Okay - back to the usual nonsense, eh? There are two indie horror movies (via) coming out soon (one a comedy, the other decidedly not a comedy) that Uncle P is pumped to see.
The first is Bad Milofrom director and co-writer Jacob Vaughn. Ken Marino (about to be seen in the stoner comedy We're the Millers) plays Ken, a guy who thinks his stomach problems are caused by stress. Unfortunately, it turns out that Ken has a demon living in his intestines. A demon who is intent on killing the people causing Ken's stress. The amazing cast includes Patrick Warburton ("The Tick;" "Family Guy;" "Rules of Engagement"); Peter Stormare (Fargo; The Brothers Grimm; "Prison Break"); Gillian Jacobs ("Community"); Stephen Root ("News Radio;" O Brother Where Art Thou; "Boardwalk Empire") and Mary Kay Place ("Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman;" The Big Chill; "Big Love"). Talk about a dream cast! Bad Milo is certainly not a movie for everyone, but it is right up Uncle P's alley (you should excuse the expression) and I especially love the use of practical effects, harkening bad to the days of 80's indie horror movies like Basket Case. Here's the NSFW Red Band trailer:
Bad Milo will be available OnDemand starting August 29th and in limited release in theaters on October 4th. Bad Milo is being released by Magnet Films, the same company that gave us the sentient tire movie, Rubber.
Mark (Josh Ethier) disappears into a bright light. Two years later, a string of grisly murders convinces his friend Seth (Graham Skipper) that Mark has come back, albeit with something... not quite right inside him. Shot in New Hampshire with a cast of unknowns, the trailer for Almost Human looks like it might be the trailer for the next "X-Files" movie as made by Sean S. Cunningham:
No U.S. release date has been announced for Almost Human, but I'll be sure to let you know when it is.
So, I finally got to see the much talked-about 'remake' of Mother's Day from director Darren Lynn Bousman (Repo: The Genetic Opera) and I first have to say that it resembles Charles Kaufman's 1980 Troma slasher as much as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre resembles Psycho. They may share the same source material, but they are two very different films. And I must admit, Bousman's is the more successful of two.
A suburban house party is interrupted when three bank-robbing brothers force their way into the home where they grew up, only to discover that their mother doesn't live there anymore. Brother Johnny (Matt O'Learly) has been shot. Brothers Addley (Warren Kole from USA's "Common Law") and Ike (Patrick Fluegler from "The 4400") call Mother to come get them. When Mother and Sister arrive, all hell breaks loose and the movie becomes a story of survival, torture, desperation and revenge.
It's late and I'm tired, so here's another 5 For/Five Against review, inspired (as always) by my buddy, Sean:
5 For:
1. Rebecca De Mornay, best known for Risky Business and The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, gives a new career-defining performance as Mother. As chilling as she may have been in Cradle, she is absolutely terrifying as a woman who will go to any lengths to protect her children.
2. Shawn Ashmore (X-Men; X2) is practically perfect as George, the doctor forced to attend to a killer and who has perfect insight into Mother's manipulations (on a side note, his twin brother Aaron can be seen on my favorite steampunk SyFy show, "Warehouse 13").
3. Scott Milam's screenplay transforms Kaufman's characters into real life people, as opposed to the cartoonish villains Kaufman gave us in the original.
4. Warren Kole's obviously insane Addley was the antithesis of the character he plays on "Common Law." Kole proves himself an actor who is not afraid to go where he needs to in order to achieve the performance required. Addley is definitely not a guy you want to meet in a dark alley.
5. Bousman manages to create an intense feeling of claustrophobia in what is probably his most artistically successful film to date. Yes, there are plenty of scenes set outside the house where the main action takes place, but the scenes in the house's basement are particularly upsetting and disturbing.
5 Against:
1. The violent torture depicted in the film may be a bit much for some viewers. I was able to distance myself, but some folks may find some scenes too much to handle.
2. Jaime King ("Heart of Dixie") as the film's "final girl" just didn't cut it for me. Her rather one-note performance didn't make Beth a character I wanted to root for.
3. The movie keeps referencing an impending tornado which is threatening the Nebraska town in which the film is set but we never get to see any evidence of such a storm.
4. Stupid cops. A cop arrives at the house and obviously suspects something is wrong, yet he never calls for back up and (SPOILER ALERT) announces his presence without being sure the killer is actually dead.
5. The ending (SPOILER ALERT 2). Characters who should have been dead, survive and pull off a highly improbable kidnapping.
Overall, I liked the movie. It's one of the better 'Home Invasion' films in recent memory and proves that Bousman is capable of making a film that doesn't rely on weird makeup prosthetics or strange mechanical devices to make an interesting, if very disturbing, film. **1/2 (Two and a Half Out of Four Stars).
Why does Jason Voorhees get a doll? Yes, he's going onto his 12th incarnation (in 3D, no less), but there are plenty of other Horror movie killers more worthy of a doll.
I've already recently talked about the Father (or is it Mother) of the Slasher genre, Hitchcock's still effective and nearly perfectly-made Psycho.At the time, Hollywood was in a tizzy. the Master of Suspense making a cheap indie horror movie? What was he thinking? Indeed. Psycho ended up being quite an extraordinary film that literally changed the movie-going habits of America. Richard Matheson wrote both the novel and screenplay, based on the notorious Wisconsin necrophiliac, Ed Gein.
