Hopefully the new blog & website will be up sometime within the next month. I’m still meticulously hand-coding all the old entries to be archived at the new website. It’s not particularly fun and I frequently question why I’m bothering to do it since I think my writing and focus has changed somewhat drastically in the past 2 years. I think once I’m done with 2007’s entries, I may fairly be in the clear, since I obviously didn’t update as much in 2008 and 2009.

If anyone would like to recommend any horror movies for me to watch in October, please do. I’ve been spending the summer mostly watching Marx Brothers and Pre-Code Hollywood films. I am not insanely psyched about anything out right now, nor anything in my Netflix queue.

Comments will be open until the spammers show up.

I will return to blogging eventually. I’m in the process of designing my own website that will have an embedded blog and where all previous blog entries from this blog and The Film School Dropout will be archived in a separate section. So archiving is/will be taking up the bulk of the conversion since I’ve already designed the website . At the absolute latest, the new site will be up by the Fall of this year. I’m taking classes over the summer, working a part-time job, taking care of a few things for this year’s Richmond Zine Fest and trying to start a 20-25 page paper that has to be submitted with my grad school applications to US’ three schools with a Film Preservation & Archiving MA program, since two of those schools have applications due in December.

Anything I write between now and then will premiere with the new website. I just don’t have the time or patience anymore to deal with the absurd amount of maintenance that keeping a blog is requiring as of late. It may be naive to hope that owning my own webspace will eliminate content stealers and Russian spammers, but I’m willing to give it a shot by placing some serious hurdles.

Week 2 of the ongoing Friday night series at my house: Crappy newer horror movie starring a current or former actors from the CW network vs. an older and surprisingly good horror/slasher film. I don’t know if I would call this a “series” in all honestly, just two weeks of coincidences.

Boogeyman (2005)

This was the second outing of Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert’s Ghost House Pictures after the wildly successful and fairly entertaining remake of The Grudge in late 2004. Boogeyman is the opposite of entertaining however. If anything, it’s proof that perhaps that Eric Kripke’s talent has improved over the past 4 or 5 years. He co-wrote Boogeyman and is the creator and frequent collaborator on Supernatural, a series that has gotten better over time. The Kripke motif’s displayed in Boogeyman are that the main character drives a classic car and has a doomed girlfriend named Jessica. Boogeyman is a dull film that uses flashy and stylish camera tricks just to wake you out of your boredom. The tale is pretty basic: a man (Barry Watson, formerly of 7th Heaven) who is haunted by a Boogeyman that apparently killed his father when he was 8 and tore apart his family returns to his still-haunted house after his mother’s death. There is no tension to be found in this movie, so it is really hard to care what happens. The final battle is so distractingly CGI and tips it’s hat so much to the final battle of Evil Dead 2 that all it makes you think is “You know what’s a good movie? Evil Dead 2.”

The House on Sorority Row (1983)

Out of the three slasher films I’ve seen that takes place in a sorority house, The House on Sorority Row ranks a solid #2 after the original Black Christmas. Sorority House Massacre would be third. The House on Sorority Row almost seems like a sequel to Black Christmas, since the killer also is hidden and resides in the attic of a house full of doomed sorority sisters. While the killer remains shrouded in mystery for much of the film, unlike Black Christmas, he is revealed at one point. A group of graduating sorority sisters decides to throw a party in their house, disobeying their troubled house mother. A prank on the housemother goes horribly awry, and the girls don’t particularly have fun at their party as a result. What’s kind of interesting about this movie is that the obvious final girl, Kate, has a blind date pursuing her thoughout the entire film, but she obviously doesn’t care about him because she has other, more important things on her mind, (like why her friends are disappearing), and there is no romantic angle to the story. He ends up drunk and sitting in his car, which is humorously realistic. Seriously, the romantic angle between Laurie Strode and that cute EMT guy who slips in a puddle of blood in Halloween 2 was more pursued (and abruptly dropped) than the story of Kate and the blind date.

