The Brood (1979)

 

Psychotherapist Hal Raglan has developed a method he calls "psychoplasmics", in which he encourages patients with mental disturbances to let go of their suppressed emotions through psychosomatically inducing physiological changes to their bodies.  Raglan performs public demonstrations with one such patient, who is able to induce welts and burns to appear on his own body when confronted with memories of the abuse he suffered from his father.

Another of Raglan's patients is Nola Carveth, a severely disturbed woman who is in a legal battle with her husband Frank for custody of their young daughter Candice. Following a visit with Nola, Frank discovers bruises and scratches on Candice.  Though his daughter doesn't say how they happened, Frank not unnaturally believes that his estranged wife was responsible.  Confronting Raglan about the issue doesn't get the outcome he expects, though: the psychotherapist insists that Candice's weekly visits continue, and threatens to work to deny Frank custody if they do not!

Understandably angry, Frank refuses to back down and sets out to find some leverage against Raglan so he can protect his daughter.  That search is soon complicated, however, by the vicious murders of several people close to his wife and to him ...

Director David Cronenberg has acknowledged that The Brood was inspired in large part by the disintegration of his own first marriage.  I'm not sure that making a horror film about your ex is any more endorsed by mental health professionals than Dr Raglan's on-screen woo-woo would be, but the actual film itself proves to be a pretty good one.  It's not flawless, by any means - the murder scenes are a tad unconvincing in their choreography and some of the blood effects, for instance - but it's genuinely creepy at times and definitely shows the potential that Cronenberg would go on to realise throughout the early and mid 80s.

Eden Log (2007)

 

A man wakes up in a cave.  He has a corpse beside him, and no memory of who he is or how he came to be in this place.  Setting out to explore, he quickly stumbles across automated video messages, and an apparently insane man who appears to be physically integrated with a strange plant.  He also finds himself menaced by both armoured figures and animalistic mutants.

What's going on?  Why is here?  These are of course the questions that our nameless protagonist wants to answer, provided he can stay alive long enough to do so.

Eden Log is a French science fiction horror film.  It does not appear to have had a substantial financial backing, and utilises a lot of darkness and a deliberately muted palette (at times, it feels like it is black and white) as what I imagine was both a cost saving measure - it limits the sets and make-up you will need, and how sophisticated they need to be - and a stylistic choice.  The overall look conveys the grimy squalor of this dystopic future and makes the occasional (muted) splash of colour the more notable for its rarity.

Unfortunately, for my taste this visual style is the main thing the film has going for it, as neither the performances nor the script left me all that impressed.  The delivery of dialogue, at least in the English language version I saw, is rather wooden.  I expect the actors were probably more comfortable in their native French.  The story, meanwhile, feels rather stretched even for a (these days) relatively trim run time of 100 minutes.  It would probably have worked better as an episode of a science fiction anthology series like the Outer Limits, where it would have been only half that length.  Also, it includes a sexual assault scene that could (and should) have been omitted.

Splice (2009)

Clive and Elsa are genetic engineers working at Nucleic Exchange Research & Development (yes, the acronym is NERD - thankfully the film never makes a big deal of this 'funny' thing).  As part of their work, they've created a mated pair of slug-like creatures that they believe will allow them to produce a new chemical with potent medical benefits - though not as potent as if they were allowed to splice human DNA into their work.

However, the powers that be at NERD are not on board with the human hybrid idea, despite the dollar signs Clive and Elsa dangle in front of them.  This is not, of course, due to any particular moral qualms: they're just aware that such research would be a legal and PR disaster.  It's kind of refreshing to see a cinematic corporation that's not cartoonishly evil, and merely amoral in a banal, butt-covering kind of way, I think.

Anyway, Elsa isn't about to give up on her dream project, and persuades Clive to go along with her in creating a human/slug-thing hybrid embryo.  Just as a proof of concept.  They won't let it come to term, of course.

Yeah, anyone believe that plan is going to work out?

Splice is kind of like a slightly smarter, less gonzo action movie version of Species.  It's got a solid cast, decent creature effects, and a mostly solid and well-paced script.  There is however some sexual violence in the last act.  I could have done without that.  I can see that it was the probably the simplest way to get to the endgame they wanted, but I'm not convinced said endgame was worth it.

That issue aside, this is a solid little horror film.

Videodrome (1983)

 

Max Renn is the president of CIVIC-TV, a channel that specializes in provocative content, full of sexuality or violence.  He's always on the look-out for the next prurient sensation, and is not above some pretty shady business practices to get it.

Basically, in other words, Max is the cinematic embodiment of the "video nasty" boogeyman that conservative alarmists were in a fuss about in the early 80s - when they weren't in a fuss about Dungeons and Dragons or rock music, that is.

