoys scaring his victims first before killing them, and now the character really is someone that you can hate.  The setup this time involves Sara, a web show producer played by Desiree Akhavan whose series involves finding the people behind Internet personal ads and showing the world how strange they are.  As such, the ad that she gets asking for a videographer for a day and that it's a big plus if they're a fan of Interview With the Vampire is right up her alley.

This time around, the filmmakers and Duplass himself (who co-wrote the script this time around) seemed to have a lot more fun with the premise.  For starters, the character is remarkably honest with Sara from the first meeting save for a few small details, and she plays right along with the game of shooting a documentary about the world's most famous serial killer that no one knows.  There actually are a few bits where we feel the slightest amount of pity for this guy, but they're always pushed back by his constant need to scare Sara only to get the tide turned on him on more than one occasion.  For the better part of an hour, this is actually a pretty snappy little thriller, but it's one where the ending is kind of a letdown.  In that way, it's kind of an exact opposite of the first, which left me flat for its middle section only to be rescued by a slam-bang finale. 

Overall, I definitely think these are movies that are helped by the fact that they are short.  Most found footage movies are pretty short, but it's absolutely crucial to these two flicks.  We're dealing with a pretty thin premise here, after all.  It's not like we're looking at demonic possession or something.  Much like all films in this genre, you also have to get by the simple question of "why is this person still filming?"  This is especially bad in the first, when Aaron just keeps on keepin' on with his documentary of being scared despite having enough evidence that he could have called the police on no less than six different occasions before he actually does and summarily tells them nothing.  Suspending disbelief here is kind of a chore, so don't act like I didn't warn you.

Amazingly enough, though, the Creep movies manage to, well, creep past their hokey setups and stick with you despite some of the head-scratching things that the protagonists do.  There are things here that will stick with you after the end credits roll; two particularly memorable bits are a really long sequence of dialogue in the second film where Duplass espouses the virtue of his favorite song and the story that may or may not have inspired him to become a serial killer and the scene that introduces the wolf mask that he frequently wears in the first film, complete with a name ("Peach Fuzz") and a dance.  Did I mention that this dude wears a wolf mask?  Well, he does.  And it's laughable in the best way.

I award these films *** out of ****, mainly for the performances, the memorable bits of dialogue and my belief that we've all had a friend something like this guy.

Split (2016)

2016
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Starring James McAvoy, Anya Taylor-Joy, Betty Buckley, Haley Lu Richardson and Jessica Sula

I remember a time when I used to enjoy going to movies.  Like, actually going to theaters to see them.  It seems like a long, long time ago, way back to that mystical wayback land of the early 2000s when the Lord of the Rings movies ruled the roost and the rabid anticipation for each new superhero movie to get released.  Remember that?  Remember when they were special and there weren't 27 of them per year?  But there was another ever-present thing from that time period that I was always jacked for every time it came up - the new M. Night Shyamalan movie that was about to be unleashed.

I'm sure I've told the story on this here blog in the past, but fuck it, here we go again.  Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs.  Those flicks were a breath of fresh air to me throughout high school because they were so different from any "scary" movie that I'd seen previously (although the second one isn't quite a scary movie, but stick with me).  Yeah, they had their moments of legit tension.  But they were such satisfying slow burns that spent a LOT of time on their characters and getting you emotionally invested in what you were watching.  And I loved them.  And then I made the mistake of calling Shyamalan the best director currently working, and then his career immediately took a dive for the shit.  As such, I didn't hold out much hope for Split when I heard that it was about to be released and didn't give it a chance.  But then, word of mouth came along.  Curiosity got the better of me.  And I paid the $14.99 to buy a digital copy.  Well, does it live up to the hype?

