THE WOLF OF SNOW HOLLOW (2020)

 

(Director/screenwriter/co-star: Jim Cummings)

Review

WOLF is a modest budget drama that sports a FARGO (1996), THE X-FILES (1993-2018) and lycanthropic vibe/setting. Set during the holiday season, between pre-Christmas and New Year’s Eve, it tells the tale of a divorced, ex-alcoholic cop (John Marshall, played by director/screenwriter Jim Cummings) trying to fend off a nervous breakdown while investigating a string of small-town murders.

There’s more than one monster in WOLF, the primary ones being Marshall and the mysterious-till-the-end killer. John, constantly hysterical and well-intentioned, yells at everyone, including his father, Sheriff Hadley (Robert Forster, MANIAC COP 3: BADGE OF SILENCE, 1993), Detective Julia Robson (Riki Lindhome,THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, 2009) and his daughter (Jenna, played by Chloe East). John’s constant shouting is heavy-handed but lends a consistency to WOLF’s monster theme if you can forgive it.

This tightly written, shot and edited film is a low-key standout work if you are in the mood for a supernatural-themed, dryly humorous drama with strong-to-great acting by its principals, occasional gore, and its minor, effective end-twist. Its killer is a solid choice. Also, its humor (love the ending) works in this hour-and-twenty-four-minute flick, worth checking out if you view this as a drama with terror elements.

SILENT NIGHT, BLOODY NIGHT (1972)

 

(a.k.a. NIGHT OF THE DARK FULL MOON; a.k.a. DEATH HOUSE; a.k.a. DEATHOUSE. Director/co-screenwriter: Theodore Gershuny. Co-screenwriters: Jeffrey Konvitz and Ira Teller.)

 

Review

Christmas Eve Day, 1950, East Willard, Massachusetts. An old man, Wilfred Butler, dies after running out of his massive house while fire engulfs him. His will dictates that the mansion be used as an asylum.

Christmas Eve Day, 1970. The mansion-turned-asylum is empty. Lawyer John Carter and his assistant/mistress, Ingrid, show up on Christmas Eve from out of town to collect the money the townspeople are offering his client (Jeffrey Butler, grandson of Wilfred) for the giant house. The town council, secretive and suspicious, tersely agree to get Jeffrey’s money the next day. The lawyer and his assistant spend the night in the mansion, unaware that a black-gloved, Bible-reading killer─whose progress we sometimes see via Killer POV and strange angles─is in the house. When they repair to bed, the killer attacks them with an axe. Quick closeup cuts of cherry syrup-looking blood, stained sheets, and clutching hands are shown. The whispery killer, identifying himself as "Marianne," calls Sheriff Bill Mason and tells him to investigate the mansion. The switchboard operator (Tess Howard), hearing this, panics.

Later that night, Jeffrey Butler (James Patterson) arrives in town and meets Diane Adams (Mary Woronov), the mayor’s daughter. They become fast friends. More murders occur. More phone calls are made by Marianne, one to Diane: “Tell them I have the diary─1935,” the killer says. This inspires Diane to delve further into the mysterious, tragic and deadly history of the Butler family.

Filmed in Oyster Bay, Long Island, New York in 1970, but not released until 1972, two years before BLACK CHRISTMAS, SILENT features the Killer POV shots and whispery killer phone call elements that BLACK popularized. Like BLACK, it is atmospheric with dark tones, visually and thematically, with a compelling mystery and a few twists─although SILENT’s is more explicitly resolved than BLACK’s.

If SILENT is not good as BLACK, it’s close. Its cinematography (courtesy of Adam Giffard) is appropriately dark, grimy, and wintry. Gershon Kingsley’s score is striking in parts and contributes to the overall miasmic mood, while Tom Kennedy, Charles Baum and Jonathan Kroll’s editing─which occasionally verges on artsy─furthers SILENT’s weird Christmas hell vibe. This makes sense, considering that several former Andy Warhol players and crew members worked on SILENT: Mary Woronov (WARLOCK, 1989); Candy Darling (her final film); Ondine; Tally Brown; and others. Woronov was married to director/co-screenwriter Geshuny at the time.

Other notable actor appeared in this film─John Carradine (THE HOWLING, 1981) as Charlie Towman, mute owner of the town newspaper, and Patrick O’Neal (THE STEPFORD WIVES, 1975) as John Carter.

If you’re okay with a notably flawed film with an intense, grim, and sometimes oddball-artsy mood, you might enjoy SILENT, a public domain/uncopyrighted work. Its offbeat pacing may make it confusing for some viewers. This is not surprising─one of the screenwriters, Jeffrey Konvitz, is known for laying on thick, effective atmosphere with a touch of strangeness; he wrote the 1974 novel THE SENTINEL, and later co-produced the resulting 1977 film as well.

A remake, SILENT NIGHT, BLOODY NIGHT: THE HOMECOMING, was released in 2013, followed by a 2015 sequel, SILENT NIGHT, BLOODY NIGHT 2: REVIVAL. Mary Woronov, according to IMDb, is appearing in the third film, tentatively titled SILENT NIGHT, BLOODY NIGHT PART 3.

