Category Archives: Film

Beneath (2013)

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beneath01

Contender for Worst Cover Ever.

Title card:  “The following is inspired by true events. In 2013 a collapse at the Brackett Coal Mine left a group of workers trapped nearly six hundred feet underground.  This is what happened . . . beneath the surface.”

That is a strangely specific and verifiable way to begin a horror film.  If there ever was a Brackett Coal Mine collapse, it must have been suppressed by the government because I’m not finding it.

C’mon guys, have the courtesy to lie to us — like Fox Mulder, we want to believe; it’s OK to lie, just don’t rub our faces in it.

The film opens with search and rescue crew breaking through the rocks.  They see blood on the wall, then a survivor.

Flash back to 4 days ago — Samantha Marsh is recording testimonials praising her father George on her phone.  She has escaped the coal town and is now a big shot lawyer in New York.  She confides in one of the locals that she is an environmental lawyer, and by the reaction, she might as well have said she puts rapists and child molesters back on the streets.

At the local bar, after her father’s farewell party, Samantha is tossing back shots with the good ol’ boys.  To prove she has not lost touch with the coal miners, she offers to go subterranean with them the next day (not a sexual euphemism), thereby guaranteeing 1) a cave-in, 2) attack by strange creatures, 3) or both.

beneath02The next morning she joins dad and the crew down in the mine.  The mechanical digger hits a rough patch, but the operator presses on, breaking into a cavern.  Cue the predicted cave-in.  Not that that’s a bad thing — it’s pretty much what you come to a mining thriller to see, as long as it is done well.

The effects are not spectacular, but they get the job done.  I had never thought about the effect of the air being compressed in a cave-in, but here it blows a man across the shaft like a rag doll.  Good creative stuff.

The survivors retreat into a rescue pod that can provide fresh air and water for the 72 hours it will take for them be be rescued.  It isn’t long before they hear noise and go outside the pod to see if maybe one of their crew is still alive in the mine.

It is understandable that they would want to help their buddies.  But it seems like they are too quick to go into fear mode — and not fear of additional cave-ins, but of something in the mine.

The story meanders a little as the miners try to survive the lack of oxygen, and the changes that their pals start experiencing.  It is effective, actually giving me chills a number of times.

The performances are generally good with one exception.  The always fun Jeff Fahey (Lost) is good as George, there is a nice assortment of earthy miners, and Joey Kern is good in the Corporal Hicks role. Unfortunately,  Kelly Noonan is no Ellen Ripley.  I just never bought her performance either above ground or below.  Even the look of her character was off-putting.  The braided hair just looked ridiculous on her.  Also, her blindingly white smile was almost comical, especially the contrast after she gets dirtied up with coal dust.

Overall, a nice little thriller, though.

Post-Post:

  • Joey Kern also went overboard with the veneers, but it is less jarring than the fluorescent Joe Bidenesque choppers of Kelly Noonan..
  • There is apparently some tension between Samantha and her Mom, but is a useless thread that is laid out and serves absolutely no purpose.  It would have been better if her Mom were dead and she had the conflict with her only remaining parent.

Mine Games (2012)

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minegames01

Another contender for worst cover ever.

There is just something that works for me in underground movies.  Not underground movies, but movies that are actually set largely underground.

There is no need to justify loving a great film like The Descent; but liking The Descent 2 goes a long way toward proving my point.  It doesn’t matter why the people are underground.  It could be caves like The Cave or Sanctum.  Could be really deep like The Core or really shallow like Buried.  Could be subways like Creep or End of the Line.  Could be mines like My Bloody Valentine or today’s subject.  Like putting putting people in a spaceship, putting people in danger underground is always a great premise.

That said, the actual start to this film is not great.  It begins in a flash-forward with an annoying voice-over and a mine set which struck me as cheesy (although not so much when the action actually got there).  There is an effective quick scene where we hear a crying woman trapped behind a barred door trying to claw her way out, then we cut to Michael who lost me with his first line of dialogue.

There is just something not comfortable about him and I don’t think it is his character.  In his chat with girlfriend Briana Evigan, I sense zero relationship there.  She mentions his meds which we learn are to combat schizophrenia, but that doesn’t seem to be the problem either.  This is not a couple.

They are getting supplies at a convenience store.  Beside the door is strange item — some sort of board that advertises the Washington Tribune’s story of “Couple Found Murdered in RV.”  Has a newspaper gone to that much effort since the Titanic sank? This board should have been worn by a street-urchin hawking newspapers in 1912, I tells ya.  Second — caution, time loops ahead — I can’t decide whether it makes sense that the deaths are being referenced yet.

minegames09They arrive at the woodsy cabin of the soon-to-be dead Matt and Sarah which appears to be about 10,000 square feet.

The group consists of Lex, with the mug, disposition and wit of a soccer hooligan; Guy, the very stiff grand-son of Gregory Peck and amazing doppelganger of Benedict Cumberbatch; Michael, the wispy, solid-as-Jello schizophrenic; and TJ,  whose main characteristic is that he is not one of the other three guys.

