House by the Cemetery (1981)

1981
Directed by Lucio Fulci
Starring Catriona MacColl, Paolo Malco, Ania Pieroni, Giovanni Frezza and Silvia Collatina

The ol' Lick Ness Monster blog has gone through a lot of changes over the years.  It wasn't always like it is today, which is...pretty much a complete f**kin' mess, where I alternate between reviewing pretty much any movie I feel like, occasional top five lists and the even rarer horror nerd op-ed piece.  WAY back when this thing started, I actually had a focus, and my whole goal was to introduce people to only the best horror movies.  Or at least what I considered the best, because I highly doubt that any hoity-toity film critic out there would include Maximum Overdrive on such a list.  Well, I was just looking through that list of 50 International Horror Registry (seriously, that's what I called it - what the hell was I thinking?) inductions, and one movie conspicuous by its absence was the one in question today.  I'm looking forward to typing this one up, because I consider House by the Cemetery to be one of the SCARIEST movies ever made.

Released in 1981 and featuring a whole lotta actors with a whole lotta vowels in their names (it's Italian), House by the Cemetery is one of those flicks that initially didn't get much love from critics but has since come to be known as a classic.  And it was directed by Lucio Fulci.  Odds are that most of you younger teeny-boppers reading this probably don't know that name.  Up until a few years ago, I'd never seen any of the dude's movies.  But even before I checked out any of his flicks, I knew more than a few people who just SWORE by his work.  While I'm still not a superfan or anything (just due to personal preference), there's no doubt that this guy left a huge mark on horror history with his "Gates of Hell" trilogy, a series of three totally un-related movies that are almost completely devoid of coherent plots but feature a bunch of fake blood, nasty kills, vanishing zombies and all other sorts of debauchery.  This is actually the third movie in the trilogy, following City of the Living Dead and The Beyond, but it requires no knowledge of the other films.  Enough talk.  On with the show.

Horror movies with a prologue kill always gain +2 Fonzie cool points in my book, and Fulci delivers the goods with a sequence pretty much ripped straight out of my nightmares.  I've always been scared of abandoned houses, and what we see here is a young woman going through a creepy house in search of her boyfriend.  Well, she finds him, complete with scissors lodged in his throat, before being brutally stabbed and dragged into a cellar.  As solid of an attention-grabber as you'll ever find, and we're only two minutes into the running time.

I'll be the first person to admit that this flick has a lot of characters.  Probably too many.  But the main story of the film is the following: a short time later, a family moves into the same house where Prologue Kill occurred.  There's a researcher/scientist type guy named Norman, his wife Lucy, and their young son Bob.  To be perfectly honest, the parents are pretty drab and uninteresting, but the character that I really want to talk about is Bob.  "Bob."  It's kind of an odd name for a kid in a horror movie, but nonetheless Bob is the character that you'll remember as this movie goes on.  See, kids, back in the day horror films used to NOT be shy about putting kids in mortal danger.  Sometimes, they would even kill them off.  What this movie does with Bob is nothing short of torturous, and it's to be commended, because running this poor kid through the gauntlet is what gives this movie almost all of its power to scare the bejesus out of you.  He's played by Giovanni Frezza, and he manages to not get too annoying, an amazing feat in and of itself for a movie like this.

To be sure, almost all of the movie's scariest moments involve Bob.  It immediately becomes clear that the actual PLOT of this movie is inconsequential.  It turns out that Norman's former colleague was the previous owner of the house and murdered his mistress before offing himself.  Norman is there to look into the history of the house and find out why this happened.  And Lucy is just kind of...there.  I can't fault the actors here for their lack of characterization; it's exactly the way that it was written in the script.  In between that basic framework of a mystery story, we're given a whole side cast of potential victims including a slimy realtor (played by Dagmar Lassander of Devil Fish relative fame for anyone familiar with MST3K) and Bob's hapless babysitter.  Both of whom, at different points, find themselves going into the basement of the house only to be brutally killed - the latter of whom is discovered by Bob, followed by this soul-destroying camera shot of him running up the steps in slow motion.  Kids...stick with The Wizard of Oz.  If I'd seen this as a child, it would have TRAUMATIZED me.

