Mulberry Street (2006)

There are a lot of rats in New York City (though not as many as commonly believed), so a spate of attacks on humans by aggressive rodents attracts some news coverage, but is not immediately seen as the start of a major disaster.

But this is an October review, so of course Bad Things are about to ensue.  The rats, it seems, carry a pathogen of some kind which infects anyone they bite, turning them (slowly or quickly, depending on partly on how badly they were bitten and partly on narrative needs) into ravening, mutated monsters that want nothing more than to attack and feed on any humans they see.  Soon the uninfected find themselves hunted in the streets or under siege in their own homes.

So what we have here is a zombie movie in all respects except the actual presence of zombies - which come to think of it was also basically the situation in writer Nick Damici's later film Stake Land, though the specifics of the two films are very different.

And a pretty good zombie movie it is, even without any undead monsters.  The cast aren't well known names or faces, but they do a solid job.  The movie's financial assets don't always stretch to the most convincing of special effects, but the film-makers are smart enough to minimise the impacts of that weakness.  And lastly there's a pretty solid script, creating a set of characters who are reasonably likeable and then putting them through hell.  Probably the only narrative misstep - at least for my tastes - came right at the end; which is an unfortunately impactful place to go wrong, of course.

I originally had another movie slated for review on Halloween but it was such a damp squib of a film that I decided to sneak in a watch Mulberry Street as well, and I am glad I did.  If you've enjoyed zombie fare in the past, then even though it's not technically got any zombies in it, you should find this an engaging watch.

Splinter (2008)

Polly and Seth had planned a nice anniversary camping trip.  So when they accidentally break their tent, and then get carjacked while searching for a motel, they probably think their day has hit rock bottom.

Unfortunately for them, they are in a horror movie, and things can still get considerably worse; as the attendant at the gas station they are about to pull into recently found out ...

Splinter is a low budget but by no means low effort monster movie.  It has a solid cast; decent, mostly practical, effects - which the director protects from too much exposure with some occasionally annoying rapidly shifting camera work; and at a lean 82 minutes it maintains momentum and engagement.

The movie I kept thinking of while watching Splinter is John Carpenter's The Thing.  The details are very different, mind you, and the tone is much less one of paranoia and much more about direct action.  But the basic situation - a small group who distrust each other in an isolated location, under threat from a creature that can warp human flesh - certainly contains a strong echo.

I'm pleased that this is not a slavish homage like say Harbinger Down was, though.  Splinter reminded me of The Thing without feeling like a lesser echo of it.  It's a film with its own sense of identity and a reasonably consistent and coherent narrative, provided one accepts the core conceit of the monster.

If you like monster movies, and particularly if you liked The Thing, this movie is worth your time.

Creepshow (1982)

An irate and aggressive father confiscates his son's "Creepshow" horror comic book, ranting as he does so about how it is puerile and stupid.  When his son protests, the older man strikes the boy, then carries the comic book out to the trash.

Not a very nice man.  But we're more interested than the book than we are in him, at least for now.  Creepshow, you see, is an anthology film of five (six, if you count this framing sequence) stories.  That lets the show pack in a bunch of different horror staples: murder, zombies, monsters, mutation, bugs, voodoo: we got it all!

None of this wealth of content matters if the movie's not good, of course.  Fortunately, Creepshow is a fun film.  Not in any way a scary one, I feel I must point out.  Like the 1950s comic books on which it is modelled, the aim here is gonzo, gleeful gross-out, with a side order of awful fates for its often equally awful characters.  This is not a subtle or nuanced film, is what I'm saying.  But it's not trying to be.

At 120 minutes, Creepshow does perhaps slightly outstay its welcome.  And it's tempting to wish that when George Romero and Stephen King decided to collaborate, they tried to stretch themselves more than this.  But at the end of the day, the movie they did decide to make is a solid example of its type.  So if it sounds like your thing, you should check it out.

The Crazies (1973)

A young girl getting a late night drink is teased by her brother.  Their incipient argument is short-circuited by their father going on a berserk rampage that sees their mother murdered and their home in flames.

Neighbours raise the alarm over the fire, and among the first people contacted are a young couple named Judy and David.  David's a volunteer firefighter called to help battle the blaze.  Judy is a nurse summoned to help look after the injured children.  By the time she gets to the clinic, however, she finds it occupied by the US army.  There's been an accident with some dangerous bio-weapons, you see, and the residents of the town may all have been exposed to a bio-agent that causes either death or a homicidal frenzy in all of its victims.

Now Judy and David and the other folk of the town - as well as the basically well-intentioned but completely out of their depth and overwhelmed members of the military - must try to survive an ever spiraling cycle of suspicion and violence.

