An Effigy In a Turtleneck

The laws of the universe are very clear when it comes to horror anthologies, and even more Windex-sprayed crystal when said anthologies are included in February’s Shortening:

You must have a doll story.

While past entries here at the Doll’s House include the ventriloquist laden Dead of Night and punchy puppet tale Screamtime, this year’s installment comes to us in a more subdued format with only a minor brush of dolldom. Let’s see if 1974’s From Beyond the Grave survives the month:

Quick Plot: Based on the stories of Ronald Chetwynd-Hayes, From Beyond the Grave tells four tales carefully linked by Temptations Limited, an intriguing little antique shop run by the great Peter Cushing. With the motto “Offers You Cannot Resist,” Temptations Ltd. attracts a varied clientele of a slightly disingenuous nature.

Our first customer is none other than David Warner in the form of a slippery bargain hunter who slyly talks Cushing down on the price of a valued antique mirror. As you might guess, holding a séance revolving around an antique mirror that you conned out of creepy Peter Cushing is not going to have the happiest of conclusions.

The next tale is titled “An Act of Kindness” and beings cheerily enough as Christopher, a bored office manager with a miserable wife and distant child, befriends a poor veteran selling matches. Since said poor veteran is played by Donald Pleasance, Christopher finds himself desperate to impress the man, lying about having served in the war with the help of a military medal bought under false pretences from our new favorite antiques shop. Such service claims help worm Christopher into the heart of his new friend’s daughter Emily (played by the Juliet Landau-esque Angela Pleasance).

It’s here where the tag ‘doll’ probably found its way into From Beyond the Grave, as An Act of Kindness sees miniature wedding cake toppers as key in its big finish. There’s also a brief, but well-executed act of violence involving a miniature effigy wearing a turtleneck. ‘Miniature effigy wearing a turtleneck’ is, as you’d imagine, close to being the greatest word sequence ever typed. The fact that this segment has a naughty twist is really just gravy.

Next up is “The Elemental,” wherein the jerky Reggie tries to swindle Mr. Cushing by switching price tags on an inexpensive snuff box. This leads Reggie down a possessed path of sorts that forces him to enlist the aid of a kooky psychic and her exorcism skills.

Last but not least is “The Door.” In the final tale, a young man named William buys the titular hinged fixture from Cushing and debates dipping his British hands into the open and full cash register. Not surprisingly, said door seems to open an entryway into a netherworld of sorts haunted by a genuinely creepy murderous occultist.

A late Amicus production, From Beyond the Grave was the first feature film directed by Kevin Connor, a man who went on to work steadily in television after the memorable Motel Hell.  While this film steers fairly clear of the all-out camp of that film, it does manage to have quite a healthy dose of naughty humor about it. The stories have a pleasant (or Donald Pleasance) balance of winks and scares, making From Beyond the Grave a nice little treat for the anthology enthusiast.

Lessons Learned

An office manager is just a jumped up clerk

A woman hath a more enduring quality

Subways are generally packed with evil elementals (not that we didn’t already know this)

Don’t ever try to eff with Peter Cushing. Not only can he slit your throat with those cheekbones, but he also most likely has supernatural control over everything he touches and will ensure you suffer a grisly comeuppance

Rent/Bury/Buy

It’s surprising that From Beyond the Grave doesn’t come up more often in discussions about anthologies. While it’s far from the great entertainment of something like Creepshow or brilliant twistiness of its closer peer Asylum, this is a tight little ride with no real dull spots. Throw in a cast of genre-friendly faces, a few true surprising twists, some effective moment of eeriness, and an effigy wearing a turtleneck for a darn good night of atmospheric horror.

Shortening Cred: Though the dolls of “An Act of Kindness” didn’t quite prove to be the driving force behind some of the terror, From Beyond the Grave remains the most recent film in my memory to feature an adorable effigy wearing a wool turtleneck. Happy February!

Swapping Scarecrows For Working Wax

I know I haven’t been celebrating the greatest month of all with the usual candy corn fueled fervor I keep in reserve, but times have been busy here in the actual Doll’s House. After apartment hunting with more gusto than Gary Busey bare handing it in Surviving the Game, I’ve since moved on to the act of packing with more reluctance than Paul Rudd cleaning up his breakfast tray in Wet Hot American Summer. Still to come: the part where my fella and I face the first real test of our relationship by battling for poster space, followed by my cats meeting/hopefully not killing their new stepsisters.