The movie opens with a scene that grabs your attention within the first five minutes.  We meet popular high school students Claire (Haley Lu Richardson) and Marcia (Jessica Sula), hosting a party of sorts where shy, withdrawn Casey Cooke (Anya Taylor-Joy) is also present.  Casey is waiting for someone to pick her up...and waiting...and waiting...and nobody shows, leaving it up to one of the girls' dads to drive her home.  Spoiler alert: he never makes that drive, as the dad is knocked out by mysterious man who soon incapacitates the three girls with an aerosol spray.  Cue opening credits, and I'll admit to actually being excited to see that big, giant masturbatory "Directed by M. Night Shyamalan" marquee again.

Essentially, Split is a horror flick about these three girls being trapped in an undesirable situation and trying to get out.  They wake up together in a room locked inside a smaller room, and they're aware of the guy on the other side who likely wants to do bad, bad things to them.  Spoiler alert #2: Some bad, bad things do happen in this movie, but the movie has some fun dealing with the personalities of the captives.  Almost immediately, Casey stands out as the star of the show, and played by a very game Anya Taylor-Joy she's a firecracker.  I'll admit to not caring all that much for her two companions, but amazingly enough they grew on me as the running time ticked by.  And then there's James McAvoy.

It's hard to call his character any sort of real name.  Mainly because there are 23 of them.  The title of the movie comes from the fact that he suffers from dissociative identity disorder, and that the guy who kidnapped the girls is "Dennis," an obsessive-compulsive neat freak who has a thing for underage girls.  We also get to know "Patricia," a slightly scary matriarch; "Hedwig," the child-side of the character's personality; and "Barry," the dominant personality who is a fashionista and makes a pile of money selling art.  The usual trappings of a movie like this occur as the girls attempt to escape while we get bits of McAvoy interacting with them.  Spoiler alert #3: McAvoy is fucking boss in this movie.  Like, legit it's one of the best horror movie performances I've ever seen.  On paper, some of the things he does here should make you laugh, but he manages to come off as creepy in all the right places and even relatable in some others. 

The movie has a framing device that it keeps going back to in regards to McAvoy's relationship with renowned psychologist Karen Fletcher (Betty Buckley), who believes that DID is the key to unlocking human possibilities.  When you think about it, it really is amazing how a blind person can have an alternate personality that regains sight, isn't it?  Well, it can also be scary, as the periodic bits where we hear about a latent 24th personality named only "The Beast" become more frequent.  The final thirty minutes or so of the movie where "The Beast" shows up are absolutely electric, and while I wasn't exactly pissing myself in terror and was able to sleep like a baby immediately afterward I'll admit to being on the edge of my seat watching our characters in peril attempt to evade this guy.  And man, he has powers and abilities that rival anything the Ultimate Warrior or Hulk Hogan did in the WWF's glory days.

As a psychological horror flick, Shyamalan really managed to craft something special here.  There are scenes in this movie that would have been either utter bores or unintentionally hilarious in some of his mid-period misfires (and there's no need to bring up the names of those films - "you eyeing my lemon drink?"), but they're handled with care and restraint here.  There are also little touches that get you to genuinely project yourself up there on that screen, especially with the character of Casey.  Every once in a while, we get a glimpse into her childhood and a hunting trip that gives us all the reason we need as to why she is such a shy, introverted person.  Spoiler alert #4: this stuff also gives us an ending that while it is happy on paper also leaves us with a feeling that kicks you right in the gut unlike anything I've seen in a long time.

Yeah, dear readers, this is a movie where pretty much everything fires on all cylinders.  You get the camera work and directing chops from Shyamalan that manages to catch your eye without pounding you over the head how hard the guy was trying to create an artsy shot, you get solid performances up and down the board and a truly legendary one from McAvoy, and you get a script that shows pretty much never-ending invention and logic.  The cherry on top?  A final scene that gives us a kick-ass setup for something that I'm actually looking forward to watching in a theater.  And yes, I plan on making the 45-minute drive for this particular upcoming film, due out sometime in 2019. 

