Undercover Of The Night

Earlier today I finally caught up with this year's horror phenomenon - the shot on $11,000 spook-tacular, Paranormal Activity. Did I think it lived up to its reputation? For the most part, yes. I will say I found it to be more satisfyingly creepy than outright terrifying but I think it's difficult at this stage for it to impact viewers the same way it did unsuspecting film festival attendees. I also have to say that on this first viewing, I couldn't help but have part of my attention focused on admiring the resourcefulness of writer/director Oren Peli.

Unlike its faux-doc brethren, The Blair Witch Project, which was completely free of any effects work, Paranormal Activity does show some physical manifestations of its haunting. And while these moments are all convincingly accomplished (save for one brief, late-addition instance of CGI - which doesn't seriously harm the movie but yet is the phoniest-looking shot in the film), it was hard for me to not be speculating (with admiration) on how Peli pulled off some of his low tech tricks (was that done with wires? was there a magnet under the table?) rather than just being wrapped up in the story.

While critics of Blair Witch often complained that "nothing happened" in that film, I think the fact that we never saw the slightest sign of any movie-style trickery (no glowing eyes in the woods, no levitating bodies, no ghostly apparitions, etc.) is what helped it maintain such a perfect illusion. Paranormal Activity, on the other hand, risks breaking the spell of reality to deliver the kind of goods most audiences want out of a spook show and I expect most will appreciate its concession to showmanship. In endeavoring to please the audience, there's nothing esoteric about Paranormal Activity. Just as the film's 'Demand It' marketing campaign recalled the kind of bluster and ballyhoo of William Castle, so to does the movie's thrills show an ingratiating desire on the part of Peli to really work a crowd.

Given the film's limited (by Hollywood standards, at least - I wish I had $11,000 to throw around) means, this will inevitably not be an eventful enough paranormal happening for all audiences. And the avalanche of hype it's arriving in theaters on, while doing it a lot of good commercially, is surely creating the kind of outsized expectations that any film would be hard pressed to meet. But Peli doles out his story's supernatural incidents in steady increments, leading to some nice payoffs. Sam Raimi's recent return to horror, Drag Me To Hell, was referred to by Raimi as a 'spook-a-blast' and that's an apt description of Paranormal Activity as well. It's nothing that's going to seriously traumatize an audience, just keep them jumping and shrieking.

While a 'found footage' film like this is supposed to appear relatively artless and off-the-cuff, Peli does a couple of things in regards to storytelling that I thought were smart. One, he answers the 'why don't they just leave' question right out of the gate by establishing that this isn't about the house, it's about the girl, Katie, and how she's experienced similar haunting episodes throughout her life in every place she's ever lived. So until events escalate to a violent degree later on, the idea of leaving doesn't make much sense. And secondly, Peli makes the ongoing recording of events plausible by portraying Micah as an arrogant ass, whose machismo only acerbates the situation. While some will find Micah's behavior to be too much of a turn off, I enjoyed Micah Sloat's deliberately unsympathetic performance as a skeptic, control freak, and all-around ego tripper.

Whether or not Paranormal Activity scares everyone the same across the board (it won't, because nothing ever does), I love the fact that it's scared as many people as it has with such old-fashioned means. This is a movie that rediscovers (as Blair Witch did) how cheap it is to frighten an audience. Slamming doors, lights that turn on and off by themselves, screams in the night - Peli is working from a familiar bag of tricks but it just shows how hard-wired the human brain is to react to these primitive, primal fears. This probably isn't the movie to make hardened horror fans curl up in a corner but it may brush some of the cynicism off their love of the genre.

This Film Contains Elements Of Shock And Suspense

Above is the opening bumper for the TV premiere of Halloween. That 1981 broadcast was my first time seeing Halloween and watching this intro again for the first time since that night, I find myself reliving the tingle of excitement of knowing that I was finally - finally! - going to see this modern classic. Almost thirty years on, this bumper makes me think of how much has changed since then in regards to how we watch movies.

