HAPPY HORROR DAYS (2020)

 

(Various directors and screenwriters)

Storyline(s)

This collection of nine short films is a horror-themed take on different holidays, ranging from New Year’s Eve to Christmas.

 

Review

I admire the ambitious, expansive theme of this filmic collection even though many of the shorts are disappointing, some of them egregiously bad, some of them just-short-of-the-mark. A few of them are good (“Candy,” “Labor Day,” “Cranberry Sauce,” “Hannukah” and “Merry and Fright”) but for the most part, one could skip HORROR and watch something better, like ALL THE CREATURES WERE STIRRING (2018) and A CHRISTMAS HORROR STORY (2015).

In Curtis Schultz’s “Father Time,” a pregnant woman has nightmares about Father Time. It goes exactly where one might expect it to go, no surprises or scary thrills in this one.

“Becoming Patrick” (director: Bel Delià; screenwriters: Kevin Marron and Rachel Rath): A man is kidnapped and beaten by masked assailants. (This is shown from his point of view, so there’s minimal on-camera violence.) He wakes─surprisingly unhurt─in an unexpected environment. “Patrick“ has a dumb, underwhelming finish.

Richard Galli’s “Forty Winks” tells the story of a woman who eats meat on Easter and becomes dangerously crazy. This no-frills, no-twist and dumb-ending short is time wasted.

“4^th of July” (screenwriter/director: Vito Trabucco) is a mix of a revenge thriller and Quentin Tarantino’s PULP FICTION (1994) with an ending lifted from George A. Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968). This polemic, ugly, stripped-of-any-entertainment-value short flick has a point, but its finish is telegraphed early on, and its direct rip-off mix (sans any originality) mark this as unpleasant, tiresome revenge porn. If you’re going to make an edutainment film, there should be entertainment in the mix as well as what some view as education, not just lazily ripped-off-from-better-films-and-news-headlines bulls**t.

“Labor Day” (screenwriter/director: Jessica Sonneborn): A pregnant woman has GROUNDHOG DAY-style waking nightmares, slowly revealing possible clues to her situation. As a non-fan of waking-over-and-over-nightmare scenarios, this made me wish “Labor” was done twenty seconds in, despite its clever double entendre title and twisted situation. Those without an aversion to GROUNDHOG DAY-style works may enjoy this one a lot.

Matt McWilliams and Josh Murphy’s “Candy” is a fun haunted house-and-forest piece that, FX-wise, recalls Sam Raimi’s 1981 cult classic THE EVIL DEAD. While “Candy” telegraphs its wrap-up early on, it is entertaining, and one of the best microworks in this anthology.

Thanksgiving is rewarding in John K.D. Graham’s “Cranberry Sauce,” in which a young woman must pass through a spooky suburban (and possibly haunted) L.A. tunnel to buy cranberry sauce and cigarettes. This is another entertaining brief flick, with some unexpected developments and striking visuals aspects.

Jonathan and Jessica Sonneborn’s “Hannukah” is a light, humorous take on infidelity, embezzlement, fear, and murder, with a nice end-twist.

“Merry and Fright” (screenwriters: Colin Costello and Westley Alley; director: Westley Alley) wraps up this collection of shorts. In “Merry,” the host of the Anderson Family’s annual Christmas party tells two abbreviated tales, one about a slasher Santa with a (possible) femme fatale, the other about a don’t-open-the-door Santa-Gram. A mostly solid, well-written work─I love its effective tales-within-a-tale structure─its ending is okay.

THE CALL (2020)

 

(Director/screenwriter: Chung-Hyun Lee, who based his work on Sergio Casci's screenplay. Streaming/Netflix movie. South Korean remake of the 2011 American film THE CALLER.)

 

Review

CALL is an okay film. It’s an imaginative disregard-logic/time-in-slipstreams flick where two young women in the same town (Bosung)─but twenty years apart─come into contact via telephone calls.

Seo-yeon (played by Park Shin-Hye) has returned to Bosung after a long absence (due to her father’s untimely death in her childhood). While settling in, she receives a phone call via her landline. She talks to a stranger, a young woman named Oh Young-sook (Jong-seo Jung). They quickly establish a rapport, even after they realize they’re from different time periods. There’s darkness in both of their lives, and they, in their different times, save each other from grief and danger─or so it seems.

Things get twisty when it’s revealed that neither woman is what she shows herself to be, whether it’s brought about by deception or repressed memories. The plot pretzels come violent and relentless (with a little blood in the encounters). I enjoyed the competent directing, cinematography, and the stellar acting by the two leads, but near the end I tired of the endless succession of wait, there’s more cleverness movie.

It has a solid, emotionally satisfying ending if you turn off the film just as the end-credits begin to roll. To watch CALL beyond that is to risk sequel-demanding scenes that ruined the movie for a lot of viewers (myself included), if online reviews are a reliable measure.

BLACK CHRISTMAS (2019)

 

(Director/co-screenwriter: Sophia Takal. Co-screenwriter: April Wolfe.)

This feminist PG-13 reimagining─not a remake─of Bob Clark’s 1974 masterpiece was not well-received by critics or filmgoers when it came out last year. I get why, given how hyper-focused filmgoers─especially horror fans─can be with their genre expectations.

