Clownhouse

I'm working through Sam Rockwell's filmography which led me to Clownhouse, his first feature.  It's a late eighties slasher that's not especially scary unless you share the youngest brothers fear of clowns or unless you know the director is a convicted pedophile.

With their parents away Sam is left to look after his younger brothers. They go to the circus where after the show, 3 insane asylum escapees murder the real clowns, dress up in their costumes and head off into the night.

Three guesses as to where they end up.

There's no gore just a lot of he's right behind you! which is surprisingly effective. The clowns don't speak which is a nice touch but they don't look especially demented either - they just needed to be scarier, not pennywise scary just more unhinged.

NO - after having watched this film I found out that the director Victor Salva, molested the 12 year old actor who played the youngest brother. This makes it hard to recommend the film even though I enjoyed watching it. It's something I'm conflicted about. I believe art can be separated from the individual but I don't believe a person should be allowed to work in an environment that exacerbates their deviance.

Dead of Night

Very nicely tied together portmanteau horror from the 40s (thanks Felix)

The stiff upper acting is a little off putting but once you get past that it's easy to be intrigued by this film.

A  man  travels to a country cottage where he recognises the guests from his dreams and has premonitions that something terrible is going to happen. In between informing a young guest he will be slapping her sometime in the future and an exuberant amount of chain smoking, 4 spooky tales are told.

The excellent room in the mirror story is stand out for me but I'm sure for most it's the power tripping ventriloquist one, also very good. The 3 other tales are disappointing however, including one based on a HG Wells story (!?) about two golf loving friends that seems to be thrown in for comic relief.


NO - I want to say yes but two words Golf Ghost

Devil Doll

The great Vorelli is a ventriloquist/hypnotist. With his glue on beard and perchance for planting post hypnotic suggestions in woman so that they come to him when he calls (usually in the middle of the night) he's equal parts cruel and sleazy. His ventriloquist act involves him verbally abusing his dummy Hugo, until he talks back. Vorelli then makes him get up and walk unaided to the front of the stage and apologise to the amazed audience.

A reporter seeing Hugo walk by himself decides to discover the secret of the trick and persuades his friend Marianne to to distract Vorelli so he can get a closer look at Hugo.

Unfortunately Marianne is soon coming when Vorelli calls...


YES - hypnotism AND ventriloquism what more do you need

The Changeling

I haven't heard much about this but gave it a watch alone at night and was surprised how creepy it is and also how influential it's been on ghost movies since, movies like The Ring, The Others, The Devils Backbone and Stir of Echoes.

A musician moves to a new town to start fresh and ends up renting an old historical house. He is woken by strange banging and discovers a hidden room upstairs. The mystery of whose room this was and why they still seem to be lingering in the house begins.

Everything that makes this great would never happen in a movie today it's subtle, the main character is an older guy, no jump cuts, no over the top sound effects it's slow paced and there's no swearing - ok apart from son of a bitch.


YES - classy and genuinely scary

Ladies and Gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains

we don't put out

Along with her sister and a very dorky Laura Dern, Corrine and her cousin perform in a 2 guitar no drum band called The Stains. After their first dismal performance Corrine reveals her new persona of black & white hair and red see through top and scores a tour with bands the Metal Corpses and The Looters.

With their new raunchy look and stolen song The Stains gain media attention which is quickly capitalised on by an opportunistic rock promoter who gets them sell out shows and shucks merchandise to the hordes of teenage girls dressed exactly like Corrine.

Featuring real members of the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Tubes and a young and suprisingly handsome Ray Winstone; this is an interesting film, part mockumentary, part satire on media creations, it never feels like a teen movie.

This was never released and apparently could only be seen on tv sometimes, however you can now track it down pretty easily and it's worth a view.

YES - Diane Lane was 15 when she played Corrine and she's mesmirising.

Phantasm 4: Oblivion

another dimension, another dimension.

After the first Phantasm, Don made another film every 4 years always ending on a cliffhanger. I have the box set and am watching them one after another which is a nice way to watch them actually, I don't have to wait to find out what happens and the characters start feeling like old friends.