First of all, it's outrageous to imagine that once a film left theaters that not only would it take years to be able to watch it at home but the only way to see it would be edited for television, pan and scan, and with the usual shitload of commercials. Can you imagine a horror fan today too young to see an R-rated movie in the theaters having to wait until 2012 to see Paranormal Activity for the first time? And then to have to see it on NBC or whatever? They'd laugh in your face as they downloaded it from the internet.

Make no mistake, though - in '81 I didn't think seeing Halloween on TV was cause for any disappointment. I mean, how else was I going to see it? Sure, it was a compromised way to watch it but I didn't know anything about pan and scan vs. letterbox (I don't even know if those terms existed at the time) and enjoying horror classics with commercial interruptions wasn't a problem. Having seen very few horror films in the theaters at that point (and no R-rated ones), most of the horror movies I saw as a kid were on commercial TV and they scared me just fine.

We had no cable, no VCR - it was all broadcast TV so I had no other expectations about how I would eventually see Halloween because there were no other options. It was just a matter of being patient and waiting for it to make it's TV premiere. But man, what incredible patience we had to have back then! On the upside, all that waiting helped movies to build a real mystique. Over the course of the three years that I had to wait to see Halloween, I gathered all the info about it that I could from magazines, reviews, and older kids and adults who had seen it. By the time I saw Halloween, I already had the whole movie in my head.

Speaking of which, the other thing that kills me about this bumper is how in twenty-two seconds it gives away nearly every single big scare in the movie! Fans complain about modern trailers giving everything away but they've got nothing on this! And this ran right before the movie was about to air! As far as my enjoyment of Halloween goes, though, it must not have ruined anything for me because I know I proceeded to jump out of my seat for the whole movie.

The two hours that Halloween ran on NBC that night comprised one of the great horror movie experiences of my life. It's unreal now to remember how a network broadcast of a film once was considered to be a huge event. We're so spoiled today, I can't ever imagine going back to that time but it made watching movies something indelible to me, and something not to take for granted.

I've owned Halloween in many different home video formats and in many different editions since then but what I really would love is to own a copy of the film as it ran that night with every commercial in place. In the meantime, though, that bumper - more of that night's programming than I ever thought I'd see in its original form again - will have to do. Just seeing it again puts a big jack o' lantern grin on my face.

The Right Snuff

To speak nostalgically of ‘movie magic’ usually conjures up thoughts of the wizardry associated with pioneering special effects geniuses like Willis O’Brien or Ray Harryhausen. But during the slasher boom of 1978 to 1983, advances in practical make-up FX made it possible for artists to slice, dice, burn, bleed, puncture and purée the human form in the most convincing manner possible.

Make-up maestro Tom Savini was the undeniable superstar of the splatter era, becoming a household name among households with FANGORIA subscriptions, and although this tale of a killer stalking a graduation dance doesn't have the same iconic status as Dawn of the Dead (1978) or Friday the 13th (1980), with The Prowler (1981) Savini delivered arguably the most ghoulishly convincing FX of his career.

While Savini is revered among slasher buffs for depicting the slaughtering ways of Mrs. Voorhees and her mad mongoloid offspring Jason, The Prowler is where he really got brutal. First off, in The Prowler the killer uses a pitchfork - and nothing tells the audience that a slasher villain is serious about killing like giving them a pitchfork. When a killer uses a pitchfork, it’s understood that they’re hardcore. You don’t see it used a lot in The Prowler but when that pitchfork is put into play – as in the film’s centerpiece shower murder in which the Prowler attacks actress Lisa Dunsheath – it’s the stuff of slasher legend.