Good, effective PG-13-rated slasher films are rare, with good reason: the genre is inherently suffused with darkness, blood and violence, which─to seem realistic and traditional on multiple levels─demands an R rating. For the most part, a less-than-R rating suggests a lightweight cheat of a movie, one aimed at a younger or horror-lite audience (and an insult to those who consider themselves “serious” horror fans).

Not only that, CHRISTMAS is a radical rework of a sacred beast. This reimagining, which is a hybrid genre work, emphasized its feminist values in all aspects of the film─structure, characters, dialogue and action, supplanting the usual slasher elements which largely appeals a masculine outlook.

According to its co-screenwriter April Wolfe, this 2019 version was written for young women who do not identify as horror fans but might come see the sometimes-suspenseful film anyway. (Wolfe said this in the January 2020 issue of FANGORIA magazine, in her article “It’s Black Christmas Time Again.”) Unfortunately, those young women did not fulfill Wolfe’s hopes, and viewers trashed the film for not being what they expected.

The film runs thusly: on the Calvin Hawthorne College campus, the fraternity sisters of Pi Kappa Sig (ΠΚΣ) begin receiving creepy texts on the night another sister (Lindsay) is killed by a gold-masked, black-robed assailant. The creepy texts continue peppering the ΠΚΣ sisters’ cell phones, including Riley’s (played by Imogen Poots), who was drugged and raped by a ΔΚΟ frat brother the previous year. Riley, still reeling from the assault, reported it, causing her popular attacker (Bryan Huntley) to be kicked out of Hawthorne. A backlash resulted, much of it from the male student body and administration (especially the high-profile Professor Gelsen, house father of the ΔΚΟ fraternity, played with sarcastic relish by Cary Elwes). This is not surprising, since Hawthorne, a tradition-heavy school, was founded by a notorious sexist and slave owner.

More creepy events and odd disappearances start adding up, especially after Riley and her ΠΚΣ sisters update a traditional college song with anti-rape sentiments during a winter show performance─while it’s a liberating, giddy moment for Riley and her fratmates, it’s incendiary to others, particularly the ΔΚΟ brothers who witness it.

The creepiness and attacks intensify. A black oozing sludge has replaced the blood of the killer (or killers), adding to the mystery, which is somehow connected to a bust of Hawthorne that has been relocated from a main hall to the ΔΚΟ frat’s ritual chamber after a public outcry against Hawthorne’s worldview.

Tightly written, shot and edited, BLACK deftly balances slasher flick elements, overt social progressivism, and character development, making for a film that should be not viewed as a slasher film but a hybrid, offbeat entry in the horror genre, one that is not a remake of the classic original 1974 version,

The identity of the killer (or killers) is easy to figure out, but that is partly due to the anti-toxic masculinity politics of the film, which consciously tips that hand to keep with its theme and storyline. Does this render the easily sussed-out identity issue moot? That’s up to each viewer. It did not take anything away from the film for me, but then I did not watch this expecting a mystery element in it.

Bottom line: Viewed as a horror-lite/PG-13, sometimes-suspenseful social drama with black ooze, solid acting and a willingness to try something different, it’s entertaining and effective─not the best film ever made, but well-made, given the filmmakers’ intentions. If you view this as anything else, you’re likely to be disappointed.

There’s an R-rated version of this that sports a slightly different ending, one that suggests all men are bad. If you want a more balanced and less clichéd finish, stick with the PG-13 version.

LETTERS TO SATAN CLAUS (2020)

 

(Director: Emma Jean Sutherland. Screenwriter: Michael Zara.)

Review

LETTERS is a B-movie fun, Hallmark Christmas sentiment-mocking comedy with lots of light banter (with underlying dark impulses), romance scenarios (promptly made fun of), pretty people, solid actors engaging in intentionally bad acting, and an edgy-for-Hallmark sexuality (the lead character, via light banter, makes no secret of her fondness for multiple-partner hookups).

The story: when five-year-old Holly Winters, angry at her parents and living in Ornament, writes a missive asking Santa to make her parents disappear, she accidentally writes SATAN on the letter. It’s not long before her parents are slaughtered, supposedly by an easily caught and imprisoned madman, leaving Holly and her older sister (Cookie) orphaned.

Twenty-two years later, Holly is a big-city reporter, now called Holly Frost. An Xmas celebration broadcast brings the misanthropic and foul-mouthed newswoman back to Ornament, a place she has not seen since childhood. Her hometown is still Christmas-bright, where everybody is cheerful.

Shortly after Holly’s arrival, people die (often off-camera, with bright-red fake blood in evidence). Holly is oblivious to this, contemplating the promotion she’ll get at work if she clenches her teeth through her hickville assignment (another Hallmark Channel cliché). She’s also trying to hook up with one (or, simultaneously, three) of the many hunky guys who live in Ornament, whose appearances prompt a swelling of light romantic music before it’s abruptly cut short, followed by quippy dialogue.