Rating time.  Wait for it...**** out of ****.  A stunning return to form for M. Night Shyamalan years after I'd written the guy off.  Let's see if I can avoid giving him the Lick Ness Monster curse this time around.

Cult of Chucky (2017)

2017

Directed by Don Mancini
Starring Fiona Dourif, Michael Therriault, Adam Hurtig, Alex Vincent, Jennifer Tilly and Brad Dourif as the voice of Chucky

When I was a kid, I loved the hell out of the original trilogy of Child's Play flicks.  Hell, I still do.  Watching those movies always takes me right the hell back to my childhood, back to a time before my biggest fears were things like turning 35 in a couple months.  Buzzkill.  They used to play those films on USA CONSTANTLY around 1993/94, and every time they came on I was all over the channel like a moth being drawn to a light.  I liked everything about them; the characters, the atmosphere, the humor, and, of course, Brad Dourif doing the voice of the main man himself and managing to both creep the f**k out of me and make me laugh.  Sometimes within the same scene.

I also enjoyed the Bride and Seed movies that came later, no matter how much they ramped up the goofy.  But then came Curse of Chucky, reviewed on the blog a while back and coming out many years after the series had been dormant.  The tone this time was totally different; Don Mancini, the man who has either directed or written every single movie in the franchise (and is back once again for this particular movie in both capacities) decided to bring the series back to its dark roots.  For my money, though, that movie was WAY darker and more serious than even the original movie.  Instead, it just felt more like the gritty reboot that has been done to death in Hollywood over the past 15 years - albeit one with a fantastic adherence to continuity.  Well, now we're all the way up to the present day, and it's time to continue the epic story of serial killers trapped in dolls and all of the people that his life affects.  It truly is a Shakespearian tale.  Let's get to it.

Well, in Curse of Chucky, we had a much more contained story within the family home of Nica Pierce.  She was played by Fiona Dourif, Brad's real-life daughter (and man, there is a strong resemblance), and by the end of that movie she was framed for the murders of her entire family and sent away to a mental institution.  Four years have passed, and Nica is still around, still played by Fiona, and she now believes that she was responsible for all of those deaths and that Chucky was just a manifestation of her psychosis.  The script actually does a decent-enough job setting up the institution as the setting for everything that is to come, to say nothing of some of the cameos we've already enjoyed.

See, Alex Vincent is in this movie.  The man, the myth, the legend.  The guy who once played Andy Barclay in the first two movies is now back as an adult after the awesome post-credits sequence from the last one, and he is in possession of the original Chucky's head.  Which he constantly tortures, no less.  Yeah, this ain't exactly the time period where Chucky used to beat teachers to death with rulers.  In a move that comes as a surprise to absolutely no one, people soon start dying in that mental institution, and we get kind of a dual-setting storyline where Nica deals with the presence of Chucky and her own slipping psychopathy while Andy deals with...doing something about it.  Again, truly Shakespearian.

And boy, what a cast of characters we have at the institution.  It's lorded over by Dr. Foley (Michael Therriault), and God is he annoying.  He's got a face that can strip wallpaper, and he's a perv.  There's another patient who goes by the moniker "Multiple" Malcolm (Adam Hurtig), with whom Nica shares a sex scene (holy Christ) and who eventually believes himself to be Mark Zuckerburg.  Honestly, this happens.  And once the Chucky doll shows up at the place, there's another patient who believes it to be her baby.  That storyline is creepy in the bad way, in that it actually gets under your skin and makes you feel kind of dirty.  I think Mancini was aiming for poignancy with this storyline, but wow, does it fail.

This movie really is the Chucky show.  Slowly but surely, it's revealed that there are no less than three of them running around in the institution in some nice nods to series continuity that fellow nerds like myself will pick up on.  That's where the movie gets its name, and it's where this movie gets its climactic scenes.  Eventually, Andy makes his way to the scene of the crimes.  And eventually, we get some showdown scenes and Chucky once again trying to do that familiar voodoo chant.  Only there is kind of a twist this time that feels like it was pulled directly out of Don Mancini's ass and is explained away in about .5 seconds flat.