The prospect of pitchforking a nude woman might’ve made lesser men pause (or to work under pseudonyms) but director Joe Zito and Savini embrace the opportunity. No doubt there were easy techniques behind this effect (as there was with many of Savini's effects, which often took their cues from stage magic) but Savini and Zito do an expert job of selling the illusion (after Dunsheath is impaled, we hear the tips of the pitchfork scraping against the tile of the shower wall), making this an unforgettably ghastly scene. While not every slasher victim of the early ‘80s had the luxury of being able to simply gasp at the sight of their off-screen assailant (like Friday the 13th’s Laurie Bartram) before the filmmakers discreetly cut away to the next scene, this isn’t even as elegant as Robbi Morgan having her throat slashed or Jeannine Taylor receiving an axe to the head. No, even in a slasher film when a naked woman is impaled by a pitchfork and jacked up off her feet against a shower wall, an invisible line of etiquette has been breached.

Even more manners are decimated by the film’s second-most legendary effect, a climatic shotgun blast to the head. Savini was something of an expert head exploder in his FX heyday, first depicting a shotgun blast to the head in Dawn of the Dead (as a zealous S.W.A.T. member shoots a zombie point blank), then doing the same in 1980's Maniac (Savini blew his own head apart here, portraying a guy out for a night at the disco who runs afoul of a shotgun wielding Joe Spinell), and in The Prowler an instance of cranial carnage serves as the film’s final coup de grace. Some might cry that The Prowler’s exploding head is just a case of Savini repeating his past tricks but when something’s good, it’s good.

Savini’s work in The Prowler is so good, in fact, that he even makes the film’s two throat slashings memorable – no small feat given that by 1981, these were already the most commonplace of slasher movie kills. Seeing a character get their throat slashed in a slasher film was about as remarkable as seeing a character in an old-time Western get shot in the gut and keel over but Savini challenges discerning gorehounds to shop and compare, delivering premium throat-slashings with outrageous super soaker action.

Unfortunately, the pacing of The Prowler could’ve been improved, with too much time separating the already sparse number of kills (a half-hour between kills in a slasher movie is too long) and it was also a bad decision on the part of Zito and screenwriters Neal Barbera and Glenn Leopold to pair the film’s heroine, aspiring journalist Pam MacDonald (the fetching Vicky Dawson) with her deputy boyfriend (Christopher Goutman) for almost all of her scenes so there’s very little of her in solo jeopardy – with a scene of Pam hiding under a bed as the enraged killer trashes the room searching for her (almost identical to a scene from the same year's Friday the 13th Part 2, even down to the appearance of a rat scurrying next to the heroine’s face) being an effective exception. Also, while most slasher films with a whodunit angle at least tried to give the audience a range of plausible suspects who could be the killer, the identity of the Prowler is by far the most lamely transparent of all slasher movie mysteries.

Still, Savini is so 100% on his game here that those flaws ultimately don’t matter. Despite their reputations, very few old-school slasher films are especially graphic. The Prowler, however, is a grisly exception to that. Savini may be most celebrated for his contributions to the zombie classics Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead (1985) – films with FX far more elaborate than seen in Savini’s slasher films, which had to strive for a greater sense of plausibility (and usually strive for an R-rating as well) – but The Prowler features signature work from the Sultan of Splatter.

It's often been said by critics that if you’ve seen one slasher film, you’ve seen them all. But if there’s a mantra to the slasher genre, it’s that it’s not the weapon you use to kill a character (a shish—ka-bob, a hot poker, a pitchfork), it’s how you stick it in. And with its uncomfortably convincing realism, Savini’s work in The Prowler still has the right snuff.

Cloudy With A Chance of Meat Hooks

Soon movie screens won't be able to contain the fury of Leatherface. According to a story in Variety, the next installment of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series will not only be under the auspices of Twisted Pictures (rather than Platinum Dunes) but will also be in 3-D.

Some say that in the case of horror movies that 3-D detracts from suspense or whatever but while I understand that complaint I think it's all in how the story is told. There's only been two big 3-D horror movies so far since the recent 3-D revival - My Bloody Valentine 3-D and The Final Destination - so it's a little early to tell how horror and 3-D will continue to develop together.

