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.
Seed of Chucky (2004- dir. Don Mancini) ***
…after taking two steps forward with Bride of Chucky we take two steps back on the third and final day
of our Chucky-a-thon. In Seed of Chucky,
Jennifer Tilly plays herself as the star of a new movie based on the real-life
exploits of Chucky and Tiffany. Billy Boyd joins the family as the voice of
Glen/Glenda, the dolls’ Pinocchio-esque (and rather incontinent) child. The
problem is the movie is too mean to Tilly, who goes along with all the gags at
her expense gamely enough that maybe we shouldn’t feel too sorry for her, but
it still isn’t much fun to watch. There’s also a little too much truth in
advertising. This isn’t just called Seed
of Chucky because of Glen/Glenda; there is a lot of doll sperm in this
movie from the bad CGI opening credits sequence to Chucky whacking off to an
issue of Fangoria to a truly unpleasant
scene in which Tiffany artificially inseminates Tilly. This must be the lazy
influence of the gross-out comedies that There’s
Something About Mary spawned, or perhaps it’s writer/director Don Mancini’s
attempt to make a John Waters movie, since Waters is on board as a relentless
paparazzo. I have no beef with a sperm joke as long as it’s funny, but Tilly
getting sexually assaulted most definitely is not. I preferred Glen/Glenda, who
brings a little heart to the series. He’s a good character that saves Seed of Chucky from being as blah as Child’s Play 2, and Mancini pulls a
funny running gag from the dolls’ “Made in Japan” stamps and there’s a good Shining joke toward the end, so Seed of Chucky isn’t a total wash.
—And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973- dir. Roy Ward Baker) ***
The big gimmick of the delightfully titled —And Now the Screaming Starts! is that
there’s no gimmick at all. Amicus, the studio best known for its portmanteaus,
delivers a straightforward feature. Stephanie Beacham moves into her new
husband’s old manor. The ghosts there would prefer she left. This starts as an
old-fashioned old dark house movie with an eyeless ghost that emerges from
paintings of Herbert Lom and a severed hand that keeps crawling around and grabbing
people. Then it takes an unexpected turn from the cheesily generic to the rapey
and serious. It’s OK stuff that gets a boost from Roy Ward Baker’s ever-fine
direction and a geek-pleasing cast that includes Beacham, Lom, Peter Cushing,
and Patrick Magee, although all but Beacham are underused.
October 13
Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter (2012- dir. Timur Bekmambetov) *½
Is it possible for a movie to not only be about vampires but
actually be a vampire? I vote “yes,”
because while watching Abraham Lincoln
Vampire Hunter, I felt like my brain was being sucked out of my head with
the passing of every frame. I guess that would make it more of a zombie than a
vampire, but let’s not get too nitpicky about a movie with such a complete
disdain for history. A campy premise can be played without camp, as Don
Coscarelli did so brilliantly with Bubba
Ho-Tep, but it shouldn’t be played with a complete absence of
self-awareness and humor… at least not with so much bad CGI. Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter is played
so straight it ends up falling on its own stake. Indeed, the dumbest part of
this symphony of dumb action and dumber editing is that it thinks it has
something profound to say about human rights. You mean slavery is bad and
slavers are like vampires? Keep filling my brain with knowledge! The best thing
about watching Abraham Lincoln Vampire
Hunter is that my wife will now stop pressuring me to watch Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter.
October 14
King Kong (1976- dir. John Guilermin) ****
It’s been a good three decades since I’ve seen Dino De
Laurentiis’s infamous production of King
Kong. As a kid, I didn’t think it was that bad. As an adult, this opinion
holds true. I liked the updates, which both make it less demanding of
comparison to the (obviously) superior original and made it very relevant to a
1970s audience with its recasting of Carl Denham as a greedy oil man (is there
any other kind?), Jack Driscoll as an environmentally-conscious paleontologist,
and Ann Darrow as a spaced-out Hollywood starlet whose life is saved by Deep Throat only so she can be abducted
by a giant gorilla. While Rick Baker in a gorilla suit is no substitute for
Willis O’Brien’s marvelous special effects, the animatronic mask is much more articulate
than the usual ludicrous gorilla costume. Plus it’s satisfyingly self-conscious
of its shortcomings (Jack: “Who the hell do you think went through there? Some
guy in an ape suit?”). Thank Lorenzo Semple, Jr., for the persistent wit; he
was also the screenwriter behind many episodes of “Batman,” the wittiest TV
show of the sixties. The cast is
very good too with Jeff Bridges, Chuck Grodin, and Jessica Lange keeping you
from shrieking “Bring on the goddamned monkey, already!” for the first 50
minutes of the movie. I really liked it. Sue me.