With them are Rose, who has psychic flashes; Claire, the cute one; and Lyla, Michael’s unlikely girlfriend played by Briana Evigan.

The gang finds an abandoned mine near the cabin and ignores the warnings not to enter.  After doing a little exploration, they go back to the cabin.

minegames02The most odious member of the group, Lex, claims he dropped his wallet, so he and TJ take a 2nd trip to the mine.  There, they discover two dead corpses of themselves. They go back to the cabin and tell the group what they saw.

Guy doesn’t believe them, so they make a 3rd trip to the mine in the same day.  For a change in a horror movies, the bodies are still there, and everyone agrees they are in trouble.

Naturally, the solution is to take a 4th trip to the mine.  This time, behind the barred door seen in the opening, they find another body — this time alive, and more importantly, cute — Claire.  As they already have a Claire in the cabin, they leave her and return to the cabin.

minegames06Michael is acting very creepy, so they decide to exile him from the cabin. But where to go?  Hmmmmm . . . . so we get the 5th trip to the mine today where he is locked in a room, sadly for him not the same one as Claire.

After they return to the cabin, Rose has another psychic flash saying that Michael has escaped.  So they make the 6th trip to the mine that day.

There are time-loops, are-we-already-dead conversations, psychic flashes, nice callbacks to earlier events, people meeting themselves, and the very clever use of a particular note.

There are a couple of wildcards thrown in to provide alternative explanations, at least briefly, for the strange happenings.  The use of mushrooms to explain Rose’s psychic flashes is clever.  There is also an aurora borealis which is never really connected to the story, but does linger mysteriously over the proceedings.  However, I never got the sense that Michael’s illness was the root of his craziness, and I found it to be mostly a distraction.

This is in the same vein (ha, mining humor!) as Triangle and Timecrimes, an enjoyable time — and mind — bender.  The only weakness for me was the actor playing Michael, and unfortunately he is in far more scenes than the other actors.

Post-Post:

  • It took 4 writers and 12 producers to make this.
  • “You brought a rolling suitcase on a camping trip”

Return of the Ape Man (1944)

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returnapeman01Only the knowledge that this was not truly a sequel to The Ape Man gave me the strength to watch.  Even at a mere 59:45, nothing could make me watch Ape Man II: Electric Boogaloo.

According to the newspaper headline, local tramp Willie “the Weasel” is reported missing. The newspaper continues in the article sensitively referring to him as “the weasel” rather than as Willie. He was last seen talking to 2 “distinguished gentlemen”; although in relative terms to a tramp named weasel, that doesn’t narrow it down much.

Professor Dexter (Bela Lugosi) and Professor Gilmore (John Carradine) are raising the temperature in a special, presumably insulated, chamber in their lab from 100 below zero to room temperature.  They wheel out a gurney with a man — we have to assume it is Willie — and inject him with a serum and are able to revive him after four months of being frozen solid. They slip him a fiver and send him happily on his way.

returnapeman03Lugosi wants to test his theory for four years, or four hundred years.  Obviously, he wouldn’t be around to collect his Nobel Prize, so he cleverly decides to finds an ancient dead body and re-animate it.  He goes on an expedition to “Seek Prehistoric Men Embedded in Glacier.”  We get some nice jaunty music and footage culled from Alaskan Adventures (1926) showing his trip to the North Pole.  Even though obviously inserted into the movie, it is a nice change from the low-budget feel of Ape Man I.  After 10 months of back-breaking digging — by some grunts, not the Professors — they find a man.

returnapeman02After melting the block of ice that they shipped back to the states, the inject him with the serum which brings him back to life.  He attacks the Professors, but they are able to maneuver him in to a cell conveniently located in the lab.  Lugosi’s plan is to transplant a portion of a modern brain into the Ape Man, giving him powers of speech and reasoning, but leaving his memories of the good old days.

Carradine naively asks where he will get the donor brain, and Lugosi looks at him like he has USDA stamped across his forehead.  Surprisingly, Lugosi lures Carradine’s future son-in-law back to the lab and drugs him.  Carradine walks in and pulls a gun on Lugosi.  The future in-law is revived and remembers nothing of the incident.

The Ape Man breaks out of his cell, and shows a disconcerting amount of butt-crack as he wriggles out the window.  Lugosi manages to track him down — while wearing a tuxedo and carrying a blow-torch.  Sadly, the Ape Man was loose long enough to kill a policeman.

returnapeman04Carradine comes to the lab when he sees the murder reported in the newspaper.  Lugosi stuns him with electricity, ties him up and puts him in the deep freeze.  The operation is a success as the Ape Man gains the power of speech.  He then bolts out of the lab again.  Possessing part of Gilmore’s brain, he goes to Gilmore house and breaks in.  And inexplicably strangles Mrs. Gilmore.