The Crazies is written and directed by George Romero of Night of the Living Dead fame, and it shares a fair few similarities with his most famous film.  You've got an outbreak of violence behaviour, a group of ordinary people trying to survive it, and growing tensions among said group as their situation becomes more difficult.  You can also see some of the themes of his later zombie films getting an early work-out here, e.g. the authorities flailing ineffectually to contain the situation, and frequently make things worse as half-trained and barely-informed soldiers are sent to do a dangerous and difficult job with inevitably tragic results.

I also don't think it's a coincidence that old George made a movie about dangerous military chemicals/bio-weapons just a year or two after the US discontinued use of Agent Orange.

I would describe this film as more entertaining than it is good.  Romero was not a subtle film-maker, and this is not a subtle or nuanced film, with performances to match.  It's also afflicted or blessed (depending on your perspective) with an incongruously chirpy soundtrack.  On the other hand, it moves briskly and I was never bored.  If you liked Night of the Living Dead, it's worth checking out what Romero was up to before he finally pulled the trigger on a sequel to that film.

Vampyros Lesbos (1971)

American executive Linda Westinghouse finds herself experiencing recurring erotic dreams about a beautiful brunette.  It's probably no surprise that when her work takes her to the remote home of Countess Nadine Carody, the Countess turns out to be the brunette in question.

The two women immediately become lovers, but of course Nadine is actually more interested in Linda's blood than she is in rest of her body, what with that whole "being a vampire" thing she has going on.  She's not your common sunlight-fearing bloodsucker though, as she emphatically proves by gambolling naked on the beach with Linda.

Despite the passion she feels for Nadine, Linda finds herself unnerved about their relationship, especially when she meets a Doctor who warns her of the Countess's true nature.  Will she succumb to the vampire's sensual charms?  Will she survive if she denies them?

Vampyros Lesbos basically steals the plot of Dracula, but combines the Mina and Jonathon Harker roles together, with lashings of nudity on top of it.  I actually rather like the idea of a Dracula adaptation where Mina Harker is more than just a victim to be rescued, and would be keen to see someone seriously take that approach on.  Alas, writer/director Jesus Franco is most definitely not the man to do that, as he's an unabashed exploitation-based film-maker.  Bare bosoms and bottoms (and the occasional artsy bit of shotwork) are his stock in trade, and the story takes a very secondary role to the titillation.

The House on Sorority Row (1983)

Seven members of a sorority plan a graduation party, despite the objections of their domineering house mother, Mrs Slater.  When the older woman demands they cancel the party and take down all the decorations, they plan to prank her in revenge.  Alas, things get out of control, and the repercussions could well be deadly ...

The House on Sorority Row (AKA House of Evil or Seven Sisters) is a fairly formulaic slasher coming from toward the end of the genre's roughly five year 'golden age' between Halloween and Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter.  Despite the provocative title and cover image, the film's pretty tame in terms of both sex and violence.  Particularly violence, really.  There's a fair bit of "here are the shadows of someone being murdered" rather than "here is someone being murdered".  This was possibly partly due to the then current furore about "video nasties", but I suspect a bigger driver was probably just that it's a lot cheaper to film shadows than a convincing on-camera 'kill scene'.

The problem with this (presumed) cost-cutting measure is that it needs a quality director to keep up the tension and creepiness in the face of the lack of "payoff" (because let's face it, the kill scenes are a key draw for slasher movies).  This movie would need someone like John Carpenter at the helm to really make it work, and well ... it doesn't.  The script doesn't do itself many favours in the tension stakes by making the 'final girl' so transparently obvious from the start (and also by failing to actually establish discernible characters for five of the seven young women at all).

This is only for slasher fanatics, and even they are unlikely to find a whole lot to really enthuse about, here.

Murderdrome (2013)

Cherry Skye just wants to play roller derby and maybe date this guy named Brad.  Quite what's so appealing about Brad is a mystery to me, but apparently Cherry's not the only one to see it.  His ex, despite being the one who ended their relationship, is determined to prevent anything happening between him and Cherry.

Naturally, said ex is also a roller derby rival of Cherry's, and somehow their romantic and professional rivalry attracts the attention of a demonic spirit that's determined to snare Cherry's soul ... though not before murdering everyone else who has appeared in the film.

I very much enjoyed writer-director Daniel Armstrong's Sheborg Massacre, and picked up this earlier effort off the back of that enjoyment.  Alas, Murderdrome is a much less effective film.  The script's a muddle, the characters paper thin, and the acting generally is merely bad, as opposed to the deliberately bombastic and over the top performances of the more recent film.  Heck, even on a technical level it's wanting: this has the worst audio I've (not) heard on a film since Invasion of the Pod People.

