N: Nightshot (2018)

About a third of the way through Nightshot, my son looked into my office and commented, “That looks terrifying.” My response was “Does, doesn’t it?” and the rest was…

Hm.

Nightshot purports to be an urbex video (that’s urban exploration for all us oldsters), where our host (Nathalie Couturier) leads her cameraman through an expansive, abandoned hospital while talking about the history of the horrors that took place there. It seems your typical mad doctor was doing obscene experiments involving pregnant women. At some point Nathalie cheerily announces to her cameraman (and therefore, her audience) that she herself is pregnant, so go ahead and write the rest of the movie yourself. Pretty sure Dr. Freudstein is involved.

My major issue here is that Nightshot is advertised as a one-take movie, and I have some doubts. Once again, whenever we are near something spoooooooky the camera glitches out and the audio goes wild, a major difference being these things also affect our urban explorers (and nice work on the audio effects). These are ready-made opportunities for a cut, so pull the other one. Those are still some extended takes, though, so mad props to Nathalie, who literally carries the movie. If I’m wrong, her achievement is all the more laudable.

Secondly, Nightshot did find itself a hell of a location, to be sure, but as we get deeper into the story, the Blair Witch curse sinks in and we seem to just be wandering endlessly through it. There are rooms that are tricked out for maximum creepiness and story advancement, but man I got tired of that one hall.

One of the tricked-out rooms has a Ouija board in it. Nathalie starts spinning out some bullshit about the spirit board for her audiences, and the Ouija gets so offended it flies across the room. That part I liked.

Never a good sign.

Third, as the story progresses, it becomes increasingly obvious that Nathalie is suffering a miscarriage. My wife and I survived two of those, so I am not appreciative of its use as a plot device.

There is some genuine horror there at the end, but that just seems to play out the Evilspeak model of “get through the bulk of the movie so things can go nuts in the final ten minutes”. I’m not a fan. Nathalie Couturier, though – you can stay.

 

 

October 19, 2023
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

M: Maybe Next Year (2023)

I’m actually surprised I managed to get this far. I’m still the only guy doing what I do at work (I have announced I am no longer interested in auditioning for the role of Superman, with my supervisor’s full support), I’ve been freed from the onus of most of the City meetings this month, and it still hasn’t been enough. As a brief interruption several hours later, the various paperwork snafus have been cleared up. One guy starts tomorrow, one on Monday. Hooray. Now to get back on my bullshit: I’ve got a few reviews lined up for down the line – one goes live tomorrow, in fact – so keep checking.

Surprise!

It’s been good to be reviewing movies again, even in the rough, first draft form I’ve been using. That other project I was working on has gotten ungainly big, and I need to do some pruning there, in my copious free time. But I made a crappy header and bought a domain name, so now I have to do it. In theory.

So now, let us prepare for the terror of SURPRISE HUBRISWEEN REVIEWS!!!!!

October 18, 2023
Categories: Mindless Blather . Tags: . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

L: Last Radio Call (2022)

Sarah Serling (Sarah Froelich) is on a mission: in 2018, her husband, police officer David Serling answered a call to an abandoend hospital, and disappeared. Only his damaged body camera was recovered, and ever since, no one has been able to help her, especially the police.

Sarah’s hired a filmmaker to document her search, so there’s your found footage explanation right there. After she has nearly given up, she gets a surprise phone call from someone who is angrily leaving the force; he was in charge of tracking and archiving the department’s body camera footage. When he was ordered to delete everything, he instead made a copy of everything, and then deleted it. He gives Sarah the copies and announces he’s getting the hell out of Dodge.

What Sarah finds in the memory cards is an incident a few days before Serling’s disappearance, in which Serling was forced to shoot a man who was committing ritual murder in his backyard. There is no offical report of an officer-involved shooting, the death is reported as a standard homicide. Luckily (or not), Sarah sees an ad with the ritual murderer’s twin brother.

This whole thing, we find, involves the Red Sister, a nasty spirit who hangs out on the piece of land the hospital was built on – and it is becoming possible that her husband is actually still alive in there, held prisoner by the Red Sister.

As I’ve said before, I really like found footage movies when they work, and I do think Last Radio Call fits into that category. Sara Froelich has a good, naturalistic delivery that grabbed me at once. Alas, her co-stars aren’t quite up to her quality, but then again, Keekee Suki as the twin brother has a lot of Expository Stuff to get through that no human tongue could make sound natural.

