Hemlock Grove Trailer: Netflix Series by Eli Roth

Famke Janssen! Pennsylvania! Monsters! I am excited for this yall...starts April 19th.

Netflix Roulette: Dead End (2003)

2003's Twilight Zone-y Dead End (directed by Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa) is an unassuming little thriller in the mode of Carnival of Souls. I don't think I'm giving anything away by stating this up front, because it's so damned obvious to the viewer what's going on, even if it's not obvious to the characters in the film. This is the afterlife as an unpleasant car trip with your family. Hell, in other words.

The story here follows The Harringtons, Frank and Laura, and their children, Marion and Richard, on a long drive to Grandma's house for Christmas. Along for the ride is Marion's fiance, Brad. It's late on Christmas Eve, and Frank nods off ever so briefly behind the wheel, narrowly avoiding a collision with an oncoming car. After the near miss, they meet a hitchhiker on the road: a girl in a white dress carrying a baby. They give her a ride. During a pit stop, she lets Brad hold the baby. To his horror and dismay, the baby is dead. And soon, so is Brad, victim of a mysterious hearse that appears every time someone dies. As the trip continues down an endless highway that seems to loop back on itself, the Harringtons succumb to the hearse one by one.

I think you can fill in the rest. It's not terribly original and, like I say, it's not a hard movie to decode. But it's not bad for all of that. In fact, it was agreeably well-made. It makes the most of its limited setting. The car acts as a kind of microcosm where each of the characters is put into the crucible. The intent here is to deconstruct the family we're presented, and the Harringtons are suitably dysfunctional. Watching them tear themselves to pieces is the main pleasure of the movie, though the filmmakers offer a literal version of this, too. It likes its gore. This kind of movie rises and falls on its performances, and here, the filmmakers have wisely spent their money on pretty good actors. Ray Wise is the most recognizable face in the cast as Frank, and his put-upon patriarch reminds me a LOT of Leland Palmer from Twin Peaks. It's a similar performance. He doesn't overreach this--indeed, he's probably cashing a paycheck here--but Leland Palmer was a pretty good character, and so is Frank Harrington. The movie is all but stolen from everyone by Lin Shaye as Laura, though, who the filmmakers have provided with freak-out scenes and a license to chew the scenery. She dutifully obliges them. The other actors are good, too, though only Alexandra Holden is given any meat to chew on.

For the most part, it's fun watching these people come apart at the seams, but the movie would have been a B-movie programmer once upon a time, and it embraces that niche. That it's so derivative is disappointing, because this same selection of talent is clearly capable of better. One wishes that they had just a leetle more ambition. But they don't, and the result is perfectly fine. It's well paced and well-shot, and it does an admirable job with it's few gross-out scenes. Just don't expect it to surprise you.

Love Letter to Vulcan Video (and the like)

(Internet Killed the Video Store)

We live in a time of immediate gratification, of possibly new adult ADHD cases brought on by over-stimulation and the internet, and the God of convenience. I certainly am not immune to any of what modern life’s technology and structure has provided for busy on-the-go people. But I must admit to a soft spot in my heart for the simple things.

Classic case: as an adult, I sometimes look around me at the maelstrom of what life has become, and I wish it all away. I wish myself back into a childhood where bills were magically paid, where someone else drove me everywhere and took the brunt of what I know now to be inevitable road rage and commute anxiety. I miss when I wrote letters to friends I met over the summer and it took weeks before I got a reply. I long for a time when I read novels (tactile objects made of paper and smudged your fingers with ink) and waited all week to see my favorite television show (probably Herman’s Head or Parker Lewis Can’t Lose), with the understanding that missing it meant I would probably never see it aired again.

Now, we live in a world with Hulu and DVRs so that we never miss our favorite show. We read books with awesome devices like Kindles (interestingly, its popularity might be behind the creation of a perfume that celebrates the nostalgic smell of those long lost places called ‘libraries’– I’ve already ordered mine online and expect it any day now).

