The Langoliers (1995)

1995
Directed by Tom Holland
Starring Patricia Wettig, Dean Stockwell, David Morse, Mark Lindsay Chapman, Frankie Faison and Bronson Pinchot

The first Stephen King novel I ever read was The Shining.  And if you're a 13-year-old looking to make their first leap into this man's literary library, that's by far the one that I would recommend starting out with, because in addition to inspiring what might very well be the scariest movie of all time, it's one of the scariest pieces of fiction ever written.  After 420 pages of ghosts in bathtubs, mysterious games of roque, and that epic boiler finale, I wanted more.  I bet you'll never guess what the SECOND thing I ever read by Stephen King was...well, unless you're looking at the mammoth poster located just above this review, in which case you're a damned CHEATER.

Yup, it was "The Langoliers."  More specifically, it was one of four separate novellas in a mammoth book called "Four Past Midnight," and to this day, it remains one of my favorite King works.  The story of a small group of survivors on board an airplane that curiously lost 99% of its passengers without a trace, this was some fantastic stuff.  As opposed to knocking you over the head with pure horror, "The Langoliers" was really more of a mystery that unfolded throughout its lean and mean 280-page length (hence the term "novella") that slowly reveals the truth about the flight and what awaits the survivors.  That's not to say that it doesn't have its suspenseful moments; there are plenty, but they're just that.  Suspenseful, but not terrifying.  But the thing that really stuck with me about this story was that I believe it to have the most downright likable group of characters in anything King has ever done.  Even the douchy bad guy was sympathetic, but we'll be getting to him in due time.

Which brings me to this movie.  Released in 1995, The Langoliers was the TV movie version that aired on ABC just in time for May Sweeps.  Written and directed by Tom Holland (a pretty prolific guy in the horror genre, and his Twitter account is definitely worth following), the script is actually incredibly faithful to the novella.  It also has a fairly recognizable cast of actors at its disposal.  Unfortunately, it falls short on execution in one major way.  Thus concludes the introductory film criticism.

As already mentioned, our story starts with a red-eye flight bound for Boston's Logan International Airport.  Blind little girl Dinah Bellman wakes up and begins searching for the bathroom, only to discover that the plane is significantly less crowded than it was when she fell asleep.  In fact, just about everyone is gone, including her Aunt Vicky.  So begins the first third of the film, as we go about meeting the characters on board the flight who are now left to wonder just what the heck happened to everybody in a manner that Rod Serling would be damn proud of.

I'd be fairly willing to bet that King had Twilight Zone heavily on the brain when he wrote this story, and make no mistake about it, The Langoliers is essentially a three-hour Twilight Zone episode.  True story: I was actually going to write a blog listing my five favorite TZ twist endings, even going so far as to scribe my notes for the post during my down time at work.  But then I realized how lazy of an idea that was.  Fortunately, one of those twist endings (if you must know, it was the one at the end of "The Odyssey of Flight 33") reminded me of this film, so here it is.  And now you know, and knowing is half the battle!  That lovely aside is over, kids, so back to the show. 

From here, we go about meeting the characters, and it's a fairly interesting, varied bunch.  There's Brian Engle (David Morse), the Captain of the airplane who has just found out that his ex-wife has died; there's Laurel Stevenson (Patricia Wettig), a school teacher onboard the plane to essentially meet her online date before online dating was even a thing; there's Bob Jenkins (the always reliable Dean Stockwell), mystery novelist whose harebrained theories almost universally turn out to be true; there's Albert Kaussner (Christopher Collet), young violinist whose fantasy "Arizona Jew" character made the book undeniably awesome but is sorely lacking here in this film; there's Bethany Simms, troubled teen on her way to drug rehab and romantic interest for Albert; there's Nick Hopewell (Mark Lindsay Chapman), a goddamned British secret agent who is on his way to KILL SOMEBODY in Boston; and, amazingly enough, several more.  In the book, they were all fleshed out very well.  Here, it almost all feels a bit rushed.  But one thing that ISN'T rushed is the best character in the entire film, one Mr. Craig Toomey.

Ahhh, Craig Toomey.  He's played by Bronson "Balki" Pinchot, Mr. Serge himself, and he's your human villain of the film.  Eventually, the plane lands.  By that point, everyone on board is friendly with each other, with the story already planting the seeds for what is to come.  Bob Jenkins has begun to theorize that the airplane traveled back in time, the romantic roots have been planted for Albert and Bethany as well as Laurel and Nick, and they've all noticed that eerie crunching sound in the distance that seems to be getting closer.  And there is NOBODY ELSE AROUND, seemingly in the entire world.  All throughout, Craig Toomey has been a giant pain in everybody's ass.  He's a businessman with a tragic back story involving the kind of father that everyone has nightmares about, screaming at little Craig for achieving a B (a B!) in school and decrying his son for "scampering" through life.  See, he likes that word, scamper.  It says a lot about how GOOD that book was that I remember dialogue and descriptors like this 20 years later.  Toomey also has the eccentric habit of constantly tearing sheets of paper to alleviate his stress, but it serves no use.  He's on his way to a business meeting, and nothing is going to stop it.  Even if he has to kill to get there.

