I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini
reviews at the end of every week in October. I write it. You read it. No one
needs to get hurt.
October 4
Hollywood Boulevard (1976- dir. Allan Arkush and Joe Dante) ***
Producer Jon Davison bet that he could make the cheapest
movie New World Pictures ever made. Roger Corman took that bet, hence the
existence of Hollywood Boulevard, a
$60,000 crazed-killer flick/clip show littered with bits from eleven previous
Corman pictures. Davison guaranteed he’d have more than a bet-winning turkey on
his hands by hiring the future directors of Rock
‘n’ Roll High School and Gremlins
to get behind the camera and Mary Woronov, Paul Bartel, Dick Miller, and the
deputy from Jaws to get in front of
it (plus bonus cameos from Robby the Robot and Godzilla!). As a result, Hollywood Boulevard is a
cartoon-come-to-life parody of movie making from a bunch of people who’d
reduced movie making to a cartoon parody. Unfortunately, attempts to mine
laughs from rape keep derailing the fun. Exploitative, sleazy, self-aware, and
mostly entertaining. It’s a Roger Corman movie.
Konga (1961- dir. John Lemont) ***½
AIP gives King Kong
a mad scientist twist in Konga.
Michael Gough is the doc who gives his chimp, Konga, a dose of enormity serum he
picked up from an old witch doctor buddy. Soon the cute little guy is a hulking
gorilla loose in London and smiting Gough’s enemies. I get why Konga gets
bigger, but there’s no explanation for why he becomes a totally different
species of primate. Whatever. It’s pretty stupid tp split hairs about a movie
starring a guy in a gorilla suit. Gough is pretty psycho, so Konga isn’t totally devoid of menace,
and the ease with which his sweet girlfriend (Margo Johns) goes along with the
killing is kind of chilling, but the bottom line is that this is schlock, which
becomes wildly clear when Konga starts treating Gough like Fay Wray in the
final reel. I like schlock, and it sure isn’t boring, so I’m not complaining.
October 5
World War Z (2013- dir. Marc Forster) **
Despite being the most limited monsters, zombies continue to
get more play than vampires, werewolves, and Frankensteins combined. World War Z is well made and well acted,
but you’ve seen 100 other movies just like it and there will be 100 more before
this year is over. The only things that distinguish it from other zombie movies
are its globetrotting and its refusal to criticize the military. Otherwise, World War Z is purely generic. Panic in
the streets, martial law, flesh eating, metaphor, metaphor, blah, blah, blah.
October 6
Scream Pretty Peggy (1973- dir. Gordon Hessler) ***½
Donald from “That Girl” is a sculptor who hires a college
kid to do his housekeeping. His mom is Bette Davis, who flounces around the
house in her nightgown drunk. He keeps his sister locked up above the garage to
keep her from hacking up the neighbors with a kitchen knife. Co-writers Jimmy
Sangster and Arthur Hoffe rip limbs off of three well-familiar Gothic and
horror stories, piece them back together like a couple of little Dr.
Frankensteins, and end up with a made-for-TV horror flick that goes down as easily
as a fistful of Velveeta. Plus, you can never go wrong with Bette Davis. That’s
currency you can put in the bank.
October 7
Pumpkinhead (1988- dir. Stan Winston) ****½
Special effects and makeup whiz Stan Winston (Jurassic Park, Aliens, The Star Wars
Christmas Special) takes a crack at directing his own film and cracks it
wide open. At a time when cynical slasher movies and ironic horror-comedies
were king, Winston made an old-fashioned monster movie with a fairy tale-like
atmosphere. Pumpkinhead is a wonderful creation, not unlike the Gill Man but
still very original, which is the least we should expect from Winston. The real
surprise is how much humanity, sincerity, and willingness to confront moral
complexities he brings to his first picture. Lance Henrickson gives a
restrained yet emotionally intense performance as a grief-stricken father who
makes a demonic deal of love and revenge. Winston makes some concessions to
contemporary tastes with the systematic slaughter of a bunch of teens, and the
killings are the least interesting parts of Pumpkinhead.
Fortunately, Winston populates his film with enough witches, monsters, owls,
spooky old graveyards, and real people with real feelings to distinguish his
film from its era.