 Holly becomes aware of the satanic shadow-and-slaughter after her hunky co-worker (Cameraman Sam) disappears and she coughs up blood and his “dumb, sexy” earring at a public gathering. She also receives blood-drippy pic from one of the Devil’s victims. Eventually, the Fallen One reveals herself to Holly and those close to her although the rest of the town thinks Holly is a serial killer─even this last opinion is lensed in a Hallmark-light outlook, where the police (two of them hunky twins) give equal weight to the fact that Holly is Grinch-hearted and a serial killer.

Can Holly find the “Christmas giggle. . . inside her heart" and, in doing so defeat Satan and restore Ornament's romantic holiday vibe? 

As a Syfy Channel Original movie, this is a good offering. The film ends, with a sequel-friendly wink, before it wears out its bright-façade-arch-hearted welcome. Screenwriter Michael Zara’s dark humor, sexual vibrancy and chomping-at-the-bit sarcasm spices  LETTER’s kind-hearted and slick veneer, effectively created through its laid-on-thick use of music, cinematography, rife-with-Christmas-trappings dialogue and (almost) painfully obvious false cheer. Those who are not Syfy Channel fans might not view LETTERS in a favorable light.

BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974)

 

(a.k.a. SILENT NIGHT, EVIL NIGHT; a.k.a. STRANGER IN THE HOUSE [television/NBC retitle for its initial airing on May 14, 1978]. Director/uncredited co-screenwriter: Bob Clark. Co-screenwriter: Roy Moore.)

Review

BLACK, along with Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960), Michael Powell’s PEEPING TOM (1960), Mario Bava’s A BAY OF BLOOD (1971) and Tobe Hooper’s THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974), is credited with creating and refining the slasher subgenre, and rightfully so─each of these films contributed their own quirks, filmmaking tricks and twists to the soon-to-burst subgenre.

One of the slasher-expansive aspects of BLACK was Clark and Moore’s fleshing-out of its characters, particularly the collegiate sisters. Clark felt that previous higher-learning films only showed young women as pretty, peppy types without any depth, so he and Moore set out to create women with their own personalities, strengths, and weaknesses. (Also, according to IMDb, Clark set and abided by the rules that the female characters should not be objectified, nor were they to do nude scenes.) 

BLACK is also the first holiday season-themed slasher flick made, featuring some of the most creative kills of the subgenre (a plastic bag, a crystal unicorn, etc.).

Shot in forty days and set in the fictional town of Bedford (an homage to Frank Capra's 1946 movie IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE), BLACK was inspired by the real-life crimes of Wayne Boden, a Canadian serial killer who murdered four women between November 1969 and spring 1971 (he was caught soon after that). Moore mixed Boden’s murders with the urban legend of The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs.

The story: while the sisters of Pi Kappa Sig (ΠΚΣ) prepare for the winter holiday break, a crank-calling, distorted-voiced serial killer who secretly resides in their house stalks them and those around them.

Everything works in this film: the dark, viewer-immersive cinematography (courtesy of Reginald H. Morris, billed as Reg Morris); the offbeat, unsettling soundtrack (composer Carl Zittrer said he tied combs, forks and knives to his piano strings to warp the music); the tightly penned, often-humorous screenplay and no-shots-wasted film.

Of course, all of this would have been for naught if BLACK‘s cast had not been worthwhile─and what a stellar cast it was!

Olivia Hussey played Jess. Keir Dullea (2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, a film Clark loved) played the high-strung pianist Peter. Margot Kidder played the razor-tongued, alcoholic Barb (Clark later said Kidder drank real alcohol for her character’s inebriation scenes). Andrea Martin played Phyl (Martin appeared in the 2006 BLACK remake, playing a different character). Lynne Griffin played Clare Harrison. Marian Waldman played the hilarious secret-inebriate house mother Mrs. Mac (a character based on Bob Clark’s real-life aunt).

Art Hindle played Chris Hayden─Hindle later played Ted Jarvis in Clark’s PORKY’S (1981) and PORKY’S II: THE NEXT DAY (1983). Doug McGrath, billed as Douglas McGrath, played Sergeant Nash─McGrath also became a PORKY’s cast member, playing Coach Warren in the first film of the coming-of-age sex-comedy trilogy.

John Saxon played Lt. Ken Fuller (Saxon was a last-minute fill-in actor, replacing  Edmond O’Brien, who had to bow out because of his Alzheimer’s and his physically frail health). Saxon saved the film by taking his role days before BLACK was slated to begin production; if he had not, the movie would not have been made.

A holiday season perennial for this cineaste, BLACK is one of my all-time favorite horror flicks, a landmark work that elevated the genre with little, if any, gore, strong character-based writing and equally believable acting, a dark but humorous tone and cinematography, and twisty ending (which later became a cliché, but in 1974 was a fresh plot-pretzel finish).

Lee Hays wrote a now-out-of-print novelization of BLACK, published in 1976. I read that it delved deeper into the characters and had more plot development. If you find it at a reasonable price, you might want to consider purchasing it.

IMDb says that Elvis Presley supposedly loved BLACK and made it an annual tradition to watch it every Christmas. (Cool, if true.) Presley died in August 1977.

HOLIDAY HELL (2019)

 

(Directors: Jeremy Berg, David Burns, Jeff Ferrell, Jeff Vigil. Screenwriters: Jeremy Berg, Jeff Ferrell.)