This leads to the movie's money sequence of tension and discovery, as Bob debates whether or not to go back into the basement.  Well, he does, only to get locked in.  Jesus.  The parents bust the door down and find him restrained by a pair of slimy zombie hands and hack it off...and then the script gives us our answers, as it turns out that the thing killing everybody in the basement is actually a rotting living corpse named Jacob Freudstein (clever - see, it combines Freud and Frankenstein) who has figured out a way to stay alive indefinitely by absorbing the blood of his victims.  Oh yeah, spoiler alert.  That said, the movie then throws its climax our way, complete with a slightly ambiguous ending that is nothing if not a complete and utter bummer.  It doesn't make much sense, but that's nothing new.  Traditionally, Lucio Fulci movies don't make much sense in traditional terms, but that's just the way I like it.

If I haven't made it clear already, I consider House by the Cemetery to be a really scary movie.  The Thing in the Basement is something that every kid can relate to, and this movie takes that concept and amps up the weirdness to the nth degree.  The kill scenes are shown in their total glory, complete with awesome makeup FX work on both the murder scenes and on Dr. Freudstein himself.  I DO have to also report, though, that there are long stretches of the movie that kind of drag.  The mystery aspect of the plot involving Norman searching the grounds, finding various tombstones around the property, and meeting former colleagues and important professor-type people are all pretty much terminally boring.  Thankfully, they're brief, and we quickly get back to the blood and murder taking place in the basement. 

I always go back to that when it comes to this movie.  It's a movie about a monster in the basement, and it's revealed to you slowly, with eerie dark shots and almost no clue as to what it actually is for much of the running time.  Folks, that's what scary stories are all about.  It's beauty in simplicity, and when you've got a director like Lucio Fulci who can get the absolute most out of every dollar of budget, that simplicity can be scary as f**k.  This isn't one to watch at night.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

Rating time.  This flick gets a solid *** 1/2 out of ****, and the added award that it's easily one of the ten most frightening movies I've ever seen.  Maybe I'll get to the other movies in the Gates of Hell series soon.  And that is what they refer to in the business as a "teaser."

The Bye Bye Man (2017)

2017
Directed by Stacy Title
Starring Douglas Smith, Lucien Laviscount, Cressida Bonas, Doug Jones, Carrie-Anne Boss and Faye Dunaway

I have had some really shitty luck with modern horror lately.  How bad?  I checked out The Bye Bye Man.  And just how bad is that?  Rings was better.  That should about do it for the intro paragraph this week.

According to the ever-accurate Wikipedia, this flick was based on a part of a much longer work called "The Bridge to Body Island" by Robert Daman Schneck.  I've spent a fair amount of time recently debating with the few people who I speak to (like, actually in person) that there have been plenty of cases where the movie based on the book is actually better.  And yes, folks, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining is way better than the much-more-book-faithful-but-completely-milquetoast 1997 TV remake.  However, there is no possible way that this movie can be anything other than way worse than the short story that it comes from.  The best way I can describe the story that we have here is that it's very familiar.  It's kind of like the ghost movies that have been really popular with the kids lately, and it's kind of a ripoff of that whole Slender Man thing that's also big with the kids.  So I guess what we have here is a movie that tries to be really cool and edgy, but instead kind of sucks.  Folks, when the Lick Ness Monster reviews modern horror films, this is the kind of amazing insight that you are blessed with.  On with the show.

The most important part of the screenplay is the first ten pages, and this is something that a lot of newer horror films really struggle with.  It's difficult to explain why.  We get an event that gives us the past evil and the reason to care, but so many of them just fail in that attempt despite doing everything right on paper.  It just feels so paint by numbers.  That's also what we have here, as the magical opening gives us a major rampage of death carried out by a man doing his best Howard Unruh impersonation.  Google it.  A whole bunch of people get wiped out by this guy's pistol, followed by a dire warning just before he blows himself away for everything to "not think it" and "not say it."  Spoiler alert.

