Diary of the Dead 2018: Week 5

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week this October. I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

October 26

Hellraiser (1987- dir. Clive Barker) **

The premise of Clive Barker's adaptation of his own novella, The Hellbound Heart, is appropriately skeletal. Some dickhead stumbles into hell, and manages to escape and return to corporeal form by slaughtering the assholes his sister-in-law/sex monkey lures to him using her feminine wiles. Unfortunately, a band of mutant hell monsters miss torturing him so much that they go searching for him in the earthly realm. With its bad acting, leaden dialogue, and over-the-top gore, Hellraiser plays like a pre-teen goth's attempt to freak out his parents. Ooooh! Extreme!

Phenomena (1985- dir. Dario Argento) ***

Review: 'The Definitive Guide to Horror Movies: 365 Films to Scare You to Death'

In 2006, monster authorities James Marriott and Kim Newman published the first edition of The Definitive Guide to Horror Movies: 333 Films to Scare You to Death. With our current decade slouching toward its conclusion, Marriott and Newman have updated their guide to a neat 365 films, so it can serve as a demon-a-day calendar for horror freaks with plenty of spare time.

The additions are all limited to the eight years that have passed since The Definitive Guide to Horror Movies was last updated, and like the rest of the book, the addendums consist of the essential (instant cult smashes A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, The Babadook, It Follows, Get Out), the awful (V/H/S), and “How’d this get in here?” non-genre pictures (A Field in England). The new material also commits some glaring oversights. How did great stuff such as Black Swan, The Skin I Live In, Kill List, and The Cabin in the Woods not make the cut? Surely there must be a better explanation than “We needed to make room for The Human Centipede 2.”

For those who’ve never read any edition of Marriott and Newman’s tome, it consists of half-page reviews written with an analytical eye and a blob of cheeky wit. Finding 365 great movies in any one genre is pretty tough, and the write ups are not always favorable, so don’t get too bent out of shape about the inclusion of crap such as Last House on the Left, Friday the 13^th, Sleepy Hollow, and Saw. Seven guest critics join the main writers, yet the guests are the only contributors whose reviews receive bylines. It would have been helpful if we’d known which of the others were written by Newman or Marriott since there are sometimes conflicting opinions about certain films (for example, the introduction to the chapter on 1930s films is way more complimentary toward Tod Browning’s Dracula than the specific review of the film is).

It also would have been nice if the expanded format extended before 2010 so that absolute essentials such as Gojira, The Stepford Wives, Gremlins, 28 Days Later, and Shadow of the Vampire could finally take their rightful places in this book. The older entries haven’t even been updated for this new edition, so an insert about made-for-TV horror peters out in 2007, missing the rich vein of today’s scary small-screen choices and the piece on Suspiria indicates that the final chapter of Dario Argento’s Three Mothers Trilogy has yet to be released when Mother of Tears came out all the way back in 2007. There’s also no introductory chapter for all the new entries for 2010s films.

While no one ever pleases all fans with movie guides such as these, Marriott and Newman get it righter than most. If you already own 333 Films to Scare You to Death, 365 Films to Scare You to Death may be worth a double dip, and if you don’t, you’ll probably want to add it to your Halloween wish list… and be sure to check back here on Psychobabble this coming Halloween season, because I’ll be putting my copy to good use.

Review: 'Opera' Blu-ray

Evaluating a Dario Argento movies requires its own rule book since his methods are so unlike anyone else’s. In a movie such as Opera, he may liberally borrow from horrors past ranging from The Birds to Halloween to A Clockwork Orange to (of course) Phantom of the Opera, but his films are always entirely his own no matter how referential or how successful they are. Opera is no Suspiria or Deep Red, but it is still one of Argento’s more successful pictures despite its absence of logic and ridiculous musical choices. While the latter undermines Argento’s purposes as he renders his most shocking scenes comical by scoring them with awful heavy metal tunes, the former just adds to the dreamy unreality that is one of his more appealing signatures.

Opera finds the soprano starring in a production of Verdi’s Macbeth being stalked by a masked killer. Instead of targeting the life of the singer (Christina Marscillach), he merely forces her to watch while he slays other folks in her theatrical inner circle. He ensures her peepers remain open by Scotch-taping rows of needles under her eyelids. If you’re like me and have a thing about your eyes, these scenes are almost impossible to watch (oh, the irony!).

Like any Argento picture, Opera is not a matter of plot. It is the sum total of Argento’s audacious flights of fancy and weirdly poetic extreme violence. We get plenty of this stuff with a disorienting opening filmed in the first-person pov, a gory raven raid on an opera audience, and of course, that vicious gimmick with the needles. An extended scene that finds the heroine trapped with the killer in her own apartment and escaping through an air duct with a little girl out of a Lewis Carroll story could be the most masterfully suspenseful set piece in a career littered with them.