And then there is Netflix and the internet, where movie watching is at our immediate retrieval. This thought particularly resonates with me because I haven’t forgotten my beloved video stores. Epochs ago, I remember the excitement of a Friday night when I got to go to the video store (this one was a small section in the local grocery store), and rent a horror movie. I would spend an hour picking up each VHS, looking at the outlandish or silly cover art, and reading the summary on the back. And then I would pick one, some random oddity of a movie that looked cool. That’s how I discovered many cult and classic horror movies – by accident. Not by reading online reviews or going with a Netflix suggestion generated from a creepy algorithm, but from a pure place of uninformed curiosity.

This is my open love letter to those video stores (some dying, some not) all around me. About 7 years ago, I worked part-time at a Hollywood Video. I had the perks of free rentals and thoroughly enjoyed going through every single movie in the Horror section. I loved that my co-workers would often send an unsuspecting customer my way to get horror recommendations. What ensued was something like a psychiatry session where I asked probing questions about their fears, and prescribe a film to fit their nightmares. My old Hollywood Video is now closed, as are most locations since they declared Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 2010. It is disheartening to see video stores closing. Perhaps I’m not ready to fully embrace technology and the influence it’s wrought on the things I adore. But, at the same time, I’m not dismissing the awesomeness of a Netflix account or internet access to videos. My own Netflix account has been active for as long as I can remember, and I can’t imagine not having the ability to stream Dexter or Dracula (1979). I suppose this is just a long exposition in which I simply want to convey how I miss the video store experience.

(worth the short drive)

Today, I went to an Austin, TX independent store called ‘Vulcan Video’ where there horror section is divided up into categories (Killer Animals, J-Horror, Brian Yuzna, Frank Henenlotter, Guillermo del Toro, Fulci, etc). Walking in the doors, I immediately felt the excitement of discovery, of finding that rare video or quirky 80s movie that I’ve read about but could never find online. I was happy to see several people in the store on a weekday evening (my luck, it was 2 fer 1 Wednesday!), and felt a sort of kinship with the people who still rented movies in the flesh. Obviously, these people probably all have online accounts save for a few loyalists or the technologically adverse, but the schema was all the same as I remember. You peruse the aisle, tilt your head to the side to read the titles, and spend a few awkward moments in someone else’s personal bubble as you scan the same section. You pick out your movie, feel the weight of it in your hands, and decide “this is the one.” The commitment is a little more serious here. You have approximately 4 days to watch the movie before it’s due back, before you start racking up very real charges, unlike a Netflix situation where you hold on to a movie for 3 months at a time without a thought, letting it collect dust on the coffee table. You bring the movies up to the counter, and the love affair with a potentially life-changing film begins.

(A beast I must tame!)

As a shout-out to my Hollywood Video days, I’ve decided to watch all the 80s horror movies at Vulcan Video, starting in order of the alphabet. There are a few caveats: I will skip over any movie that is available on Netflix streaming (I’ll leave those to the wonderful WildClaw contributor Dr. Morbius), or movies that I already own. My first intention was to rent every single horror film and review each, but when I saw Vulcan’s enormous collection… that’s just not a viable option. So I will start with ‘A’ and work my way through; this little project will give me a reason to keep going back to the mom-and-pop video store to show my support.

(Total = $2 and some change)

Netflix Roulette: Dracula (1979)

Movie adaptations of Dracula almost never shed the influence of John Balderston and Hamilton Deane's stage play, almost always to their detriment. Almost alone of Dracula adaptations, the one that I wish had hewed closer to the play than to the book is John Badham's 1979 version. Frank Langella was just coming off a successful, and now legendary production of the play. You may have heard of it. It's the one with the sets and costumes designed by the late Edward Gorey in black, white, and red. The producers of the 1979 movie brought Langella to the screen, but left Gorey on the stage. I can imagine a movie version that includes both as a kind of ur-Tim Burton movie. Or maybe not. The existing photographs suggest a weird kind of silent film. Sadly, it was not to be.