Craig Toomey is an awesome character, and Pinchot was more than game to play him.  He chews the scenery, but he's the kind of ham that you actually like to eat.  Simply put, this guy was aces in this movie.  Eventually, Toomey goes bat-crap crazy and it's up to the remaining characters to find him before he can kill anybody...but that loud noise is only getting louder.  And once we find out what it is...whoo boy, get ready for some bad CGI, kids.  I'll leave it up to you to discover what awaits these people should their refueling efforts fail.  Non-spoiler answer: the movie's title creatures definitely looked a lot cooler in my mind's eye when reading the book, as this was one of the few King stories that I actually READ first.

So that's what this movie is all about, people.  A group of people onboard a plane travel through a rip in time, one of the surviving passengers happens to be a psychopathic killer, and there are also supernatural beings out to do terrible things to them in the event they can't find a way back to the present day.  It's the crux of the book, and it's also the crux here.  Where this movie fell WAY short of the bar was in casting.  Yeah, Pinchot was boss.  But everyone else with the exception of Stockwell was woefully miscast.  David Morse was Mike Bennett levels of bland as Captain Engle; in the book, he was conflicted and complicated.  Here, he's just kind of there.  The Albert Kaussner of the book was somebody you could get behind; here, he's just a stereotypical dweeb.  Same thing with Bethany, except she's just your garden variety mid-'90s "bad girl" character.  The worst offender is definitely Wettig as Laurel; like Engle, she was charismatic and layered in the novella.  Wettig was just one-dimensional to the core.

Now, I will say this.  The movie DOES hold your attention for all 180 minutes of its running time.  But a lot of it will be spent wondering what different actors could have done in these roles.  Bad casting is a flaw that I can overlook in other movies.  In this one, though, it's enough to knock that awesome story back a whole couple of pegs.  That's a lot of pegs, kids.  There's no shortage of side plots in The Langoliers, and they're thrown entirely off by the off-kilter casting choices.  Or maybe I'm just weird.  It's been a while since I've dusted off this phrase, but call it glandular. 

However, there are two final notes of coolness to be had here: yet another awesome cameo from King himself as Craig Toomey's boss who greets him during the film's harrowing climax, and the fact that the whole damn movie was filmed at and around Bangor International Airport.  Those in the know (like, myself and fellow nerds) are aware that this is also Stephen King's hometown.  So +2 to the movie and Tom Holland on that one.

Rating time.  I'll give the TV movie-of-the-week version of The Langoliers ** 1/2 out of ****.  Like the source material, the story is awesome, but that cast...man.  At any rate, it's an ideal Saturday afternoon time waster if you're half-asleep and aren't paying too much attention to your TV.  Lastly, READ THE NOVELLA!

Ghosthouse (1988)

1988
Directed by Umberto Lenzi
Starring Lara Wendel, Greg Scott, Mary Sellers and Donald O'Brien

If you're ever in the mood for a change of pace with your horror-watching, go to Italy.  Italian horror movies have their own unique flavor with several of my favorite aspects of low-budget cinema: The acting is almost uniformly terrible, stuff very seldom makes sense, and buckets of fake blood.  If this sounds like fun to you, you're in the right place.  If you're in the mood for high quality, you're ALSO in the right place, as some of the best horror directors around are all about having names with plenty of vowels.  Dario Argento, Mario Bava, Lucio Fulci, get any DVD with those names attached and you're in for a good time. 

Ghosthouse is definitely another movie in this vein.  Directed by Umberto Lenzi, a guy who has made literally dozens of other exploitation films and shows absolutely no qualms here about slathering on the red stuff, this is one of the many unofficial sequels to the Sam Raimi Evil Dead franchise that I'm not a particularly big fan of.  Basically, they took the first two ED films, renamed them La Casa 1 and 2, and then took several more films that kinda-sorta shared the "badass ghosts in a remote location" theme and made them part of the same series in Italy.  Thus, if you find this movie in Europe, it's known as La Casa 3.  Why?  Who knows, but I don't pretend to know the mysteries of the universe.  What I DO know is that this movie, while not particularly GOOD in the traditional sense, was a fun experience that I actually liked BETTER than those other movies starring that dude with the big chin.  Blasphemy, I know.  On with the show.