Storyline

An antiques and curiosities shopkeeper tells the tales relating to the items he’s trying to sell to a last-minute customer.

Review

In the wraparound tale (“Nevertold Casket Co.”), a young woman (Amelia) visits the titular antiques and curiosities store.  Its owner (Thaddeus Rosemont, a.k.a. The Shopkeeper) helps her find a gift for her sister─which entails an obligatory backstory for each object. The consistently excellent Jeffrey Combs (I STILL KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, 1998) is his usual, entertaining self here, as Thaddeus, a courteous, dark-vignette-telling retailer.

Thaddeus’s first tale (“Dollface“) is prompted by a mask. A group of young adults party in a murder house where a female killer (Dollface) used to live. The characters are generic, and the acting and the dialogue is terrible for the most part. The killer, with her nightgown, long black hair and spooky mask, makes for an interesting figure when she offs the kids who tormented her and her sister years before. There’s an okay twist at the end, one that’s telegraphed early in this lackluster segment.

In “The Hand that Rocks the Dreidl,” an old German rabbi doll is the source of terror for a theft-minded babysitter (Lisa) and her wannabe gangsta boyfriend (Tre). The acting is solid in “Dreidl,” as is the plot (despite its by-the-numbers predictability).

The third story, “Christmas Carnage,” is inspired by a brown-stained Santa suit, once belonging to a “disturbed man” (according to Thaddeus). The man in question is Chris, a sober-for-a-year alcoholic stuck in a marriage with a cold, materialistic woman. His longtime sales job, where he’s taken for granted, is just as bad. During an unpleasant company Christmas party, he falls off the wagon. Will he resist the urge to enact his bloody, off-camera revenge?

Joel Murray, a consistently good actor, is convincing as the barely-hanging-on Chris. The other actors, lesser known, vary from bad to solid.

“A Room to Let” is a tale told by Amelia (Meagan Karimi-Naser), its source object a skull in a glass case and her ring, once worn by her mother. Cut to a young woman, moving into a boarding house on bucolic Jenne Farm. Its owners are friendly even if the townspeople are terrified or hostile. Also, a clowder of black cats have gathered in the barn, where something feels off.

A pleasing, well-foreshadowed twist caps the end of this wraparound tale, one that makes up for the lackluster elements of this often generic, relatively goreless and suspenseless film. I would not watch HOLIDAY more than once, other than to appreciate certain performances (Combs’s, Murray’s and Karimi-Naser’s) and the fun plot pretzel at the end of “Room.”

Jeff Ferrell directed “Nevertold Casket Co.” and “The Hand that Rocks the Dreidl.”

Jeff Vigil directed “Dollface.” David Burns: “Christmas Carnage.” Jeremy Berg directed “Room to Let.”

CHRISTMAS EVIL (1980)

 

(a.k.a. YOU BETTER WATCH OUT; a.k.a. TERROR IN TOYLAND. Director/screenwriter: Lewis Jackson.)

Storyline

A toy factory employee goes on a killing spree after a Christmas-related meltdown.

Review

CHRISTMAS is a unique, excellent entry in the Santa’s-on-a-rampage genre, a work that did not get the box office and critical kudos it deserved when it came out. It has since become a cult classic, helped by the fact that John Waters lavished love on it, going so far as to provide an audio commentary for Synapse Films’ 2006 Special Edition DVD of the film.

What sets CHRISTMAS apart from Claus-has-got-a-blood-dripping-bag flicks is that the main character, the gone-murderous Harry Stadling (Brandon Maggart) is not simply seeking revenge for a personal wrong. His motivations stem from the holiday chasm of people’s professed “goodwill towards men” and what they’re doing to those around them. His co-workers at the Jolly Dreams toy factory play tricks on him and call him a “schmuck” behind his back; his boss’s publicized charity is a sham; everybody around him, even his concerned brother (Phil, played with equal intensity by Jeffrey DeMunn) is a Christmas naysayer in Harry’s eyes.

Then, of course, there’s the traumatic realization of thirty-three years prior, that Santa Claus isn’t real, revealed when Harry─then a young boy─saw his mother have sex with his father while his father wore a Santa suit. This impels Harry to preserve the Christmas spirit, lest it die at the hands of corrupt, unfeeling others.

Once Harry snaps, he reels from one surreal event to another: he kills somebody, and a few minutes later, finds himself the awkward toast of a Christmas party (where people don’t notice the blood on his Santa suit); not long after that, more violence occurs, and the last fifteen minutes of CHRISTMAS intentionally plays out like much of the ending of James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN (1931), replete with torch-wielding New Jerseyites. Some people might be put off by the offbeat, occasionally lagging (drama) pacing of CHRISTMAS, which is not a hyper-focused slash-and-kill horror flick, and that’s fine─every film is made for a certain audience, and CHRISTMAS has deeper message than the usual, jump-cut-edited killer-on-the-loose flick, and film geeks might recognize Rutanya Alda, billed as Ratanya Alda, who played Theresa─Alda later appeared in other films, including AMITYVILLE II: THE POSSESSION (1982).