Grim Prairie Tales (1990- dir. Wayne Coe) *
A couple of great actors anchor this direct-to-video
portmanteau, but there’s no getting around how insubstantial it is. Menacing
James Earl Jones and city slicker Brad Dourif tell each other a quartet of
horror stories around a campfire in frontier times. There’s so little to the
first tale about a man passing over an Indian burial ground that the most
shocking moment is when it ends so abruptly and anticlimactically. The second
one about a sexual encounter is the best of the lot for its utter weirdness,
but again, it’s all over too quickly. The third tale, in which a girl discovers
that her dad (William Atherton) is a member of a lynch mob, is actually
genuinely horrifying, but not for the usual horror movie reasons. This story
raises some serious issues, and its refusal to deal with them more directly may
have worked in a better film, but it feels downright offensive in this perfunctory
piece of crap. Finally, there are some gunslingers and a ghost. In the spirit
of the movie I’m reviewing, I’m not going to bother thinking about that final
story, and I’m just going to end this review in the sloppiest, most sudden way
I can. Fart.
October 8
Room 237 (2012- dir. Rodney Ascher) ***
If any filmmaker constructed his images so meticulously that
even his background props deserve closer study, it’s Stanley Kubrick, but Room 237 is not really a documentary
about interpretations of The Shining.
It’s about how that invitation to study closer can be a slippery slope to the
kind of madness Jack Torrance might think is a bit much. Not every interviewee
is a total crackpot. The guy who reads themes of Native American genocide into The Shining brings up some interesting
ideas before going off the deep end, and hats off to the eagle eye who somehow
spotted that Jack is reading a Playgirl
while waiting in the Overlook lobby. However, the woman who sees Minotaurs in
every frame takes overreaching to new lengths, as does the guy who’s convinced
the movie is about the holocaust. The one who believes Kubrick faked the Apollo
moon landing footage is flat-out nuts. A little of this stuff goes a long way,
and Room 237 could have earned itself
another half-star by losing a half-hour. That footage of The Shining superimposed forwards and backwards over itself is
pretty cool though.
October 9
Child’s Play 2 (1990- dir. John Lafia) **
When I began Diary of the Dead (and Psychobabble!) five years ago, the biggest and most delightful surprise
was how good Child’s Play is (which,
quite coincidentally, I watched precisely five years ago today). In tribute to
that momentous discovery, I’m going to be hitting a Chucky adventure a day for
the next three days. First up is John Lafia’s Child’s Play 2, in which Grace Zabriskie places the kid from the
first movie in Jenny Agutter’s foster home. Brad Dourif returns as Chucky, who
possesses a Good Guy doll left by one of Agutter’s former charges. Mayhem
ensues. As I’m, sure you’ve already detected, the cast of Child’s Play 2 is very cool. Dourif still delivers some
foul-mouthed fun, but there’s not nearly enough Zabriskie. That’s not the only
issue with Child’s Play 2, which just
isn’t imaginatively written or directed. There’s none of Child’s Play’s social criticism and too little of its humor and
outrageousness. I have a feeling that’s going to change tomorrow, though.
Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995- dir. Mel Brooks) **
Why oh why would Mel Brooks make a movie that so welcomes
comparison to his greatest parody? His love for the subject matter is just as
on display in Dracula: Dead and Loving It
as it was in Young Frankenstein (no
doubt horror historian and co-screenwriter Steve Haberman can also be thanked
for a lot of the specific references to Tod Browning’s movie), and the cast is
good, but they have nothing to work with. Brooks’s best films—Young Frankenstein, The Producers, even Blazing
Saddles—each had an emotional core that is totally absent from this cold
corpse. Even worse, there isn’t a single funny gag. You know the screenwriters
are desperate when they start stealing jokes from “The Groovie Goolies.”
October 10
Bride of Chucky (1998- dir. RonnyYu) ****½
After a genuinely clever and pointed opening act, a lazy
Part 2, and a third act that I haven’t seen, Chucky is back and realizing his
full high-camp potential in the post-Scream
era of self-aware horror. The winking nods to horror films past come furiously.
Psycho, sexy, hilarious Jennifer Tilly is here to carry the first half of the picture
as Charles Lee Ray’s former murder-mate, Tiffany. She then resurrects Chucky
with a handy copy of Voodoo for Dummies
and gets transformed into a devil dolly herself. Bride of Chucky is the most fun installment so far. Director Ronny
Yu and cinematographer Peter Pau animate it with wonderful style that often
resembles panels from an E.C. horror comic, and the doll effects are rad. Tilly
and Brad Dourif are a killer team whether in the flesh or in the plastic. I
even liked the teens’ funny “accidental Bonnie and Clyde” parallel plot. But
what would happen if Tiffany got her wish and this terrible two had a baby
doll?
To be continued…