Diary of a Madman (1963- dir. Reginald Le Borg) ***
Vincent Price holds down the fort in this adaptation of Guy
de Maupassant’s story “Le Horla.” A condemned man is under the influence of a
murderous entity called the Horla. When he suddenly dies in the presence of
Price, our star becomes the new host. Because it’s a period spook story from a
literary source starring Vincent Price, it’s hard not to compare it to Roger
Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe pictures of the same period. The relatively
style-less, chintzy, and talky Diary of a
Madman suffers in that comparison, but Price puts his customary all into
the role of the tortured magistrate and Nancy Kovack is very watchable as a gold-digging
yet conflicted model. There’s also a pretty neat animated effect in which Price’s
sculpture transforms from a smiley Nancy to a frowny Nancy. That statue is also
involved in the movie’s one truly effective scare.
October 15
Paranormal Activity 4 (2012- dir. Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman) **
Poor Katie Featherston. She’s a good actress. Must she be
forever doomed to skulk around in sequel after sequel after sequel of the Paranormal Activity series? As was the
case in part 3, Katie is actually a minor player. The main characters are a
bunch of kids, and since this latest installment is set in the present instead
of the halcyon days of 2006, there’s no need to explain why everything is being
filmed even before the weird stuff starts happening, because kids (and most
adults) today just live their lives through their cell phone viewfinders. Progress!
The Paranormal Activity movies,
however, have not progressed. Shadows dash in the background. Doors move.
Stairs thump. Chandeliers sway. People sleep. The most significant addition is
the reliance on fake-out scares, which occur at a truly absurd rate. What
started as a really, really scary little movie has become just another
formulaic horror franchise. And there’s no end in sight! Paranormal Activity 5 is in the works for 2014! At least we all get
a break this year.
October 16
The Hands of Orlac (1924- dir. Robert Wiene) ***
Five years after making The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the first feature horror film and the paragon of German Expressionism,
Robert Wiene adapted Maurice Renard’s perennial terror tale about Paul Orlac, a
pianist who loses his hands in a train crash and receives a transplant from a
deceased murderer whose extremities have not lost their yen for killing. While
the subject matter is wackier than that of Caligari,
the visual style is much less phantasmagoric. Wiene only really lets his
imagination loose during Orlac’s dream of his hands’ former owner, and even that
sequence does not approach the nightmarish distortions of Caligari. Comparison to Karl Freund’s frothing 1935 remake Mad Love also makes Orlac seem tame. On its own merits, The Hands of Orlac is a good shadow-submerged creeper and Conrad
Veidt does his usual wonderfully weird work as Orlac. However, the nearly
two-hour version of this originally ninety-minute film is unnecessarily drawn
out and the ending is disappointing.
Zombie High (1987- dir. Ron Link) **½
An awesome cast (Virginia Madsen! Sherilyn Fenn! Paul Feig!)
attends a high school academy where everyone listens to the worst generic pop
songs in the world and their classmates get transformed into brain-dead conformists
in the bio lab. What starts as tongue-in-cheek, retro-eighties fun turns turgid
once that cast starts going under the knife and Madsen turns into Nancy Drew. Ultimately,
Zombie High makes the mistake of
taking itself too seriously, and what could have been a cool paranoid horror satire
ends up being a bland paranoid horror movie. The true story of Aziz Ghazal—a
guy who killed himself, his wife, and his daughter—is much more horrifying than
anything in Zombie High, the movie he
wrote and produced.
October 17
Attack of the Puppet People (1958- dir. Bert I. Gordon) ****
The cigar-sucking execs at AIP suss that if the kids will
turn out for an Incredible Shrinking Man they will surely quadruple their
numbers for a whole crowd of Incredible Shrinking Men and Women. John Hoyt
commits himself delightfully to the role of Mr. Franz, a lonely doll maker who
miniaturizes folks to add to his collection. Few villains are so endearing. Bert
I. Gordon’s Attack of the Puppet People
most certainly is not the profound classic that Jack Arnold’s film is, and the
“dolls” in suspended animation are clearly two-dimensional photographs, so it
doesn’t always wow on the special-effects front. Big deal! Attack of the Puppet People remains one of AIP’s most charming and
poignant B-horrors. You’d have to be a super-sized ass wipe to not want to get
shrunk down so you could dance to Rock & Roll on Mr. Franz’s desktop. What
fun! Director Gordon was really into this kind of stuff. His other films
included such size-shifting epics as The
Amazing Colossal Man (which June Kenney and John Agar watch at a drive-in
in Puppet People!), War of the Colossal Beast, Village of the Giants, and The Food of the Gods. His nickname
“Mister B.I.G.” was not unearned.