Fun fact: Bad girl Vicki is played by soap opera stalwart Eileen Davidson.
Fun fact #2: The housemother in the upcoming remake will be played by Carrie Fisher. Even if I don’t totally see Carrie Fisher as a housemother type, she will likely be the best part of the movie.

They’ve Changed Faces is an interesting take on the Dracula legend. The description that my boyfriend and I found originally called it a satire on capitalist culture, but there’s not much humor to be found in this movie. Nor is it a traditional horror film. There is little to no blood found in the movie. While the premise feels like a sci-fi movie of sorts, it’s not exactly that either, although it is somewhat similar to John Carpenter’s They Live, but pre-dates that film by 15 years.

The basic story is that a car designer at an auto company named Alberto is suddenly called to the CEO’s office one morning and told that the owner of the company would like to meet with him at his secluded villa. The designer has never heard of the owner, who goes by the name of “Engineer Nosferatu” (played by Adolfo Celi, the villain from Danger: Diabolik). The designer drives out to the villa, but gets lost along the way, and comes across a pretty, topless, free-spirited hitch-hiker named Laura. Once he arrives to Nosferatu’s villa, he ignores Laura’s pleas to not go in and to run away with her instead. What he finds is a large mansion where the inside is akin to a more spammy version of Bill Gates’ house. Everytime you sit on a piece of furniture, an ad over the loudspeakers plays. This even happens when our protagonist showers. He is seduced by Nosferatu’s assistant-in-a-terrible-wig Corinna. Much like vampire tradition, Nosferatu can only be seen in the evening. He tells Alberto that he controls basically everything in Italy, and would like to make Alberto a CEO. He allows Alberto time to mull it over, but as each day progresses, Alberto discovers more and more disturbing things about Nosferatu, including that Laura has disappeared from his car at the gates.

They’ve Changed Faces is a slow burn of a movie, but it is well paced at barely 90 minutes. There is a lot of ambiguity going on, it has a creepy atmosphere where modern technology and design meets the old world, and the ending is bleak. Since it does not really fall into one genre, the best I can describe it is how I heard Vanishing Point described the other day, “a movie about the death of the 1960’s”. Even in the early 1970’s, there was a dearth of movies discussing the evils of capitalism, or its far-reaching consequences. At times I felt this movie was an alternative answer to Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, like what if C.C. Baxter decided not to have a soul and go after Fran Kubelik and stayed Vice President at the company?

The blog is back up, complete with Creative Common and Copyscape logos on each post. Some new categories have been added, but for some reason is the category cloud is being buggy right now.

I’m still considering buying my own domain and webspace, but I haven’t figured out all the logistics just yet.

I will hopefully be posting some actual content within the next few days.

With the exception of a few entries, this blog is private until further notice. I will be taking care of some maintenance issues regarding this blog – namely posting the Creative Commons and Copyscape info on every single post I’ve written in the past year-and-a-half, as well as deleting other irrelevant posts. Hopefully it will only take a few days, but I can’t say for sure.

I’m honestly considering other options in regards to the future of this blog, including finding another blog host, or starting my own website. I didn’t have nearly as much trouble at Blogspot as I do with WordPress with spammers (both the type who try to post comments and the type who steal my content). Having two different people steal content from one blog post within three days on top of dealing with an uncooperative new neighbor who partially destroyed my car with her moving truck has just made me really tired of dealing with dishonest, lazy assholes.

I guess this is becoming a twice-yearly thing.

I don’t care if you’re a crappy person looking to spam in some other country using the blog format: DO NOT USE MY BLOG POSTS WITHOUT MY PERMISSION! You can’t use them without my permission or without acknowledgement of where the post came from (i.e., a simple link will do), you can’t use them to sell stuff without my permission, and you sure as hell can’t alter them in any way, shape, or form without my permission.

I’ve been using the Creative Commons since last November when it happened for the first time. It’s to the right of this post, seriously, you can click on it and see how I roll. The only thing that isn’t noted is that if you still go ahead and take my posts, I’ll personally contact whomever is hosting your blog.