There's obviously a lot of resistance to the format among some genre fans but frankly, I'm stoked to see zombies (Resident Evil: Afterlife), vampires and werewolves (Underworld 4), man-eating fish (Piranha 3-D), Jason (Friday the 13th Part 2), Michael Myers (Halloween 3-D), and even Jigsaw (Saw VII) all in 3-D. Maybe the format is still a novelty but color film and sound must've seemed like novelties at one point, too. Besides, in the case of Texas Chainsaw, I know that meat hooks and chainsaws are going to play great in 3-D. I'm just stating the facts here.

If I could offer one suggestion to Lionsgate, though, the poster for TCM 3-D has got to bear the tagline "You Haven't Seen A Massacre Until You've Seen A Massacre In 3-D!" Granted, as taglines go it's no "Who Will Survive And What Will Be Left Them" but I sure like the sound of it.

Seeing Red

I'm not against the revisiting and retooling of the classic slasher franchises of the '70s and '80s. Even if these reboots have been only sporadically satisfying (and some would say that's an overly kind assessment), I just don't see the harm. Besides, it's not very realistic to expect that studios would leave modern icons like Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees alone for long - so why get up in arms about it? As long as these properties are lucrative, they'll remain active. And yet, at the end of a decade that's seen Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, and Friday the 13th spearheading slasher cinema again, it's hard not to overstate how energizing The Hills Run Red feels amidst all the deja vu.

Directed by Dave Parker (who previously helmed The Dead Hate The Living) and scripted by David Schow (Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III), The Hills Run Red is arguably the only great American slasher film of the present decade. And I say "arguably" only because I'm not sure if American Psycho (2000) and Wrong Turn (2003) qualify as true slashers or whether they belong in other categories. Whatever the case, The Hills Run Red is a rowdy, but smart, call back to the early '80s style of slasher film - specifically the likes of The Burning (1981) and Madman (1982) which featured woods-dwelling maniacs who had taken on the legendary aura of campfire folklore. Here the maniac is 'Babyface,' the monstrous star slasher of a lost early '80s film titled - da-dum! - The Hills Run Red. Even if everything else had been mediocre in this movie, Babyface alone would've made Hills a notable addition to the slasher pantheon. However, there really is much more to appreciate here.

It's not a perfect film but Parker and Schow show just how far applying some intelligence and genre savvy to a slasher film will get you. I feel like I'm in danger of setting expectations too high for Hills and, I admit, my reaction may be more enthusiastic than the film really warrants but as a slasher fan I found it worth celebrating.

Writer/director Adam Green's Hatchet (2006), was trumpeted as being "old-school American horror," with its posters boasting that "it's not a remake, it's not a sequel, and it's not based on a Japanese one," but yet that film had so little going on besides its kill scenes (which admittedly did look great) that it ended up simply pointing out the limitations of the slasher genre rather than vaulting past them. If anything, Hatchet was a deliberate step backwards, making it appear that slasher movies no longer had anything to offer to fans except nostalgia. And if that's the case, if the only new ideas are going to be about creative kills, why not go ahead with remakes of known titles like My Bloody Valentine and Friday the 13th? But The Hills Have Red proves that even if your film is about the search for an '80s slasher movie, you don't have to make a film that's stuck in the '80s as well.

Read my full review at Shock Till You Drop.

Zombieland, Ho!

In case you haven't been keeping up on the avalanche of rave reviews it's been receiving, Zombieland is one terrific time at the movies. I honestly can't see many people being disappointed by this one - even the most constipated of horror fans ought to enjoy it. There's one particular moment, though, that I wanted to give a mention to - even though it really has nothing to do with much.

At one point in the movie, Wichita (Emma Stone) cites Anaconda (1997) as being her first R-rated horror movie. Now, maybe it's not a widely known fact but Anaconda is actually PG-13. That's an awfully lazy gaffe to make but yet I found it to be an endearing slip-up.