SANTA JAWS (2018)

 

(TV/Syfy Channel Original film; director: Misty Talley. Screenwriter: Jake Kiernan.)

Review

SANTA, a Syfy Channel Original film, is fun in parts, with serious lag time in others (even for viewers like me, who don’t take films too seriously). For the most part, I don’t blame screenwriter Jake Kiernan for SANTA’s boring parts─after all, the film has a microbudget, limiting its story and FX, and required padding for it to be a feature. SANTA, with its limited budget and natural-length storyline, is a forty-five-minute short at best. It doesn’t help that the acting is less than convincing, even for an on-the-cheap self-aware horror comedy.

What follows could save you from possible time-wastage (if you must see SANTA, for whatever reason).

After energetic Cody (Reid Miller) gets his supernatural pen as a gift and draws Santa Jaws (also the name of Cody’s comic book) and someone gets killed, you can fast-forward to the next kill scene. There’s a lot of characters-running-around footage, so you probably won’t miss important talking points. SANTA becomes focused in the last quarter, highlighted by Cody’s priceless “It’s not a shark─it’s Santa Jaws!” as well as memorable, schlocky-humorous kill scenes that are sprinkled throughout the movie. While SANTA is a bad-in-a-bad-way flick, fast-forwarding (which I wish I could have done as a non-review writing viewer) might make it (more) fun, with only a half-hour to forty-five minutes of your time spent on it. SANTA is worth checking out if you’re quick on the fast-forward draw or turn some of its elements into the basis for a drinking game.

GOOD TIDINGS (2016)

 

(Director/co-screenwriter: Stuart W. Bedford. Co-screenwriters: Giavanni Gentile and Stu Jopia.)

 

Review

After three vicious, escaped mental patients descend on a city homeless shelter, the inhabitants of the charity house, including two traumatized war vets, must fight for their lives on Christmas Day.

GOOD is a disappointing film. It has a great premise, its intentions are admirable when it comes to characterization, but its extended length and questionable character choices make it a chore to watch at times. At an hour and fifteen minutes, this would be a good film; at an hour and forty minutes─its running length─it’s a is this over yet? experience.

The filmmakers make an admirable effort to flesh out and establish sympathy for the people within the shelter─from its lead character, Frank Roland (Colin Murtagh), to the rest of the characters, the emotional bonds are well-represented. Even the three killers (billed as Larry, Curly and Moe) are given personalities (shown through their body language, personality tics, hoarse laughter, and noises), making them interesting villains with a clear pecking order. Unfortunately, much of this undercut by repetitive scenes of Plot Convenient Stupidity where characters─established as smart individuals with lifetimes of hard choices─decide not to kill the villains when they easily could.

Despite this, GOOD is not a total time waste. Besides its solid acting, character-based writing, and its dark sense of humor, there’s a consistently grimy feel to the flick, from its shot-through-a-dirty-filter/beige-background tone, grubby-looking characters, mostly solid and rough (if overabundant) fight and kill scenes, and a mostly effective, sparse, and off-beat soundtrack (provided by Jeanmichaelnoir, a.k.a Liam W. Ashcroft who also plays Moe). (Possible) further proof of the filmmaker’s sense of humor: there’s a character named Reggie Bannister (Andrew Oyeneyin); I’m not sure if this is an homage to the real-life Reggie Bannister, who played Reggie in Don Coscarelli’s PHANTASM (1979-2016) pentalogy. But if so, nice!

If you’re a patient viewer, you might not mind GOOD’s bloated running time. Otherwise, despite filmic evidence of the on- and off-screen talent, you might want to pass on this one or imagine a well-edited version of its story in your head.

ALL THROUGH THE HOUSE (2015)

 

(Director/screenwriter: Todd Nunes)

 

Review

Shot in seven days, ALL is a moderately entertaining and well-edited X-mas horror flick, for the most part. If it’s not suspenseful, it’s not for the lack of the filmmakers’ trying: scenes might have been suspenseful are undercut by its low budget, and flat acting by much of cast lumps ALL in a budget-hobbled, direct-to-video category. Despite those limitations, this could be a fun, late-night flick for more forgiving viewers.

Story: Rachel Kimmel (Ashley Mary Nunes) returns home from college during the winter holidays. A sense of reluctant obligation compels the twenty-something Rachel and her same-age friends (Gia and Sarah) to help her grandmother’s eccentric neighbor (Mrs. Garrett, an older woman) decorate the interior of her already-Xmas-gaudy house. The women’s reluctant sense of obligation stems from the fact that Rachel feels bad for Garrett, whose husband (Mitchell) left her under mysterious circumstances “sometime in the Nineties,” fifteen years prior, and whose daughter (Jamie) died under equally cloudy circumstances─at least as far as Rachel, Gia and Sarah are concerned. Mrs. Garrett and Rachel’s foul-mouthed, wheelchair-bound grandma (Abby) know, but they refuse to tell her (“That’s a conversation for another day,” Mrs. Garrett says, early on in ALL.)