I honestly don’t mind the goofy little blog and horror blog aggregators that come through and use my posts. They usually acknowledge where the posts came from, and occasionally bring traffic here, even if only one of these aggregators has invited me to join their site (unfortunately, it’s been overrun by Twilight posts). I do mind people who rip off entire posts and/or rip off entire posts, then splice them to make it look as though they didn’t.

If you want more background as to the first time this happened: go here. The funny thing is that this always seems to happen when I make a more Richmond-specific post. I guess I can expect this again in October or November if I post about this year’s Richmond Zine Fest again.

Cry_Wolf

The inherent problem with using a technological or internet fad in a film is that sooner rather than later usually, it becomes obsolete. Cry_Wolf is a film where at only 4 years old, you look at it now and laugh at the use of AOL IM, candy bar cell phones, and possibly the first version of the T-Mobile Sidekick phone – the only piece of technology that is still relevant. I seriously think 2005 was the last year I used AOL IM. This isn’t the only problem with Cry_Wolf however. When your cast of characters basically consists of spoiled, overprivileged prep school kids who are all jerks of various levels and are just minimally conceived, it’s hard to care. I imagine the pitch for this movie was “a modern telling of “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” meets The Usual Suspects meets Heathers.” The filmmakers received a $1 million grant from Chrysler to make the film  after winning a short film contest (and you can understand now why car companies are in trouble). The only reasons why this movie was watched in my household was 1) it was filmed in Richmond, at the University of Richmond, Union PSCE, and St. Joseph’s campus’ – all schools that look way nicer than the university I attend and my sister and I work for, despite UofR and my university being somewhat competitive in certain areas. Although one scene I recognized as being filmed in the dingy stacks of the Main location of the Richmond Public Library, where at the time, was where they hid their tiny DVD collection; and 2) Jared Padalecki, playing a Senator’s son from Texas, whom, despite being from Texas himself, J. Pads does not sport a Texan accent in this film. I’m pretty sure only crappy movies are filmed in Richmond, although we occasionally get pretty good TV shows and mini-series filmed here, such as HBO’s John Adams series. Most of the movie was spent with my boyfriend, sister, and I asking questions such as, “Do you think Jared Padalecki went to Ellwood Thompson’s or Ipanema when he was here?” and “Where do you think Jon Bon Jovi went to when he was here?” Despite getting the “Unrated” DVD copy, there really isn’t much gore or any nudity, so there isn’t much reason for your typical horror fan to rent this. It is just a gutless film altogether, no pun intended. I’m assuming it was aimed towards teenagers, but seriously, teenagers deserve decent movies too.

Cry_Wolf is somewhat similar to another horror movie that came out around that time called Stay Alive, which was based in RPG video games, and featuring Frankie Muniz, Milo Ventimiglia, and Angelina Jolie’s brother. I feel bad saying that Stay Alive is actually the more entertaining movie and still fairly relevant.

I hate underscores, by the way.

It’s unfortunate that the poster is cooler than the movie.

Curtains

All About Eve meets Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor meets a giallo film. An aging, but still pretty Method actress pretends to be insane to be put into a psychiatric institution to research a part, and the director has her full support. But after awhile, the actress does become a teensy bit unhinged, and the director abandons her in the institution and chooses to recast the part. She breaks out of the institution and invites herself over to his weekend casting session at his house with six younger actresses, and the younger actresses begin to die one by one, just as the director is bedding almost each actress. There is a post-modern twist to this in that Samantha Eggar (from Cronenberg’s The Brood) is playing an aging actress named Samantha, and the director in the movie is named Jonathan Stryker, who is the director of Curtains (the director in the movie is played by an actor though…confused yet?). Despite Samantha being set up as the protagonist and lead suspect of the film, she is missing from this movie for long periods of time, I guess partly to lay more suspicion on her. So it is hard to know who to root for when there is no clear protagonist or villain really, other than Stryker. The film does have a good twist ending, and is really well-paced. It’s also somewhat known for the mask of the killer being pretty scary and how one woman is chased on ice skates.