Yes, kids, we have another Lick Ness Monster review that's decidedly negative in tone, but if you want some counterbalance I seem to be in the minority about these newer Chucky movies.  Yeah, they're darker and they're deadly serious.  A lot of people seem to like the approach, but I think it kills what made this series unique.  If you want some positives, though, there's plenty to talk about here.  In addition to Brad Dourif doing yet another home run job as the voice of Chucky, we get Jennifer Tilly (still smokin' hot at 50+ years old) returning to the series in scenes that steal the show.  The effects work on the various Chucky dolls are also top notch, and some of the kills are pretty cringe-worthy.  Not scary in the least bit, but cringe-worthy.

So what don't I like about this movie?  Well, it's not fun.  That was always what I could count on the [i]Child's Play[/i] movies of my youth for - a fun time in front of the TV.  There's this pervasive sense of darkness that just eats up any and all fun to be had, and also a kind of mean-spiritedness.  You want proof of that?  Just watch this movie and get a load of how it ends.  But remember to stay tuned after the credits for another fun cameo; it was definitely a big crowd-pleaser for this reporter.

Rating time.  This flick gets a ** out of ****.  Yeah, I know that the Internet horror community consensus says differently, but this newfangled Chucky universe just isn't for me.

Tales From the Darkside: Series Retrospective

1983-1988

Created by George A. Romero

There's nothing quite like anthology shows.  From the days of my youth doing my damndest to find my way over to a friend's house on Friday night for Tales From the Crypt to my college years absorbing Twilight Zone reruns on at midnight on SyFy to burning through Thriller on the DVR as a geeky adult, these things have been eponymous with my life.  Supposedly, they're bringing the latter series back, but I really don't have a whole lot of hope for that one.  A lot of these shows were that special brand of lightning in a bottle taking place in their own time period that just can't be replicated.  Case in point: Tales From the Darkside.

OK, guys, I'm giddy about this particular review.  For starters, I'd seen a few episodes before but didn't take in every show until I bought the complete series on DVD roughly a a year-and-a-half ago when all of the horror discs were marked down in the post-Halloween selloff.  I've watched a few episodes here and there ever since with the plan on writing a big overview, but other things kept getting my attention.  The moral of the story is that this is definitely the longest review-in-waiting that I've ever done.  No joke, that big multi-disc set that I picked up for twenty-five bucks at Wal-Mart has been perched on top of my dresser next to the DVD player for ALL THAT TIME.  I really don't know why it's taken me this long to watch every episode, because the show is really, really good.  In fact, I'll go even further and say that it's probably my favorite thing that I've ever seen associated with George A. Romero.

For the uninitiated, Romero is a really popular and influential guy in the horror community.  The creator of the modern-day zombie film with 1968's Night of the Living Dead and a whole heap of movies that followed in its wake, he's undoubtedly played a really huge role in the development of horror in the 20th and 21st centuries.  Sadly, he also passed away in the time that it took me to watch this series.  In the early '80s, this show was the result of the success of the Romero-directed anthology opus Creepshow.  The origial idea: Creepshow: The Series.  The title that the show would eventually take was perhaps even more of a nod to the EC horror comics that served as that film's inspiration, as what the creators and producers were shooting for was nothing short of a live-action horror comic book.  A pilot was produced that aired two days before Halloween in 1983, and it was successful enough to be picked up by CBS and distributed via syndication throughout its main run from 1984-1988.  So what made this show such a huge cult success?  Let's get to looking at the show's entire run, beginning with the pilot episode.