13 years later, Kim Henkal and Tobe Hooper would base their screenplay on Gein, as well. This time, the story was set in Texas and the Gein character was an entire family of sadistic cannibals who lured strangers to their remote farm where they would be terrorized before being butchered. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a drive-in sensation and started Hooper's directing career (which sadly peaked with Poltergeist). Of course, the most memorable member of this mad clan was a character simply known as Leatherface (so named because he wears a mask made of other human faces stitched together). The interesting think about TTCM is that we never really see any of the violence. We see its aftermath and we hear that terrible chainsaw running, but really awful stuff happens off screen, leaving the view to conjure up his or her own horrifying images, proving that less is, indeed, more.
TTCM has had several sequels, though only Hooper's own is any good. sadly, it wasn't until 1986 when Hooper and Henkal reunited for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, the truly nightmarish sequel set mostly in the access tunnels beneath an abandoned amusement park. Bill Mosely (more about him in a bit) plays a Chop-Top, one of the most vile and repulsive and still fascinating characters in Horror history. And the scene where Leatherface tries to make our heroine waer her own mask? Stupefyingly horrific.
I saw TTCM2 in a theater, and remembering feeling the same nightmarish numbness I felt after seeing Apocalypse Nowand another movie I'll talk about in a bit.
Now - you may be asking yourself about the inclusion of a certain 1978 classic Horror movie and it's immortal antagonist, a certain M.M. I feel like I need to let you know that I am deliberately omitting this particular film from this particular post because of an upcoming, preplanned post of it's own.
Director Bob Clark (A Christmas Story), got his start in Horror. He'd previously made a weird zombie picture called Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things, but in 1974 he gave us Black Christmas, a gruesome little tale about a killer stalking a sorority. Olivia Hussey (Romeo and Juliet); Keir Dullea (2001); Margot Kidder (Superman: The Movie); John Saxon (another film yet to come) and the fabulous Andrea Martin (Hedwig and the Angry Inch) star in this low budget, yet very effective movie:
Don't bother with the 2006 remake.
Last House on the Left director Wes Craven returned in 1977 with a gruesome little story inspired by ancient Scottish history called The Hills Have Eyes. A family on their way to California in a motor-home breaks down in the desert, only to be descended upon by a clan of mutant cannibals. It starred the would would be Elliot's mom in E.T., Dee Wallace and the extraordinary-looking Michael Berryman:
In 1980, Sean S. Cunningham got his and Kevin Bacon's career off to a start with a nasty little slasher movie called Friday the 13th. We all know that Jason (see the doll, above) is not the antagonist in the the franchise's progenitor, but rather his mother (played hilariously over-the-top by former 50's B-Lister Betsy Palmer). The only worse performance is from 'Final Girl' Adrienne King, who doesn't survive past the first ten minutes of the sequel. Tom Savini (Dawn of the Dead; From Dusk Till Dawn) provided the gruesome and gory FX.
1980 also saw William Lustig's version of Joe Spinell's Maniac, loosely inspired by The Son of Sam. At the time, it was reviled for it's over-the-top violence, but Horror fans were really excited by Make-up Master Tom Savini's state-of-the-art FX.
That's Savini getting his head blown off in the opening shots, by the way. It would be another four years before an iconic, unkillable killer would grace the silver screen.
Legendary director Wes Craven created a new franchise and a new killer in 1984's A Nightmare on Elm Street:
Not only did Nightmare... bring us Freddy Krueger (thereby making a Horror icon out of actor Robert Englund), it was the feature debut of uber-talented and uber-eccentric Johnny Depp. And of course, John Saxon is not only our heroine Nancy's dad, he's the chief of police with a big secret.
There were plenty of terrible slasher movies in the 80's (and they'll get their own post, as well). Though 1986 brought us the chilling Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer. Starring Michael Rooker (Slither), was a brutal and terrifying look into the mind of a madman:
But it wouldn't be until 1991 that a cannibalistic serial killer again caught audience's attention. Previously portrayed by Bryan Cox in Michael Mann's Manhunter, Anthony Hopkins won an Academy Award for his performance as Doctor Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lector in Jonathan Demme's riveting adaption of Thomas Harris' The Silence of the Lambs, despite having less than 30 minutes of actual screen time.
Then in 1995, director David Fincher directed the only movie I have never been able to bring myself to watch again, Se7en. This is only the third movie that made me feel like I was watching someone else's nightmare, and it disturbed me from the opening credits. Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Gwyneth Paltrow and Kevin Spacey star in this exceptionally creepy tale of a serial killer using the Seven Deadly Sins as his M.O. Set in an unnamed city wher it constantly rains, Se7en is the single most disturbing movie I have ever seen.
Rocker-turned-director Rob Zombie made a loving homage to those 70's horror flicks with House of 1000 Corpses in 2003. Undeservedly maligned, House... hearkens back to TTCM in a tale about a family of maniacs luring strangers in to torture and kill them. And those they don't kill are given over to the deformed Dr. Satan for experimentation:
Zombie's technically superior 2005 sequel, The Devil's Rejectsis a revenge tale and ignores Dr. Satan and his experiments altogether. In both films, TCM2's Bill Mosely is super creepy as Otis:
The slasher genre eventually evolved into the 'Torture Porn' genre of films like Saw and Hostel, exercises in bad taste, rather than true Horror. And recent attempts at rebooting some those franchises have been less than critically successful (though I do have hopes for the upcoming Elm Street reboot, starring Jackie Earle Haley.
OK, so tell me... What serial killer/slasher flick got to you? Who's your favorite unstoppable maniac?I left some off my list for brevity's sake (ha!). Maybe one of them is yours...