I’m ultimately able to give Last Radio Call a better than passing grade because of the novel nature of its bad guy and dammit, I love a supernatural detective story.

October 17, 2023
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck . Tags: , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: 2 Comments

K: Kadaicha (1988)

A group of Australian teens have a problem; they are each having the same dream about a tunnel leading to a torchlit chamber covered in aboriginal markings, where a tall figure is chanting. The figure turns, revealing it is a rotting corpse, and it forces something into their hand before they wake in fright. Upon awakening, they find a kadaicha, a crystal inscribed with, again, aboriginal markings. And whoever finds a kadaicha will die within 24 hours.

There’s a whole lot of familiar tropes in this movie, made four years after Nightmare on Elm Street, and possessing many of the markings of it and its imitators. Our main character, Gail (Zoe Carides) is the daughter of the real estate hustler who masterminded this plagued locale, and as she researches the cause of her friends’ death (and eventually her own imminent doom), she finds the development is built over, basically, an Indian graveyard.

To its credit, the movie makes it a little more than that, with an eye towards Australia’s troubled history. There was a massacre and then a counter-massacre, then a counter-counter massacre, and there are some very angry bones in that chamber. Gail finds there were many indigenous protests about the development, but dear old dad basically just bricked up the hole to the chamber and built over it.

So the neat twist is that the aboriginals weren’t threatening the development with ghostly retribution – they were trying to warn whitey not to do it, because they knew the place was cursed with a capital K.

Kadaicha – eventually re-titled Stones of Death – keeps its political outrage simmering just under the surface, a vital difference making it watchable as more than a Nightmare  wannabe. Director James Bogle manages, in between the typical teen cut-ups, to craft some some nicely weird sequences – the spider POV is especially nice – and turned out an effective little thriller.

October 16, 2023
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J: Jack the Ripper (1976)

Klaus Kinski is a deviant weirdo who is a caring doctor by day and a murdering psycho rapist at night. No, that’s the character he plays, but I can see where the confusion lies.

Jack the Ripper is a Swiss/German film directed and partially written by Jess Franco. The poster proclaims “Only NOW Can It Be Shown Like THIS!“, meaning that Kinksi can now rip off all an actress’ clothes before raping and murdering them, often at the same time.

Kinksi is Dr. Dennis Orloff (yeah, Franco wrote this part), tending to his impoverished patients by day, and then being tormented by visions of his mother, who was a prostitute that also wanted him in on the trade. After these nipple-filled nightmares, there’s nothing left for him but to go out and kill. One of his victims is Franco standard Lina Romay, who lasts the longest of his victims, even getting a production number in what looks like the worst cabaret possible on the budget.

As a Franco film, it follows the template of The Awful Dr. Orloff, except without the mad science angle. No, this Orloff is just in it for vengeance against his dead mother. The police are also notably useless as in the original flick, and Inspector Worthless’s girlfriend (Josephine Chaplin) strikes out on her own to find the killer, without telling the Inspector. Nudity will ensue.

Everybody in the movie is a better detective than the Inspector. There’s a blind man character that would give Sherlock Holmes a run for his money. Even the itinerant fisherman played by the musically-named Howard Fux is better at the game than the Inspector.

Reportedly shot in a week, Franco has no time for his usual zoom lens fetish, so the movie feels more like an actual gothic thriller, sort of a boring Hammer flick. A lot of time is spent on the police work and supposedly risible dealings with witnesses, while we wait for Kinski to whack out again. Despite his off-screen infamy, Kinski was a very good, serious actor, and he brings the appropriate level of intensity to his role. There’s some good stuff in here, especially Kinski’s cat-and-mouse game with Romay in a foggy wood, but if you’re familiar at all with the actual Ripper case, man, are you going to be pissed…

October 15, 2023
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I: If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971)

It may not be the classic definition of a Hubrisween movie, but If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? is a prime example of a conservative horror story. Of course, Stephen King has already posited that all horror stories are ultimately conservative, but this is a horror movie designed to strike fear in a certain demographic.

This is the title of a sermon delivered by Mississippi Baptist minister Estus Pirkle, and it’s all about how evil Commies will take over the US of A unless its thoughtless sex-education-class-attending masses come to Jesus. This takes the form of vignettes gleefully showing the atrocities that will take place after such a takeover, including massacres, drunken soldiers invading homes, and in a crowning moment, puncturing the eardrums of children who were attending a clandestine prayer meeting. That is punctuated by the child actor vomiting, which rumor has it was not supposed to happen.

My God, they pithed him like a frog.