You might say I’ve been stressed.

But thankfully, there’s one semi-monthly tradition that always soothes the crazed soul: the Lightning Bugg Doll’s House Swaparoo! In honor of the glory of October, T.L. Bugg and I went the good old fashioned Instant Watch horror route. Over at his Lair, I assigned Zach one of those VHS staples of the ‘80s that always warmed my straw heart: 1988’s Scarecrows.

My assignment? That very same year’s cult horror comedy Waxwork.

It has a little person butler and everything!

Quick Plot: In a sunny college town, a group of spoiled university students stumble upon a ‘hey, how’d that get there overnight?’ wax museum called Waxwork run by none other than genre stalwart David Warner. This is awesome on its own, but get ready to pick up some messy pieces as I make your head explode:

He’s dressed as if he ransacked Willy Wonka’s closet.

As if that wasn’t enough, he also heads a satanic wax museum with the best security system of all time. See, if any of the wanderers dare to cross that oh-so-tempting velvet rope, he or she ends up transported to an alternate dimension where the scene of the waxy display is real. That would be fine if Waxwork focused on happy periods in history, like discovering the cure to polio or the day peanut butter met banana. 

Then again, when was the last time you entered a wax museum and didn’t leave with a nagging sense of the icks? They’re inherently creepy places. Even the purely historical one I visited in Virginia a few years back seemed designed to steal the souls of every patron.

The scenes on display inside Waxwork are more in line with horror fans than history hunters, with vampires, werewolves, mummies, and phantoms luring our snarky teens into grizzly fates. The wealthy brat Mark (played by Face of the 80s Zach Galligan) and hungry virgin Sarah make it through the night, but there’s still another day of battle to wage.

You know how there are some films that other people seem to adore, yet the one time you tried to watch it you just couldn’t keep your eyes on the screen? That was how I always felt about Waxwork, perhaps in part because its first big sequence involves werewolves. As I’ve said before, it’s a monster that just doesn’t do anything for me one way or another. While I can appreciate the metaphorical aspect of man’s darker side (or menstruation metaphor of a female’s redder one), I generally find the execution to be either dull or just plain silly looking.

Such was my initial experience with Waxwork a few months ago, when I sat down to what I had always assumed was an ‘80s horror movie about killer wax mannequins but is, whaddya know? actually a comedy more focused on throwback horror monsters. Writer/director Anthony Hickox (he of the decent Hellraiser III) is clearly having a ball with giving us classic movie villains with an ever so slight twist. It’s not many an ‘80s teen horror film that would feature a fencing duel between its unlikable antihero and a pirate-styled Marquis de Sade, but Waxwork seems intent on being something special.

I see that now.

High Points

There’s a character named China (played by Michelle Johnson) who responds quite smartly to her vampiric dilemma. In a period where even the bravest final girl usually ran through boxes of Kleanex before lucking into victory, it’s nice to see a female character (and one presented as the bitchy slut at that) use her wits when needed

Any final reel that involves wheelchair-bound old dudes battling zombies, vampires, axe-wielders and werewolves can’t be half bad!

Low Points

Due to my intense discomfort with wax figures, I would have liked to see Waxwork utilize that fear factor a little more, rather than focusing so much on some of its Universal tributes

Lessons Learned

Having drinks with the butler leads to anarchy

If you think of completely raw, possibly human meat as steak tartar, it goes down slightly easier

Dictators have the shouting voices and the small mustaches

Stray Confusion

John Rhys-Davies 

Jonathan Rhys Meyers:

Not the same person. One day, I'll understand that.

Rent/Bury/Buy

Now streaming on Instant Watch, Waxwork is good fun so long as you know that’s what you’re getting. I think my initial humbug reaction came from expectation: I wanted a waxy horror film and got an affectionate horror comedy. Thankfully, this time around I wanted a good time and Waxwork is busting with that. 

Thanks as always to my righteous recommender Zach. To see what that southern fried lightning bug thought of Scarecrows (an eerie little dark ride that I’ve always felt deserved more love) then grab some corn on the cob for the ride and head on over!