Movie making - in regards to genre films, at least - has become more and more the province of know-it-all film buffs, always prepared to flaunt the most arcane knowledge about the most obscure films. And yet, Zombieland flubs the rating of Anaconda. Which means that this went all the way to theaters with no one connected with making this movie at any point ever reading or hearing that line of dialogue and saying "You know what? That doesn't sound right." The thing is, I've gotten so used to hearing dialogue written by screenwriters who are out to prove how dense their knowledge of movies and pop culture is that to hear an out-and-out mistake was actually refreshing. And really, the whole movie struck me as a breath of fresh air - only most of what I loved about Zombieland was the deliberate result of great writing, directing, and acting.

Check out my full review of Zombieland at Shock Till You Drop.

I've Seen Fire And I've Seen Rain But I Always Thought I'd See The Boogens One More Time Again

There are few things more disheartening than rewatching a movie that you loved as kid only to find out that it just isn't any good. Case in point: 1981's fondly recalled creature feature The Boogens. I've had the tape that was released in 1997 from Republic Pictures lying around for ages - and pre-dating that, a bootleg copy bought at a Fangoria Weekend of Horrors way back when - but I never really got around to sitting down for a proper reunion with The Boogens.

I kept buying it, of course, because it was a movie I had really adored as a kid - for a few months in '81 or '82 it always seemed to be on HBO - so adding it to my collection was a no-brainer. But actually watching it again - well, it never seemed like the right time. Or I would put it on but end up getting busy with something else while it played in the background (comic book collections don't organize themselves, you know). But last night I finally made a commitment to watch The Boogens.

See, for a few frightening moments yesterday I thought I had lost my copy. Out of the blue I had been thinking about The Boogens but when I went looking for it where I had last remembered it being, it wasn't there. That then sent me on a wild Boogen hunt through various rooms and boxes and in the span of those desperate moments, I started to beat myself up over having owned this movie forever and a day without watching it so when I finally did come across it in the back of a closet I swore I wasn't going to put off The Boogens one more day.

But damn it, I should've known better. I mean, seriously - I never could remember anything cool actually happening in The Boogens. I knew that the monsters had looked lousy - even by the standards of low budget filmmaking. And I couldn't remember any great splatter FX moments or even ever being especially scared for that matter - and back when I first saw The Boogens, I was an easy mark for scaring! Well, I'm all grown up now - kind of on the old side, in fact, and having rewatched The Boogens I'm trying hard to figure out what could've originally appealed to me about this movie.

If only I had kept a diary, it would make things so much easier.

To be fair to myself, it's not as though it was just young dumb-asses like me that thought The Boogens was worth throwing a party for. At the time, in Twilight Zone Magazine, Stephen King heralded The Boogens as being a "wildly energetic monster movie." Maybe our perceptions of 'energetic' have been permanently warped since epilepsy-inducing editing styles have become the norm in the last twenty years or so but I don't know. After all, some really exciting movies did come out in '81 - like Clash of the Titans, An American Werewolf in London, Escape from New York, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. Yeah, some of those might seem leisurely paced by today's standards but compared to the crushing tedium of The Boogens, even On Golden Pond looks like Crank 2.

For those unfamiliar with The Boogens, it chronicles the deadly consequences that occur when a long-shuttered Colorado silver mine is reopened. Back in 1912 the mine was closed thanks to reports by the miners at the time of mysterious attacks on them. Turns out that it was damn Boogens causing that trouble. What a boogen really is, or where they came from, the movie never tosses out any clues (it never even refers to them in the film by any name - 'boogen' or otherwise). That's ok - monsters don't need explanations to be enjoyed (although I think it's odd that The Boogens didn't include a representative of that old B-movie standby, the Concerned Scientist).