Flash forward fifty-some years to the present day.  Unfortunately, just like in the aforementioned Rings, this means that we get to meet our extraordinarily vapid bunch of protagonist characters.  Meet Eliot (Douglas Smith), his girlfriend Sasha (Cressida Bonas) and their mutual friend John (Lucien Laviscount, and boy, that is a name that just begs to be used for a Reggae-singing professional wrestler).  These three are college students moving into an off-campus house located not far away from where they attend school, and, that's pretty much it.  There's really not much else interesting to say about who they are, although we'll get to some of the things they DO in due time.  What you really need to know is that these actors are mediocre at best and outright offensively bad at worst.  Cressida Bonas is especially awful as Sasha, and the scenes that eventually come of her attempting to emote her terror in the same voice you'd use while giving your address at the DMV are all the proof I need.  This is the trio that we spend our time with, and it truly is a great timeline.

This is where the "spooky haunted house" section of the movie kicks in.  The three friends (and two of them decidedly more than friends) start finding these mysterious coins all around the house.  Eventually, the characters begin having weird hallucinations and hearing voices.  Then, the titular Bye Bye Man - a hooded figure who reaches out to them like Tyraptus from the old Dragon Strike board game - makes his appearance.  The hooded avenger is played by Doug Jones, a pretty familiar guy to those in the know who has made a career out of playing dark characters while caked in makeup.  He does another commendable job here, but it's not like the surrounding material gives him much to work with.  Thus, I declare his performance wasted.  Yet more amazing insight.

See, the whole concept of the movie is the following: the Bye Bye Man is some sort of entity that thrives on fear.  The introductory massacre was actually a reporter who covered an EARLIER atrocity involving a teenager killing his entire family, so the idea is that the entity spreads like a virus.  Once you're afraid, you're already screwed.  The coins are like his early calling card, and the hallucinations are the next step.  Unfortunately, the movie takes a hard dive into ridiculous territory at the second stage as the Bye Bye Man uses his otherworldly powers to convince Eliot that his girlfriend is shacking up with John.  It's just as enthralling as you'd expect.  There's a couple of kills to bring this movie just above the government minimum before we hit the finale, and neither is especially impactful or memorable. 

There is also this one ridiculous bit involving a creepy coat hanger that Eliot and Sasha keep in their bedroom that had me laughing out loud in the movie theater...but then it reminded me of one of my crippling childhood fears.  Like most kids, I was scared of the basement.  But for some mystical reason, the thing that scared me the most about said basement was the coat rack.  I thought that getting shoved into this thing meant certain death at the hands of spectral boogeymen who would carry me into the world that existed beyond the coats, so I can at least kind of see where Eliot and Sasha wouldn't take this coat off the rack that occasionally turns into the Bye Bye Man.  Thus concludes this week's edition of the epic Lick Ness Monster Biography Saga.  Hope everyone enjoyed.

Amazingly enough, there's a couple of side characters played by actors who have been in some way better and much more noteworthy stuff.  The requisite Police Detective character is filled by Carrie-Anne Moss, known to most as Trinity from The Matrix but known best to me as an early-'90s TV babe of the highest order on shows like Silk Stalkings and Forever Knight.  There's also Best Actress Academy Award winner Faye Dunaway (!) as the Creepy Old Widow who gives us some much-needed exposition for key scenes, and it ranks right up there with her villain role from Supergirl as things that she'd probably like scrubbed from the resume.  Just thought that I would mention these characters/actors, because I know that all nine of my followers would riot if I didn't.

This was another bad movie.  Unlike Rings, there's not even the potential of what could have been to make me want to write more about it.  The acting is bad, the characters are bad, the scares and tension are nonexistent, and the ending is another one of those modern horror endings that just made me roll my eyes and go "really?"  These days, I pretty much get sexual arousal when a horror film just decides to END without the hint of more stuff to come.  Alas, that ain't what we get here.  Don't say I didn't warn you about this one.  Stay far away.

* out of ****.  Hey, at least it's not Rob Zombie's Halloween II.