At the end of the day, this just doesn't have the energy or anarchic sense of fun that it really needed.  Fortunately, Mr Armstrong seems to have got better at capturing those qualities since this was made, so I am still interested to see his next effort.

Outpost 11 (2013)

It is 1955 in an alternate, steampunk-ish world, and the "Second Hundred Years' War" rages on.  As part of the war effort, Britain has established a chain of tiny, isolated outposts in Antarctica, where they monitor enemy communications and activity.  Quite why a desolate, nigh uninhabitable wasteland would be a hotbed of military activity, I am not sure, but apparently it is. 

Outpost 11 has a staff of only three men: a nervous conscript, an angry and emotionally abusive corporal, and an officer of some kind who doesn't seem to care over much about the war or their ill-defined mission.  So there is a fair bit of tension in the place even before the red warning light of an imminent attack blinks on.  So when it does, it's safe to say that things are going to get very bad indeed.

The 'alternate history' background of Outpost 11 is to my mind a distraction from the claustrophobic sense of tension the film is trying to establish.  It would I think have been better to make this a cold war base in the 'real world' 1970s.  A lot of the eclectic mix of technology could still have been explained in that context, and I wouldn't have spent half the film wondering what on Earth Britain and Prussia could have found to fight over in 1850 that they'd still be locked in a war over a full century later (you can't, after all, have a Second Hundred Years' War until it has lasted a hundred years ...).

That quibble aside, is this any good?  Eh.  The cast is solid, but the script is a bit weak.  The characters are little more than flat archetypes, with little reason for us to care about them other than that they are on screen, and a number of the plot points don't feel 'natural' in the context of the situation, but instead like the writers forcing things to lead toward the outcomes they have in mind.

Vanishing on 7th Street (2010)

A sudden power blackout plunges Detroit into darkness.  When the power returns a few seconds later, anyone who didn't have their own non-mains powered light source to hand is gone, their clothes in a pile wherever they stood.

Three days later, it is clear that the effects are at least nationwide, which makes the title seem rather understated (would not The Vanishing have been shorter and punchier as well as more accurate?).  It is also clear that all power sources - batteries, generators, even the sun itself - are running down.

In these bleak circumstances, a small group of survivors, dragging their diminishing sources of light with them, stumble across each other and bicker about what to do next.

After a promising opening, Vanishing on 7th Street loses momentum as the characters sit in place and squabble for an inordinately long time, pushing the threat of the shadows (whatever they are and whatever they want) into the background and eroding my engagement with the situation and the characters I'm supposed to root for.   The film's sense of progress is lost here, and it never recovers it.

I tend to feel that the root cause of the loss of momentum is a lack of purpose to the shadow vs human conflict.  What's doing this and why?  We will never know.  That sense of mystery can sometimes work: part of Night of the Living Dead's effectiveness as a film comes from the fact that no-one understand why the dead have returned as cannibalistic monsters.  But at least the characters in Romero's movie had a clear purpose in response: to survive until help comes.  The group here have given up on help and can't agree on anything, so they barely move from the spot where they meet.  Even when they do act, it's without any goal beyond "exist for a few seconds more".

Ultimately, this one runs out of juice even faster than the draining batteries the characters have to deal with.

Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Season 1 (1974)

Chicage in the mid-1970s.  Carl Kolchak is an experienced reporter with the Independent News Service.  He works a lot of crime-related stories, which often puts him into conflict with the Police Department, due (a) to his "creative" ways of getting information and (b) his equally creative - one might say "crazy", given that they usually involve supernatural creatures - theories about who the culprits might be.  Vampires and werewolves and witches, oh my!

Of course, this is a TV show - one that Chris Carter cited as a big influence on The X-Files - so Kolchak is invariably right about who or what is responsible, and almost as invariably manages to find and defeat them.  Though somehow, of course, he always does so without finding any concrete proof of what he saw.  Kolchak's inability to take a decent photograph, for instance, is one of the show's several not-as-funny-as-the-writers-think running gags.

Alas, misfiring humour is far from the only problem with this show.  The writing in general is formulaic and thin, the recurring supporting cast is too divorced from the supernatural shenanigans to ever really connect, and the production values are ... not good.  The last episode in particular has some very ill-advised costume work, though frankly, it may be my favourite of the season since it's one of the few times the show manages to inch toward the "so bad it is good" line, rather than just being dull.

