Everything Dies, That's A Fact. But Maybe Everything That Dies Someday Comes Back

Every time I watch director Gary Sherman's Dead & Buried (1981), I'm struck all over again by how nasty a piece of work it is. There's a heartlessness to the violence in this movie that I never get used to. Its fantasy elements of voodoo, zombies, and black magic gives the movie's acts of sadism a slight buffer but it ranks high as one of the most hardcore American splatter films of the '80s.

Dead & Buried was written by Ron Shusett and Dan O'Bannon, who were coming off of a big success with Alien (1979), with the posters for Dead & Buried boasting that "the creators of Alien bring a new kind of terror to Earth." Sherman had been MIA since helming the 1972 cult favorite Death Line (aka Raw Meat) but even after almost ten years, Dead & Buried wasn't a rusty re-entry to the director's chair - it's clear that he hadn't missed a step. Sherman went on to direct two more notable exploitation films - 1982's Vice Squad and 1987's Wanted: Dead or Alive - before stumbling with the troubled Poltergeist III (1988) and never quite recovering his momentum.

But Dead & Buried remains a real dark gem. This got in just before the MPAA got tough with horror films in the '80s - I can't imagine that it would've earned such a lenient R-rating even a year later. And while it's storyline is absurd and shouldn't work, it does, thanks to Sherman direction never copping to how preposterous it all is. William G. Dobbs, the small town mortician with the ability to resurrect the dead that Jack Albertson (in his last role) plays here, is a villain right out of a comic book and while his ghoulish deeds seem to have no real purpose, the movie is never less than convincing as pulp horror.

The sick joke of Dead & Buried is that it's a film about the dead desecrating the living. This isn't a zombie film about the dead mindlessly devouring the living for subsistence; it's about the dead not just taking life, but maiming and mutilating life. As directed by Dobbs' will, the undead residents of Potter's Bluff don't just kill their victims, they go the extra mile to make them into unrecognizable corpses - burning them, crushing their skulls with stones, melting their faces with acid (FX genius Stan Winston really outdid himself on this early assignment). In Dead & Buried the dead are like zealots to a cause, coming together as one to destroy and disfigure life anywhere they find it in their tight-knit community. If you want to live in Potter's Bluff, you have to die first. And even if you don't want to live in Potter's Bluff, you still should be prepared to die.

Typically in zombie films, the dead are either pathetically mimicking the living (the zombies still compelled to wander the mall in Dawn of the Dead) or else are completely inhuman (like the thoroughly rotted forms seen in Fulci's Zombie or the Rage-fueled crazies of 28 Days Later) but in Dead & Buried the dead are true works of art - their mangled faces restored post-mortem with painstaking skill by Dobbs, the Michelangelo of the morgue to whom a closed casket was a sin (one of the most striking sequences in the film is a time-lapse depiction of a hitchhiker's crushed face being reassembled). His zombies weren't a parody of life but in his eyes, an improvement. It's no surprise that he learned how to bring back the dead - he loved his work too much to let it stay buried.

The Box

When I see a big budget studio film that's bound to appeal only to a very niche audience, it causes me to wonder how it got made in the first place and to admire the kind of special talent it takes to convince a studio to back a project that's almost certain to fail.

Whoever pulled that trick off with The Box must be one skilled freak of nature because nothing about this film says "yeah, let's put $30 million into this!" It's an adaptation of a semi-obscure Richard Matheson short story that doesn't really have any action per se, it's not quite a horror film (it has its share of creepy moments but you couldn't call it outright horror), it's not what Hollywood thinks of sci-fi anymore (no giant robots), and oh yeah - it's a period piece set in the '70s.

So while The Box isn't likely to become a hit, my thanks go out to writer/director Richard Kelly for pushing all the right buttons with me. Sure, this probably could've used some tightening - The Box sags in the middle before snapping back for the climax - but I never felt impatient to get out of the world that Kelly had created. There's something innately comforting about the film's warm '70s vibe coupled with the weird conspiratorial atmosphere closing in around the lives of Arthur and Norma Lewis (James Marsden and Cameron Diaz). It's somehow eerie and homey at the same time and those are two things I like.

Some will undoubtedly find The Box to be a pretty package with nothing in it but it turned out to be just what I was looking for - a big scale Twilight Zone tale filled with moral quandaries, spaced-out sci-fi and '70s shout-outs. Click over to Shock Till You Drop for my full review.