While I don't think that the episode is a particularly strong one, there's no doubt that I would have been TERRIFIED of that initial Halloween-themed pilot show.  The story is about this old miserly guy who holds an entire town hostage with his IOU system (hey, they're as good as cash).  The catch?  If any town child can explore his spooky house and find the IOU's, their debts are forgiven, but the crotchety fuck terrifies the poor kids with animatronic ghosts.  Man, what an asshole.  Of course, this Halloween there are all kinds of REAL ghosts out for the dude, and this was the format that the series would follow from this point forward.  Set up an intriguing and potentially scary situation, build it up and pay it off.  In short, A+ back-to-basics storytelling!

The first season introduced that ungodly theme music, with the camera gliding through the eerie woods complete with a soul-destroying voiceover: "Man lives in the sunlit world of what he believes to be reality. But...there is, unseen by most, an underworld, a place that is just as real, but not as brightly lit...a dark side."  BRRRRR.  There was some good stuff to be had as Tales From the Darkside found its footing.  My early favorites were "The Odds," with Danny Aiello as a bookie who never turns down a bet and Tom Noonan as the mysterious wagerer determined to break him; "Mookie and Pookie," with the gorgeous Justine Bateman in an early role who believes her deceased brother's spirit is now inhabiting her computer; and the Stephen King adaptation "Word Processor of the Gods" that takes the familiar "everything a creator creates becomes real" trope played out to perfection.  Jessica Harper, Harry Anderson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar show up in various episodes that are worth checking out, but everything here pales in comparison for what was to come.  Get ready.

While Season One featured a lot of talented people in front of the camera, Season Two brought us not only Romero but a bunch of his friends helping out behind it, and it shows.  The Halloween episode this season entitled "Halloween Candy" was directed by makeup maestro Tom Savini and is another instant classic about a rotten bastard who enjoys tormenting trick-or-treating children before running into a Satanic goblin.  Yes, this actually happens.  Romero himself wrote the episode "The Devil's Advocate," starring Jerry Stiller as a radio show host who wakes up in a strange, warped version of his studio before being tormented by calls from the past.  Stiller is just aces here (as always), but amazingly there's more.  "Lifebomb" is a story with one hell of a twist as a work-a-holic cuts a deal with an insurance company that virtually guarantees that his bad ticker won't kill him, but this guarantee comes with a hell of a cost.  Finally, Seth Green stars in "Monsters in My Room," a tale that any kid can relate to about the proverbial demons that lurk in your bedroom when the lights go out. 

At this point, I remember taking a long break from watching the series, but I remembered how strong that second season was.  When it was time to dive back in, I was ready, and what greeted me was "The Circus."  This was another Romero-scripted episode and was an excellent season starter as William Hickey plays a cynical reporter who doesn't believe the stories about the strange creatures on display at a traveling circus.  Three guesses how that turns out.  We also get an honest-to-goodness Christmas episode this time as two kids demand a Christmas tale from their parents - and in "Seasons of Belief," what they get is the "Grither."  One of the kids is played by Jenna Von Oy, a.k.a. Six from Blossom.  I think the focus of this season was more about creepiness than the normal slam-bang payoff, and the change of pace worked.  The proof of this is "Everybody Needs a Little Love," an adaptation of a Robert Bloch short story with Jerry Orbach as a lonely divorcee who becomes obsessed with a mannequin.  Said mannequin does not look like Elaine Benes.

Bloch would also be responsible for the story that opened the final season - "Beetles," where an archaeologist unearths an ancient sarcophagus and doesn't believe the dour warnings about what doing so could do to him.  Classic Mummy's Curse-style story, right there.  A few episodes later, Clive Barker joined the pantheon of horror luminaries on the show when he adapted his short story "The Yattering and Jack" for the series.  The episode is played for laughs and actually succeeds on a few occasions, and I'm not even going to spell out the story for this one.  Trust me, look it up.  Stephen King would return to write "Sorry, Right Number," where a woman gets a frantic phone call and struggles mightily to help the person making the call.  Imagine that Halle Berry movie, but good.  Fantastic writing contained in that previous sentence.  Also, remember how bad that Cameron Diaz movie The Box was?  See, I got the impression that the movie was essentially a horror anthology episode painfully stretched to 90 minutes...and that was proven here as Jodie Foster directs "Do Not Open This Box"!  Yet another big success as the show's run comes to a close.

