Trilogy of Terror - dir. by Dan Curtis (1975)

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark sparked my interest in made-for-TV horror from the 70's and 80's, so I moved on to Trilogy of Terror, possibly the most famous made-for-TV horror film released during the sub-genre's heyday. I'd caught the sequel, 1996's Trilogy of Terror II, which featured the Zuni fetish doll made popular by the first film, years ago, and enjoyed it, and honestly have no good explanation for having waited so long to see the original.

Both films were directed by Dan Curtis, and the first features three vignettes based on stories by Richard Matheson. Karen Black plays the lead (different characters) in each, in stories named after her characters: "Julie," "Millicent and Therese," and "Amelia". In the first, she plays a teacher who is drugged and blackmailed by a deranged student; in the second, she is a woman living in fear of her psychotic sister, a mental patient who scares off everyone from possible lovers to neighborhood children.

The final story is the most famous and features the aforementioned Zuni fetish doll, which was featured again in the third segment of Trilogy of Terror II, eleven years later. While not the first "living doll" story ever put to film (check out the Twilight Zone episode "Living Doll" for a brilliant early entry in the sub-genre), this particularly vicious doll certainly had influence on later films from Child's Play (1987) to just about everything Full Moon released in the early nineties. The first two stories are good, but this last episode is the best and features an extremely creepy final shot.

Trilogy of Terror was an ABC Movie of the Week, and is one of the better anthology horror films out there, ranking with Creepshow (1982), Tales From the Darkside: the Movie (1990), and the more recent, and brilliant, Trick 'R Treat (2008). Originally the pilot episode to a proposed TV series, it stands on its own as a fine example of the best of this type of film.

Puppet Master: Axis of Evil - dir. by David DeCoteau (2010)

As a big fan of the Full Moon direct-to-video horror movies of the early nineties, and the Puppet Master films in particular, it's disappointing to say that this newest Puppet Master outing is possibly the worst of the series. And that includes Retro Puppet Master (1999), which is pretty awful (I don't count Puppet Master: the Legacy [2003], and neither should you).

The man behind the camera this time is Full Moon regular David DeCoteau. He's done some decent movies--hell, he directed possibly the best of the Puppet Master films, number III (1991)--but he's also responsible for the aforementioned Retro Puppet Master and . . . well, check out his credits on imdb.com. DeCoteau biography makes no mention of it, but it appears he got his start directing porn under various pseudonyms, before moving into B (and probably C) horror, sci-fi, and comedies.

I haven't seen any of his porn titles, but will go out on a limb here and suggest that the acting in those movies couldn't possibly be worse than what's on display here, in Puppet Master: Axis of Evil. It's hard to say which is worse, the writing or the acting. They complement each other to horrible effect. It's bad, very bad. Even bad for a newer Full Moon movie.

Budget limitations can be blamed for a number of failings littering the Full Moon catalog from the last fifteen years, but there's no excuse for the kind of writing, the kind of dialogue, found in this incredibly boring film. It's shot OK, the anamorphic widescreen is nice, and Richard Band's theme is as awesome as it always is. But the story is ridiculous and unexciting, and there's just about nothing to like about any of the characters.

Our lead villain is a supposed Nazi, though he looks and sounds more like a punk-ass American kid. This, he explains, is his cover. See, he's infiltrating Chinatown in 1939 (which, according to the film, is the year the U.S. got into the war), trying to track down these puppets, you know, the puppets the Nazis were after in Puppet Master III, which, compared to this, looks like it belongs in the National Film Registry. The hero is an intense, righteous bastard, who hates himself for being crippled and thus unable to fight in the war, alongside his courageous (and equally annoying) older brother.

The sets are poorly lit, there are few establishing shots, almost no extras, and no real sense that we're actually in Chinatown. Music plays constantly on the soundtrack--as is often the case with newer Full Moon titles, displaying the director's lack of confidence in his material. There isn't much of note in the way of special fx. No animatronics--unless you count shots pulled from the original Puppet Master (1989). If the writing and acting were better, a decent Puppet Master still probably couldn't be made with the sort of budgets Full Moon works with these days.
Add to that, awful writing and acting, and shoddy direction, and there really isn't much to recommend. The opening credits sequence was kind of cool, I guess.