The Ape Man returns to the lab and confesses to killing Hilda.  The cops show up and just start blasting away at the Ape Man, but not before he kills Lugosi.  Despite having more bullets in him than Michael Myers, he again flees the lab.

He returns to the Gilmore house, throws his niece over his shoulder and carries her off. He returns to the lab and puts her in the deep freeze room, ironically starting a fire so she is nearly killed by the heat and smoke.

Her fiance is able to save her at the last minute, but the Ape Man dies in the fire.  Although we don’t see the body, so the way is clear for The Ape Man Bounces Back, Beach Blanket Ape Man and I was a Teenage Ape man.

Post-Post:

  • John Carradine is the father of David, Robert and Keith Carradine.
  • Throughout the whole film, I kept thinking of Phil Hartman.

The Ape Man (1943)

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apeman01Amazon teaser:  Conducting weird scientific experiments, crazed Dr. James Brewster (Bela Lugosi), aided by colleague Dr. Randall, has managed to transform himself into an ape.

A man hanging around the docks spots Dr. Randall’s picture in the newspaper concerning the disappearance of his colleague Lugosi.  Then he spots Randall hanging around the docks.  Sadly a possibly key piece of dialogue is unintelligible, and even the closed caption says [INAUDIBLE].

Lugosi’s sister Agatha gets off the boat and meets Randall.  He confides to her that he knows where Lugosi is — at the old family mansion, although “he’d be better off in the family cemetery plot.”  I sense a flashback.

apeman21They return to the mansion, and go through a secret panel behind the fireplace.  Not saying it is impossible, that that’s a nice feat of engineering having a fireplace that can pivot out into the room and still connect to a chimney.  He leads her to the lab and warns her.  He opens a door revealing a real gorilla; after that bit of misdirection, we see the less apish Lugosi.  He is at least 2 dudes along on the evolution chart, and actually looks a little like Cornelius or Zira from Planet of the Apes.  Really, other than facial hair, I don’t see the problem.

The only way to reverse him back to a human requires the taking of spinal fluid from another human which would mean death for them.  Randall refuses to help at that cost.

Frustrated, Lugosi dons a coat and hat and takes the gorilla out.  He and the gorilla go to Randall’s office and kill his assistant, enabling Lugosi to extract his spinal fluid.

apeman20Randall injects Lugosi with the serum.  It does humanize him a bit, at least allowing him to walk upright, but the effects are short-lived.  He takes the gorilla out for a series of murders to secure a fresh supply of the fluid.  Randall, however, has reservations about killing people in order for Lugosi to walk upright for a few minutes.

There are a lot of elements to like here: a wise-cracking reporter, his hot photographer partner, a gorilla, an ape-man, Lugosi.  Sadly, it just doesn’t come together.  This film somehow seems to have both too much and too little going on during its brief 64 minute run-time.

I give this one only 25% of a barrel full of monkeys.

Post-Post:

apeman23apeman26

The Human Monster (1939)

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humanmonster02This was a hard one to watch — literally.  The print at Amazon is awful, often making it impossible to distinguish what is on the screen.

The English accents also made watching difficult.  On the plus side, the captioning was crisp and clear.

We start off with several nice shots of bodies tossed up against a pier, bobbing in the surf and a couple washing up on the shore.  A headline in The Insurance Monitor — “The Oldest Insurance Journal in the World” — says insurance circles are alarmed at the increase in drowning fatalities.  Since all these corpses seem to be fully dressed, that does seem strange.

Inspector Holt is assigned the case, and he is buddied up with O’Reilly, a Yank who has come to learn the British way of solving crimes.

humanmonster03Dr. Orloff (Bela Lugosi) is an insurance broker and known as a very generous man. While loaning Mr. Stuart £2,000, Lugosi generously offers to write him an insurance policy with himself as beneficiary.  He also suggests that Stuart pay a visit to the home for blind vagrants to learn the joy of charity.

Stuart does visit the home and is greeted by Lugosi who gives him the full tour which includes being killed by a giant deformed blind man and tossed in the Thames.

By helpful coincidence, his hot daughter Diana has returned from America that same day and able to identify the body.  Lugosi offers her a job as a secretary at the home for blind bums.

humanmonster09Diana goes directly to the home and gets the same tour as her father, except less murdery.  She uncovers evidence that Lugosi killed her father, leading to a twist of not quite Sixth Sense proportions.

This film was much darker than The Devil Bat and Scared to Death.  It is not without humor, but blind men, the deformed giant, the taking of a blind man’s hearing, and the callous disposal of bodies keep the film from veering off into farce.

Post-Post:

  • Writer Edgar Wallace got a “Conceived by” credit on the original King Kong.  55 years after he died, he got a “Story by” credit on Revenge of the Living Dead Girls.
  • Released as The Dark Eyes of London, in England, this was the first film to receive the English “H” rating signifying it was too “horrific” for children under 16.  Or the last, depending which source you trust.
  • I had never heard the term Agony Column.