The ending is atypical of the genre, a finish that leaves Harry’s fate open to interpretation. Since the tone of the film is sympathetic to Harry’s point of view, I have my own take on it, a mix of what really happened and how Harry sees it, but others might view in a less forgiving or more fantastic, holy-cow light. Either way, this one of the most original Santa slasher-mixed-with-social-commentary flicks ever made, one the viewer likely won’t forget, like it or hate it.

SHEITAN (2006)

 

(a.k.a. SATAN; director/co-screenwriter: Kim Chapiron. Co-screenwriter: Christian Chapiron.)

Storyline

A group of young scumbags and their female friends, booted out of a disco, hang out with Eve, the beguiling young woman they met there, at her parents’ secluded country home.

Review

SHAITAN (in Hindi and Arabic it means “devil”) is an interesting and often good French-language film, a raunchy and hellish take on Jesus’s birth and the three wisemen (who are turned into unlikeable louts in SHAITAN).

After the three drunk and fiercely heterosexual friends (Thaï, Ladj and Bart) get thrown out of Styxx Club in Paris, they, with their female friends (Yasmine and Jean) take their new friend Eve up on her offer to hang out at her parents’ big, empty country house on Christmas Eve. When they get there, they encounter a bucktoothed, goofy shepherd, Joseph (played with malevolent and hilarious relish by the consistently great Vincent Cassel), who lives and works at Eve’s house. Josephine, Joseph’s reclusive, pregnant sister, also lives there, choosing to hide in her room upon the arrival of the young people, whose male members are odious, especially the idiotic Bart. (Cassel pulls double acting duty in SHAITAN, playing the bucktoothed Josephine with equally hilarious and dark aplomb.)

Revelry, skinny dipping, fights with the locals, and a big dinner follow, with the frustrated, c**k-blocked young men drinking with the flirtatious women and Joseph’s sometimes violent mood swings. As the night progresses, things become more unsettling. Joseph tells a leering, devilish tale of sister-brother incest and shows special interest in Bart, who’s trying to act tough but fails miserably. Not only that, the rooms with the dolls and their spare parts─Eve’s absent parents are dollmakers─increase the creepiness.

The Chapiron-penned and -directed film is a wild, R-rated and often homoerotic work, between its shifting tones, moods and camerawork (EVIL DEAD-esque extreme close-ups, odd angles, etc.). Some of the middle section scenes could have easily been excised, but their purpose, it seems, is to flesh SHAITAN out to its required ninety-minute length.

When midnight, December twenty-fifth, strikes, everything comes together. Mysteries and situations are resolved in violent and briefly bloody fashion, capped by an offbeat, beatific finish.  The morality that often drives and structures American films is absent here, aside from the toxic-macho attitude of the three young fools, making SHAITAN a welcome addition to the horror genre.

Make sure you watch the credits.

SHAITAN is not a perfect movie, but it’s entertaining and energetic, with loathsome characters (and great actors). Worth your time, if you’re not uptight about religion, amoral characters and occasional male/female frontal nudity.

BLOOD BEAT (1983)

 

(a.k.a. BLOODBEAT; director/screenwriter: Fabrice-Ange Zaphiratos)

Storyline

In rural Wisconsin, a young woman meeting her boyfriend’s family starts having sexual reactions when the ghost of a vengeful samurai starts attacking and killing everyone around her.

Review

This strange film opens with a hunter (Gary) shooting a deer with an arrow, bringing it home to his off-putting, psychic artist wife (Cathy, convincingly played by Helen Benton) and her getting upset─it seems she’s been having migraine-inducing visions again. While Gary guts the deer in the yard, his son (Ted) and daughter (Dolly) arrive for a Christmas stayover with girlfriend and boyfriend in tow. Uncle Pete also arrives about this time.

Sarah, Ted’s girlfriend, is a less neurotic and a non-artistic version of Cathy. Sarah does not understand why Cathy silently stares at her with spooky, hostile intensity when they first meet. Other family members brush off this clash, chalking it up to Cathy’s sensitive, mood-flip ways. Sarah, however, is unable to shake off Cathy’s attitude. Cathy tells Ted that she knew Sarah, a surprise guest, was coming because “a mother knows everything.”

While putting sheets on their bed, Ted tells Sarah that the people who lived in the house prior to Cathy and Gary were psychoanalysts “or into meditation or something” before abruptly moving out without saying why. He says this after Sarah, also psychic, gets a reddish negative-print vision of the room, accompanied by the sound of a crying baby--a baby that is no longer in the house. Sarah, further unsettled, looks about the room at Cathy’s abstract, disturbing paintings and the gold-colored Asian figures scattered on shelves around the room.

Bad events occur. Sarah wakes up during the night and finds samurai armor and a sword in her bedroom trunk. Cathy, downstairs, has a vision and starts painting the black figure of a samurai warrior and recalls when she─then a girl─ found the same samurai armor and sword. When Cathy, like Sarah now, told her family about it, there was no blade and armor! One thing that seems to be different in Sarah’s case: she is multi-orgasmic when the samurai kills.

The family panics, their lights start flickering, kitchen knives and soda cans fly (as if by their own volition), and Cathy does her spooky psychic routine while they, separately and together, battle the samurai.