So where were we?   Reggie is being attacked by balls and Mike's gone off to find out why his eyes turned gold. Weirdly the character of Tim the boy has just been erased, they don't even bother killing him off he's gone and never mentioned again.

Mike's tripping out in the desert, developing new powers and changing into something not human. He tries to kill himself but the Tall Man won't let him. He discovers he can materialise dimension gates and does a bit of time travelling.

It's been 12 years since this last film so seems unlikely that there wll be another one with Scrimm, who plays the Tall Man as he's now in his eighties but I wouldn't be surprised to see a remake or reimaginging or whatever the fuck Tim Burton/Marcus Nispel call their vapid projects.

NO - great apocalyptic tone but unless you know these characters you won't care

Phantasm 3: Lord of the Dead

semi colon says it all

After a quick recap we're straight back where we left off in the last film, driving away in the hearse which promptly crashes. Reggie's ok but Mikes unconscious and Liz, who was a main character in the last film, gets her face eaten off by dwarves. Mike recovers in hospital but gets abducted by the Tall Man. Reggie sets out in his trust hemi on a rescue mission accompanied by a silver ball that it actually Mike's dead brother Jody - don't ask - and he soon starts encountering empty towns with empty cemeteries.

This is all getting very familiar now but in a nice soap opera way. I like catching up with Reggie and the Tall Man although Reggie's constant lechering of female characters is wearing a bit thin. Mike is now played by the same actor as the first film which is good and bad. Good because he's not a pretty boy like James LeGros but bad because he has such a distracting nose, really long with a weird line in the end of it.

I like this one better than the 2nd film because Rocky is such a cool character, an ex army nunchuck welding wedge haircut hardarse and it's cool how at the end she just says fuck this I'm out of here and leaves them.

NO - I've mentioned before if the film title has a semi colon in it then it's going to be bad and this film does nothing to disprove my theory.

Phantasm 2

3 years and 11 million dollars later

Mike is now a man, a good looking moody 80s style man, who has just got out of a psychiatric hospital after learning to keep stories of dwarfs, balls and a tall man to himself.

Reggie is bringing Mike home from the hospital when his house blows up as the approach!  they hit the road using Mike's visions to take them to the Tall Man who is back to his old grave robbing, dwarf making tricks.

Don made so much money out of no budget Phantasm that someone pretty much gave him the cash to make the same film again on condition that he replace one of the leads with a well known actor (James LeGros? who?) It's still a lot of fun and retains the enthusiasm of the first film. The Tall Man is such a great creation with his weird white bob haircut and the strange look he does with one eye open and the other squinty while bellowing a threatening "Boy!"

NO - just because you thought it looks awesome doesn't mean you can use the same footage of a house you blew up in the space of 5 minutes for 2 different reasons.

Phantasm

Jason, Freddy, Michael and the Tall Man.

After a funeral Mike notices the undertaker lift the coffin out of the grave single handedly and take it back to the mausoleum. Mike returns later that night to investigate and is attacked by hooded dwarfs and a flying silver ball that can drill into skulls. He convinces his brother Jody and their friend Reggie that somethings up and together they discover that the undertaker isn't human and he's digging up corpses, transforming them into dwarfs and shipping them back to some other dimension.

This all sounds a bit shit but it's handled so competently by Don Coscarelli who wrote and directed this on a tiny budget that you can easily go along for the ride (and what a ride - a black barracuda hemi) with imaginative cg free special effects, awesome theme and mysterious villain this is just as good as Halloween or Friday the 13th but it's also very strange and I think that's what stopped it from becoming as well known as those films.


YES - but just can't make it from B to A

Blow Up

David Hemmings (looking a lot like the boy from the tin drum grown up) is Thomas, a fashion photographer who captures a strange encounter in a park. It's not until later after he plays around with enlarging the photo that he discovers he has taken a photo of a dead body.