Badham's Dracula takes more liberties with the material than usual. Among the pointless changes made to the story is recasting Mina as Van Helsing's daughter, recasting Lucy as Dr. Seward's daughter and as the heroine of the movie. It omits the prologue in Transylvania, too. This is the result of screenwriter W. D. Richter over-thinking the plot of the story, methinks. Richter is known for screenplays that are complex to the point of goofiness, and this movie is no different. Some of the changes are interesting, though. The decision to begin with the wreck of the Demeter is a post modern flourish that hearkens back to Nosferatu, and the movie stages the wreckage with a delightful level of menace. The scenes of Dracula crawling down walls are from the book. Still other elements are plucked from the vast filmography of Dracula movies. This isn't an adaptation of the story so much as it's a commentary on the screen image of Dracula.

From the opening frames, this is a beautiful, ornate production. No cheap Hammer knock-off, this. It has good actors, too, though I think Langella is a tad too smooth an operator as the Count and Olivier is too in love with doing an accent as Van Helsing. It's odd seeing Olivier feasting on Peter Cushing's leavings, but here it is none the less. Kate Nelligan, on the other hand, pretty much steals every scene she's in. I had a crush on her when I first saw the movie way back when.

The movie has disappointingly few horrifying set-pieces. It tries too hard for most of its running time. The wreck of the Demeter I already mentioned, and it's good. The others, involving the count, have a tendency to skirt towards ridiculousness, though without ever quite crossing the line. It's not generally a scary movie, and that may be partially the fault of an over-familiarity with the Dracula story. But I don't think so. It does manage at least one humdinger of a horror set piece, though: Mina (in the Lucy role) becomes the Bloofer lady during the early going. Our erstwhile vampire hunters break through her grave to the abandoned coal mines that riddle the landscape, where they catch up to her just after sunset. This version of Mina is an apparition that craves a kiss from her father. The scene is ghastly beyond all expectations, but even here, the movie is frustratingly inconsistent, given that the scene is predicated on Mina casting a reflection in a pool of water. In the very next scene, the movie goes out of its way to demonstrate that vampires don't cast reflections. Lazy. The rest? The movie ends with a disappointing anticlimax, I think, one in which it seems that the filmmakers aren't quite sure how to end things.

This is a film for which I have a good deal of affection--it's an interesting film even though it's a singularly frustrating one--but I can't defend its flaws. I originally saw it when I was young, and it made an impression. It was one of those movies that I waited until the wee hours of the morning to watch when it was first on cable, often just before sunrise, and that experience casts the film as a kind of dream memory for me. Watching it again now kind of punctures that memory, which is too bad, but I expect I'll get over it.

Netflix Roulette: Beast Within (2008)

The best thing about Beast Within (2008, directed by Wolf Wolff and Ohmuthi, AKA ) is that it's NOT a remake of the rapey 1982 Philippe Mora movie of the same name. That doesn't mean that it's not derivative, because it is. This is what I call a "one from column A" movie. Its great flash of insight is to wonder what would happen if the birds in Hitchcock's movie were carrying the pathogen for a zombie epidemic. At least it's not so shamelessly unimaginative that it leans on the crutch of a familiar name, but you've seen this all before.

The story follows a group of college kids--German college kids, this time; the movie is German, but mysteriously shot in English--as they return to the ancestral property of their friend, Robert, a med-school student whose grandfather has passed away under mysterious circumstances. His grandfather, Professor Bergen, was conducting research into a virulent strain of the avian flu. The birds in the district are particularly aggressive, too, and soon, they're infecting humans with their disease. Our young heroes soon find themselves besieged in Professor Bergen's mansion as the locals descend on them.

So, yeah. A stock zombie movie with a different kind of disease vector. But it's not without its pleasures. It IS well-shot. That's not something to be discounted, particularly in a sector of filmmaking that is often long on enthusiasm and short on craft and talent. Unfortunately, it's not particularly well-acted. The performances are stilted, probably resulting from shooting in English with a German cast. This stilted-ness is almost a fatal flaw. One character's transformation into a mad scientist, for example, is rendered unintentionally funny given his accent. The movie dawdles a bit with character development, too. It obviously intends slow-burn menace rather than a roller coaster ride, ratcheting up the dread with a careful, deliberate pace. Unfortunately, this particular approach is dependent on its performances. The performances here aren't good enough.