I read that BLOOD BEAT is considered a cult classic by some viewers. I see why. It’s nutty. That said, it lags in pointless, extended scenes with bad dialogue made worse by flat acting and jarring soundtrack choices (classical music). Many of the actors are one-time cinematic performers. The director (Zaphiratos) wrote and directed one other film, LA GRANDE FRIME (1977). The limited filmic output of these people is not surprising.

Is BLOOD BEAT worth seeing? If you have the patience to sit out its flaws, yes. It’s not the worst film I’ve seen, there is a weird intuitive flow to it, and it’s unique for its setting-storyline combination, so I’m glad I’ve seen it. Chances are I will not watch it again, unless it’s with a make-fun-of-it friend.

TOYS OF TERROR (2020)

 

(TV/Syfy Channel Original film; director: Nicholas Verso. Screenwriter: Dana Gould.)

Storyline

A family (two adults, three kids) move into a mansion with the intention of flipping it, unaware of its angry, active-spirits past.

Review

The building that once housed the Saint Germaine Children’s Hospital (established in 1918) has long stood empty─all because of one night, years before, when a black-robed and -masked figure left a trunk with a dead boy’s (Jason’s) toys on the doorstep. Now, a house-flipping couple (Hannah and David) and their three children (Alicia, the teenager; Zoe and Franklin, pre-tweens in serious need of discipline) have moved in. Strange things happen─ghostly look-away-and-they’re-gone figures in the mirrors; toys that appear where they weren’t seconds ago; etc.

The children are the first to notice the toys, who encourage the children to misbehave, angering the adults (including their nanny, Rose) who don’t understand why the children are acting badly. It’s not long before the adults understand, too, after Rose is almost knocked off the second story bannister OMEN-style, their handyman (Emmett) is horribly killed in front of them, and then it’s Christmas Eve. . . when bad situations explode in films like this.

This being a Syfy Channel Original film, there’s a certain level of cheesiness to the special FX (some are practical, as opposed to CGI) and story padding to flesh it out to ninety minutes. Thankfully, this is one the television channel’s better and more imaginative films, its screenplay written by comedian Dana Gould (STAN AGAINST EVIL), with occasional lags in the story (due to the aforementioned necessary padding), but mostly Old School Horror fun, not gory and laugh out loud funny in parts. The acting is mostly solid though a few scenes are not only CGI-bad they’re acting-bad (e.g., when slivers of shattered Christmas ornament are slicing Hannah’s cheeks─sans blood, because it’s TV-14-related television─and she doesn’t even flinch).

Mostly entertaining despite its tale-longish running length, sometimes cheap FX and not-great acting, TOYS is worth watching if you are a connoisseur of genre-smart writing, and low-budget flicks.

 

BETTER WATCH OUT (2016)

 

(Director/co-screenwriter: Chris Peckover. Co-screenwriter: Zack Kahn.)

Storyline

When a home invasion threatens her and the twelve-year-old boy in her care, a babysitter finds that this is no ordinary break-in.

Review

BETTER is a smart and tightly written suspense thriller with great acting, with an abbreviated set-up and touches of comedy to occasionally lighten up the dark tone of this Christmas, f**k-with-babysitter-tropes work.

The story: a babysitter (Ashley) and her twelve-year-old-charge charge (Luke) are trapped when a home invader, armed with a shotgun, breaks into Luke’s house. The suspense is at a zenith when everything turns. . . This is an all-around excellent film, with talented actors who effectively embody their characters─Olivia DeJunge plays Ashley, the sensible babysitter; Levi Miller, plays Luke, her surprisingly dark responsibility; and Ed Oxenbould plays Garrett, Luke’s equally nerdy and less intense best friend. (Quick fun note: DeJunge and Oxenbould played siblings in M. Night Shyamalan’s 2015 dumbf**k-set-up/horrible-parenting movie THE VISIT.)

BETTER is a fun, if sometimes unsettling B-level flick, an above-average work that does not reinvent the babysitter-horror genre, but plays with it in a smart-minded, entertaining way. If this film is any indication filmmakers Peckover and Kahn are a worthwhile creative mix.

A CHRISTMAS HORROR STORY (2015)

 

(a.k.a. A HOLIDAY HORROR STORY; directors: Grant Harvey, Steve Hoban and Brett Sullivan. Screenwriters: James Kee, Sarah Larsen, Doug Taylor, Pascal Trottier and uncredited Jason Filiatrault.)

Storyline

A Christmas-festive radio DJ (Dangerous Dan) helps links interwoven holiday-oriented horror stories involving a student documentary gone wrong, a Christmas tree with a supernatural price, a nasty family visit to a rich aunt with a terrible secret, and a flesh-eating infection in the North Pole.

Review

HORROR is an entertaining and memorable winter collection of grisly scare stories, loosely interlaced via characters, season’s screamings, and location: set mostly in the fictional Bailey Downs, this town is also featured in the GINGER SNAPS trilogy, 2000-4, and the BBC-America television series ORPHAN BLACK, 2013-7─not surprising, considering that the HORROR filmmakers worked on GINGER with director John Fawcett, who co-created ORPHAN.