So, longtime students of the blog, how do a lot of horror movies begin?  That's right, with a Past Evil, and that's what we get with Ghosthouse.  Admittedly, it's also a damn good one, as we get a creepy little girl named Henrietta (played by Kristen Fougerousse, and while she doesn't speak much, her presence is the thing that you'll definitely remember about this movie) who is (a) obsessed with her scary clown doll, and (b) has just murdered the family cat.  After her dad locks her in the basement, we get further spookiness as Henrietta uses the otherworldly powers of the doll to murder her father as well, and it's shown in all of its tomato-sauced glory.  Five minutes in, two bloody deaths.  All in all, the scorecard is getting filled in nicely.

Smash forward twenty years to the present day of 1988, where we meet our two main characters - Martha (Lara Wendel) and her boyfriend Paul (Greg Scott).  To be fair, these two aren't exactly Sir Laurence Olivier-level thespians, and that's putting it nicely.  Wendel in particular is damn near unwatchable at points, but I don't think many people look to Italian horror cinema to see deep Strasburg method acting.  What you need to know is that they're a couple, they have sex, and Paul is really into ham radio.  Yeah, ham radio.  Remember that stuff?  It's this contraption that leads them to a mysterious replaying of the same soul-destroying song that played over the prologue kills (which I just realized that I forgot to mention - yeah, every time Henrietta and her doll are around, this eerie kids' song plays in the background), which means that it's off to find the source of it.  Truly Paul Schrader-esque scripting at work here.

This movie definitely has its fair share of pointless characters.  I'll start with...Pepe.  On their way to the ghost house, Paul and Martha pick up this annoying hitch-hiker who likes to play weird jokes and has a borderline sexual eating fixation.  He's one of the most annoying side characters you'll ever see, made all the more amazing by the fact that he's in the movie for virtually NO REASON.  The same can be said for the three weird squatter people who are ON VACATION at the abandoned house when Paul and Martha get there.  Yeah.  On vacation.  At a run-down house where murders took place.  I like to sit at home and play video games, but whatever floats your boat, bros.  Then there's Susan, played by the certifiably hot Mary Sellers who serves as the token eye candy and is the recipient of the movie's death scene.  Who are these people?  Who cares.  They're here to get killed.  Fortunately, that's an area where Ghosthouse excels.

For anyone who has seen Dario Argento's masterpiece Suspiria, you know that horror that doesn't quite make sense is that much scarier.  This is the approach that Umberto Lenzi takes with this movie.  Every time that kiddie song pops up on the soundtrack, we know that someone is either getting wrecked in a gruesome way or there's going to be some nonsensical event happen that is never explained.  For an indication of some of the latter, this movie contains a murderous groundskeeper whose motives (I think) are never explained.  Yup.  He chases people around with a meat cleaver.  Why?  Who knows.  There's also disappearing ghost dogs and police who conspicuously don't mind that all of Scooby's gang is hanging out in a van near an abandoned house looking for ghosts.  That is what you call script convenience.  Really, though, none of this stuff even matters, because every time that Henrietta shows up, this flick is ACES.

Make no mistake, this is Henrietta's movie.  Again, her motives are never truly explained; we learned in the prologue that her dad, the local mortician, stole the clown doll from someone who was buried in the cemetery.  The implication is that evil spirits possess the doll and also Henrietta.  But that stare...man, that ungodly stare that Henrietta has.  Henrietta's presence is just one of those things that instantly gets under your skin every time she pops up on camera, and f**k me if science can explain it.  So even when the movie is having its characters do very DUMB THINGS (like taking vacations in abandoned houses, random showering in said abandoned house, refusing to leave after multiple people turn up dead, etc.), we can forgive it because this villain is legitimately scary and the payoff scenes are shot so well.

There are movies with great concepts that have terrible execution.  The Will Smith film Hancock comes immediately to mind.  Movies like Ghosthouse are a rarer breed, films with questionable material and shitty writing but boasting all the atmosphere and raw, guttural power to creep you out that you could ever ask for.  That's all you can ask for out of a horror film - to be scared, weirded out, or occasionally repulsed.  Any one of these is just fine on its own; all three is like a 50-point achievement.  Also, the ending is unintentionally hilarious...so much so that I won't spoil it for a change.

*** out of ****.  If you go into this one NOT expecting highbrow entertainment, you won't be disappointed.  It's definitely worth a watch if you're into Italian horror and still worth checking out if you're not a mutant like me.

Frailty (2001)

2001
Directed by Bill Paxton
Starring Bill Paxton, Matthew McConaughey, Powers Boothe, Matt O'Leary, Jeremy Sumpter and Levi Kreis

A little over a week ago, we lost a guy who I - no joke - consider to be a national treasure.  Folks, Bill Paxton was IT.  Regardless of the movie, regardless of the quality, this dude was unforgettable.  Legitimately one of my three favorite actors of all time, his filmography reads like a laundry list of coolness.  In Weird Science, Aliens, Predator 2 and True Lies, he made his trademark "hilarious douchebag" character an art form.  Of course, there's also A Simple Plan, a movie that came many years before Breaking Bad and did the concept of "once you head down the wrong road, there's no turning back" better than that show ever could have - and with a more charismatic main star, to boot.  And then there are his contributions to the horror genre - Near Dark, a woefully underrated vampire gem from 1988 that we'll be getting to in due time, and Frailty, the movie in question today and one of only two movies that the man ever directed.