Amazingly enough, though, we're not done, as two years later we were graced with Tales From the Darkside: The Movie.  I reviewed it previously here on the blog, and I won't do the entire blow-by-blow, but the short version is this: as a climax to the series, it's pretty much perfect.  And as Tom Savini put it, "THIS is the real Creepshow 3." 

That quote really sums up the entire experience of watching this series.  It seems like each successive generation of horror film-makers brings back the things that they loved from their childhood.  Right now, it's the things covered in this particular review.  1980s horror.  Back then, it was the horror comic books of the 1950s, and this show did that to absolute perfection.  Not every episode was a home run; to be fair, there are a fair amount of episodes that are fairly boring and not scary in the least bit.  But a ***+ half-hour of television at least every other week is more than acceptable ratio.  If you find this thing on the cheap like I did, it's definitely worth plunking down a couple of ten-dollar bills to have in your collection.  It's a really fantastic time capsule of that whole magical period in horror history and...wait for it...I actually prefer this to Tales From the Crypt now.  The difference?  Occasionally, Crypt would get cynical with its source material.  This was ALWAYS a celebration, and that's just such a rare, refreshing thing. 

Check this show out, kids, it's well worth 18 months of your life.

Puppet Master: Axis Termination (2017)

2017

Directed by Charles Band
Starring George Appleby, Tonya Kay, Paul Logan, Kevin Scott Allen, Tania Fox, Alynxia America and Daniele Romer

Full confession time: when I decided to cover the last few Puppet Master flicks, I was expecting the worst.  I mean, I've seen some of the latter Charles Band films to come down the pike, and they're not terribly impressive.  Imagine my surprise when I find out that they're actually a pretty fun little trilogy of movies.  Not great, definitely not spectacular, but fun, and Axis Termination is more of the same, if not just a step below the David Lean-esque quality that we've come to expect from this epic series.  Wait, what?

A decent amount of time would pass between Axis Rising and this one; five years, to be exact, or enough time for Charles Band to save up enough free Big Mac coupons to set aside the $1 million or so budget that these movies require.  Once again, they manage to push that budget to the absolute maximum, as we get a movie that actually looks semi-professional.  I don't know exactly how interesting the story is when it comes to making these movies, because they really are pretty cookie-cutter.  Got a few actors willing to work for scale and a fair special effects guy to animate the puppets?  You're good, bro.  Then again, there are days where I would love to be a fly on the wall for the making of an actual movie about killer puppets who happen to be good guys.  It can't be easy to make these movies watchable.  How watchable?  Let's get to examining the story.

If you can count on one thing with the Axis trilogy of Puppet Master movies, it's that old characters are about to die off.  Like, severely.  The last two movies were the story of Danny Coogan and his girlfriend Beth, perfectly nice World War II-era patriots who became the new masters...of puppets.  Well, they die here within the first two minutes of running time after a clever ruse that a fifth grader could come up with courtesy of those dagblasted, consarnit Nazis.  It really is kind of a buzzkill; they were likable characters, but it doesn't really matter much since I thin they're only mentioned two more times in the movie from this point forward.  What you need to know is that the magical elixir of Andre Toulon that re-animates inanimate objects is now in Nazi hands, and we need a new crop of characters to combat them.

And boy, what a bunch of characters this movie throws at us.  I'm somewhat grateful for this, because it's enough to fill up two whole paragraphs of this eight-stanza review!  First, let's look at the Good Guy side.  Your star is Dr. Ivan (George Appleby), a dwarf who is also a powerful psychic.  Let me tell you something about dwarves in movies (brother), no matter how bland and/or terrible the material around them is, they always play the role to the full hilt.  Just look at anything starring Phil Fondacaro or Warwick Davis for further proof.  Dr. Ivan also has a hot daughter (Tania Fox) and an ungodly beautiful assistant played by Daniele Romer who gives us this amazing sequence where she does some magic topless that would have set off the Skeevy Paragraph if I did that thing.  Oh, and they're rounded out by the movie's requisite military guy (Paul Logan), but he's barely worth mentioning.