The main wraparound glue that holds HORROR together is Dangerous Dan, a radio DJ (played by sometimes wistful, often jovial William Shatner), broadcasting and drinking his way through Christmas Eve. When the camera cuts away from Dan, other stories are told, all of them worth watching.

One of the not-quite-a-wraparound stories involves Santa Claus (George Buzza) who fends off flesh-rending, rabid elves, before moving onto a more insidious foe. Another involves a dysfunctional family whose visit to a frosty, wealthy aunt leads to truth-telling and supernatural punishment (Julian Richings, who played Death in the CW television show SUPERNATURAL, 2005-20, adds a Riff-Raff-like intensity to his role of Gerhardt in this multi-tale film). Meanwhile, student documentarian filmmakers break into St. Joseph’s Academy, the scene of a grim crime, some of them acting weirder and weirder as the night shoot progresses. Tragedy befalls a husband and wife after the husband (Adrian Holmes, who also guest-starred on SUPERNATURAL in 2008 and 2017) trespasses on forest land, cuts down a Christmas tree, and their son briefly disappears.

HORROR is an imaginative, clever and all-around fun movie, with especially effective, well-foreshadowed and disturbing twists, great and appropriately over-the-top acting, good and sometimes funny writing, and a welcome lightness to set off its─and the world’s─elements.

RABID (1977)

 

(Director/screenwriter: David Cronenberg)

Storyline

An experimental plastic surgery turns a young woman into a bloodthirsty creature. She attacks her victims, infecting them, causing a city-wide epidemic.

Review

Cronenberg’s 1977 follow-up to the controversial SHIVERS (1974) is a thematic evolution and upgrade for the screenwriter-director whose early-to-mid-career cinematic works often focused on mutation, and body- and disease-based horror. The tone and flow of RABID is sharper and improved, less raw shot-wise. Theme- and writing-wise it’s a more self-assured and mature sibling to SHIVERS.

Ex-porn actress Marilyn Chambers (BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR, 1972) played Rose, the lead character and patient zero for the plague. She did a good job of conveying Rose’s journey from recovering accident victim, confused amnesiac to full-on predator─and while there are a few nude scenes with her, they’re restrained and non-gratuitous in that they further the plot in a meaningful way. Joe Silver, a veteran character actor, whose laidback performance was a highlight in SHIVERS, gets a pivotal role here as well, playing a medical expert (Murray Cypher). As fun as his character’s name is, it’s not quite as notable/darkly funny as the name of Rose’s surgeon, Dr. Dan Keloid (played by Howard Ryshpan)─the scene where an infected Keloid begins to lose his mind during a surgery is one of the more enjoyable scenes in RABID.

The penile mutation symbol, as in SHIVERS, is present here as well: this time out, it doesn’t crawl, slug-like, out of its victims, but instead nests within Rose’s armpit. With another director, this might be heavy-handed and silly, but in Cronenberg’s vision, there’s an added element of creepiness to it.

This relatively short feature is a maturation of Cronenberg’s filmmaking abilities, one that works and entertains on all still-icky levels, with an emotionally blunt end-scene that is striking in its tone-consistent, cold-reality harshness. According to IMDb, RABID remains one of Canada’s highest-grossing films of all-time.

ALL THE CREATURES WERE STIRRING (2018)

 

(Directors/screenwriters: David Ian McKendry and Rebekah McKendry)

Storyline

An awkward first date takes place during a strange and scary theater performance, each on-stage segment leading into a cinematic version of that segment.

Review

This 2018 Christmas-themed horror anthology film is a fun, worthwhile low-budget diversion from the grimmer aspects of the holidays.

“To All A Goodnight,” the wraparound story, involves Max and Jenna, a couple on their awkward first date on Christmas Eve. They attend an odd, terror-themed and sparsely attended theater performance, its staff rude and mute, and each anthological stage performance leading to a cinematic equivalent, and an unsurprising secret one of the awkward datemates holds. Diva Zappa, youngest daughter of musician Frank and Gail Zappa, played Actor 3.

The first stage act (“The Stockings Were Hung”) tells the tale of a corporate office Christmas gift exchange that turns deadly when unwrapped boxes reveal guns, a knife, and other dangerous objects as well as creepy phone calls from a mysterious tormentor.

In “Dash Away All,” a last-minute shopper─a married, thirty-something man─finds that his car, parked in an empty, late-night parking lot, won’t start. Then he sees a van with two young, intensely helpful and nervous women whose aid may or may not be beneficial to him.

“All Through the House” is an update of Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella A Christmas Carol, with a young man (Chet) being haunted by shadowy demons and a friendly, frustrated neighbor.

The fourth segment, “Arose Such a Clatter,” centers around a middle-aged driver who accidentally hits a deer while driving home on Christmas Eve─and discovers that it’s not just any deer that he killed, when he’s followed home by something or someone whose vision is red tinted (stalker POV!).

In “In A Twinkling,” Gabby (played by Constance Wu) surprises her friend Steve (Morgan Peter Brown) with a Christmas Eve visit and finds herself trapped with him in a black-and-white, 1950s holiday party with inhuman versions of their friends and theremin music playing in the background. I especially enjoyed this one, with its light, atypical-for-horror ending.