Kolchak might indeed have been a big influence on Chris Carter, because I can't help remembering the confused, "we haven't actually got a plan or a point" mess that The X-Files descended into, and seeing a connection.

Bereavement (2010)

A boy named Martin has a medical condition that means he is unable to feel pain.  At the age of six, he is abducted by a serial killer, who plans to use the youngster as a kind of acolyte.

Five years later, teenager Allison Miller moves to the area - which seems to have become a whole lot more rural in the meantime - to live with her uncle after her parents die.  She's a bit of a fish out of water, though she does strike up a friendship with a young man named William.

Naturally, that serial killer is still at work in the area.  Which is frankly ridiculous given the rate at which he seems to capture and carve up women (and of course it's always women).  The sheer numbers of disappearances - especially in a lightly populated area - would surely have prompted an official response.  or at least some kind of public anxiety.

Equally naturally, Allison is inevitably going to stumble across the killer and his creepy boy sidekick, despite no-one else doing so in the intervening time.

You can probably tell from my griping above that I was not a big fan of this film.  It failed to grip me, leaving me plenty of time to pick holes in the plot-line.  I suspect that even if it had gripped me, the relentlessly mean-spirited nature of the narrative would have eventually turned me off; at least up until the point where it became so gratuitous that it became almost funny.

Mind you, it's probably that very mean-spiritedness that will be a selling point for some people: this is certainly not a typical Hollywood film in that regard.  I can't say I would recommend it, though.

Autumn (2009)

In the space of a day 99% of humanity starts spewing blood from their mouths and then drops dead.  One city's frightened survivors gather in a local recreation centre, but soon fall to squabbling over whether to remain where they are on the hope of rescue, or try to get out into the country and away from the rotting piles of corpses.

That question becomes even more pressing when the corpses get up and start walking around.  I mean sure, they seem to be completely oblivious to outside stimulus and just shamble about aimlessly, but it's still seriously creepy.  And they are still rotting.

So yeah, we're now living in a post-Walking Dead world and I'm pretty sure you're all already  thinking the "Zed word" (or Zee word, if you're American).  And yep, eventually the newly reanimated plague victims begin to become aware of what's around them, and to display signs of aggression ... no surprise there.  Honestly, even in 2009 I doubt it was much of a surprise.

So yep, we're in super low budget zombie movie territory here.  But is it good super low budget zombie movie territory?  Well, I'm not sure such territory actually exists, but if it does, this is not it.  Autumn is ponderous, tedious stuff, with a human cast that show little more initiative than the corpses that "threaten" them.  The sum total of their response to the realisation that the walking corpses might be dangerous is to build a fence.  That done, they just kind of sit in a house for most of the movie.  They don't even try to secure it in any way, or make plans about how to maintain their food source, or ... well, do anything.  Not that they need to do much, since even fifteen minutes from the end of the film, it is still pretty easy for a lone human to safely shove their way through a whole crowd of zombies.

Boring.

The Nightmare Gallery (2019)

A young man calls his professor, gleefully excited about an ancient book he's located.  But when he starts to look through the tome, some bog standard "spooky" stuff happens and he vanishes.

Three years later, the professor is still putting up "have you seen me?" posters at the university.  I admire her tenacity, though not her technique.  I'm not alone in this, since her obsessive behaviour is causing some issues for her professionally and personally.  Though at least she is a lesbian so we don't have to sit through the tired old professor/student romance (or suspicion thereof) storyline.

Of course this status quo wouldn't make for much of a movie, so soon enough a mysterious package turns up for the Professor, seemingly offering the first hint of finding her missing friend.  Sadly, this also won't make for much of a movie.

Because alas, The Nightmare Gallery really hasn't got much of anything new or interesting to offer in its roughly 100 minutes of running time.  Our professor (played by Buffy alumnus Amber Benson) is soon experiencing a muddled collection of the same kind of bog standard "spooky" stuff as her missing protege, though whatever occult force is at work is much less eager to grab her than it did the kid.  I admit there is a decent reason for this reticence, as well as a decent reason for why she would care so much about her former assistant.  Still, for all I can give a nod of appreciation for such details, they do little to offset the fact that the lion's share of the film is just a bunch of tired old horror movie tropes inelegantly stitched together.

Oh, and there's a post credits scene which makes the whole movie even less interesting than it was to begin with, so if you do find yourself watching it, maybe bail out before you get to that.

October 2019 Schedule

Reviews this October will be posted on Tuesdays (except today), Thursdays and Saturdays.  As usual, they will focus on horror films.  So if you're not into that genre, you can probably safely skip visiting here for a month.

The regular Tuesday and Friday schedule will resume on November 5th.