The movie ends with a cliffhanger--the words "to be continued" don't appear onscreen, but they may as well--and I have zero interest in what comes next.

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark - dir. by John Newland (1973)

The Guillermo Del Toro-produced remake of Don't Be Afraid arrives in theaters early next year. Looking to go the same route as Eli Roth with The Last Exorcism (coming later this summer), Del Toro and director Troy Nixey shot their film with a PG-13 rating in mind, only to receive the more restrictive R.

"By agreement," Del Toro said at this summer's Comic Con, "we shot a movie with no sex, no gore or profanity, because we thought it was the way to avoid R. The MPAA came back and said, it didn't matter, that it would be rated R anyway, for 'pervasive scariness', which in a way is fantastic to hear."

It is fantastic to hear. Now, hopefully the studio won't try and cut out some of that "scariness" between now and January. It isn't Fox, so there's a good chance the film will go out as intended.

The movie this is based on, made for TV in the early seventies, is a damn good piece of horror that is helped by its simple premise and director John Newland's ability to create tension and suspense, while leaving his villains mostly in shadows for the film's duration.

Those villains are nasty little bastards too: small, almost puppet-size, humanoid monsters set free by a curious woman (Kim Darby) unable to ignore the warnings of her dead grandmother's housekeeper. He tells her to leave the fireplace alone, not to mess with the bricks which have sealed it ever since her grandfather's death. Pretty soon, she's seeing the little monsters all over the house, but only in brief glimpses. She tries to tell her husband (Jim Hutton), who naturally doesn't believe her, and the monsters continue tormenting her, before mounting their big attack.

TV movies got their start in the seventies, and were fairly popular at the time (programs like the "ABC Movie of the Week," which was before my time). Some are rather good--I'm thinking Wes Craven's Deadly Blessing (1981) and Frank De Felitta's Dark Night of the Scarecrow (also 1981). And then there are some quality Stephen King miniseries as well, later on (It [1990], The Tommyknockers [1993]). I'd rank Don't Be Afraid of the Dark up there with some of the best in the horror made-for-TV genre, and I think, with Guillermo Del Toro producing, we have a pretty scary remake to look forward to next January.

Sacrament by Clive Barker (1996)

I’ll start this by saying that I am aware that Clive Barker is not strictly a horror author. I’m sure it’s been somewhat frustrating to him over his career to have carried this label years after writing his last true piece of horror fiction, Cabal, in 1988 (a case could be made, however, for Cold Heart Canyon [2001] or Mister B. Gone [2008], being horror). But his style of fantasy, even his children’s novels such The Thief of Always (1992) and the Abarat series (2002 and 2004), are so dark, and contain so many elements of horror fiction, that it isn’t difficult to see why he still gets pegged as a horror author. And, I’m sure his involvement in mainstream horror film series (Hellraiser, Candyman) helped contribute as well.

Anyway, I’m now going to discuss his 1996 novel, Sacrament, which is a fantasy, a parable of sorts, and is not a horror novel, but does, as I said above, contain plenty of horror content, like his other fantasy novels, and thus is suitable for discussion on this blog.

The scope of this novel is not nearly as large as some of his other works. A recurring theme of Barker’s stories is that of a world hidden within our own world; or a doorway from our world leading into another. In Imajica (1991), the heroes of the story travel through Four Dominions, other planes of existence linked to Earth, the Fifth Dominion; the characters in The Great and Secret Show (1989) and Everville (1994) travel across a mystical dream sea known as Quiddity, to explore the unknown areas lying on the other side. Sacrament, on the other hand, involves a man, Will Rabjohns’, journey across the Arctic, through his hometown in England, and to his new residence in San Francisco. The vivid and fantastic descriptions this time around are focused not on otherworldy places, but right here in our own fantastical world.