I still find it interesting that Canadian horror films in the late 1970s and early 1980s primarily featured adults in the casts. Not adults portraying teenagers, such as the case with American horror films.

And yeah, I’m not going to make a habit of using “pitches” to describe movies.

At this point, I’m starting to believe that Bruce Campbell is a better writer than he is filmmaker. While My Name is Bruce is somewhat better than his first film, The Man with the Screaming Brain, it’s still a bit rough to sit through. Neither of his films captures that weird glee of the Evil Dead films, nor of the more obscure Detroit film crew efforts of Intruder or Thou Shalt Not Kill, Except…. Try as they may, they do not. Which is strange, because both of his books capture that feeling better than the two feature films he has directed.

My Name is Bruce is a comedy-horror take on the film of the same name from the 1970s starring Bruce Lee (yes, the comedy comes first in this one). Mr. Campbell plays a more exaggerated version of “himself” which is supposed to be a more exaggerated version of his most popular character, Ash from the Evil Dead series. He is a drunk, rude, obnoxious, selfish bastard and generally a jerk to his co-workers, and stereotypical fans. After a goofy looking goth kid/Bruce Campbell megafan unleashes an ancient Chinese demon onto his town of Gold Lick, Oregon, he kidnaps Mr. Campbell thinking that he is the only person who can save the town. Campbell, on the other hand, thinks this is all one weird surprise birthday set-up orchestrated by his agent Mills (Ted Raimi, in one of his three roles in the entire movie). When he is proven wrong, he reacts in a typical Ash-fashion.

Hearing about the movie for a couple of years before it came out, I thought the plotline of a fan or town confusing Campbell for Ash would be much more prominent than it actually was in the end result, perhaps as a commentary on how certain people or fans genuinely do confuse a character with the actor who plays them. The stronger plotline is Bruce trying to be the biggest jerk possible, and then trying to be slightly less jerky and heroic, which gets a tad boring after the first 30 minutes. The first 30 minutes are actually pretty funny and features the most skewering of Campbell. What brought the film to a distracting, crazy halt is when Ted Raimi is introduced into his third role as Gold Lick’s sole Chinese person, and the last town descendent of the people who brought about the demon in the cemetary. He gives a long expositiony speech in the middle of the movie, and I was so distracted by the fact that a white man was playing a Chinese man that I don’t even know what he said. I know this film was low-budget, and completely shot on Campbell’s ranch in Oregon (which that particular result is not as bad as it could have been – I guess Campbell has a pretty large ranch), but couldn’t he have found an actual Chinese-American to play the part? Since Raimi also plays the town’s sole Italian, I get the feeling that casting Raimi in roles that require ethnic stereotypes with bad accents is some sort of weird inside joke or is some product of a really old sense of humor, since he was also in The Man with the Screaming Brain playing a bumbling hip-hop obsessed Bulgarian man who dressed like a member of Kris Kross. It’s a sense of humor I don’t really understand. Campbell does this to an extent in his books as well. In Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way, Richmond, VA is depicted as a total Southern stereotype where bumbling Bruce makes his way into a secret society of men who long for the old ways of the South, and who brutally beat him once they find out that he’s from Detroit. I don’t think people like that exist to that exaggeration around here anymore. Even the ones that do to a small extent now mostly live in the counties outside the city, not in it. I’ll forego a rant on the voting statistics on the city of Richmond. But honestly? I swear that I see more rebel flags when I drive slightly north to Maryland and Pennsylvania than I do in Central Virginia. I still recommend the book though, it’s a fun book. In the right hands, it would make a good, high-concept movie, actually. My Name is Bruce however, is probably only worth a peek if you really like Bruce Campbell and feel the need to support him. At this point, I’d say his best movie is the short documentary he made called Fanalysis, which was attached to the “Book of the Dead” DVD release of Evil Dead earlier this decade.

If anyone can clarify the exact year this film was released, let me know. IMDB says 2007, Netflix says 2006, and my memory of horror blogs posting about the film touring around the country says late 2008. I know it took a couple of years to come out.