Scorpion Releasing brings Opera to blu-ray with a meticulous 2K scan. I know, I know—4K is the ideal way to go, but this is still a very attractive presentation with barely a speck of dust and organic, lively textures. This is particularly important since the film is so textural whether lingering on red velvet, the gnarly twine of a thick rope, or the pearl-like ring around a raven’s eye. There are also two bonus interviews—a previously issued 21-minute talk with Argento and a brand new one with actor William McNamara. McNamara has a relatively small role in the feature, but his interview is still nicely illuminating as he explains the circumstances that led to the audacious pov of the opening scene and his reaction to having his voice dubbed by a British actor.

Review: ''Devil's Advocates: Suspiria'

Bypassing linear storytelling to fashion a colorful, noisy, subtext-rich nightmare with fine-art aesthetics, Suspiria is a film that almost consciously begs for lengthy analysis. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas subjects it to one in her new book for The Devil’s Advocates series, choosing a scene-by-scene analysis as the main meat of her monograph. This allows her to organically explore the film’s gender politics, relationship with horror films and fairy-tales past, and myriad themes—a young woman’s budding sexuality and intellect, the formerly fascistic relationship between Italy (where the film was produced) and Germany (where the film is set), and so on.

At times, Heller-Nicholas fails to follow through on her threads satisfactorily, as when she refers to the idea— confirmed by filmmaker Dario Argento himself— that the witches who are the movie’s main villains are supposed to represent lesbianism without explaining the ramifications of this homophobic theme on the film or even why Argento would want to include it. For the most part, though, Heller-Nicholas makes excellent use of the less-than-100 pages the Devil’s Advocates format allows her, dissecting the film acutely, intelligently and accessibly. She also makes room for breezy biographies of Argento and his cast; the film’s legacy, which naturally includes its sequels Inferno and Mother of Tears; and an extended interview with cinematographer Luciano Tovoli, who captured the film’s brilliantly vivid images, all of which fleshes out the story nicely.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 49

The Date: November 18

The Movie: Suspiria (1977)

What Is It?: Jessica Harper takes up residence at a Munich ballet academy and uncovers a nest of witches. Dario Argento’s masterpiece strings together a series of nightmare set pieces and builds to a demonic fairy tale climax. You could do the back stroke in all the phony blood splattered throughout this picture.

Why Today?: Today is National Occult Day.

Diary of the Dead 2011: Week 4

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews every Friday in October (this year I’ll only be discussing movies I haven’t reviewed elsewhere on this site). I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.



October 21st

The Legend of Boggy Creek (1972- dir. Charles B. Pierce) **½

The Legend of Boggy Creek arrived amidst a weird wave of Big Foot Fever. A few years earlier, two jokers named Patterson and Gimlin made news with grainy film of one of their buddies in a monkey suit. A few years later, the Six Million Dollar Man duked it out with Sasquatch. Fonzi jumped over him in water-skis. Boggy isn’t much more convincing than any of those things, but the documentary conceit was certainly novel at the time. It also justifies the amateur acting and “In Search Of”-quality narration. Stretching the gimmick to 87 minutes is a bit unnecessary. A reasonable person can only watch so much footage of NRA cardholders assholing around in a swamp. I admire director Pierce’s restraint in not giving us a good look at the monster. The country muzak songs are delightfully wretched.

Blood and Roses: U.S. Edit (1960- dir. Roger Vadim) ***½

Joseph Sheridan le Fanu’s pre-Dracula novel Carmilla was adapted a bunch of times, most famously as The Vampire Lovers. Roger Vadim’s Blood and Roses was the first one to leave the book’s essential lesbian romance intact. That theme was gutted from the U.S. edit, which is

Diary of the Dead: Monster Movie Month 2008!

Originally posted October 2008

Come October, I shut myself off from friends and family, draw the drapes, and devote myself to a single, noble pursuit: watching monster movie after monster movie as an extended prelude to the best day of the year: Halloween. This year I’m keeping a little running diary about the films I watch right here on Psychobabble. I’ll be covering classics from my personal collection, stinkers from the bottom of my Netflix barrel, and (hopefully) some as-yet undiscovered gems. So, join me, won’t you please, for another morass of bullshit straight from my very own keyboard, as I present Diary of the Dead: Monster Movie Month 2008!

(I'll probably be updating several times a day, so check back often!)

So, that's it for Monster Movie Month.

What I Learned: Writing about every movie I watch during a month in which I've watched 66 movies is a real pain in the balls. Next year I'm leaving the bloviating to the bloggers.

October 31:

666. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) ****½
Here's where it all ends. Like The Blair Witch Project, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is proof that you don't need big stars or a big budget to make a truly frightening film. As soon as the kids pick up a creepy, self-mutilating hitchhiker, the dread and tension sink in and don't abate until an hour after the closing credits have rolled. Many, many, many have tried to top TCM at the game it invented and failed miserably. This is one of the scariest movies ever made (although listening to all of that screaming is truly exhausting, hence the deduction of half-a-star).

What?: The opening narration is spoken by John Larroquette of "Night Court".