20 Horror Movies for $5 Recap

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20horrormovies01Good

I’m grading on a curve here — not good in the sense that I could have paid $11 to see it and walked away satisfied.  But certainly way ahead of the other movies in this collection.  And better than some movies I actually have paid $11 to watch.

Keepsake (2008) – Probably the best in the collection.  Maybe more than any of the others, it seemed like an effort by serious film-makers.  I just today discovered that I have owned this movie for years and did not realize it.  It was in another cheapo collection that I never finished because I didn’t have the voracious gaping maw of a blog to feed on a deadline.

Hell’s Highway (2002) – I’m not 100% positive if this was the 2nd best, or if I was just giddy because this was the last entry.  It is more that there were a few scenes I appreciated rather than sustained goodness.  Micro-budget, but not afraid for their reach to exceed their grasp, and show some seams.  I could imagine the crew scrambling and running in between takes to get it as right as possible.

Not Bad

“Not Bad” might literally be a synonym for “Good”, but I still have to hedge a little on these. 20 years ago, I could have imagined re-watching one of these on a rainy Saturday afternoon.  That standard is long gone with so many better movies available on demand, but it stills works as a metric.

White Zombie (1932) – I cut this a lot of slack based on the age.  Had this been part of the Universal Monster scene, it would not be in the public domain, would have been better preserved, and would be more highly regarded.  It’s an entertaining watch.

Wages of Sin (2006), In the Dead of Winter (1993) – Wow, I am already having a hard time remembering much about these except that I did get some moments of genuine enjoyment out of both of them.

Trancers (1985), Prom Night (1980), Puppet Master (1989) – These seem like a little bit of a cheat since they were actual theatrically released movies — or at least cult videos — with some recognizable faces.

Tolerable

I’m confident I could sit still and watch these again without being tied to a chair.  But I really can’t imagine voluntarily watching them again without such restraints.

Curtains (1983) – I’m giving this the benefit of the doubt.  The transfer was so terrible, it was tough to watch, but others seem to like it.  If I got a free Blu-Ray, I’d give it another chance.

King of the Zombies (1941) – Very dated, and probably raaaacist.  But make some allowances and it is not a torturous watch.

Inside (2006) – Very slow, but not in a bad way, with an intriguing premise and some good performances.

Cruel World (2005) – Really a train wreck that I am being very charitable to.  On another day, this could easily be in the next bracket down.  Whenever I have doubts that acting is actually a skill, I will remember Edward Furlong’s “performance.”

Grave Mistake (2008) – Kind of fun in its micro-budget silliness.

Nurse (1997) – In the Watchable category only because it doesn’t really do anything wrong.  It is just slow, melodramatic, and fails to adequately exploit an interesting concept.

The Gingerdead Man 3 (2011) – No effort at all was expended in the making of this film.  It is so shameless, however, that it is kind of likable.

Participation Trophies (i.e. Crap)

Night Shadow (1989)  – Man-childs, men-children?  Whatever, just embarrassing.  Infantile acting and a story that takes forever to go nowhere.

Howling IV: The Original Nightmare (1988) – Another slow start that seemed very slow to end also.

Teenage Zombies (1960) – I feel kind of sorry for this one.  It was clearly just some yahoos trying to make a quick buck in the old AIP days.  There is no pretense of art; but that doesn’t make it any easier to watch.

Shaded Places (2000) – Just awful.  Awful performances, unbearable score, leaden pace, and I am guessing a largely improvised script — not necessarily a bad thing, but there is not a Christopher Guest or Larry David in this bunch.

Awaken the Dead (2007) – Well, somebody had to be last.  From the original review:

  • Cinematography: Just dreadful.  I don’t even think it was incompetence or budget constraints; it was just terrible choices.
  • Acting: Mostly terrible.
  • Dialogue: Terrible.
  • Make-Up: Really looked more like Insane Clown Posse than zombies.
  • Story: Adequate.  You don’t really need much for a good zombie movie.
  • Sound: Not well-recorded.  Sound does not get enough respect — in this, and many low-budget movies, expectations are lowered upon hearing the first word of dialogue.

Epilogue

Despite the crap, I was actually surprised at how watchable most of the movies were.  I’ve seen worse blindly choosing on NetFlix.  And all of them were still more enjoyable than watching a movie on Hulu.

Tales from the Crypt – Judy, You’re Not Yourself Today (S2E11)

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This is a great example of how you can take a so-so story and use great performances, score and directing to make it fun.  Well, until the ending, at least.

The opening credits really set a tone even though they really have nothing to do with the story.  Bouncy tango music plays while the camera pans across small dolls, statues, tchotchkes, both bric and a-brac.  Hypnotic, yes.  Relevant, not sure.

Donald is a gun enthusiast who seems to also be something as an anglophile as he and his wife speak with English, or at least, patrician accents.  They have prints of fox hunts on the wall and Donald is even is wearing an ascot for God’s sake.

tftcjudy03He heads out to the gun club leaving wife Judy (Carol Kane) at home.  An elderly  solicitor — OK, a witch — knocks at the door and Judy invites her in.  After Judy admires a hideous necklace she is wearing, the old lady gives it to her.  This enables her to switch bodies with Judy just like in Freaky Friday, and the remake of Freaky Friday, and the other remake of Freaky Friday, and all those other movies that ripped off Freaky Friday.

When Donald returns home, Judy in the old woman’s body jumps him.  She convinces Donald that it really is her and he goes looking for the witch in Judy’s body.  Before he leaves, he locks Judy in the old woman’s body in the closet.  It is not clear why he does this.  It turns out to be a good idea, but I really don’t credit his character with being that smart — even with the English accent.  It must be said that Frances Bay as the old woman is GREAT portraying Carol Kane in the much-older body.

tftcjudy04Donald finds the witch in Judy’s body at the train station.  He tricks her into switching the bodies back.  Donald and Judy go back to their house and let the witch out of the closet.  But not before Donald kills her while firing wildly with his pistol.  He buries her in the basement.