It’s taken years and I probably had too many beers when I watched this for a third or fourth viewing this past weekend, but I think Demons is finally growing on me. Does it make any sense? No, it still doesn’t. Will I ever understand some of the academic theories around this movie? Not for awhile, but mostly because I’m thinking about the scene where the blond guy is riding a motorbike through a theater slashing at demons with a samurai sword. And how right after that, a helicopter magically falls through the ceiling. Or what that red haired chick dressed as a Irish pilgrim had to do with any of this. Same with the guy in the silver mask. Why do the blond guy and the silver mask guy look like characters from Mortal Kombat?

Demons is about an assorted group of people who are given tickets to a sneak preview for movie at this mysterious art deco-style theater. No one knows what the movie is about, but it turns out it’s a horror movie that seems to be about young archeologists on the search for a mask. A similar mask was in the lobby and one of the prostitutes attending the film with her pimp and co-worker puts it on, and is cut on the cheek. Something similar happens to a person in the movie, and all hell breaks loose.

I like Rosemary, the ground zero demon. She has hair like my middle school chorus teacher (or Rick James if you prefer). She is one badass demon.

The movie has a good, apocalyptic ending once you get past the goofy points that come before it. Also, a cameo appearance from the kid from Fulci’s The House by the Cemetary.

As far as Demons 2 goes, I want to like it, but it’s kind of a mess. I do not know whether or not it was supposed to be in continuity with the first movie. The first character we see is the guy (who looks like the result of what would happen if you mixed Michael Berryman’s genes with a young Rupert Everett’s) who played one of the coked up punk kids  in the first movie, as a security guard for this building in the second movie. Also in this movie: the guy who played the pimp in the first movie, this time as the building’s very bossy/poor man’s Ken Foree-type personal trainer; and a young Asia Argento.

This time the demons are coming through the television in a show that most of the characters seem to be watching. The show may or may not be a documentary on what happened in the first movie, or it may be more of the movie or a sequel to the movie the people in the first Demons movie were watching. I honestly don’t know, and wish I did know. This time the ground zero demon is Sally, who has having a birthday party in her apartment. Sally is one of those needy friends who is a gigantic drama queen. She storms off into her room at one point while her friends are dancing to The Smiths, where she catches the show and the demon that somehow makes it out of the television.

Demons 2 is somewhat reminscent of David Cronenberg’s Shivers. It is a film that takes place in a completely secure and locked down high-rise apartment building, meaning that the other inhabitants become infected really quickly, although mostly because blood is continuously seeping through the floors and pipes. That’s a terribly made building right there. Under more capable hands, the main story of the hunky physics major who is trying to save his pretty and pregnant wife, would be more compelling. Instead, you just root for them cos even as a demon, Sally is still pretty annoying.

The ending is also not particularly satisfying. It’s pretty disappointing actually. It’s almost as if the budget ran out. The film in general leaves a lot of unsettled stories, like, what happened to lil Asia Argento?

I don’t live in a large city, and it’s probably goofy for me to think about this just based on Shivers and Demons 2, but why would anyone think that having a self-contained building and/or a building where if something goes wrong, the building is completely locked down and impossible to get out of a good idea? Was this entire sub-subgenre of film based on The Towering Inferno, where “people trapped and in danger in a large building = entertainment”?

I can’t remember whether or not I’ve heard recently that Demons is up for a remake. It probably is, since at this point, one may as well believe that any horror movie made in the past 30 years is up for a remake. Unless the makers find even someone more incompetent than Lamberto Bava to be at the helm of these films, the remake(s) may not be that bad. Which I hate to say about Lamberto Bava, because his first film, Macabre, is actually pretty good. I want to think that for some reason, Demons and Demons 2 got seriously butchered at some point, but considering that both movies have been on video or DVD in America for at least 20 years, I find it hard to believe that there are better versions of these movies out there, versions that match the pretty good concept with good quality. Oh well.