Rachel’s arrival sparks a cycle of murders that target twenty-something heterosexual couples who are about to have sex or have had sex. A killer in a Santa Claus suit and a white-beard, silver-painted mask, wielding a big pair of gardening shears, stabs female breasts and castrates the men (male violence is off-camera). Eventually, Abby, Rachel and her friends become targets and must fight to survive.

The first two-thirds of the film are quick character and story set-up, shadowy and Christmas-creepy shots interior shots of Mrs. Garrett’s house and a series of 1990s-esque, humorous, soft porn-ish kill scenes with nudity and impressive, practical FX and blood. The third-act twists are solid, though genre-familiar viewers may glean them earlier on.

Acting-wise, the standouts are: Ashley Mary Nunes (Rachel); Cathy Garrett (having fun with her role as Rachel’s spitfire grandmother); and Melynda Kiring, as the pleasant but obviously “off” Mrs. Garrett. A notable actor, for his real-life connections, is Justice Lee, Ashley Mary Nunes’s son and Todd Nunes’s nephew─he plays “Young Jacob.”

Fans of Seventies-era Alice Cooper might enjoy the appearance of one of the late-in-the-flick character reveals, and its ending is fun (if key character-illogical). I also appreciated the scenes that screenwriter/director Todd Nunes used to effectively bookend the movie.

If you’re looking for something pays a well-directed, direct-to-video homage to more iconic/memorable slasher films, this might be a good match for your late-night mood.

THE HILLS HAVE EYES PART 2 (1984)

 

(a.ka. THE HILLS HAVE EYES PART II; director/ screenwriter: Wes Craven)

 

Review

Seven years after the events of Wes Craven’s 1977 film, two survivors from the previous movie are co-owners of a motocross team: Ruby, now called Rachel, who betrayed her cannibal family to help the Carters in the first film; and Bobby Carter, Rachel’s boyfriend, who’s seeing a psychiatrist to try and shake off his HILLS-related trauma. A racing event is set to take place in the desert area where Rachel’s tunnel-dwelling family attacked the Carters, and Robert, still traumatized, refuses to go. Rachel goes in his place, riding in a bus with the late-adolescent, horny and feckless motorcyclists.

The bus breaks down, stranding the Rachel and her team near the site of the original massacre. Surviving members of Rachel’s family─some of whom weren’t seen in the 1977 flick─assault and slay many of teenage riders, the remainder of whom (along with Rachel) fight to stay alive.

Released in 1985, HILLS PART 2 is a bad, choppy-edit film, more a desert-set-FRIDAY-THE-13^th knock-off than a follow-up to its potent-themed prequel. This is borne out by this sequel’s heavy, shoehorn-recycling of original-film footage and its FRIDAY-esque stalk-and-kill scenes as well as composer Harry Manfredini’s recycling of his iconic FRIDAY (1980) soundtrack here. What makes HILLS PART 2 worse is that none of the young characters, aside from Rachel, are worth rooting for. They’re obnoxious, begging to be taken out.

There are also inconsistencies with the second film.

One of them is the presence of the unscarred Pluto (Michael Berryman, reprising his iconic role)─in HILLS, Pluto appeared to be killed; even if he survived, he would’ve been horribly scarred. A further franchise contradiction is the presence of The Reaper (John Bloom, not Joe Bob Briggs), Jupiter’s brother and current head of Ruby’s inbred kin. In HILLS, it was stated by a reliable source that Jupiter (James Whitworth) only had a sister, who was killed in a house fire started by Jupiter. (It’s also worth noting that The Reaper’s voice was dubbed by Nicholas Worth.)

Shot before Wes Craven’s A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (1984), Craven, who later disavowed HILLS PART 2, said he was two-thirds through making HILLS PART 2 when the studio halted its production because of its cost. Craven went on to make NIGHTMARE, and when it was a huge hit, the studio (Hills Two Corporation VTC) wanted Craven to finish HILLS PART 2 (which Craven already wasn’t a fan of), crafting it with only its existing footage─the legendary filmmaker was forced to use many of the scenes from HILLS to make it long enough to qualify as a feature-length work.

Michael Berryman was not the only returning HILLS actor. Janus Blythe came back to play Ruby (now Rachel). Robert Houston, seen briefly at the film’s start, reprised his role of Bobby Carter. Also, the canine character Beast (one of the two German Shepherds seen in HILLS) appears in the second film.

Kevin Spirtas (billed as Kevin Blair, FRIDAY THE 13^th PART VII: THE NEW BLOOD, 1988) played Roy. Williard E. Pugh (ROBOCOP 2, 1990) played Foster. Peter Frechette (GREASE 2, 1982) played Harry. Penny Johnson Jerald (billed as Penny Johnson, FREDDY’S NIGHTMARES, TV series, 1990 episode) played Sue.

HILLS PART 2 is far from the worst film I’ve seen. Its behind-the-scenes crew did a good job with its technical aspects, a few of the scenes jump scare-worthy. Otherwise, it feels like a bland, disembodied-from-its-source-film-FRIDAY-THE-13^th-structured work, one you can skip without missing much. Recommended for HILLS completists or super die-hard fans of any of its players.