Anyway, things are pretty good for ol' Max.  He's just started a new sexual liaison with an attractive and kinky radio psychologist, and he's got a lead on that new sensation he has been looking for.  Videodrome is an ultra-low-budget pirate broadcast.  It's plotless, single-set sexual violence is just the edge that Max thinks CIVIC-TV needs in order to grow, so he immediately sets out to find the people behind it.

That search, however, turns out to be far stranger and more dangerous than Max could ever have imagined.

As I alluded to in my second paragraph, Videodrome definitely feels tapped into the early 80s zeitgeist, exploring many of the anxieties that plagued society's self-appointed moral guardians at the time.  You know the ones I mean: the type who believed that A Nightmare on Elm Street was surely a sign of the end times.  It's a somewhat risky idea, really.  I could easily see tackling such themes ending up in some kind of cringingly awful self-apologia.  Fortunately, this is a David Cronenberg film from what is probably his best period (from 79 to 86 he brought us The Brood, Scanners, The Dead Zone, this film and The Fly - quite the resume!).  It's a deftly made mix of sex, body horror and hallucinatory weirdness, and well worth a look if you're at all a horror fan.  Personally, I think it would work a treat in a double feature with either The Fly or John Carpenter's The Thing.

Rabies (2010)

A young woman is trapped in a sealed pit, deep in the woods.  Her brother Ofer, unable to get her out, promises to find help.

A park ranger and his wife are conducting rounds of a nature reserve in a forest.

Four teenagers driving to a tennis tournament take a wrong turn and accidentally run over a man who staggers out of the woods in front of their car.

These three groups, as well as two others I haven't yet mentioned, will spend the rest of the film intersecting and interacting in various, rarely-productive, ways.

So .. this film.  Thirty minutes in, I was really enjoying it.  Decent interactions between the characters and a nice surprise in that the teenagers respond relatively sensibly to hitting the young man (who is Ofer, in case you hadn't realised).  Two of them stay with the car and call the cops - who wonder of wonders in a horror film, actually show up! - while the other two try to help Ofer find his sister.  I was excited.

And then the rapiness kicked in.  Oh boy.  Both the teens who stayed with the car are attractive young women, and one of the two cops is all about sexually assaulting them via a "search".  It's clearly not the first time, and it's also apparent that his partner - who we're disturbingly asked to find sympathetic - is aware of this and has covered for him in the past.  From then on in, I was frankly not in a positive mood toward the movie.  I could possibly have overlooked it if the second cop had been positioned as just as bad, given he is obviously complicit in the behaviour, but as noted, he's positioned as sympathetic.  Screw that.

Rabies (or Kalavet, in the original Hebrew) has a good cast (albeit working in a language I don't speak), and several good moments, but for my tastes they aren't enough to compensate for the awfulness of the gender politics.

Deathgasm (2015)

 

After his mother gets locked up for a drug-addicted rampage, heavy metal enthusiast Brodie is packed off to a rural New Zealand town to live with his evangelistic uncle and obnoxious cousin.  It's a seriously uncool situation with only two redeeming features.

The first of these is Brodie's beautiful high school classmate Medina, who actually seems to like him.  The second is Zakk, a fellow metalhead with whom Brodie forms a garage band.  If truth be told, Zakk's a bit of a jerk at times, but Brodie's not exactly spoiled for choices when it comes to friends.

Things take a turn for the weird when Zakk and Brodie stumble across some ancient sheets of music that used to belong to a renowned heavy metal musician.  This is actually the Black Hymn, which will grant demonic power to those who play it.  And after a particularly fierce beating from his toxic cousin, Brodie's in the mood to not feel powerless any more.

Of course, invoking demonic power is by definition a bad idea, and soon the sleepy town's streets are awash in both gore and demon-possessed locals.  Now it's up to Brodie and his friends to try and prevent the literal apocalypse, armed only with sex toys, chainsaws, and a blistering guitar solo or three.

Deathgasm is clearly following in the in the comedy-horror splatterpunk style of early Peter Jackson, before he started churning out turgid, 94 hour long CGI-fests.  It features a great deal of over the top gore, gross out comedy, and juvenile wackiness (e.g. the use of sex toys as weapons).  If you are in the target audience for such fare, you will likely enjoy it: I did, though I do feel it loses steam a bit in its final half hour.  The film's only answer to how to keep building seems to be to throw more absurd gore on screen, and there comes a point where that gets a bit played out.

Ridge War Z (2013)

 

A journalist accompanies three veterans to the site of the climactic battle of the war between the living and the undead. There, he asks the men to share their stories of the encounter, while the film asks the viewer to believe that the fate of humanity rested on the outcome of a skirmish involving a whole six soldiers.