But while a monster's origins aren't so important, performance must be judged and on that count, the Boogens get low marks. When you're making a monster movie, no matter what you've got to find a way to make your monster work or you're sunk. Unfortunately, the tentacled Boogens are kind of non-descript critters. Despite the damage they inflict, they never appear to be much of a threat. Their movements never seem like anything more than the awkward movements of puppets and fangs alone don't make for a ferocious face.

Where the designers of the Boogens made their real misstep, I believe, is in giving them completely pupil-less black eyes. My gut tells me that the Boogens would've been immeasurably improved as monsters if some scary, jaundiced yellow eyes were staring out of those faces. Call me a cheap sucker for yellow eyes if you want but in this case I think they would've worked like fins on a fish. And along with the yellow eyes, I think it would've also been smart to indulge in some Boogen-Vision shots - kind of like the shots from the Wolfen's POV in Wolfen (1981). Subjective camera angles are one thing but if The Boogens can't have shots in official Boogen-Vision, then who can? I mean, talk about leaving an opportunity lying on the table.

The one endearing aspect I did find in The Boogens was the presence of actress Rebecca Balding, who - along with Friday the 13th Part II's Amy Steel - was the best should've-been scream queen of the early '80s. Balding also starred in the lost 1980 slasher film Silent Scream (due to be released on DVD for the first time soon) but inexplicably, that and Boogens marked her only horror roles (although she eventually went on to a recurring role in the supernatural series Charmed - a show on which Boogens director James L. Conway served as a co-executive producer).

Seeing how casting a truly likable heroine in horror films has become something of a lost art, it's great to see how Balding's charm effortlessly comes across here. I don't know how to describe it but there used to be a sense of reality that came across from actors and actresses where the line between the actor and the character they were playing seemed imperceptible. Up through the early '80s, especially in genre films, it seemed like performers had a natural ability to 'be themselves' on camera - or at least to make it seem like they were bringing no special artifice to their work. And Balding's performance here is a perfect example of that. I have no idea what Balding is like in real life but I'd be very surprised if her personality was much different than that of the character of Trish that she played here. Sure she might not jump into bed with a guy she just met like Trish does (to be fair, we know this is a decent guy and really - what else are these two going to do in a nothing dump like Silver City?) but it's easy to believe from watching her in The Boogens that you were seeing the genuine article. Good luck getting that kind of vibe from anyone in a modern movie.

I wish The Boogens was as much fun as I'd remembered it being. All I can say is that I guess at the time, thanks to Balding and her cast mates (including the future Mrs. Michael Crichton, Anne-Marie Martin) that The Boogens had a charm that some of the slasher movies of the time didn't. This wasn't a bunch of obnoxious teens in peril - instead it was a more personable, adult foursome of friends (even if they were every bit as horny as teenagers). Plus, even if the Boogens themselves were piss-poor monsters, they weren't a guy in a ski mask with a knife and in 1981 that probably seemed worth applauding, too. But none of that matters now. What seemed like a cool little throwback to the monster movies of the '50s back then now plays like the broke-ass production that it was, filled with a lot of yawning dead air. I've always said I'd love it if someone came along to do a remake of The Boogens and now I really want to see that happen.

Boogens director Conway is still active and working in the genre - in fact, he helmed an episode of Supernatural (entitled Fallen Idols) due to air in a couple of weeks - so maybe it isn't out of the question that he could return to revamp The Boogens. Hell, if the producer of the original Children of the Corn could direct a remake of that film for the SyFy Channel, Conway should be able to get The Boogens back in business too. Maybe SyFy might even back a Boogens trilogy - which would be great, just as long as one of the titles is Boogens: Unleashed because, well, it ought to be. It's possible, and even probable, that Conway doesn't even care about revisiting The Boogens (it might also be impossible, given the rights issues that have plagued the movie over the years) but that'd be too bad - because if you had a chance to build a better Boogens, why wouldn't you?