Rings (2017)

2017
Directed by F. Javier Gutierrez
Starring Matilda Lutz, Alex Roe, Johnny Galecki, Vincent D'Onofrio, Aimee Teegarden and Bonnie Morgan

These days, it takes quite a bit for me to actually watch a movie in a theater.  As I've said before, my town (of 13,000 people) has no theater.  Seeing a movie in something other than single-screen places that remind me of the flooding scenes from The Poseidon Adventure involve something like a 40-minute drive, but a new Ring movie?  I'm there.  Thus, a little over a week ago, I made the trek across the border into deepest, darkest Iowa to check this one out.  And...it sucked.

First things first, I'm a HUGE fan of this franchise.  The original Ringu from Japan is one of the scariest and best horror movies I've ever seen, and the official sequel Ringu 2 and prequel Ringu 0: Birthday are both very badass in their own right.  Jumping Stateside for the American series, I would probably rank the 2002 film The Ring at #3 only behind John Carpenter's The Thing and David Cronenberg's The Fly in the "Best Remake of All Time" discussion.  Those two movies are actually better than the original films; The Ring isn't QUITE as good as Ringu, but it's damn close.  And The Ring Two...yeah, it's pretty bad, but I actually love it for all the wrong reasons.  CGI Deer Attacks FTW.  So when it comes to Sadako, Samara and impenetrable webs of mystery based around cursed videotapes, I'm as nerdy as it gets and I was very eager for a new installment in this series.  Unfortunately, it's everything that's wrong with modern horror movies rolled up into one convenient, extremely crappy package.  Since this review would be pretty damn boring if I ended it with this history lesson, let's get into the reasons why this flick is a huge let-down.

What we have here is one of the most ridiculous sequences out of the gate that I've seen from any horror movie in a good long while.  If for some reason you're reading this and AREN'T familiar with the premise of The Ring, it goes like this - there's a videotape that spells death in 7 days for anyone who watches it, as this tape is cursed by the spirit of Samara Morgan.  Samara is kind of a mix of Linda Blair from The Exorcist and, I dunno, that bathtub lady from The Shining, an evil girl who was shoved down a well and killed by her own family who now haunts the rest of the world through this damn tape.  So where is this going?  Well, one of the passengers on this plane has watched the tape.  We get that lovely bit of exposition, and then the whole plane going down as Samara cuts down everyone on it.  It's nowhere near as cool as it sounds, believe me.

From here, we're launched a couple years into the future into the main plot.  The guy who watched the tape is having an estate sale, where an old VCR ('memba those?) and a copy of the tape are up for sale.  Said items are purchased by Gabriel (Johnny Galecki, a.k.a. Leonard from The Big Bang Theory), a college professor who immediately fixes up the ancient equipment and watches it.  For what it's worth, Galecki isn't too bad in this, sleepwalking only 20% of the time and actually making me forget that he's on my least favorite sitcom of all time.  And as we meet the main characters, I found myself wishing that the whole film was about this character.

Oh boy, the main characters.  Yes, folks, it's time to meet Holt (Alex Roe) and Julia (Matilda Lutz), incredibly cookie-cutter and cardboard cutoutty college-age kids who will serve as Protagonist A and Protagonist B for the remainder of the film.  Holt attends college at the same school that Gabriel teaches at, while Julia is staying behind at home to care for her sick mother (a plot device that immediately gets forgotten the second that it's inconvenient).  And that's pretty much all the character development we get for these two yutzes.  I really wanted to care about these two, but when their paper-thin characterizations are combined with actors that were either bad or didn't give a f**k, I tuned out of this flick for long stretches thanks to these two.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

Time for this plot to unspool.  Soon enough, Julia notices that Holt isn't responding to her calls or Skypes, and goes to the college looking for him.  What she finds is that almost everyone in Gabriel's class has watched this mysterious videotape and passed it around (Ring factoid for newbies: you save yourself in these movies by making a copy and showing it to somebody else).  The first third of the movie actually builds up to this really nifty scene as one of the students bites it at the hands of Samara.  From that point on, everything takes a bigger nosedive than anything we've seen thus far.