One thing Barker does so well in this book is show an enormous appreciation of nature and our planet in general. It isn’t a preachy story, but one doesn’t have to look hard to find an environmental message of sorts. Rabjohns has made a career as a photographer snapping pictures of wildlife in its last throes, species on the verge of extinction. When a polar bear knocks him into a coma, he is taken back through his memories to his childhood, when he came into contact with two bizarre, powerful beings disguised as humans, Steep and Rosa. He finds that it was Steep who, when he was a child, gave him his first taste of death and provided him with his lifelong interest in the end of life, particularly with the extinction of entire species.

Will Rabjohns is the first gay lead in a Clive Barker novel, and sections of the book deal with Rabjohns’ and his friends’ coping with, and understanding of, “the plague,” Barker’s word for AIDS (he also referred to the disease by this name, and this name alone, in Imajica). Indeed there are parallels drawn between the AIDS epidemic, and also the gay lifestyle, and Rabjohns’ and Steep’s respective places in the world. Steep is a man who has lived for hundreds of years and is continuously vexed by the fact that he does not know what he is or where he came from; his entire life is an attempt to reconcile this, to hopefully figure out what he is. He has transformed Rabjohns, in a way, or rather, set his life on a course he otherwise wouldn’t have intended; and because of this, Rabjohns has doubts and questions about his career and motivations. But his identity, who he is as a person, as a gay man and artist, are never unclear to him. His security in himself is in sharp contrast to the murderous Steep, who can never be fully satisfied due to his lack of understanding of himself.

Like Barker’s other novels intended for adults, Sacrament contains some fairly bizarre violent and sexual content, mixed in with scenes of great beauty and some philosophy. He’s stated that this is his lowest-selling novel (I don’t know if that’s still the case). Too bad, because it’s an excellent story, told through flashbacks, with a great pace, startling moments of horror, and is certainly worth reading for fans of dark fantasy, fantastique, fables, or however you’d like to call it.

Splice - dir. by Vincenzo Natali (2009)

It's somewhat hard to believe a studio executive saw the film Splice (2009) and thought it would make a good wide-release film, a possible summer-alternative money-maker. Don't get me wrong--the movie is good; damn good. It's just . . . well, a weird sci-fi horror movie, featuring adults in all major roles, that doesn't have a necessarily happy ending, and generally doesn't have much of anything that you'd normally think would appeal to a major studio.

So, thank you to Warner Bros for distributing this crazy film, and more importantly, Joel Silver and Dark Castle Productions, for picking it up after its festival premier last year. Dark Castle has had a weird history, starting their company off with the releases of House On Haunted Hill (1999) and Thirteen Ghosts (2001), both decent remakes of William Castle films. After that, it gets a little sketchy, with nonsense like Ghost Ship (2002), Ninja Assassin (2009), with some good ones (last year's The Orphan was quite good and went basically unnoticed) here and there.

Splice is like nothing I've seen from the company yet (I can't comment on it in relation to the rest of director Vincenzo Natali's ouvre, as I have not yet seen any of his previous films), combining realistic (seeming) science fiction with some worthwhile questions of morality--and how's this? Zero fake scares or jumps. When's the last time you went to see a horror film and there wasn't a single moment wherein someone is startled by a cat, their friend, an ice machine turning on, etc; or there weren't at least seven or eight soundtrack shrieks, in order to get a cheap jump from the audience?

As much as I liked this year's The Wolfman, the first half contained more silly soundtrack jumps than anything I've ever seen. It's nice when you know the author of your horror entertainment is aware of the difference between a genuinely scary moment and a gimmick used to cause someone to jump in their seat.

I think bypassing that kinda thing, which doesn't always hurt a movie but can sometimes be fairly annoying, Splice actually creates a pretty believable atmosphere. It isn't jokey sci-fi, but it isn't confusing hard sci-fi, and it doesn't get hung up on overexplaining anything, which is kind of a feat considering the gene-splicing subject matter.

And overexplaining is also something critics should be wary of when reviewing a film of this type. And by that I mean one that contains seriously strange plot developments in the second half, developments that aren't even hinted at in the trailer.