No, it's not any more convincing than it sounds.

Ridge War Z (AKA Gory Ridge) feels like it wants to be the quasi-documentary zombie war narrative that the World War Z novel also offered, but that the film based on the book chose not to be.

Perhaps, in more skilled (and wealthier) hands, this approach could have worked.  Here, with the script's clumsy, plodding repetition of the "war is hell" refrain, and the embarrassingly meagre zombie-fighting action it offers, the outcome is pure tedium.  I can't really blame the cast for this: they do a decent job, but they simply aren't able to get much out of the trite dialogue and weak action scenes.

Ridge War Z seems to earnestly want to be a thoughtful film about war that just happens to have zombies in it, but it lacks the ability to match this ambition.  I can't see that it will please any audience.  People who want a drama about war are likely to be turned off by the zombies, and those who are keen on undead carnage will be thoroughly unimpressed by the anemic zombie action on offer.

Re-Animator (1985)

Dan Cain has it pretty good.  He's a handsome medical student with a smart, attractive girlfriend.  And a new transfer student just rented the spare room at his house, so he's not going to have any trouble covering his rent, now.  Basically, as long as Dan avoids getting involved in bizarre experiments aimed at raising the dead, I am sure his life will be all sunshine, rainbows and puppies.

Good thing there's no chance his new room-mate, Herbert West, is experimenting in Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, right?  And even if he was to do something like that, there's little chance it would lead to evil headless professors or rampaging undead hordes, I'm sure!

Re-Animator is a gleefully over-the-top bit of cinematic schlock.  I imagine the screenwriting team taking the motto "Subtlety is for cowards!" as they hurl viscera and nudity at the camera from almost the first shot of the film.  Our opening scene features exploding eyeballs and things are not going to get any more restrained from there.  The cast seem fully on board with the melodramatic excess, with Jeffrey Combs (as Herbert West) and David Gale (as the malevolent Dr Carl Hill) being particularly noteworthy in their enthusiastic hamming.

It's hard to argue that this is a good film, but it sure is a fun one!

Let the Right One In (2008)

12-year old Oskar lives with his divorced mother in a block of flats.  Oskar's shy and meek demeanour conceals a core of bitter rage.  He is bullied every day at school, and spends his evenings imagining bloody revenge: he keeps a knife under his bed and collects newspaper articles about violent crimes.

Oskar's about to have plenty of new reading material, as a series of murders sweeps the neighbourhood.  He's somewhat distracted from his usual clipping-collecting routine, though, by meeting Eli, who is a new arrival in the apartment block.  Eli is Oskar's own age, and she rapidly becomes his only real friend.  He confides in her about the bullying, and she encourages him to fight back.

Of course, Eli and the murders are connected, something that we know even if Oskar doesn't.  The story of who is committing the murders, and why, and what will happen when Oskar finds out, is essentially what the film is all about.  

Let the Right One In is intelligently and elegantly put together, and does a fine job of juxtaposing the misery that Oskar experiences at school with his growing relationship with Eli.  While there are supernatural elements at play here, the film arguably finds horror more effectively on a more mundane level: it is pretty easy to see a parallel between Oskar's story and the real world radicalisation of alienated young men.

Note that Let the Right One In is the original Swedish version of this film; there is also an English-language remake titled Let Me In, which is apparently very similar.

Ginger Snaps (2000)

Ginger and Brigitte Fitzgerald hate their home town, their schoolmates, their parents ... basically everyone and everything, in fact, except each other.  Still sharing a bedroom despite being sixteen and fifteen respectively, their principal form of entertainment is staging elaborate photographic tableaux of their own deaths.

Said deaths start feeling rather too real, however, when they are attacked by a violent, wolf-like creature one night.  Ginger is savagely mauled by the beast before they can get free of it, and even then they only manage to escape when the creature pursues so single-mindedly that it runs right into the path of an oncoming vehicle.

But at least the crisis is over, right?  Well, maybe not.  Ginger's wounds heal suspiciously quickly, and her behaviour changes in ways that probably aren't solely related to the fact that she's (finally and belatedly) experiencing her first period.  Just what kind of creature was it that attacked the two young women, and is Ginger fated to become one of them?

This Canadian horror film puts a lot of trust in its two leads: Ginger or Brigitte or both are in almost every scene in the movie, and are required to go through a wild ride of emotions and experiences in the process.  The actors also have to make us care about these two characters, who really aren't very pleasant at first.  So kudos to them for pulling it off, as I was definitely invested in the fate of the Fitzgerald sisters by the time we reached the film's climax.