Coming into Rings, I had high hopes for a lot of reason.  For starters, I'm absolutely sick of the ghost movies that dot the landscape these days, and I was ready for a flick that gave us a true-blue ghost that KILLS motherf**kers, onscreen and preferably in grisly ways.  And nobody does this better than Japan and the movies based on them.  Since this is the third movie in a series, the next logical step seemed to be escalation in the form of technology.  Namely, Samara going viral.  Well, this DOES happen at the end of the movie (spoiler alert), but what we get for most of the runnin time is Holt and Julia doing their best Scooby and Shaggy impersonation in Samara's birth town looking for her skeleton because...reasons.  Something about burning her body to set her soul free and save their hides.  For a third film, the stakes feel criminally low, especially since we care so little about these characters. 

For an indicator of what we're dealing with, the big crux of the film involves Holt and Julia finding a former Priest played by Vincent D'Onofrio who went blind conveniently around the time that Samara's body was moved back to her hometown.  Red herrings much?  D'Onofrio is an awesome actor, and he gives it his all to this role, but this character is essentially your "meddling kids" Scooby Doo character, and I don't think I'm spoiling a damn thing by making that reference.  Again, don't say I didn't warn you.

What else is there?  Oh, boo scares aplenty.  This is definitely my biggest issue with modern horror movies.  I watch horror movies because I like to be frightened.  Like, the kind of frightened where the hair on my neck rises and I find myself thinking about the stuff for days afterwards.  Big-studio horror movies tend to forego this and just startle us by doing the equivalent of dropping loud books on a table right in front of our ear.  Boy, does this movie like doing that.  And that, my friends, is what you call film criticism.  And the ending?  It telegraphs itself a mile away like a jab from Glass Joe, and really just made me again wish that the whole film had been about freakin' internet videos instead of mysterious hometowns, crypts, and jump scares. 

Really, I think this whole project is just a shame, because it's been 12 years since The Ring Two and I thought there was a legit chance to reignite this franchise.  Let's just say that the movie had started with the Galecki character finding the tape...and then passing it around the internet as a means of saving his own skin as well as anybody else who happened to watch it.  Only a few kids didn't quite grasp that concept, thus leaving it up to Galecki and a few of his students (preferably played by people who decidedly have a pulse) to track them down and try to save their lives only to catch Samara's eye personally.  Only since she is now on the great, grand interwebz, anything goes.  That would have been raising the stakes, modern, maybe even a little scary, and way less hokey and cliched.  Instead, we got...this.  I can't recommend Rings, kids, and that's a real pity, because there was some big-time potential here to bring this awesome "play with matches and you get burned" story to the next generation.

* 1/2 out of ****.  It's got one really great scene and Vincent D'Onofrio doing his damndest.  Other than that, avoid this one like...well, Samara.

Splatter University (1984)

1984
Directed by Richard Haines
Starring Forbes Riley, Ric Randig, Dick Biel, Kathy LaCommare and Sal Lumetta

I've seen 40,000 horror movies in my life, and I like pretty much every sub-type.  Well, except for zombie movies, but I'm not going to beat on that dead horse again.  Early '80s slasher flicks, though, are my comfort food.  Big kill count, lots of slow-burn stalking, gratuitous nudity and bad dialogue with even worse actors delivering it.  When I'm in a bad mood, I pop one of these babies in and I'm instantly hooked.

Splatter University fits that bill.  Filmed in 1981 on a Filet-o-Fish value meal budget but released three years later just as slasher cinema was exiting the peak of its popularity, all of the hallmarks you're looking for are here and then some.  A vicious, mysterious killer.  Annoying pack of early adult victims.  Even a final girl...sort of.  I know that a lot of people watched the "Randy's rules" scene in Scream and think that EVERY slasher movie follows that exact same formula, but this was a movie that turned expectation on its head in a few key ways, a move that's always appreciated.  Now, it's not exactly a good movie.  Far from it.  But it is an ernest little movie that still has roughly 10 times the soul of anything produced by Michael Bay.  The other interesting thing about this movie?  It was distributed by Troma Entertainment.  Kids, if you don't know Troma Entertianment, Google it.  With all that out of the way, let's get to the show.