Probably the worst thing to its Baptist audiences is the scene where Comrade Teacher (Wes Saunders) demonstrates to a class of inexpressive children that prayer to God will not get them candy, but Comrade Castro is happy to give them all the candy they want.

“Comrade Castro will give you all the crap Halloween candy you wish!”

The atrocity footage is brought to us courtesy of exploitation legend Ron Ormond, who had earlier brought us such worthy entertainment as Mesa of Lost Women, Please Don’t Touch Me, and Girl from Tobacco Road. Ormond crashed his single-engine plane into a field and survived, though seriously injured. This was what could be termed a come-to-Jesus moment, and from that day forth, Ormond was a Christian, eventually teaming up with Pirkle for a trilogy of films – following was The Burning Hell (which also deserves a Hubrisween slot) and The Believer’s Heaven.

Also in the mix is Judy (Judy Greer), a young lady who is attending church just to keep up appearances (we know Judy is a unbeliever because she’s dating the Sex Education teacher). Pirkle’s tale of forthcoming doom and getting covered with red paint provides Judy with her own Ron Ormond moment, and Pirkle brings her down to the altar of save her soul.

SINFUL!

Footmen was meant to be shown at prayer meetings and revivals, and this is the moment when the lights went up and people would march up to their own altars and accept Jesus. It never played actual theaters, so there are no end credits; in fact this why Pirkle never released it on video or DVD – he felt that there should always be someone at the altar after the movie’s end, waiting to receive the lost lambs for their salvation.

All good, I suppose. Pirkle is especially good in the scenes with Judy, projecting care and empathy. What gives me pause is the statistics he claims with absolute authority are true, such as the exact number of Americans the Commies intend to kill when they take over, which is a tactic used by far too many pundits and idiots in the present day.

Pirkle’s message of salvation is undercut by pronouncements like that, and by members of his non-acting flock, all things that have made it fodder for latter-day sampling and bad movie watchers. But there is a rawness to Ormond’s conservative nightmare passages that give it some power even in these Pirkle-less times.

October 14, 2023
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H: House by the Cemetery (1981)

I have questions.

It’s tempting to just let that be the review, but where’s the fun in that? And that’s what we’re here for, right? Fun.

About that.

I saw House by the Cemetery back when it was released on VHS. Didn’t think much of it. Years later, I would find out that transfer had the reels out of order. Ah. No wonder. Though I assigned re-watching it in its intended order a very low priority, I finally found time, and did.

About that.

I have questions.

So Dr. Norman Boyle (Paolo Marco) takes on his former mentor’s research. uprooting his child and wife to move to New England, to the very same house the mentor bloodily murdered his mistress and then hanged himself.

To his growing dismay, Boyle finds out the deceased had totally forsaken his original research to instead look into the history of the house’s former owner, a Dr. Freudstein, who was infamous for insane, illegal surgeries, and OH FOR GOD’S SAKE, HE’S IN THE CELLAR WE ALL KNOW HE’S IN THE CELLAR Y’ALL JUST GO TO THE CELLAR ALREADY

Ahem.

That part I can manage. That part I understand. There are three people credited with the screenplay, and even with the reels in the right order, the movie feels like three different scripts were shuffled like playing cards, and then handed to the film crew.

It is a creepy movie. I must give it that. There’s some genuinely unsettling stuff in here, and that’s not necessarily the gore scenes. There is a wonderfully eerie ghost story embedded in House by the Cemetery, but it feels like, as I said, pages from another script

But I have questions. A lot of my questions are perfectly encapsulated in a quote from the movie’s page at Imdb:

What is with the rapidly vanishing blood in this movie? Why is Boyle looking for Freudstein’s tomb miles away when he already knows it’s in his living room? What the hell is up with Ann, anyway?

This movie is the Picnic at Hanging Rock of gore movies.

So no, I didn’t find myself suddenly liking it.

October 13, 2023
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G: The Great Buddha Arrival (2015)

This is a curious movie. It is based on a 1934 movie of the same name, which is presumed lost in the bombings of World War II. It featured a giant Buddha statue standing up and walking around Japan. Yoshiro Edamasa, the director, used trick photography to get the images, and produced not the first kaiju flick, but almost certainly the first tokusatsu movie.

A video editor working on a program finds out about the possibility of a walking Buddha in pre-War Japan, which the video host claims the government hushed up. He manages to find photos of the incident (actually the only surviving pictures of the original movie) and starts investigating. He finds out that the movie was made by Edamasa to retell his experiences during the incident, but more troubling, the event was preceded by a wave of suicides and then the name “Hiroshima” crops up…

And so does something else.