Some of the monster effects show up the film's relatively low budget, but that minor quibble aside, this is a good little horror film.

Debug (2014)

Six convict hackers on work release, along with their guard, are sent to debug the systems on a drifting starship. Left running unsupervised for years at a time, these sophisticated programs can get corrupted, even come to think they are 'real people'. Clearing them out is routine work and none of the seven humans expect this time to be anything out of the ordinary.

Of course if they were right there wouldn't be much of a movie.  So it's probably no surprise if I tell you that the security AI on this particular vessel is determined to do unto the humans before they can do unto it ...

Written and directed by David Hewlett, who is probably best known for his role as Rodney McKay on the Stargate TV shows, Debug is a smartly produced bit of low budget SF/horror.  The script isn't anything particularly deep or innovative - the debt to HAL's homicidal impulses in 2001 is openly acknowledged by Hewlett - but it moves along briskly and doesn't ask its characters to be too obviously stupid.  The sets and costumes are effective and the special effects work, while obviously modest and limited, do not look too terrible.  I tend to credit Hewlett's extensive experience of TV science fiction (and the contacts he made there) for how well-judged these elements are.

Hewlett's TV experience probably also helped with casting.  Everyone here is solid, and obviously a post-Game of Thrones Jason Momoa was a pretty good 'get' even back in 2014.  No doubt the years of Stargate: Atlantis that they did together didn't hurt.

If you're the target audience for a "haunted house in space" movie, you could certainly do a lot worse than Debug.

Vampire Circus (1972)

The Count of Stetl is a vampire, who has been preying on village children for his blood.  Finally his depredations grow to much for the townsfolk to bear.  They assault his castle and after a fierce struggle, one of them stakes the Count in the heart.  He sinks into a death-like trance, though not before prophesying that the children of the village will be the food for his resurrection.

Fifteen years later, the village is wracked by a strange plague.  The national authorities have placed a cordon of soldiers to prevent anyone from leaving.  Not a fun situation, so the villagers are pleasantly surprised when a travelling circus somehow slips past the cordon and into their town.  At least, some new people and new diversions!

The villagers can be forgiven for having no suspicions of this strange event, but for us it has only been five minutes, and not fifteen years.  And we know that the Count's human lover escaped his demise.  And of course, we also know that this is a movie called Vampire Circus, so I don't think it is exactly a spoiler if I tell you that at least some of the the carnival folk (including a pre-Doctor Who Lalla Ward) are here to make sure the Count's prophecy comes true.

This is a late stage Hammer Film.  Hammer burst onto the cinematic horror scene in late 1950s with a series of successful films starring Christopher Lee and/or Peter Cushing, but by the end of the following decade they were struggling.  The stagy, mannered tone of their films and tendency toward period settings made them seem old-fashioned and they steadily lost ground to the more naturalistic (and more graphic) US competition. 

Hammer attempted to adapt to changing audience expectations.  Vampire Circus is one of several of their films to include a significant dose of nudity and rather more graphic violence/gore than their early offerings.  Unfortunately, they mainly proved through this that it is possible to be salacious and still come across as a bit fuddy-duddy.

Despite having what I consider a terrible title, Vampire Circus is one of the better efforts of Hammer's later years.  It's a fun romp if not exactly a very scary one: it certainly has plenty of ideas, even if they aren't all executed that well!  If you've an interest in the progression of cinematic vampires through the ages, it is worth checking out.

Oculus (2013)

11 years ago, Alan Russell murdered his wife Marie, and was then killed in self defence by his ten year old son Tim when he tried to kill his children.

Or at least, that's the finding of the police investigation.  Tim's sister Kaylie, who was 12 at the time of the killings, thinks otherwise.  She is sure that an antique mirror her father purchased somehow drove both Alan and Marie insane.  She has tracked dozens of cases of the mirror's owners meeting macabre fates, and has become an antiques dealer herself with the avowed intention of finding the mirror and getting irrefutable proof of its malign, supernatural powers.

And now, as Tim reaches his 21st birthday and is released from the mental institution where he has been treated for the past decade, Kaylie has located the mirror and is ready for the showdown.

Oculus is a well-crafted horror film, driven more by suspense and creepiness than gore or violence (though there is some of the latter).  It has a solid cast and a pretty tight script that does a good job of justifying the characters' actions, or failure to act.  "Why doesn't Kaylie just smash the mirror?" has a couple of different answers offered, for instance, and they hold water pretty well.

Well-crafted stuff, check it out if you want to be creeped out.

October 2020 Review Schedule

This October, reviews will be posted on Tuesdays, Thursdays (except today) and Saturdays.