Extraterrestrial Activity

I've been in kind of a post-Halloween funk this week. Nothing seems to be catching my attention or inspiring me to do much. It'll pass, of course, but let me tell you - The Fourth Kind didn't do anything to help me. If I wasn't in a funk before, I sure am now. Based on the trailers I was hoping for some enjoyably creepy extraterrestrial hokum. While I don't believe in aliens and flying saucers and all that nonsense, I'm totally willing to play along during the course of a movie for the sake of having a good time. But by the end of The Fourth Kind, though, all that I felt was a sense of depression.

I know that being abducted by aliens isn't supposed to be a picnic but to watch The Fourth Kind is to learn just how bad aliens - or at least believing in aliens - can fuck up your life. Milla Jovovich plays a real-life psychologist in Nome, Alaska who has some pre-existing issues of her own, thanks to her husband's mysterious death. When her patients begin to tell her similar stories about a white owl that visits them at night, she decides that a little hypno-therapy should sort 'em out. Well, that's when people really begin to lose their shit. It's suggested by one character after a particularly tragic episode that maybe hypnotizing these patients isn't such a smooth move but Jovovich's character doesn't want to hear that. Eventually her persistence bites her in the ass. She should've been a Kenny Rogers fan. If she had been, she would've known when to hold 'em, when to fold 'em, when to walk away, and for damn sure know when to run.

The Fourth Kind is reportedly based on true events but I'm too lazy to look into verifying that. Sans any fact-checking, I'm going to guess that it's all bullshit. Not just the alien stuff, because that's a given. I just hope the whole movie is an elaborate put-on, including the 'real' footage that plays in tandem with the reenactments. If this is really based on documented cases, this is one depressing movie. Not creepy, just depressing. I don't believe in aliens but I do believe that disturbed people can lose themselves in paranoid fantasies and never find their way back. If you're going to make a movie about alien abductions, don't be ambiguous about whether aliens exist or not. I'm sure they don't exist in real life, but at least have the characters in a movie about aliens not seem so sad and crazy.

Even though it's strongly suggested in The Fourth Kind that aliens were - and still are! - at work in Nome, Alsaka, the evidence is too wishy-washy. Director Olatunde Osunsanmi leaves the decision up to us what we take away from the 'facts' that his movie presents. That may be admirable from a journalistic stand-point but personally, I think some exaggeration of the facts and maybe even some outright fabrication was needed. We're talking about flying saucers here, not an expose of the banking industry. Jovovich and the rest of the cast (especially Will Patton as a sheriff at the end of his wits) are all good but right up until its conclusion, The Fourth Kind doesn't have any real cards to play. It just sputters out, leaving nothing but wrecked lives.

When I was a kid, stories of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and aliens all scared me but also filled me with a sense of wonder. When I saw a movie like The Mysterious Monsters (1976), reportedly based on true testimony, or watched an (ahem!) 'investigative' show like In Search Of (1976-1982), it made me dream about what was out there, undiscovered in the world or the universe. But the only speculation The Fourth Kind encourages is about what kind of anti-depressants its most traumatized characters must be on. Whatever meds they're taking, I hope they're out of this world.

Halloween, Too

I didn't plan on waiting until Halloween to watch writer/director Michael Dougherty's Trick 'R Treat but circumstances, commitments, and sometimes just a lack of energy forced me to keep putting off screening it. By now, most fans are familiar with the long, difficult journey this Halloween-themed anthology has taken on the way to release as well as with the acclaim it received at every film fest it played for the past two years or so. But that was the word from the festival circuit, and sometimes the early hype generated by eager fans and online journalists can be misleading. Since Trick 'R Treat has hit DVD and everyone has had a chance to see it, the gushing accolades have been tempered by some "what's the big deal?" reviews and a couple of "this sucks" reviews as well. But those kind of reviews are useful, too - I like to hear a few contrary opinions rather than just universal praise.

My first attempt to watch Trick 'R Treat didn't go so well. I got through about ten minutes one night last week before exhaustion from a long day set in and what little I saw didn't excite me that much. But some time to myself late last night as Halloween slipped away for another year seemed like the perfect chance to give Trick 'R Treat another shot - and I'm glad I did as while my enthusiasm for the film isn't as unbridled as that of some viewers, I really enjoyed it. For all the criticism towards Warner Bros.' handling of the movie, I can understand some of their reluctance to release it theatrically. Anthologies never do great business - even Trick 'R Treat's avowed model, Creepshow, underperformed when it was released in '82. Then again, selling a movie called Trick 'R Treat during October probably shouldn't present a marketing challenge.