Yep a Giant Buddha statue has stood up and is walking across the city. Needless to say, a lot of people turn out to watch this. The Buddha stops before a tower; a great chanting is heard, and the crowds begin to walk toward the statue, as if in a trance. And then the  horror starts.

As I said, it’s a curious beast. Partially a documentary, partially cosmic horror story. At a trim 50 minutes, it has no time to wear out its welcome. If fact, the only annoying thing was having to watch it on FreeVee, which only served to remind me how much I hate commercials during movies.

Overall, the hardest part was convincing myself that yes, there was an actual lost movie involved. Not some Larry Blamire/Blair Witch jiggery-pokery.

October 12, 2023
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck . Tags: , , , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

F: Feed the Light (2014)

Sara (Lina Sundén) is a desperate woman who breaks into the Malmö Institute armed only with a knife and a set of lockpicks. She’s looking for her daughter, whom her recently-divorced husband has taken into the nondescript building. When the Chief (Jenny Lampa) mistakes her for a new hire, Sara finds that Malmo is much weirder than she thought; her job is to sweep up the sparkling dust that drops from the facility’s lights, because the dust “attracts vermin”. She also witnesses one of the other workers get covered with the dust, and the vermin – a swath of darkness – enters the worker’s body and he dies in an explosion of blood.

She enters into an uneasy alliance with the head janitor (Martin Jirhamn), who reveals that things can get even worse: the reason her cell phone was confiscated by the Chief is not because it would interfere with Malmö’s machines, but because the phones can be used to unlock the seemingly nonexistent door to Level Two. Sara has found her husband (Patrik Karlson), now significantly older, because he got lost in Level Two, where time can move… oddly. Level Two is where their daughter is now trapped.

And you do not want to go to Level Three. That’s where the Light lives.

Feed the Light is a fascinatingly low-fi tale of cosmic horror. The black-and-white presentation (except for the occasional burst of color, see the bloody demise above) is going to immediately make most cineastes think of David Lynch, and that’s an association that’s not far wrong, with demented behavior, existential dread and a trove of unanswered questions. It’s not as ultimately incomprehensible as Lynch, but it is as accomplished.

And it’s always good to find a movie that can turn a lack of a multi-million dollar budget into an asset, rather than a disadvantage.

October 11, 2023
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck, The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

E: Eerie Tales (1919)

Richard Oswald’s Eerie Tales is that most venerable of horror movie formats, the anthology, made long before Amicus claimed it as their territory. The original negative is considered lost, and what we are watching today is a restoration performed by the Cinémathéque Francais, which, according to the credits, is some 100 meters shorter than the original.

Our framing device takes place in a rare book store, run by an especially antic owner. After he shoos out his customers and closes down, life-sized portraits of the Devil (Reinhold Schünzel) a prostitute (Anita Berber) and Death (Conrad Veidt) come to life and amuse themselves by reading some of the books littering the place, and as they do, the three take the place of characters in the stories. So you see, Screams of a Winter Night totally ripped off this movie.

The first story is “The Apparition” by Anselma Heine, the tale of a woman rescued from her murderous husband, who then mystifies her rescuer by simply disappearing, with even the hotel staff testifying that the man arrived alone the previous night. (so add Kiss of the Vampire to the list of rip-offs) I am making the leap that any missing footage might be from this section, because that is more comforting than thinking that I’m too stupid to get the part when a drunken Veidt discovers the lady is missing and rushes from the room in horror.

Next up is “The Hand” by Robert Leibmann, a tale of ghostly retribution. You might feel a little more at home with the next two stories, which are Poe’s “The Black Cat” (a particularly good adaptation, too) and Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Suicide Club”. The movie wraps up with “The Spectre” by Richard Oswald (yes, the director), where a nobleman gets the best of a literal Scaramouche character who is attempting to seduce his wife.

At this point in cinema history, all the tricks of visual storytelling had been worked out, so Eerie Tales is a fine example of silent filmmaking, easily accessible to the modern viewer. The actors are all up to the task of multiple characterizations, with Veidt as a standout, here a year before his star-making turn as Cesare in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Reinhold Schünzel is in charge of all the scenery-chewing (at which he excels), and Anita Berber is sadly under-utilized, functioning mainly as someone to be fought over, or murdered.

Silent movies are good for you. You should watch one today.

October 10, 2023
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck . Tags: , , , . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

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