I like my plague the way I like my coffee/men: black & Beany. Um...

Ever since I stayed up late four weeknights in the 6th grade to watch ABC’s adaptation of The Stand, I’ve had something you might call ‘a thing’ for plagues. Whether it’s a movie like Carriers or a novel like Blindness, the idea of infection sparing no one is just such a ripe and rich premise for any horror film.

Toss in the word bubonic--easily one of my favorites--and  you’ve got the ingredients for one kicking movie. Oh, and did I mention Christopher Triangle Smith is behind the camera?

Yes, you could easily say my expectations for Black Death was about as high as the body count of the actual Black Death.

Quick Plot: It’s 1348, a great time for rats, mead, and long hair but a crappy time for life expectancy. A deadly sickness is tearing through Europe leaving nothing but paranoid Christians and rotting corpses in its path. 

Enter Oswald, a young monk torn between his village love and his word to God. Fearing the worst, he sends his girlfriend home to the woods where she plans to wait for him every morning as he decides where his true heart lies. 

A sign comes in the form of the rarely shampooed Sean Bean playing Ulric, a knight leading a tribe of Christian mercenaries into the woods to capture a rumored necromancer. As they venture deeper into the wild, they encounter violent savages and eventually, Black Book’s lovely Carice van Houten’s Langiva, a mysterious beauty lording over a gang of pagans.

Christopher Smith has one of the most impressive resumes of any genre filmmaker working today, so the idea of putting one of my favorite film premises in his hands is beyond exciting. In a way, unless Black Death met Wizard of Oz standards, it was probably never going to truly be as good as I wanted it to be.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t like Black Death. It had body boils, angry mobs, David Warner, a bleak ending and Sean Bean snarling. Of COURSE I enjoyed the movie. But coming from the man who made a beautiful day of sailing into a time warping horror complete with a baghead killer, Black Death fell a tad short of being the bubonic bonanza I was hoping for. 

High Points

One of the interesting aspects of any film set pre-1700 is the necessary lack of firearms. Black Death gives us a great moment of dialogue where the young monk learns from a grizzled knight about the mercy knife and how a carefully placed stab wound serves as the medieval headshot for merciful killings

SPOILERS

I drifted off a bit from Black Death during its somewhat disappointing third act, but I found the epilogue to be absolutely great. Having Oswald, our young and lovelorn hero, 

transform into a dark witch-hunting murderer (with Episode 2 Anakin Skywalker hair to boot) was devastatingly brilliant, making it a spiritual prequel to films like Mark of the Devil and Witchfinder General

The only good thing I was ever able to say about the awful Hitcher remake was that hey, at least the truck stretch out was cool. So it’s kind of neat that Black Death, another Sean Bean vehicle, gets to do the limb pulling, period style


THUS ENDETH SPOILERS

Low Points

While some of the sound design is haunting (ew death gurgles!) I find it hard to believe that every time sword moves it makes that slicey sound

There’s a fantastic shot when one of Ullric’s men is crucified by the pagans, as Smith’s camera follows him face-on in a frenetic Wicker Man-like final prayer. The problem is that this type of moment is far too rare. With a hauntingly fogged landscape and some set pieces that speak for themselves (hooded executioners marching on, corpses a’plenty) it’s kind of a shame that Black Death doesn’t feel truly immersed in the natural madness like, say, Vinyan or Aguire: The Wrath of God.

Lessons Learned

Christians appreciate the concept of betrayal

The longbow is quicker to load AND farther in flight. Take THAT buck of tar!

It’s indeed possible to smell a lie on a man

As Red Riding Hood taught us well, eye makeup was never more lovely than during pre-Industrial Revolution times

The Winning Line

“I look forward to shagging your mother’s ass in hell”

Who knew medieval times were filled with such great trash mama talk!

Rent/Bury/Buy

Black Death is certainly worth a lights-off watch, particularly since it’s currently streaming on Instant Watch. My slight disappointment probably stems more from the fact that I just watched Werner Herzog’s drop dead gorgeous Nosferatu (review coming soon) and was slightly spoiled by his masterful use of medieval times, plagues, and European forestry. So Black Death ain’t Nosferatu, but it’s still an engrossing period horror refreshing for our age.