That all said, it mostly provides the goods. There's satisfying zombie gore that utilizes fairly good make-up effects (though there's also some dodgy CGI). I like the way the movie gives the women in the cast the opportunity to bring the lumber. It's along way from Judith O'Dea's catatonic Barbara in Night of the Living Dead. It also finds some subtext in the notion that real horror lies in watching helplessly while friends and loved-ones succumb to a mysterious and debilitating disease, and of the necessity of putting them down. This is the heart of the zombie archetype, I think, regardless of whatever socio-political readings filmmakers graft on top of it. At a fundamental level, zombie movies are a product of life in the hot zone.

Netflix Roulette: Phantasm

Phantasm (1979, directed by Don Coscarelli), is a film that I hadn't seen since it first showed up on cable in, oh, 1980 or so. I remember not really liking it way back then, but I had such dim memories of it that I was eager to revisit it when the roulette wheel spun it my way. I mean it's one of the foundational late-seventies cult movies. I fancy myself a student of the horror genre, so I should probably have an informed opinion, right?

It turns out that I still don't like it, though I'm amused at the way it assembles its story elements at random, occasionally from pop-culture allusions. Post-modernism was all the rage among the young turks of horror in the late seventies. I'm also struck by how much like a childrens' movie it plays.

Most of Phantasm was lost on the younger me: It has a Gom Jabbar and the Bene Gesserit invocation against fear! I missed that all those years ago, because at the time, I hadn't read Dune. Coscarelli makes sure that you don't miss the reference by naming the bar in the next scene "Dune's Cantina," which pulls double duty as an allusion, I guess. There's a paperback edition of Roger Zelazny's My Name is Legion on a table at one point, too, which tips the filmmakers' hands. This is a sci fi movie masquerading as a horror movie. Anyway, the Gom Jabbar made me laugh and redirected my attention to it's sheer ridiculousness. The story is a mishmash, in which our teen hero, Mike, eavesdrops on a funeral for one of his older brother's friends and notices some odd things about the proprietor of the mortuary. It seems that he's a front for a race of extra-dimensional dwarves who are plucking slaves from this world. The proprietor, The Tall Man (Angus Scrimm), is a shape-shifter who occasionally assumes the form of a beautiful girl to lure her victims. One of the victims in his/her net is Mike's brother, Jody, who is all Mike has left in the world after their parent's death. Weirdness ensues...

Phantasm was a hot item among my schoolmates when it originally hit cable, mostly for the boobs, but also for that nasty little flying ball. The ball reminds me of the kind of stuff that kids imagine as the worst kinds devices dealing bodily mutilation, like imagining sliding down a railing and having it turn into a razor. The stuff of EC Comics, in other words, but not connected to anything that's actually scary. It's a gross-out effect. For myself, I remember focusing on the weird transsexual imagery, but that's just a reflection of my own personal peccadilloes, I guess. It's not a movie that stands up to close scrutiny, because it doesn't make a lick of sense. It's a shambolic enterprise full of ideas, but lacking in both the talent and resources to bring them fully to life.

Netflix Roulette: Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned

The algorithm that randomly picks the movies for these posts? She is a cruel, cruel mistress. Today, she serves up a steaming turd-pile named Bachelor Party in the Bungalow of the Damned (2008, directed by Brian Thompson). Let's not mince words. This film sucks. Painfully. Boringly. It sucks so hard, light cannot escape its pull.

Well, maybe I'm exaggerating.

Everything you need to know is right there in the title of the film. Five friends head to a bungalow in the Hamptons to fete one of their own on the eve of his marriage. The house is provided by the uncle of their creepy friend, Gordon, who gets twitchy once the strippers/escorts arrive. With good reason, it seems, because the trio of escorts are demons intent on devouring them all. Best man Sammy is left with the task of defending his friends after forgoing the festivities (what a mensch!). Complicating things is Michelle, the fiance of the eponymous bachelor, who shows up late in the movie. Blah, blah, blah.