He's a bit of a cock but I ended up liking him and you need to because he's in every scene. His fashion shoots are appalling but I love his studio home - black/white/grey an amethyst crystal on his coffee table - cool.

The pace is meandering broken up with some weird scenes a threesome on a giant piece of paper, Thomas diving to answer the phone, a disaffected rock concert and anarchist mime hippies playing mime tennis.

Ultimately the mystery of the photograph goes no where but it underlines the main theme of the film - perception which like memory is personal and mutable. We believe Thomas because we are watching through his eyes but imagine if he showed you the shitty photo and took you to see a dead body that wasn't there - would you believe him?


YES - cold mods

Trilogy of Terror

Julie, Therese/Millicent, Amelie.

These are the titles of the 3 stories in this portmanteau horror directed by Dan Curtis and written by Robert Matheson. Dan must love Karen Black as he has her starring in all of them and she sure is awesome to watch, it's her acting that raises this above other movies of this genre.

The first story is about an english teacher menaced by one of her students, the second a tale of twin sisters and the last a doll that comes to life.

It's shot straight up 70s and as usual the 70s dialogue comes across far more adult than todays horror fair, although there's some shonky writing in the weakest second story the last one more than makes up for it.


YES - I'm glad I didn't see this when I was 10, that doll would of scarred me for life.

Day of the Locust

I knew this existed but for some reason never watched it, but wow holy shit I'm glad I finally did.

Directed by John Schesinger (Midnight Cowboy) and based on Nathanael West's book this film is a masterpiece.

Tod Hackett moves to sweltering 1930's hollywood with plans on becoming an art director, however he slowly but surely gets his soul sucked out by the flaky parasites who dwell there.

Karen Black as Faye Greener with her freaky cat eyes and trowel makeup make her a delicious horror to watch but the best performance comes from Donald Sutherland. His sad sack Homer is pathetic and while initially you feel sorry for him it's hard not to finally feel annoyance as the other characters do.  His loneliness has contorted him into a simpering parasite of another kind and watching him sitting in a deck chair, crying silently while his fingers clench and knuckles whiten, you know something bad is going to happen.

This symbolic surreal tapestry slow burns it's way to an unsettling final 20 minutes - where a crowd at a film premiere turns into a murderous mob.

Not a horror film but certainly about the horror of the film industry - the fakeness and desperation, the billions spent on creating illusion. Not a lot has changed really. Maybe plastic surgery.


YES - this is now in my top 10

Kiss of the Spider Woman

I really like the book by Manual Puig and wanted to see how it translates to screen.

It doesn't.

I'm not entirely sure why not. It's got two very meaty main roles but neither Raul Julia or William Hurt nail them and I think William Hurt got his oscar more for daring to play a queen which back in the 80s was a a bit riske, rather than the quality of his acting.

The film takes place mostly in their shared cell which gives the whole film a very theatrical feeling. Raul is a political prisoner who initially finds Luis's effeminate manner and tendency for escapism difficult to respect however this changes and they become intimate friends.

The spider woman of the title only makes a very brief appearance as the character of one of Luis's film stories that he tells Valentin to pass the time and distract them both from their grim circumstance.

NO - gay shawshank without the escaping

The Bad Seed

(she burns him alive)

Kristine and Kenneth seem to have the perfect daughter, eight year old Rhoda (played by 11 year old Patty McCormack) however this jewelled sunglass wearing, rollerskating charmer is actually an amoral psychopath.

After a boy drowns at a school picnic and his drunken mother turns up at her house ranting, Kristine begins to suspect that Rhoda may have had something to do with the death.

It's slightly campy but is actually an extremely dark story of a serial killer. So dark that the film makers changed the original books ending and added a light hearted comedy scene during the credits.

Rhoda is an icy calculating shit but seems to have quite modern sensibilities, well maybe without the murders but she's materialistic and an expert at emotional manipulation.

YES - girl hasn't gone bad, girls born bad.