Released in 2001, this flick came about at one of those weird "crossroads" periods for horror.  The luster of Scream and the movies it inspired had started to wear off, and the massive wave of Japan-style thrillers hadn't hit the States quite yet.  As a result, we were getting a bunch of movies that essentially threw crap at the wall to see what would stick.  Frailty was different.  It had a plan, it had a purpose, and it had an execution that managed to achieve near perfection.  It also had plenty of advance critical raves, awesome actors, and an atmosphere cooked up by a first-time director that makes me want to come up with all kinds of spicy words to describe its immersive quality.  And I don't know if you've been keeping up on current events, but that should be enough introduction, pal.  On with the show.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is a movie that has Matthew McConaughey.  Not only that, it has Matthew McConaughey in non-surfer-bum mode.  For many years, this guy appeared almost exclusively in cheesy romantic comedy movies, and it was a damn shame, because he's an awesome actor when he wants to be.  In Frailty, he's small-town boy Fenton Meiks, and he has a story for FBI Agent Wesley Doyle (Powers Boothe).  According to Fenton, his brother Adam is the "God's hand" serial killer that Doyle has been trailing for a long time, suggesting that Adam has committed suicide and that his future burial site - a rose garden in their hometown - is also where many of the previous victims are kept.  If you can accept the slight logical leap that Agent Doyle would willingly go along with a single witness here without backup, get ready for some electric stuff, as Fenton begins spinning a yarn about the events that transpired when he and his brother were children.

In Thurman circa two decades ago, we meet young Fenton (Matt O'Leary) and Adam (Jeremy Sumpter, who I'm also a huge fan of - why isn't this guy in more stuff these days?).  And then there's the father, never named in the script and appearing in the credits only as Dad Meiks.  As I've already mentioned, Paxton has had a lot of great performances over his career, but this one ranks near the top.  He's menacing without going completely over the top, even coming across as a little sympathetic at times, but always decidedly scary.  See, Dad Meiks is the ORIGINAL "God's hand" killer, and it's gradually spelled out for us how this came to be, as he believes that he was touched by an angel (but not the TV show) to kill unrighteous "demons in human form."  The sons are his helpers, and we're about to see how this goes down.

The routine goes like this - he is given a list of evil people to kill, abducts one of them and kills them in his rose garden.  Before the axe-murder death blow, however, he touches the victim and is granted a vision of all of the bad stuff the person in question has committed.  Frailty is a movie that is all about what you believe.  And make no mistake, Dad Meiks definitely believes in his mission.  The central conflict comes in the form of his sons, as Adam is a willing accomplice in all of this mayhem, while Fenton believes their dad is full of crap.  See that last sentence?  The movie makes it a lot more interesting than that, believe me. 

For an indication of what we're dealing with, there's a "close call" subplot as the local Sheriff becomes suspicious of Dad Meiks, only to summarily meet a gruesome end at the hand of Dad Meiks' axe.  It really can't be stated enough just how aces Paxton is in this role; he was clearly having a lot of fun directing himself, but the emotional element of dealing with his sons is always front and center for the world to see.  As such, this actually is a movie that hooks your emotions.  Things begin to deteriorate from this point on as Fenton's moral crisis gets the front-and-center treatment, leading to an abduction sequence that results in Dad winding up in his own rose garden.  And this is the point where the script launches us into one slam-bang surprise after another that I NEVER saw coming when I first saw this one in theaters in 2001.  Upon re-watching the film a few days ago, I can report that it still holds up.  First-time watchers, prepare to have your world rocked.

Without a doubt, Frailty is effective horror.  It truly is one of those horror films that rises above to become something much more.  Everyone involved here, from Paxton to McConaughey to Boothe to the child actors was more than game for this material and put their all into it, and it shows.  It's also a horror flick that has that "epic" presentation, with the present-day story of Fenton taking the FBI Agent on a little trip interspersed with the story of the Meiks family giving the whole thing a kind of poetic feeling.  The script creates a trio of characters in the Meiks family that we genuinely care about even as we watch them do terrible things.

Those terrible things are given to us in intervals.  There's not a whole lot of gore in this movie, but when the murder scenes hit, they make an impact.  Especially the stuff that takes place during the flick's final act.  *teaser*

I'm winding it up, reaching for it...yup, I can pull out the **** out of ****.  Overall, this flick is just a really fun ride from start to finish, and it's definitely worthy of that old-school TNT "New Classic" moniker.

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.