STIRRING is a fun, quirky and good film, with often fresh takes on the holiday spirit(s), good acting, and mostly effective pacing─the only lag in the movie is “All Through the House,” a slightly-updated-but-otherwise-flat retelling of Dickens’s famous Scrooge tale, and even that was not bad. The ending of “To All A Goodnight” is abrupt, something I did not mind, but I suspect many viewers may find its briefly glimpsed, not-surprising twist underwhelming. Otherwise, it's an entertaining flick, if you keep your expectations modest and light-hearted.

TALES FROM THE HOOD 2 (2018)

 

(Directors/screenwriters: Rusty Condieff and Darin Scott)

Storyline

Mr. Simms, the undertaker-now-more storyteller from the first TALES FROM THE HOOD (1995), is back, with new, horrifying and dark-humored stories about evil dolls, avenging vamps, experienced ghosts and spirit-filled psychics.

Review

HOOD 2 is a mostly good follow-up to the 1995 original film. The wraparound story is “Robo Hell,” a ROBOCOP (1987)-meets-MINORITY REPORT (2002) framework where the devilish Mr. Simms (played by the wicked-funny Keith David) reprograms a military robot intended for racist purposes.

In the first Simms-spun story is “Good Golly,” a roadside black history museum becomes a grisly deathtrap for three dumb teens who try to steal a doll that’s been imbued with historical evil. This is splatteriffic and fun.

“The Medium” is a laugh-out-loud funny short tale about what happens when gangstas, seeking to contact a dead man who ripped them off, visit a white fake medium. This was especially entertaining because of its actors and amusing ending.

The third story, “Date Night” is a solid, if predictable entry about two playas who get taken by more-than-they-seem women.

HOOD 2 ’s final Simms story (“The Sacrifice”) is a heavy-handed BLM-sourced work, where a black political consultant’s future is threatened in a horrifying way when he refuses to acknowledge the sacrifices of black civil rights people who came before him. Although imaginative in parts, it’s preachy and runs spell-it-out-to-the-mentally-challenged long. Well-intended, but too much.

Overall, HOOD 2 is a worthwhile film, fun, smart-minded, solidly acted and well-intentioned, despite its second-tale predictability and overly earnest shortcomings in “The Sacrifice.” 

Followed by TALES FROM THE HOOD 3 (2020).

CANNIBALS (1980)

 

(a.k.a. MONDO CANNIBALE; a.k.a. WHITE CANNIBAL QUEEN; directors: Jésus“Jess” Franco─who co-wrote the screenplay, billed as A.L. Mariaux and Jeff Manner─and Francesco Prosperi, billed as Franco Prosperi. Co-screenwriter: an uncredited Jean Rollin.)

Storyline

A man whose daughter was taken by cannibals returns ten years later to their village to get her back, only to discover she is their queen.

Review

CANNIBALS is a bad film, said to be one of the worst of the titular genre─Franco, no fan of the cannibal works, acknowledged this in later interviews (he made one other long pig work, DEVIL HUNTER, 1980). He said he only made them because they were popular at the time.

Because CANNIBALS is a Franco flick, it should be noted that the nudity is occasional and non-sexual (for the most part) and mostly limited to constantly reused slow-motion scenes where the flesh-eaters gnaw on what appears to be rubbery steak and skin and a few seconds of animal intestines. At best it’s terrible, fetishistic microbudget food porn, and some of the tribe members look Caucasian beneath their makeup.

What makes CANNIBALS, also released as MONDO CANNIBALE 3 (with Franco credited as Clifford Brown, “supposedly an homage to the real Clifford Brown, a jazz trumpeter,” according to IMDb.com) so bad?

Almost everything, from, to its terrible dialogue to its languid pacing.  The actors, for the most part, are bad in their roles, but it’s hard to blame them.  The lines they had to say─I saw the English-dub version, where even the tribal members speak it─must’ve been terrible in the original Italian as well, judging from the sleep-walking-in-their-roles actors. (Franco later said that Sabrina Siani, who played Lana, Jeremy Taylor’s daughter and tribal queen, was one of the worst actresses he’d worked with; the worst was Romina Power.)

Other actors in the film: Al Cliver, a familiar face in the low-budget horror genre, played Jeremy Taylor; Lina Romay, billed as Candy Coster, played Ana (Romay is another familiar face, as well as Franco’s longtime girlfriend; she acted in over a hundred of Franco’s films)─like Cliver, Romay is one of the best players here, but they’re not given much to work with in CANNIBALS; Shirley Knight, billed as Shirley Night, played Barbara Shelton; Anouchka, billed as Anoushka, played “Lana as a child”; and Franco himself had a cameo as Mr. Martin.

At an hour and thirty minutes, this padded-out-with-recycled-cannibalism-and-extended- jungle-walk shots movie is not the worst film I have seen, but it is boring, with its threadbare budget showing (even for a low-cost film). Viewers who have seen CANNIBAL TERROR (1980, another Franco film) might recognize CANNIBALS‘s sets. Many of them were recycled from TERROR. If you’re interested in seeing a cannibal film, Ruggero Deodato’s CANNIBAL HOLOCAUST (1980) and Umberto Lenzi’s CANNIBAL FEROX (1981) better represents the genre.