Stacy's Knights

I bought this for 2 reasons:
a) it has kevin costner in it
b) it was 50c on dvd from Dimmies

The cover is very misleading - this isn't about a glamorous crew of misfits beating the casinos, it's 3 weirdos - shy Stacy, huckery Jean and young Kevin hanging out in a log cabin, drinking and playing blackjack.

The actual sting part that the poster suggests is only in the final 10 minutes and involves Stacy dressing up like a man, who looks a lot like Roach from People Under the Stairs, to sneak into the one casino they were banned from.

Oh and did I mention Stacy's not just good at card counting, she actually has magic powers.

NO - but it was money well spent.

Tourist Trap

Ah the sunny, slim 70s.

Some friends are on a roadtrip, get a flat tire, one goes missing the rest end up at a weird dudes house who has a lot of mannequins.

This is really strange - yeah there's a crazy guy but he seems to have magic powers as well. He could have just been a psycho who likes to dress up (as a mannequin) and make his victims into mannequins, but they've given him powers as well for some reason, not that he really uses them for anything apart from making mannequins dance around.

YES - guy really likes mannequins

Jack Be Nimble

How did Alexis Arquette end up in this New Zealand film from the 90s? and how does he pull off the a perfect Noo Zelind accent? my theory is he was having a relationship with Garth Maxwell the director who gave him the role as his actual acting is a bit highschool drama.

Alexis is Jack who along with his sister Dora were given up for adoption as children. Dora went to a nice older couple while Jack went to a psycho farm family who abuse him physically and psychologically.

Very gothic but not quite horrific. Best scene is Jack hypnotising his real father to death by making him do sit ups "hey dad why don't you do something about your weight you fat shit!"

YES - I can't get over how good his accent is, if you didn't know he was American you would think he was from NZ.

Deadly Friend

Paul is smart and nerdy and makes his own retarded robot friend BB, retarded because all it can say is it's own name "BB! BB!" and make stupid baby sounds which are supposed to be endearing but because it's voiced by a raspy old man just make him sound like a pervert.

He meets drippy Tom and abused Samantha and it's all fun and games until BB gets shot and Samantha gets killed by her father.

Luckily as well as studying robotics 15 year old Paul is also a whiz at brain surgery and ends up making a Samanatha/BB zombie which doesn't know if it's a girl or a robot and promptly goes on a murdering rampage.

There's 3 gore scenes which seem inserted ad hoc to make this a horror film but it's more sci fi and there's no sex or cussing so seems surprising charming.

Oh and this is directed by Wes Craven.

YES - the track playing over the credits has to be heard to be believed.

Deadly Blessing

Little watched Wes Craven film about country couple Martha and John, whose neighbours are Hitite (not the amish but dressed like the amish and using horse carriages like the amish)

Some weird shit goes down in the barn and the Hitites are muttering about an Incubus. Marthas city friends (including a young saucy Sharon Stone) come and stay with her but this doesn't stop the stabbings, weird dreams and snake in the bath.

Is a person responsible or something else...

This is a strange one almost saved by a completely ridiculous out of nowhere ending that no one would see coming, its the type of ending that comes out of desperation, after all the and then, and thens you just go fuck it - It was all a dream.

NO - what the hell is going on? 

Black Rain

This terrible film is actually awesome!

Michael is Nick Conklin (Conklin?) an American cop who is escorting a gang member back to Osaka to be arrested but fucks up the hand over and the gang member escapes.

Michael is rude, inept, doesn't even try and speak Japanese or respect the police he's working with and is a massive dick. Along with his partner Andy Garcia, they attempt to hunt down the gang member with or without the help of the Japanese police.

Directed by Ridley Scott, it features all his favourite tricks - lights, smoke and fans. Weirdly he also recreates the smoking silhouette scene from Bladerunner exactly, this time with gaijin hostess Joyce. He also re uses some no doubt expensive wall tile blocks from Bladerunner for good measure (well he couldn't exactly use them in Legend could he?)

YES - motorbikes, smoking, swords, karaoke, lots of cheese but still stylish and enjoyable however I wonder what people from Osaka actually think of this.