The opposition.  Well, this movie definitely has plenty of them.  Tonya Kay is pretty much the star of the show in this go-round as Dr. Gerde Ernst.  Screen time?  Yeah, she has plenty of it, with her bad German accent rolling out at us the entire time.  The guy in charge of the Nazi operation this time is Krabke (Kevin Scott Allen), a dude who is the foil to Dr. Ivan in regards to psychic power.  They also still have the Nazi puppets (and it still makes me all kinds of happy to type those two words together) introduced in the last film to play around with.  Who else?  Well, if I remember correctly, there's also this freaky chick who uses sex as a weapon to go along with needles for fingers, or something.  I don't know, it's been a week since I watched it as I type this, and this sounds like the kind of detail I should remember, but I don't.  Nobody ever said I was good at this job.

And...that's pretty much it, folks.  These three movies all followed a pretty similar formula, and this one is no different.  The Good Guys have their faction in one location, the Nazis have their camp in another, and eventually they meet up for a big climactic battle.  Fortunately, the puppet fight this time around is pretty good, although I'm getting a little tired of seeing the Leech Woman "spit a leech down some unsuspecting sap's throat" kill.  Mostly because it's legit one of the only things I've seen in a movie that grosses me out. 

There really isn't a whole lot else to say about this movie, other than the fact that if you liked the last two flicks, you'll probably like this one as well.  It's got a couple of likable heroes in Dr. Ivan and his daughter and a bunch of truly detestable villains to root against - and this includes Bombshell, Weremacht and Blitzkrieg, a.k.a. the Nazi puppets.  Still happy, dammit.

Having said that, there are also some things that knock this one down a peg from the other Axis films.  Every movie in the Full Moon pantheon has sections that drag; it kind of goes with the territory when you're dealing with budgets this small.  The method this time is to have this weird power struggle between Ernst and Krabke.  This reaches a head in an extended sequence where the latter uses his mystical powers on the former, only for her to reverse it and talk down to him for something like 17 hours.  These parts of the movie in Nazi HQ are frequent, slow, and kinda boring, so don't say I didn't warn you.

Time to dispense that oh-so-holy rating.  ** 1/2 out of ****.  That makes this one not quite a "thumbs up," but if you've seen every PM movie up until this point, why the f**k not?  And with this series down, we now have two more months to go here on the blog.  Next month, I'm going to be looking at...a whole lot of different stuff!  Stay tuned.

Puppet Master: Axis Rising (2012)

2012

Directed by Charles Band
Starring Kip Canyon, Jean Louise O'Sullivan, Oto Brezina, Scott Anthony King, Stephanie Sanditz and Brad Potts

The plan for Axis of Evil, the movie reviewed last week right here on the ol' blog, was to start a new "mini-franchise" for Full Moon, and that's exactly what it did.  By and large, the movie was solid in both plotting and execution, and fans of the whole merry band of murderous (yet righteous) puppets seemed to applaud the move as well.  Thus, two years later, we were blessed with another budget that couldn't have possibly been more than a million bucks tops along with a production team that consisted of Charles Band and about six other people.  The result?  Another fair-to-good action flick with some fun horror-y moments.  In other words, pretty much exactly what you expect from this studio and this series.

The thing that works about this flick despite it being pretty stupid once again on a surface level is that it has a different tone from the last one.  Axis of Evil was a movie about its heroes; this one is pretty heavily focused on the villains.  Each Puppet Master movie kind of has that feeling if you go through the whole series, but I won't bore everyone with the bloody details of how this comes to be.  Partly because I don't feel like typing it out, and partly because I don't think anyone would care.  I suppose this introduction would get a good solid B- from the official movie review arbiters of the universe consisting of James Beradinelli and the ghost of Roger Ebert.  With that, let's get to the blow-by-blow.