Three months later, the decayed corpse arises and repossesses Judy.  Donald accidentally shoots the young Judy as they switch identities for the last time.  Young Judy dies in his arms.  Well, that’s a pisser.

There was a lot of scatter-shot greatness here until it fell apart at the end.  Judy didn’t deserve to die, and Donald didn’t deserve to lose his wife.  It is strange that the writer and director seemed to understand the show so well until this point.  They had a great score, over the top characters, interesting lighting palate, but then that ending — no irony, no comeuppance, just a a downer.

Post-Post:

  • Scott Nimerfro is tied for most TFTC scripts at 11.
  • Strange career for director Randa Haines.  She goes years between projects, but she has directed some big movies — at least big enough that I remember the titles 30 years later — and a very highly regarded TV movie.  Michael Convertino who scored this episode also scored all four of her movies.
  • I always liked that one of Carol Kane’s first credits was in The Last Detail as Young Whore.
  • Frances Bay was the old bag Jerry Seinfeld stole the marble rye from.

Outer Limits – The Message (S1E17)

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olmessage01Marlee Matlin, stretching her acting chops by playing a deaf woman, is “hearing” things despite the failure of her implants . . . no, hearing implants.

The next day, teaching her class of deaf kids, she begins hearing things again.  She frantically begins filling the chalkboard zeroes and ones and X’s.

She is taken to the hospital where she meets Larry Drake.  After playing a retarded mentally-challenged man on LA Law for years, here he is a NASA engineer who fortuitously happens to be working as a janitor in the hospital.  Now that’s stretching your chops.

He identifies her writings as binary code despite the inclusion of lots of X’s.  He runs the code through his computer, and tells her it is a message.  Just as in Contact, it is a Primer for the rest of the message.

After Marlee inputs more code into a handheld device he gives her, he prints out pages that cover an entire wall.  Tracing through the X’s produces the space-porn from the Pioneer 10 spacecraft.  Alongside a picture of the alien.  The big, big alien.

Marlee’s husband gets home from a trip and is not thrilled to see his wife working with Larry on this project.  He also isn’t thrilled that they have put $900 on his credit card for capacitors and other electronic equipment that aliens have asked for.  I don’t know why capacitors were singled out unless the charge was from  Capacitors R Us; or that’s the only electrical component the writer had heard of thanks to Dr. Emmet Brown’s ground-breaking work on the flux capacitor.

She is upset that her husband doesn’t believe her, so goes to Larry’s place where they set up the equipment on his roof as per the alien’s instructions.  While getting an aspirin, she notices that he takes the same anti-psychotic drug they tried to give her.

olmessage06Marlee’s husband finally tracks them down and tries to stop them.  However, they are able to answer the alien’s plea by firing a blast from the space laser into the alien’s solar sail, enabling them to divert the craft from crashing into the sun.

So-so story, but well performed.

Post-Post:

  • This is the 4th episode written by Brad Wright this season.
  • Larry Drake says the message is a palimpsest, but I don’t think he (or Brad Wright) knows what that means.
  • The husband was just kind of annoying here, but was great as Pusher in a couple of X-Files episodes.
  • Larry Drake was last seen in And All Through the House.
  • They seem a lot happier in the original Pioneer rendition:

“You idiot, I told you no one else would be naked.”

Ray Bradbury Theater – The Pedestrian (S3E5)

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bradbury02In complete contrast to The Wind, this short story is really just a sketch, a thumbnail, and not even the thumbnail.  It is the RBT episode that fleshes out the character and concept.  I’m not sure who to credit for the improvement.  This is the only directing credit for Alun Bollinger, so probably not much attributable to him.  Certainly Bradbury expanded the story for his screenplay.  I think, though, it is David Ogden Stiers who really sells it.  I normally don’t care for him without the Boston accent (like in that really mediocre Star Trek TNG episode), but he is great here.

bbtpedestrian01He has walked to the house of his friend Stockwell.  This is risky and unusual because in the year 2053, street-walking is against the law — I mean literally walking down the streets, not the kind of street-walking that is still prosecuted by fascists in 2014 .

He is dressed all in black and has brought similar clothing to Stockwell.  Stiers reels off Bradbury’s flowery dialogue, and it is the rare occasion that it actually works.  They are giddy as they set out.  Stockwell has never seen dew on the grass, or the over-grown sidewalks.  This despite the fact that the houses do have windows.  Bradbury even gets a laugh out of Stockwell taking a header over a root.

bbtpedestrian03They are soon spotted by a drone Helicopter.  The rest of the episode is basically an interrogation by the drone.  This tracks with the short story except that it is a drone Police Car.

Stiers is grilled on why he is outside.  The drone can’t understand the concept of going for a walk, seeing the sites, or getting some fresh air.  The drone orders Stiers to get in, finally showing that it is not a small drone but was supposed to be a full size helicopter.

The helicopter lifts off and shines a spotlight on Stockwell telling him to  disperse, which unless he is dismembered, I’m not sure is strictly possible.  I think he probably takes the long way home.

bbtpedestrian02Post-Post:

  • I really did think it was a mini-copter drone.  Just turned out to be a sketchy special effect.
  • Hmmm, didn’t realize Michelle Forbes was in that ST:TNG episode in a pre-Ro role.  The presence of Lwaxana Troi is enough to stop me from revisiting it, though.
  • NZ-LOTR Connection: Director was 2nd Unit DP on all 3 movies.
  • Next week: A Sound of Thunder.  If they manage to screw that up . . .