It really isn't fair to say much more about the film's plot than what you see in that two-minute preview. Two scientists, romantically involved, do some off-the-record research on gene splicing and end up creating a creature that is part human, part animal, and growing quickly.
I've seen some comments online from folks who got a Species (1996) vibe from the trailer. It's not Species, though; it's nothing like that fun, if silly, action-sci-fi-erotic-thriller mash-up. But it is very, very good, and probably not too similar to anything you've seen before.

Cropsey - dir. by Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman (2009)

Cropsey was a maniac, an escaped patient of a mental institution, a bogeyman who scared children sitting around campfires up and down the Hudson Valley of New York state. Like all folklore, no matter how fantastic, the Cropsey legend arises from real fear and guilt, from a dark element of the culture that is so pervasive it shows up in the subconscious of the most innocent and uneducated members of society. The American mental health system throughout the first three quarters of the 20th century was a disgraceful network of overcrowded, understaffed institutions with some of the largest, most disfunctional hospitals located on Staten Island and Long Island. Enter Geraldo Rivera and his crusade to make a change (and get famous).

In their 2009 documentary film Cropsey Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman explore the real life Cropsey tale of a Staten Island derelict, Andre Rand, accused of kidnapping and murdering at least five children on the island in the 70s and 80s. Most famously Rand was convicted of the murder of Jennifer Schweiger, a 13-year-old with Down syndrome. The directors manage to weave an intricate narrative out of a very cloudy, sensitive story, using newsreel footage, interviews with Staten Islanders involved with the case, and an eerie NYPD missing persons detective who seems to think the serial disappearances are all the work of Satanists.

It’s hard to create horror out of real life, especially in the age of hyper-saturated media, but the lore of Staten Island and the testimonies of the families and community members affected by these crimes helps to deepen the mystery surrounding Rand’s guilt or innocence, while at the same time revealing a lynch mob mentality in a society unwilling to admit its own culpability in creating a monster. In the end, the question is not whether Rand murdered these children because he felt they were better off dead than at the disposal of a cruel and destructive mental health system, or if a group of Satanists sacrificed them for some greater glory. The question is how and why we created these guilty monsters and scapegoats. How can we dump our trash and our human refuse on the Staten Islands of the world and still be surprised when out of the filth arise such demons?

Check out the film's website here.

Here's some more info about the Cropsey legend.

The Wolfen by Whitley Strieber (1978)

I was a little disappointed with the police procedural fixation of Whitley Strieber’s 1978 novel The Wolfen from the get-go, even when it was relatively clean and somewhat evocative of the urban landscape in the earlier chapters of the novel. The setting and time period, New York City in the 1970s, could play host to an awesome story of mass hysteria, urban decay, and perhaps hedonism, not to mention werewolves, the way Spike Lee manages in Summer of Sam, with a real life serial killer. I can't think of a novel, offhand, that achieves this sort of 70s paranoia and delirium, but I'm sure they're out there. It seemed that Strieber completely forgot about his city after the cops were killed in the auto pound in the first section of the book. We get a decent description of the desolation in the Bronx, and a few upper Manhattan scenes (the fountain and the museum) that are bland and generic. The love triangle bit was useless and made the two cops much less interesting. I would’ve liked to see a bit more about Dick, our main character’s husband. He seems like a misunderstood guy who has been chewed up by the system, though Strieber pulls the heartstrings a bit too heavily when he has Dick spend the extorted money on taking care of his sick father. Come on. I could imagine someone, someone who wears Druid garb at conventions, reading this novel as a defense of the Wolfen. They are nobler beasts than we. They only kill the sick, old and weak. They live in harmony with their ecosystem. That’s baloney and not supported by the text (though knowing a bit about Strieber’s wacko ideas, he may have been aiming in that direction).

Strieber also seemed a little proud of himself concerning the idea about vampires being normal humans who leach off of the Wolfen. He made the guy at the Natural History Museum a little too credulous. All it took to convince him of the existence of sapient wolf-beings was an old etching in a silly book.

There is a 1981 film starring Albert Finney very loosely based on this novel, and I’d definitely recommend the film over the book in this case.

You can learn a bit more about Strieber's latest obsessions here.