If it wasn't explicit from the title, this microbudget quickie is intended to be a bad movie, a la early Troma or certain films by Fred Olen Ray or Jim Wynorski. It even name-checks Lloyd Kaufman, who shows up in a particularly tasteless cameo near the beginning, just so there's no misunderstanding. The trouble with intentionally making a bad movie is that, more often than not, you succeed beyond your wildest expectations. This is borderline unwatchable. It's not even fun. In the interests of full disclosure, I should admit that I don't have the patience for this kind of stuff anymore, which might make me a bad horror fan these days. This film totally isn't made for the likes of me. It's made for an audience of arrested adolescent male douchebags, an audience it dutifully reflects on-screen with its main characters. So there it is.

For a movie about T&A, this is just about the un-sexiest movie I can imagine. I won't comment on our trio of strippers beyond stating that it takes more than a cheap latex mini dress from Hot Topic to make a woman sexy. The men, on the other hand, get no free pass. These guys are repellent, and not because they're physically unattractive. That's a matter of taste, though my own preferences in masculine hotness run to guys who aren't going around shirtless with fishbelly-white beer guts, as most of our "heroes" are doing in the early goings. No, they're unattractive because they're sleazy. One of our "heroes," Paulie, is first seen harassing a girl on a bench as she's reading. Another, Fish, is first glimpsed after a tryst with a transvestite (have I mentioned that this movie has a streak of homophobia that's a mile wide? Well, it does). Our "good guy" best man is the ringleader of the weekend. All three of these guys behave with contempt toward the introverted Gordon (who oozes creepiness, but nevermind that). Only Chuck, the bachelor, is nice to Gordon, but that bank of good will evaporates as soon as he climbs into the saddle with one of the escorts. Have these filmmakers learned nothing from the archetypal bachelor party movie? In which Tom Hanks makes a point of being faithful to Tawny Kitaen against all odds? Apparently not.

I dunno, maybe I'm being unduly harsh toward a defenselessly dreadful movie, but, screw it. It's easy to make excuses for movies from this sector. They're cheap. They can't afford extravagant effects and purpose-built sets. But if Sam Raimi could leverage a micro budget into The Evil Dead, if the makers of The Blair Witch Project could leverage an even smaller micro-budget into actual multiplexes, it's hard for me to cut movies like this one any slack. Of course, those movies had something this one lacks: talent, taste, a commitment to making an actual, by god movie. By contrast, this movie seems more like a bunch of guys screwing around with a camcorder on their weekends.

Netflix Roulette: The Pit and the Pendulum (1991)

Welcome to another installment of Netflix Roulette. This time, our random number generator comes up 19 and 14, which corresponds to Stuart Gordon's 1991 version of The Pit and the Pendulum.

The Pit and the Pendulum reassembles Gordon's frequent collaborators Dennis Paoli and Jeffrey Combs for a Gothic romp through Poe. This film marks the beginning of Gordon's long exile in Spain, which lends the film a certain European feeling appropriate to the story. The film is dominated by Lance Henriksen's lead performance as Grand Inquisitor Torquemada. It's animated by an antic gallows humor. But all of these elements are in the service of a cheapjack Full Moon production. It's an uneasy mix, which keeps it from being as iconic a horror movie as, say, Corman's version. The movie languished on home video, where it was originally released. I'm not entirely sure it deserves its obscurity, but it certainly goes out of its way to earn it.

The opening of the film is magnificent, though, in which Henriksen's Toquemada exhumes a body in order to condemn it as a heretic. He promptly has the skeletal remains flogged. That right there is the movie in a nutshell and if the movie consisted only of its pre-credit sequence, or if the rest were worthy of it, it would be very good indeed. Hell, if the movie let Henriksen hold the screen for most of its runtime, it would be very good. But it doesn't. The movie is populated with a supporting cast who execute the film's comedy with all the panache of a sitcom. This, unfortunately, includes Combs as the twitchy inquisitorial clerk and Stephen Lee as the lead turnkey in the dungeons. The movie also tends to eschew mood; it's entirely too well-lit for being set in a dungeon. There's also some supernatural hugger mugger that seems wholly out of place, but that's a matter of taste, I guess.