But regardless of whether or not Warners dropped the ball on a big hit, Trick 'R Treat's box office potential will have to forever remain a matter of speculation. It's the film itself that bears discussion and while the four tales that Dougherty tells here are all slight, the device of interweaving them gives them a kick and a charm that they wouldn't have otherwise had. And Trick 'R Treat's technical credits can't be undersold - the production design of Mark Freeborn, art direction Tony Wohlgemuth and cinematography of Glen MacPherson are all indispensable assets. Thanks to their contributions, watching Trick 'R Treat is like having a sumptuously illustrated tale of Halloween unfolding in front of you. And the incomparable Halloween splendor is further embellished by composer Douglas Pipes' evocative score.

Clocking in at 82 minutes, Trick 'R Treat is the perfect length - had Doughetry tried to stretch his film out any longer with additional storylines, or to embellish on any of the four tales at hand, would've likely caused the film to overstay its welcome. Trick 'R Treat isn't a game changer for the genre, nor is it meant to be - it's just everything you love about Halloween in one film and nothing that you hate.

Whatever deficiencies it may have are compensated for with its irresistible holiday spirit. It's harmless, creepy, and fun - just the way Halloween ought to be. With stores shoving Christmas on us before Halloween is even over, anything that helps keeps All Hallows' Eve around a little bit longer - and with such style - is welcome.

Trick Or Trailers: The Shining (1980)

The common wisdom says that when marketing a horror movie, you've got to hard sell the film's exploitation elements - the monsters, the violence, the terror. In step with that, horror movie trailers have typically gone for lurid, attention-grabbing come-ons ("To Avoid Fainting, Keep Repeating: 'It's Only A Movie, Only A Movie, Only A Movie...'") and challenges to the audience (how many horror trailers have dared viewers to test their bravery or issued 'warnings' about a film's content?). Director/producer William Castle (The House on Haunted Hill, The Tingler) built an entire career out of turning his movies into the equivalent of carnival attractions and a campaign like the one that's recently made Paranormal Activity into a box office sensation shows that the game plan for marketing horror movies hasn't moved too far from Castle's shadow.

But the original teaser for Stanley Kubrick's 1980 adaptation of Stephen King's novel The Shining took a daringly different approach. It abandons all conventional logic in that it's comprised of a single, unedited shot in which the camera never moves and there's no dialogue - not even voice-over narration. It has none of the things that horror trailers have always relied on to make an impression (not even darkness) and yet it's chilling in a way that few entire films are.

While today The Shining is such a part of the cultural lexicon that everyone is familiar with the image of the elevator doors cracking open to release a tidal wave of blood, in 1980 it was a startling sight. To this day, it remains the most unique horror trailer ever.

Trick Or Trailers: Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977)

I know The Exorcist (1973) was a tough act to follow, but few filmmakers have torched expectations like the makers of the ludicrous, self-serious Exorcist II: The Heretic did. Maybe it's best to blame the debacle of Exorcist II on the excesses of the '70s. Director John Boorman and his co-writer Rospo Pallenberg (credited as 'creative associate,' Boorman brought Pallenberg on after original Exorcist II screenwriter William Goodhart refused to make the changes to the script that Boorman wanted) must've been high on something more than just their own egos if they thought their film was going to satisfy audiences. If nothing else, only in the '70s would a production of such importance to a studio balloon into a film so strange, inept and willfully difficult without someone writing the checks getting wise to the fact that they were funding a disaster.

But at least Exorcist II is terrible in an ambitious way. It's a mess but it's the kind of mess that would never be made today and that's both good and bad. On the one hand, it's a dick move to fuck with the audience by giving them a self-indulgent head-trip (and a bad self-indulgent head-trip at that) when they're paying good money to see a scary movie. On the other hand, if you're going to fail, fail big, and that's something that's rarely allowed to happen in these safe times.

Every time I watch the trailer for Exorcist II: The Heretic, I become convinced that there must be an amazing movie in there someplace (how can it not be a party with all those swarming locusts?). I haven't watched it in years but I'm thinking that maybe I ought to make the time. This trailer's got a great beat, and you can dance to it.



Almost as great as the trailer is Exorcist II's teaser. Love the use of still photographs here:

Trick Or Trailers: Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III (1990)

Some trailers are seen and soon forgotten but the trailer for 1990's Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III is forever. The troubled production, which was eviscerated by the MPAA before it reached US theaters, did nothing to kick start the Texas Chainsaw franchise but yet its ingenious trailer, riffing on the legend of the Lady in the Lake and Excalibur, remains a thing of true coolness.

That New Line went the extra mile to have this trailer shot when it would've been much easier to go with clips from the film is curious - especially when its reference was likely lost on much of Leatherface's audience. Marketing Rule #365: If you want to sell a slasher movie, don't spoof Arthurian lore. Still, while it didn't help Leatherface make bank, this spot remains one of the most creative horror trailers ever.