According to the official Slasher Rule Book, these movies must contain a Past Evil.  The Past Evil comes in the brief and admittedly unintentionally hilarious prologue sequence as some nutcase escapes from a mental institution, brutally stabbing a couple of the orderlies in the process.  It doesn't take long for the writer to have some fun with the official slasher formula as we launch forward with the amazing tagline of "Three years later - Last Semester."  Get out your flowchart for that one.  Welcome to the movie's titular college (not that it's actually CALLED Splatter University, but it might as well be), where we immediately get a new kill scene as a teacher is brutally murdered after working late. 

The script launches forward once again to the ACTUAL present day.  In another twist on what we're used to, most of the MAIN characters in this movie are teachers.  Your star player is Julie Parker, recently hired teacher who was brought in to replace the aforementioned person who ate the knife exactly one semester ago.  Seriously...if you're following the way I'm laying this out, you're a very clever reader.  Julie is played by Forbes Riley, and she's easily the best thing about this movie.  She does a great job playing an innocent, vulnerable rookie teacher.  I never dreamed that I would be so into a "rookie teacher at a college" character in a horror film, but alas, here we are, so four gold stars for Forbes Riley.  Amazingly enough, this cutie actually went on to do a bunch of infomercials in the '80s and early '90s.  Insert your own "Forbes Riley with a Billy Mays goatee" joke here.

One thing about this movie that immediately becomes clear - all of the students are DOUCHES.  This goes for pretty much every college kid contained within Splatter University, but the biggest douche of all is "Wolf," played by Sal Lumetta.  As far as I know, he's never done anything else, and that's a shame, because this guy truly ranks up there in the Side Character Hall of Fame along with Shelly from Friday the 13th Part III and Bud from Halloween II.  Constantly talking about banging women and making his trademark wolf call, you'll single out this guy immediately as future killer fodder...and, amazingly, he actually survives the movie.  Oh yeah, spoiler alert. 

Which reminds me, this is a horror movie.  Most of the movie actually does focus on the character of Julie Parker, which works to its slight advantage since Forbes Riley gave this thing every ounce of her cute, bubbly energy.  A bunch of the abrasive side characters (most of them being the annoying students) get killed off.  We get some fantastic '80s female outfits in the process that, somehow, are still attractive.  Regarding the death scenes here, they're not really anything to write home about.  Basic stabbings, a few squirts of fake blood, and that's pretty much it.  We didn't have Tom Savini doing the makeup stuff here, so that stuff was somewhat limited. 

There is also one thing that I would like to comment on.  The crux of this movie is that Julie and the other teachers don't know who is doing the killing.  They're pretty much the only ones, because the SECOND that a certain character shows up on screen, you know who it is.  Fans of the Friday the 13th franchise are very familiar with Part V and how it telegraphed its mystery killer seemingly a mile away to the point that every first-time viewer that this guy couldn't POSSIBLY be the guy under the Jason mask.  This one isn't QUITE that stark, but...yeah.  It's pretty obvious. 

I give points to Splatter University for some of its originality.  The idea to reverse the usual age of the protagonists was an interesting choice, and, again, Forbes Riley is all kinds of aces in the Julie Parker role.  Those flaws, though, they add up.  And that is what you call film criticism.  There are a whole bunch of teacher and administrator characters that Julie deals with that aren't interesting in the least bit and long stretches of the movie that go nowhere in terms of plot development.  And it's not scary.  At all.  Still, if you're even a casual fan of slasher movies, I would check this one out because why the hell not?  It's a prime slice of early '80s goodness from a time when something like 25% of all movies released had some sort of tie to this particular subgenre.  They don't make films like this anymore.   When you find one that you haven't seen, jump on it bros.

** out of ****.  If you like slashers, give this one a watch.  If you don't, believe me, this one ain't gonna convert you.  Stick with Friday the 13th.