You know, when I sat down to watch this flick, I really was expecting to see a movie with the same characters as the last one played by the same actors.  After all, it came out in 2012, a mere two years after Axis of Evil.  Well, imagine my surprise when I find out that Danny Coogan and his girlfriend Beth had both been recast.  Yes, sir, instead of the pieces of cardboard that we grew to know and love earlier, they are now played by Kip Canyon and Jean Louise O'Sullivan, and I've got to say that this was an improvement.  For those keeping score, Danny is our star character in these movies, a nice, unassuming guy with a bad leg who longs to serve his country and is unable to, while Beth is kind of his feisty sidekick.  Only this time the actors are able to pull it off with a modicum of success.  So +2 cool points to the movie in this regard.

Time to start yacking about the story in this film.  Ozu, the Japanese villain that we grew to know and hate, has captured Tunneler and is trying to broker a deal to hand him over to the Nazis in return for...cash, or something, I honestly can't remember.  Anyway, she is shot and killed.  I am one damn good film reviewer.  Said Nazi is named Moebius, he's played by Scott Anthony King, and he is AWESOME in his role.  The thing about this little mini-trilogy is that they really do feel like classic Universal monster movies in that they have "mad scientist" type villains who are WAY over the top played by actors who totally embrace the cheese.  But he's not all that this movie has up its sleeve.

See, Moebius has his own secret lair in Chinatown where he begins conducting experiments to replicate the life-giving properties that the puppets possess.  And it's here where we meet his assistant of sorts, Uschi, played by the certifiably gorgeous Stephanie Sanditz.  She has the world's thickest and fakest German accent to go along with the thickest and fakest boobs, and she is something else.  Their job is to oversee the experiments of Dr. Freuhofer (Oto Brezina), kindly old get who is trying to create his own puppets both out of a need to see his captured family again along with his lust for Uschi.  A truly Shakespearian plot, if I say so myself.

So what happens in this movie?  Well, the truth is that we get long stretches where not much does happen.  The short version?  Danny and Beth are now under the protection of the military and get babysat by the dog-faced Sergeant Stone (Brad Potts).  Slowly but surely, they catch on to what Moebius is planning, leaving it up to them and the puppets to stop.  The really cool thing?  Freuhofer eventually succeeds in creating new puppets, meaning that Blade, Leech Woman and the rest of them have some truly formidable opponents: NAZI PUPPETS.  Just typing those two words makes me happy.  I'm not going to spoil what their gimmicks are here, but suffice to say, they're amazing.

I'm well aware that the tone of this review has been very positive, but I think I need to point out once again that I LOVE movies like this.  In this day and age where every movie above a certain budget shoots for that ever-lofty goal of attaining a  quality score of 7 out of 10, a series of flicks about killer puppets that are also the good guys and totally embrace being the good trashy fun that it encompasses are A-OK in my book.  The effects on the puppets are again top notch.  Almost every actor in this film is pretty much cast perfectly, especially Sanditz.  Every time she's onscreen you can't look away, for both good reasons (her smokin' hot body) and bad ones (that accent, tho).

Much like I point out how I love this whole series, I also need to reiterate that they aren't for everybody.  There are some people who disagree with me about how much fun this franchise is.  Seriously, the gall of those people to disagree with ME!  Joking aside, they definitely serve a niche audience.  If you're not in the weird cult of movie fans who find weaponized puppets killing the fuck out of a bunch of Nazis entertaining...yeah, stay away from this one.

Final rating: *** out of ****, the same score that the previous movie enjoyed.  It's absolutely no better or worse, and it will give you more of what you want if you're a fan of the [i]Puppet Master[/i] films.  Check it out.