Still, there's a lot to recommend. Henriksen is THAT good as a version of Torquemada who is inspired by Victor Hugo's Frollo. The plot of the movie concerns his lust for a young baker's wife (Rona De Ricci), who haunts his dreams. The baker plunges into the dungeons of the inquisition and winds up faced with the title horror. The film takes a few detours along the way, including the mystical education of the baker's wife at the hands of a chatty witch and a short excursion into "The Cask of Amontillado," with Oliver Reed in role of Fortunato. This last reminds me of the Corman films, actually, because they often included secondary stories to pad their length. Some of the small touches are good, too, like the hourglass that has sand made from ground up human bones and Torquemada's choice of bedroom decor (he sleeps under a sword of Damocles). The film's best line comes after Torquemada has cut out Maria's tongue: Combs disclaims the act with "How can they confess if they don't have tongues?" The film's best moment comes when Esmerelda the Witch, having ingested a bunch of gunpowder, explodes on the stake. I also appreciate the inclusion of Poe's solution to escaping from the pit. Love the rats.

So a mixed bag, all told, and pretty good as Full Moon productions go. It's certainly fun in fits and starts. But it's disappointing from the man who directed Re-Animator. It should be so much better than it is.

Netflix Roulette: Blackout

Shortly before his death, an interviewer asked William Faulkner what he was reading. Faulkner replied: "Charles Dickens and the Bible. At my age, I don't have time for anything but the good stuff."

I used to have a lot more patience for the crap that forms the largest part of the horror genre. In my youth, I could watch any given zero-budget slasher film or ridiculous creature feature and still have a good ol' time. Over the years, though, I kind of got burned out on it. In part, this was because I was watching a lot of amazing stuff outside the genre, which was giving me an appetite for "the good stuff." In part, it was because I had been over-fishing the waters for years. And, in part, it was because the market for low budget and direct to video horror had contracted to the point where I wasn't able to find the diamonds in the rough I was able to find in past years. It wasn't giving me return on investment. So I gave up, and the sub-strata of the horror genre plugged along without me. It's been over a decade since I regularly trolled this area of film. This is where Netflix comes in. A lot of the stuff that used to stock the horror aisle at chain video stores is beginning to find a home on Netflix's instant streaming service (I presume that the same thing is happening over at Blockbuster, but I won't do business with them). Somewhere along the line, I got the idea that I might play roulette with the movies on Netflix Instant as a way of putting me back in touch with my roots. Who knows, maybe there's a diamond in the rough waiting to be unearthed.

In any event, here are the rules: Netflix currently has 18 pages of Instant Watch horror movies, and each page has 24 movies on it, so I needed to come up with two random numbers: one between 1 and 18 and one between 1 and 24. I set up a function in an Excel spreadsheet to generate these and I was set. The first numbers that came up were 3 and 1, which corresponds to Blackout, a 2007 thriller starring Amber Tamblyn and directed by Rigoberto Castañeda. The premise of this movie, in which three people are trapped on an elevator and one of them is a serial killer, sounds more than a bit like Shyamalan's upcoming Devil, though on a much smaller scale.

The movie starts with a dead woman in a bathtub, then moves to a scene of her husband grieving for her in a cemetery with his young daughter. This the first of our trio of characters: Carl, a doctor, played with amiable sadness by Aiden Gillen. Then we meet Claudia (Tamblyn), an asthmatic who may or may not have been responsible for her grandmother's death. The final character is Tommy, played by Armie Hammer, a tough kid about to go on the lam with his girlfriend. The backstories of each of these characters is filled in at excruciating length in flashbacks cut into the scenes in the elevator. Frankly, they mostly feel like padding to avoid the point or, at the very least, bring the movie to feature length. That being the case, the last twenty minutes or so, once the masks have fallen from our trio of characters and the flashbacks have been abandoned and everyone knows exactly who everyone is, are actually pretty damned good. The movie sets up its suspense set-pieces with a Hitchcockian attention to significant objects (a lighter, an asthma inhaler) and pays off with a delightfully nasty denouement. In truth, I was kind of surprised that I liked this as much as I did, given how lackadaisical the first half of the movie seemed. Once it starts paying attention to its own little microcosm, it turns the screws tight. It does, however, point out the main flaw in the Netflix Instant service: it doesn't have a fast forward button.